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Recently everyone's favorite staff Red Mage deemed me worthy of receiving a review copy of The Dark Spire. His faith in my ability to complete the game is touching, and I have indeed progressed very deep within its environs. To those who are unfamiliar with The Dark Spire, it is a game developed by Success that deliberately ignores just about everything the RPG genre has done in the past 20 (even 25) years, to deliver a role-playing experience akin to early Wizardry and Ultima games. The RPG field is sometimes snidely assumed to have made no significant innovations since its inception, but The Dark Spire proves that this is not so with its many means of winnowing the casual and unprepared from even attempting to complete it. The Dark Spire offers an excellent means of demonstrating just how the genre has changed since its spiritual forbears were made, and how many things newer games offer that they are not given credit for.
Random turn orders in battle. I've spoken on this subject before, and starting off a talk about The Dark Spire with a problem that afflicts many other games may seem odd, but this game really rubs into one's eyes just how much an unpredictable turn order can hurt. In a game with enemies that can and do completely destroy the player's party with magic unless their spells are sealed with a player spell, dying because the turn order was randomly arrived at is just awful. It becomes particularly disgusting when reloading the game (usually after death) produces an identical battle with completely different turn order.
Magic that fails or backfires. Magicians, based on their job title, ought to be good at that job. The Dark Spire shows that this is not always the case. Watching a spell that is key to winning a battle fizzle and do nothing is uninspiring in the extreme, while watching a spell actually come back down upon its wielder's head is a fine means of inadvertently committing suicide. I picture Final Fantasy VI if this mechanic had been instituted, with a cast of Ultima backfiring and killing off everyone....
Traps on treasure chests. This mechanic might sound familiar to many, as frequently games will have enemies guarding treasure chests in the form of 'traps.' The Dark Spire demonstrates how feeble a method of protecting items this is by having no set treasure chests; instead all of them are dropped after battles. Very rarely these chests will have no traps, but 95% of the time simply trying to open a treasure chest will result in enormous pain. Pain that increases with progress into the tower, as a simple poisoning of the character opening a chest will turn into instant death attacks for the entire party to survive. Chests never have just one trap, they have three or four that must all be disarmed to proceed safely. After dealing with enough traps while exploring the dungeon, the lack of resources to deal with additional traps going off curtails the desire to obtain money and treasure.
Randomized damage, hit points, and accuracy. Casting a spell on an enemy group and having it do anywhere from 5 to 19 damage per enemy is irritating. Missing with 90% of attacks is also irritating, especially when entire combat rounds pass with neither the player nor the enemy actually connecting. Having an attack of identical power not kill an identical enemy is befuddling. All of this comes about thanks to invisible dice rolls determining combat, which means that all of this is randomly determined. It is true that many games use random factors, but having them be so widely varied and universally encountered is something The Dark Spire has little competition in.
Weapons with no visible damage output. Success must have had something in mind by not giving weapons any visible strength, but the result is a puzzle to every player. Thanks to the aforementioned random damage output, it isn't easy to determine via battle the effectiveness of weapons either. Imagine if Chrono Trigger's weapons had no visible attack rating, and only the descriptions to go by for determining their strength....
Not being able to cast magic if certain weapons or armor are equipped. Using magic-casters for physical fighting is usually not a smart idea in RPGs, but they usually are capable of doing it at least. But in The Dark Spire, putting almost any piece of equipment onto a priest or a mage renders them unable to cast magic. So much for multi-tasking....
Actual animation in battle. The Dark Spire's art direction is quite impressive. However, never seeing anything move in battle becomes boring. While exploring, the same backgrounds will scroll over and over, with objects and events being described instead of shown. RPGs once upon a time had to work within the technical limits of the systems they were on, but those days have (mostly) ended.
Randomly dropped weapons and equipment. Imagine if the most powerful equipment in a game was not available for purchase, but had to be found as random enemy drops. I know this is actually rather common, so I'm going to be a little more specific: instead of just the 'most powerful,' 'any powerful weapon' is what cannot be bought and instead must be found through luck. The Dark Spire's introductory equipment gets augmented once midway through, with new weapons that represent marginal increases beyond what was available at the beginning. All further increases have to be uncovered through getting lucky with enemy encounters in the dungeon, and then of course staying lucky when dealing with traps. The equivalent in another game would be having no new things in shops past the second or third town's equipment store's stock.
There are numerous other deliberately archaic mechanisms in The Dark Spire, but going into more of them is not necessary. While many games still proceed with obtuse mechanics, few exhibit anything like this game's dedication to so thoroughly reproducing the nebulous aspects of olden days. The evolution of RPGs is clearly incomplete, but this example of what a game looks like when it goes back in time should make clear just how far the genre has come.
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