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In-Spire: The Dark Spire By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman There was a time when video RPGs were actually tough; where the games were more about character builds and development, rather than some long and incomprehensible story filled with clichés. There was also a time where the most popular video RPG’s didn’t have the words: Final, Fantasy, Dragon, Warrior and Quest in the name (well, maybe they one of those words in the title, but not a pairing). Those were the wonderful early 80’s where pastels, shoulder pad suits and the keytar ruled.
Success’ recently released DS game, The Dark Spire takes us back to those times in an amazing fashion. The Dark Spire is basically a first person view dungeon crawler with very retro styling. In fact, one of the big factors of this game is how ambiguous things such as: combat, item descriptions, and skills are; much like how things were in older video RPGs such as Wizardry, Bards Tale, and Ultima. The game harkens back to a time before help lines and the internet when most everything was left to the player to find out for themselves. This alone makes the game very challenging, especially since I refuse to consult gamefaqs or any other help site as I play through this game. The challenge is so great that I catch myself resetting my game at a rate of once every ten to fifteen minutes or so due to dying or making some sort of grievous error with my characters. The game also differs from more recent gen RPGs, as you’re to create your own party from the ground up (you can use the semi-leveled default characters, but just that’s for the dumb and lazy). Though there are only 4 jobs and 4 races to choose from, you can make some pretty interesting combinations in this game allowing you to have a decently customized party. As you progress in the game and gain some experience points you can also learn a secondary job and eventually merge them to create an advanced job (ie: having a thief/warrior hybrid will allow you to convert him into a ninja).
The game’s story is very basic and practically non-existent. An evil magician steals something that belongs to the local king and runs off into a seemingly creepy tower known as the Dark Spire. A behest is issued from a local adventurer’s guild seeking a team of 4 heroes to infiltrate the tower and retrieve the stolen goods. To my knowledge, this is the entire story that is given and it rarely if ever gets mentioned again as the game progresses. I kind of like this approach, as being a stoner with mild ADD I normally don’t remember much of a game’s story anyhow. Even though returning the stolen treasure and taking out the bad guy is your main objective, you’re also given some optional side quests through the adventurer’s guild. Many of these quests are “fetch quests” and sometimes assassination jobs (killing a certain band of baddies), which doesn’t really seem weird at all. However, I’d like to know how a feeble old man and his jeweled ring got to the 2nd floor of the damn tower in the first place, especially since it’s teeming with higher level monsters that often mob and kill my dwarven warrior and halfling thief with relative ease.
As you would assume with a game that plays much like an RPG from the 80’s, the graphics are also done in a similar way. Though the game has a modern graphics scheme, I can’t really make a comment on it. I immediately changed the graphics to “retro” upon turning the game on, since that vector wire frame on black motif reminds me of playing old RPGs with my dad as a kid. With the retro graphics scheme, everything is at its base level visually. I’m led to believe this even adds to the challenge, since everything looks the same and your map doesn’t have a “you are here” indicator. I especially like the minimalist graphics in combat mode; you’re forced to use your imagination (which no one seems to do anymore), since all you have is a static image of what you’re fighting and some flavor text narrating the fight.
Just like the graphics, the audio is also made to sound like it was produced by primitive technology. All the sound effects have that fuzzy/dirty sounding PC speaker feel, where everything sounds like a muffled fart or hitting a hard object through a pillow. The music is a bit more modern sounding, but suffers from repetitiveness. It’s for the most part a pretty boring beat with some strange synthesized breathing sound effect. Though I guess the developers were trying to achieve a sort of creepy and suspenseful atmosphere to simulate walking in a darkened dungeon, it ends up being repetitive and somewhat uninteresting. I personally listened to enough of the music to review it, then just muted it out and started playing DVD’s in the background to kill the silence. It’s hard for me to give a game like this a really fair rating, since I feel that a major part of me liking this game comes from the mock nostalgic feelings this game brings about. I couldn’t really recommend this game to gamers that never experienced the early 80’s and the type of games that were being made then, since they probably wouldn’t understand the main draws of this game. However, if you enjoy a classic challenge or are willing to try an RPG that’s not driven by a long and overworked story, you very well may want to look into this one. Luckily for you guys, the game also dropped in price to $20 over the weekend, so it worked out that I delayed this article a bit. Either way, fans of the early 80’s should definitely check this one out to get their retro fix. Especially since the classic Bard’s Tale for the PC (not the Windows/Xbox/PS2 version) is going for about the same price as Dark Spire.
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