The 2011 Wishlist Marathon #4 and #5: Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja and Izuna 2: The Unemployed Ninja Returns

I'm really not getting through these at the rate I was expecting. Granted, I've been playing the Izuna games during downtime while working from home whereas my evening time has been dominated by such little-known titles as Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades II. I guess it makes sense that completing these two relatively short games has been a tad delayed. Having said that, my slow pace is not a reflection on the games' quality. In fact, I enjoyed them quite a bit!

In previous writeups, I've explained a little about a wish list I made in 2011 comprised entirely of DS games. I always expected I would get to them eventually—and I was right, but I'm not sure I would have predicted 2025 for the year I'd finally do so.  Better late than never, though, and the exercise of playing these games more or less blind has been a lot of fun. For instance, I had no idea that Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja was a roguelike. I'm not sure I'd ever even played a roguelike in 2011, and if I had, it would have been one of the Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon games if anything at all. Izuna isn't entirely dissimilar.

Who is Izuna and why is she unemployed?

Let's talk about the basics here. Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja was originally released in 2007 in the US, meaning it's the oldest game I've delved into as part of this exercise so far. Oddly, it has aged much better than some of these other games, perhaps because it doesn't really leverage any of the DS's unique functions. Graphically, it wouldn't look out of place on the GBA—but it's colorful and clean in its presentation. Everything on screen is easy to parse, so it's never confusing to navigate or engage with combat. Your top screen is where you'll see dialogue and information about Izuna while navigating the game's dungeons, but the touch screen is where the meat of the gameplay lives. 

As for the story, well, that's pretty simple. It's a time of peace, so Izuna's ninja clan is out of work. In a fit of boredom, Izuna steals a priceless artifact from the village they're staying in, which results in the villagers being cursed by the gods. Izuna must now fix the problem that she created by tracking down the various gods and beating them up. As she does, she slowly cures the various villager curses, some of which are pretty funny. One guy is cursed to just be afraid of going bald. The old man who can't stop hitting on Izuna is less funny, though.

Combat fundamentals

If you've played a traditional roguelike before, you'll know what to expect when you first enter a dungeon. Movement and actions are taken in turns and all enemies move with you. Positioning, making use of choke points, and managing your resources are crucial to success. You'll find randomized items and gear as you go, but if you die, you lose all of it for good. Your Experience is the only thing you're guaranteed to keep, but luckily, you can store away anything you find as long as you clear the dungeon or find a way to teleport out. Because Izuna features several discrete dungeons that mostly aren't very long, the tension of losing your items generally isn't very high.

Some games like this balance your time in the dungeon with a hunger gauge of some kind, but the way Izuna does it is pretty clever. You have HP as you would expect, but your other resource is SP, which serves a whole variety of different purposes. Izuna is a ninja, so of course she has access to magic talismans (found in the dungeons or purchased from shops) that accomplish various effects. You might clear a floor with a big fire attack from a talisman, or paralyze all enemies, or maybe just repair your gear. These talismans cost a certain amount of SP, which not only does not regenerate on its own, but affects how much damage you deal and receive. The closer to full SP you are, the better your melee capabilities. The game encourages you to make a choice between spending your SP for spells or hoarding it to be more effective in close quarters. 

There are items in the dungeons that can restore your SP, but of course the amount of those you find comes down to luck. You could easily go through most of a dungeon and not find any SP-restoring items—or maybe you find a bunch when you don't need them. Fortunately, you can haul your gear back to town and put them in storage for another run. Preparing your loadout for any particular venture is a big part of what makes the game fun for me. Maybe I know there's a tough boss coming up but I can trivialize it by spamming several Gouka scrolls for big fire damage—but to do that, I need a lot of SP, which means I'll need to save up some restorative items and also conserve on the long journey to the dungeon's end. Maybe on the way you'll find a lot of valuable stuff that you don't want to run the risk of losing, so you pop a Kikan scroll and teleport back to town to save your valuables. Each trip still feels impactful and important in the long run because you're gaining experience and money over time.

Complexity lurking beneath the surface

Despite the mechanics of Izuna feeling simple on the surface, there's a surprising amount of depth. At the end of the day, you're mostly just walking up to enemies and attacking them until they're dead, hoping that your numbers are good enough to outlast the damage you take in return. But you have more control over that process than simply leveling up. Sure, leveling up increases your HP and SP (which indirectly increases your offense and defense), but gear is also hugely important. Izuna has access to only a few different types of gear, but there are subcategories within each of these types that diversify your strategies. Izuna can equip swords, arms, and claws. Claws provide both attack and defense, whereas swords provide only attack, and arms provide only defense. Now, arms can only be equipped with a sword, so one wonders why you wouldn't just simplify and go with the claw option. For a while, that was also my take, but I learned over time that it wasn't necessarily the best answer.

Like most other roguelikes, Izuna has a limited inventory, which means if you choose to go the Sword + Arm route, you're limiting your inventory a bit just by default. What's important to consider here is that not all swords, claws, or arms are created equal. Each piece of gear in the game has raw stats that fall within a randomized range, but on top of that, they have a key attribute shared with all gear of that same name. For example, Cat Claws do more damage against Fish-type enemies. Dragon Claws shoot out a wave of energy when  you're full HP, à la the Master Sword. The gear combo that I really came to rely on for a big chunk of the game was Shingan Blade paired with Enma Arm. The former cannot miss and the latter prevents SP loss on being hit. Since I understood that your SP pool was a big determining factor in your overall combat ability, it felt like a natural fit if I wanted to stick primarily with melee. Being able to hit every time and never lose damage potency made it feel like I never had to leave a dungeon early unless I really wanted to.

Speaking of depth though, I still haven't discussed everything that talismans can do. There are many talismans with various effects, but the spell or function they perform is only one use for them. They can also be stuck to your gear to boost their stats or impart unique attributes. For example, the Rekka scroll is normally a fire attack, but when stuck to a weapon, it increases base attack. The amount it increases attack is equal to the number in parentheses, so the higher you find, the better. However, each weapon also has a total SP capacity which determines how much in talismans you can apply to it. For instance, if you have 100 capacity available on your sword, you could put four 20 SP Rekkas on it, or you could simply go with one 100 SP Rekka. For a min-maxer like myself, I wanted to ensure I got the most bang for my buck, so I started hunting for Fukusei scrolls, which are almost always available in the 89-95 range and simply duplicate any existing talisman. By making use of these scrolls, you can duplicate Rekkas to match the capacity of the Fukusei you used. If this sounds a little complicated, it's because it kind of is! But it speaks to the depth of this charming little 2007 DS roguelike. I won't even get in to the various ways in which you can expand your gear's SP capacity because I've gone on long enough.

Humor is a double-edged sword

In case it isn't clear, I'm an intensely mechanics-focused person, especially when it comes to games like these. But I mentioned Izuna is charming—and it is, but it's also important to note that it's a product of its time, and of Japanese culture. The game is not at all shy about acknowledging that our protagonist is a sexy teenage girl, and in fact is practically beating you over the head with that fact. It's generally played for humor, but this kind of thing usually skeeves me out a bit. A 16-year-old girl being hit on by old men or being called "just a child with oversized breasts" doesn't really get me to guffawing, if I'm being honest. There's also a random bit of an NPC dialogue that honest-to-god drops the R-slur. Even for a game from 2007, I was shocked that made it through the localization process. 

Oh, right, there's a second game here

It is at this point that I realize I've done all this writing and I realize I haven't even talked about Izuna 2. After I got through the first game reasonably quickly, I thought I might as well just do my writeup on both games together, but what I didn't anticipate is that the sequel really expands on every mechanic significantly.

The Unemployed Ninja Returns exemplifies everything a sequel should be by building on a rock-solid foundation and introducing a wide variety of new ideas. The most important and defining change from the first game is that you can now play more characters than just Izuna—and in fact, you now deploy two characters to every dungeon. At first, it's just Izuna and her ninja pals Shino and Mitsumoto, but later the whole pantheon of gods from the first game inexplicably join you, meaning you have access to a whole pile of characters who all have different aptitudes and special abilities. Some characters are good with swords, some are good with ranged weapons (new to the sequel), and many have unique tag attacks that can only be performed with specific duos. If Izuna might have worn a little thin near the end, Izuna 2 overwhelms with variety from the very beginning. 

Remember how I said there were different types of swords, claws, and arms in the first game? That's still true in Izuna 2 and all of those weapon types return, but in addition there are new types of those base weapons and then a ton of completely new kinds like razor yo-yos, bows, different kinds of arrows, boomerangs that hit all 8 spaces around you, and even dolls that can be used as weapons. There are also many new talismans and a new Staff item you can use in conjunction with them that add a third unique function to every talisman. Having all of these options added to the pool of random gear to find in any excursion adds so much variety to each run. The big roster also means you can really experiment with your loadouts more than ever before. I liked Izuna 1 just fine, but Izuna 2 is a game I would legitimately recommend if you like traditional roguelikes at all. 

The developers were also smart enough to build reasons into the game for actually tagging out in the dungeons. It might be tempting to just stick with one character all the time, but since these two characters have completely separate HP pools, many encounters are balanced around needing that extra bulk to survive. On top of that, you can instantly tag to your partner if you get hit with a nasty status ailment. You have three tags available at maximum, but they also recharge pretty quickly. It always feel possible to swap back and forth often. Building your duo to capitalize on their different strengths is a lot of fun.

I mentioned the loadout that I relied on for much of Izuna 1, so I'll shout out what I used in the sequel as well. I stuck as Izuna for my primary character with support from Utsuho, one of the gods that has great proficiency with ranged weapons. Izuna stuck with a Vampire Claw (drains 5% of damage as health) upgraded to the moon while Utsuho rotated between a bow and an insane ranged weapon called Wheel of Steal that hits all four spaces in front of you and has a chance to steal a random item. I'd swap him over to a boomerang with +Defense whenever he got surrounded. 

There's a lot more I could say about these games if I wanted to get even more in the weeds about mechanics, but ultimately, I just want to say that I liked these games a lot despite some discomfort with the developer's sense of humor. Izuna 1 is a reasonably short, solid roguelike, whereas Izuna 2 is actually pretty exceptional and something I would consider playing again if not for, well, all the games I have on the docket as it is.

The 2011 Wishlist Marathon #3: Glory of Heracles

In 2011, I made a big wishlist of DS RPGs that I knew I would get to eventually. I just didn't think it would take me fifteen years. This one is the third on this list that I am getting through at a snail's pace.

Okay, Delita.

Glory of Heracles is an interesting turn-based RPG centered on Greek mythology, fifth in a series but the first and only entry that was ever released in English. I vividly remember seeing the boxart of the game in the Electronics department at Walmart around the time of its release in 2008 (I don't have an insane memory, I just worked there for years) and despite being curious about it, I simply didn't have the funds to buy every DS RPG. I certainly tried, though.

A tale of Greek mythology

You're led to believe that you, the protagonist, are the legendary Heracles, until you come into contact with a lot of other folks who also claim to be Heracles. The main plot of the game will center around unraveling this particular mystery as well as the backstory of the other immortal characters you recruit along the way. 

The protagonist, who I named Athan for no particular reason, but will from here on refer to simply as "the protagonist"—he's a blank slate. He's your classic JRPG silent protagonist, a trope that I have pretty mixed feelings about. I think even in some of the best games in this genre, I don't care for silent protagonists, and Heracles certainly did little to change my mind. More on that later, though, because the characterization and vehicle for the plot comes from the characters that join your party. First, there's Leucos, a woman pretending to be a man for mysterious reasons. She's also immortal, and much like the protagonist, isn't exactly sure why. Later, you'll encounter Axios, a tired womanizer trope of a character and yet another immortal. You'll recruit Heracles himself later, who is definitely the real Heracles. Your final party member is Eris, who is just... a little girl. She's immortal, too.

For the most part, these characters are simply there. Each character has maybe one defining character trait and that trait is absolutely worn thin over the game's runtime. Leucos is not doing a very good job of pretending to be a man. Axios is a creep around women and that's just hilarious. Heracles says "wahaha" a lot. A LOT. Eris is a little girl and kind of mean. It's not until much later in the game that these characters become at all interesting, but that's more an artifact of the plot, not of the likability of the characters themselves.

It's worth noting that the Heracles series was helmed by writer Kazushige Nojima starting with the second game on the Famicom. He is probably most recognizable for being one of the principle writers behind Final Fantasy VII (along with Yoshinori Kitase). For instance, he was responsible for the story surrounding Cloud's memories. Considering that Glory of Heracles features an almost entirely amnesiac cast, it's clear it's a concept he's interested in. For further proof, you need only look at the third entry in the Heracles series back on the Super Famicom, which also plays with the amnesia trope.

Maintaining a large party

Initially, I was impressed by the five-character party, a welcome aspect of the game that has unfortunately become less common over the years. I loved games like Suikoden, Final Fantasy IV, and even Etrian Odyssey for their larger parties, so it was nice to see a game that trusts the player to manage it. Unfortunately, the party size is directly at odds with the long, drawn out animations of just about every attack in the game, particularly the spells. This is exacerbated by maybe the game's most notable feature, which is the ability to enhance your spells and abilities with touch screen commands.

To be clear, I think including timed button presses or little mini-games to enhance the effect of your actions in a turn-based RPG is almost always a good idea. It even works well here in Glory of Heracles in that there's eventually a great variety of different touch screen actions you can take to make you feel involved in the combat. Broadly, this is a good thing, but it takes maybe 20-30 seconds to power up a spell and then you have to sit through another 30-second long spell animation, often multiple times per battle. If all that wasn't enough, there are also little animations that play for every passive effect that procs on each character individually. This could be something like Boon that restores a little MP, or Vigor, which does the same thing for HP. Each of these passive skills will play an animation on each character in combat, individually. When you have five party members and might be fighting up to eight enemies, you can imagine how tedious this might become. The further you get in the game and the more elaborate the spell animations (and power-ups) get, the more this problem creeps in. I found myself using Sibyl's Balms (basically Repels) to avoid encounters more and more as I approached the final dungeon simply because every random encounter took five minutes or more. When you're traversing eight floors of a massive dungeon, this is simply not palatable.

Much of the game is maintenance. You have a five-character party, all of which have weapons, sub-weapons, several pieces of armor, and different items they can equip. Each of these pieces of gear have the potential to imbue your characters with different active or passive skills, so you're constantly changing your loadout. You might think this give you a lot of strategic choice, but it's generally most effective to upgrade to whatever is strongest when you get it, meaning you might lose access to a skill you've grown to rely on along the way. I found myself wishing it worked more like Final Fantasy IX, where I'd have the opportunity to learn the skill permanently before moving on to something else. 

You can learn new spells and abilities permanently, of course, but not just through leveling up. The way you acquire these abilities is a little peculiar, actually. In most towns, there's a Sorcerist, which sells various different magic items that I mostly did not use at all. However, in the basements of these establishments is an altar to a Greek deity. You can pray at these altars to learn new skills. In fact, this is the only way to learn new skills. These altars are accompanied by a fairy who will teach you new ways to power up your spells and abilities (IE, the touch screen minigames). Weirdly, you don't even learn these abilities until you've gained one more level after using the altar. It's also quite easy to miss some of them since there's very little in the way of backtracking in the game and there are a lot of basement altars as well as standalone temples with altars. I think I only missed one of them, but I'm still annoyed by it. 

Combat strategy

For the most part, I didn't have to think too much about strategy for probably the first 85% of the game. It's that last 15% that starts to mix things up a bit.

During these later stages of the game, I started to pay more attention to aspects of the combat system that I had previously mostly ignored. I've already touched on how you can boost the effect of your spells and abilities through touch screen commands, but there's also a complicated system of resource management for the usage of these spells. Spells consume MP as you might expect, but also ether, which is sorted into five different color-coded types. Fire spells cost red ether, wind spells cost green ether, and so on. These elemental spells also generate dark ether, which can be spent by dark spells, which generate small amounts of elemental ether in turn. One might ask "what happens if you have enough MP to cast a spell, but not enough ether" and the answer is not as simple as "you can't." You can choose to cast a spell without enough ether if you wish, but then you'll be subject to reflux, which damages you in proportion to the amount of "debt" you go into to cast the spell. You can use this strategically when you have almost enough ether and know the spell won't kill you. Alternatively, you can simply let it kill you and resign yourself to reviving the character—even within the same turn!

Since all actions within a turn are decided before these actions take place, you can choose to revive a character you know will die prior to it actually happening. This actually opens up some interesting strategic options that I absolutely made use of (abused?) in some of the final battles. To be clear, I think I made the final areas of this game much harder than they otherwise would be by being quite underleveled. I consulted a guide and saw that I was at least five levels below where one might expect to be—and I certainly felt it. Most bosses could comfortably take out any of my party members in one shot. Considering these annoying bosses seem to be able to take 4-5 actions in a row, this made things pretty tough.

Glory of Heracles - was it good?

Ultimately, though, I think what I'll remember most about this game is that combat system. It's way too slow for its own good, but it has a lot of interesting ideas. There are so many mechanics that are very cool in isolation, but often tedious in practice. It's sort of interesting to be dragging, clicking, and tapping during spells, but it wears thin when you have to do it for every single random battle. It's interesting in theory to have enemies that must be overkilled to remove their body from the field and prevent their revival, but it becomes extraordinarily tedious when you have eight enemies in combat and you have to kill each of them twice. That particular mechanic rears its ugly head in a fearsome way during the final encounter.

Though absolutely a flawed game, I'm glad I played Glory of Heracles. It's an interesting relic from the Nintendo DS era and an interesting snippet of a defunct RPG series. Many of those early Heracles games have fan translations now, so I may well try them out one day.

provided without context

The 2011 Wishlist Marathon #2: The Dark Spire

You know, my original plan for this series was that I would be getting through these games at a brisk pace. I'd be knocking them out once, maybe even twice a month! 

I wasn't ready for The Dark Spire.

I thought that I was already a dungeon crawling veteran, having completed every Etrian Odyssey title on their hardest difficulties. The Dark Spire is a decidedly different beast, based as it is on a much older tradition of dungeon crawling pioneered by Wizardry. While Etrian Odyssey draws on the same source of inspiration, it streamlines the experience in many ways that make the games much more palatable—even though these titles are far more punishing than your average JRPG fare. With The Dark Spire, developer Success has adhered much more closely to the genre's Dungeons and Dragons roots, to the point that HP is identified as "hits," all damage is determined via dice rolls, HP gains are determined by hit dice—you get the picture.

What is The Dark Spire?

Let's take a step back, though. What is The Dark Spire, actually? It's a dungeon crawler in which you assemble a party of four to explore, fight monsters, level up, gather loot, and complete quests in a sizable multi-floor dungeon. In between excursions, you return to town to heal up, level up your classes, learn new spells, sell all your junk, and maybe take on some new quests. At the surface level, it's pretty simple and exactly the kind of game I find myself digging. I love party building and composition, and I love games that legitimately challenge you to use and abuse the tools you are provided. That's certainly true of The Dark Spire. You'll have to figure out answers to lots of common problems. How do you map out a floor when the further you get, the less safe it is to suffer a party death? After all, for the vast majority of the game, there's no way to resurrect a party member in the dungeon. What party composition is safest to take on challenging encounters but also to ensure you can stay in the dungeon for longer periods of time so you get more value out of your trips? 

Well, for that second part, it seems like the game is fairly short on viable party compositions. You need a tank to absorb hits in the front row, and no class is more effective than warrior for that purpose. They have the lowest AC (that's right, the lower the better, in classic 2nd Edition AD&D fashion), they get the most health per level, and can equip all the armor without penalties. You also need an offensive spellcaster to deal with groups of enemies, you need a thief to disarm trapped chests and unlock doors, and you need a healer to keep your group healthy. So, it makes sense to go with warrior, thief, mage, and priest. Almost every enemy in the first three floors can only target the front row, so if your warrior has suitably low AC, you're very safe just parking your frailer party members in the back and trusting your warrior to hold down the front row. I did experiment a little with formations as the game went on, but it only became even slightly viable to do so later when I had access to advanced classes and better gear.

Navigation is the game's biggest difficulty.

As a very directionally-challenged person, I found comfort in Etrian Odyssey's complex levels because I was solely responsible for mapping everything out on the DS touch screen. It helped me to better internalize these levels' structures and made the level designs much more memorable. Dark Spire is much more challenging in this regard not only because the game's massive floors challenge EO's complexity, but because the map does not identify where you are on that map. I found myself losing track of where I was hundreds upon hundreds of times, a problem that was only partially remedied by learning the Visum Situs spell, a spell that you can mercifully learn very early on with a mage character. It identifies where you are on the map and where you are facing—for as long as you have the map open and not a moment longer.  On top of that, there are areas of complete darkness in which your only tools to aid navigation are the sounds of your footsteps and the way the map gets filled in as you move, provided it's your first time exploring there. Throw in random teleporters and traps that randomly change your facing and you have a recipe for confusion.

But The Dark Spire is a game all about backtracking. Unlike Etrian Odyssey and its readily available Ariadne Threads, you'll find that your forays into this game's titular dungeon afford you no recourse for easily returning to town—at least not until much later in the game. In fact, you will have climbed to the fourth floor, explored the basement, and done all sorts of convoluted quests before you unlock any sort of checkpoint. Until then, you'll need to keep in mind that any trip must plan for a way to return to town by backtracking all the way back to the very beginning of the first floor.

One memorable and particularly egregious example of backtracking comes from the sixth floor, where you'll find a teleporter outfitted with three jewels. You can interact with these jewels to make them light up. Using different combinations of lit jewels, you can interact with the device to teleport the party to previously inaccessible areas of the dungeon. These areas are all over, including the basement and the second floor, and all of these trips are one-way. They're also all required if you want to fill out the map, but many are required to complete quests. At least one is required to advance at all. In between each use of the teleporter, you'll need to trek your way all the way back to the sixth floor teleporter to do it all over again. 

Since you're going to be spending so much time retracing your steps, you're encouraged to become very familiar with which stairs take you to which part of which floor—and where various unmarked points of interest lie. There's a very good reason why consulting resources online became a routine as I made my way through this game. I found myself with half a dozen tabs open at any given time to keep track of quests I was completing, coordinates where points of interest were located, as well as reference on what items in this game even do. What's the difference between a rapier and an estoc? How about a cutlass? Nobody knows! Except, of course, for the internet.

While you spend a great deal of time in combat in The Dark Spire, the primary verb the game exemplifies is really traversal. Combat is just one of the many ways your progress can be impeded. The thief justifies its inclusion in your party to deal with locked doors, but perhaps even more importantly, trapped chests. Most encounters will drop a treasure chest and virtually all of them are trapped. If you want money and many, many unique items that only drop in the dungeon, you'll need a thief to keep your party safe. In the early levels, getting poisoned by a trap is a huge pain. Do you happen to have an antidote on hand? No? Well, I guess you need to trudge down two floors to return to town—and your party member is definitely going to die on the way. You won't have a way to revive that party member while you're in the dungeon and if you fight any other monsters, that dead party member won't get any much-needed experience either. Meanwhile, your thief contributes to combat by doing extremely mediocre damage, even if you manage to nab a slightly better bow later. On later floors, the trapped chests get so devastating that they can effortlessly wipe out your entire party, among a host of other

annoying effects.

Transitioning to the mid-game

The Dark Spire lulls you into a false sense of security in the game's early floors. While your first few forays may have some tension because you simply don't have enough HP to comfortably survive for long periods of time, you'll quickly settle into a rhythm of taking out most encounters with basic attacks, your frontline warrior doing about 90% of the work. My mage, thief, and priest had such poor equipment options that they frequently dealt somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 damage—and this never really changes for pure spellcasters, even as well-geared melee fighters hit triple digit damage. In these early floors, though, there's little use for spells. It's a waste of resources. You might spend hours meticulously mapping out one of these massive floors. I'd much rather get as much of that done as possible in one trip so I can avoid as much backtracking as possible.

By the time you get to the fourth floor, The Dark Spire becomes a decidedly different game. While encounters could be troubling just due to attrition in previous floors, the fourth floor starts throwing threats at you that can actually wipe your party out if you're not careful. No longer can your warrior solely protect you from danger. Enemies can now cast spells to hit your back row—so you'll need to return with spells in kind. Once the size of enemy encounters balloons, spells that hit entire groups start to become almost mandatory to progress. On the other hand, the fourth floor is where you can finally complete the quest to repair the elevator you found all the way back on the first floor. You'd think this would really open the game up. Well, yes and no.

Repairing the elevator

I was tempted to compare repairing the elevator to that moment in Dark Souls when you finally get the Lordvessel. You've spent the entire game traversing dangerous environments with the understanding that you need to remember how to get to every specific location and that you're going to have to walk there the whole way. It's very effective in Dark Souls because the level design is so strong—to the point that when you finally do unlock fast travel, it feels like a meaningful reward. It feels similar in The Dark Spire. No longer do I need to make that dangerous trek to the fourth floor every single time I want to get there! And all I had to do was collect various odds and ends from all four floors to repair the generator that powers the elevator. "But man, it's worth it," I thought at the time.

Eventually, I figured out that the threats on the first three floors are almost completely ignorable and that the real danger came from the higher floors, all of which cannot be reached via the elevator. Every time you want to get to the fifth floor, you'll have to move through the fourth floor. Every time you want to get to the sixth floor, you'll need to move through the fourth and fifth floors. Can you guess how the seventh floor works?

By the time I had repaired that elevator, I thought I had become so intimately familiar with the first three floors (and really those first two floors in particular) that the rest of the game would feel fresh in comparison. At first, this was true, but over time, I realized I had traversed the first portion of the fourth floor dozens upon dozens of times. Every time I ran out of steam, I had to return to the fourth floor elevator, take it back down to the first, and then walk my way out. Even after I finally learned a spell to teleport out of the dungeon, I still had to work my way all the way back up every time. There are shortcuts, but they are minor—and random encounters starting from the fourth floor are always a threat almost regardless of your level, and will absolutely drain your resources. You can fall back on some tricks like using Susurrus Fatalis to kill all enemies below level 8, and then transition to using area spells like Lotus Puniceus and Mucro Glacialis to deal with higher level enemies. (By the way, the Latin spell names are pretty cool.) Meanwhile, you'll need to make sure you keep your thief's levels up to deal with increasingly more difficult traps and locked doors. 

The perks of making a plan

The Dark Spire is a game that very much rewards research and planning. Although I did plenty of research and planned ahead to some extent, it still wasn't enough to avoid running into unforeseen problems. A big upgrade to your characters becomes available later in the game when you gain the ability to unlock advanced classes. These advanced classes have pretty steep requirements. You'll need level 10 in two of the base classes, specific stats, and a specific skill learned, which also has stat requirements. 

For example, I wanted my warrior to eventually become a paladin, but I didn't do enough research and realized later on that I didn't have enough Charisma. Unlike every other attribute, you can't pay skill points to increase Charisma, even though apparently there is a way to do so in the post-game. I didn't want to level up another character all over again, so I settled for samurai. It turns out my mage didn't have the right stats for the class I wanted either, so I decided to make her a samurai too. My final party ended up being two samurai, a ninja, and a druid. That means three characters that can cast spells, with the druid having access to holy magic as well. Holy magic is where all of your healing comes from, and also your ability to warp yourself out of the tower. 

The ninja (thief + warrior) is just there because you need a thief and I liked the idea of having a ninja. His melee damage was pretty good, but as I came to find out, spells really eclipse everything in terms of usefulness in the late game. You just can't compete with melee attacks that only hit one enemy at a time. I would have been better off with a wizard (mage + thief) or even a ranger (mage + priest). That extra healing certainly would have been helpful on the seventh floor.

It feels like I have a lot of negative things to say, but truthfully, I enjoyed a lot of my time with The Dark Spire. Particularly in the early portions of the game, it felt like a very fun game to hang out with while I explored and enjoyed the excellent soundtrack. Seriously, check out the soundtrack on YouTube or something—it's great. Aesthetically, everything about this game appeals to me, but in practice, the level of repetition and tedium the game subjects you to leaves me feeling a little more cold than I anticipated going in. I think it's a really interesting game for folks like me that like checking out obscure and underrepresented RPGs, but it's not a game that I would find myself recommending to most.

The 2011 Wishlist Marathon #1: Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled

Back in 2011, which, as of this writing, was 14 years ago, I was very much a handheld fanatic. I was particularly a big fan of the original DS and played a huge chunk of the library. I'm a lifelong fan of JRPGs and at the time, it really felt like handhelds were the last gasp of a dying genre. With context from the future, I can recognize that the industry in Japan was struggling to adapt to the shift to HD, so the traditionalists migrated to handhelds. For me, I just wanted to keep playing the kind of game that I loved, so handhelds were a perfect fit for me. In that spirit, I put together a big list of games I wanted to get to in addition to the backlog of games I was already working on.

Except I never got to any of them.

I stumbled across this list again recently when managing my Backloggery and came to that realization pretty quickly. Maybe it's something about the 3DS coming out at this time, but I found it odd that I never doubled back to check any of these out. I specifically made note of these because they were somewhat lesser known compared to the most popular DS RPGs. As soon as I saw this list again, I became consumed with the idea of trying out all of these games that I barely even researched 14 years ago. I still love DS and 3DS games to this day. I'm generally still playing a couple of them every year. Why not play oh, 10 or so this year?

The first arbitrarily selected game on the list is Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled, a game I have never  even slightly researched—or at least so I thought. 14 years is a long time, after all. It actually turns out that I've played a game by members of this now defunct development studio. Black Sigil was developed by a company called Studio Archcraft, which dissolved during the development of an unreleased sequel to this very game. Some years later, two members of that studio formed a new indie development studio called 6 Eyes Studio and developed a tactical RPG by the name of Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, a  game I reviewed on this blog about five and a half years ago.

Here in 2025, the idea of a game paying homage to Chrono Trigger is nothing new. I'm sure there are many games that fit the bill, but two that spring to mind right away are I am Setsuna, a game I reviewed on YouTube in 2016, and then of course Sea of Stars, a more recent example that I have not yet played. In 2009, there were few imitators to speak of, so Black Sigil always served as a point of curiosity to me—until of course I forgot about it for many years.

Black Sigil is not what I would call a hidden gem. It's an extremely rough homage to Chrono Trigger and other RPGs of that era. While the game's fundamentals are surprisingly solid, the experience is marred by some pretty serious downsides. One of the most obvious faults is the game's stunningly high encounter rate. Chrono Trigger set itself apart in its era by featuring visible enemy encounters, many of which can be avoided entirely. Black Sigil is more like an early Dragon Quest game in terms of encounters, except dialed to 11. I've heard rumors that the encounter rate is actually bugged, which wouldn't surprise me at all given how common it is to run into encounters within 1-2 steps. Much of the game's runtime for me was simply running from these encounters, waiting impatiently for enemy animations to resolve so I would actually have permission to escape.

Graphically, it doesn't look great. While the 2D sprites are solid and serve their purpose in distinguishing the characters, the backgrounds are often muddy and difficult to read, particularly in caves and other dark areas in dungeons. It can be easy to get lost while trying to make out where a certain path or doorway is—and of course this is compounded by the absurd encounter rate, which is disorienting in even many of the best classic RPGs. Traversing the world map is also a bit of a chore, particularly when you take into account how utterly unreadable the tiny in-game map is. I frequently consulted a map online that was also quite unreadable, but at least you could zoom in on that one. None of this helped with the preposterous encounter rate when moving over land, of course.

On top of all of these playability issues, it's hard to defend the game's plot and dialogue. The central premise of the game is as trodden a path as you might expect. Our protagonist, Kairu, lives in a land of magic but he can't use magic himself. Despite many attempts to learn, he never succeeds and is exiled from the land of Bel Lenora. Much to his surprise, his sister, Aurora sneaks out to join him. They end up in a brand new world after opening a mysterious gate in the Cursed Caves and the rest of the game chronicles resolving that mystery while acquiring new party members along the way. I wouldn't mind the classic JRPG storyline if the dialogue and characters were exceptional, but I would call these characters "kind of charming" at best. The dialogue also could have certainly used a proofreader to clean up many, many examples of poor grammar.

Not to bury the lede, but you might be surprised to learn that despite all of these criticisms, I enjoyed this game. Time and time again, the game surprised me with gameplay elements that were not new, but reminded me of the way a lot of games used to be, particularly in the SNES era. You get eight playable characters in this game, all of which have their own backstories and personalities, simplistic as they might be. There's a world map to explore with tons of optional content and quests. You get an airship and a boat. At many points you can traverse the entire world just to look around and see what's there. You're not selecting towns and locations on a map. You need to travel to places, remember where they are, and really explore to find interesting things.

There's a character named Nym who occupies both the Thief and Summoner JRPG archetypes. He doesn't learn his summons via level up, but through optional story events. You'll need to travel to various dungeons to acquire more summons for him—and some of these summons can only be channeled with the assistance of another specific party member. You can steal several unique items throughout the game as well. The punishing encounter rate renders most dungeons extremely grueling, but grab Nym and take him to a snowy island in the southeast and you'll find a rare encounter that you can steal Paragon Rings from, an extremely powerful accessory that regenerates both HP and SP during combat. It's certainly an upgrade to the Mana Ring, which is supposed to recover SP but instead does nothing. 

There are two party members that are completely optional. In at least one case, an extensive series of side quests needs to be completed in order to acquire the party member in question. It's very much a Magus scenario, but both of these characters have combo techs with all of your  characters, unlike  Magus himself. One of them is a bit like FFVI's Gogo, in that he has a variety of abilities borrowed from other characters. For this optional character, his skill loadout is entirely dependent on his unique equipment, which  is also strewn all across the world.

Every character has a set of unique combo attacks with every other character, and it's truly enjoyable to unlock them and see what they do. For the longest time, I stuck with Aurora and Nephi in my party for Absorbus Maximus, an AoE combo spell that drains both HP and SP. Used carefully, it could keep them topped up all times—but you've gotta be careful not to use it on undead targets so you end up just damaging yourself instead.

Black Sigil also does one of my favorite things that RPGs with large casts do—it gives you the option to split up and use your characters separately. I know this is not everyone's favorite, but I adore the route splits in Final Fantasy VI, for instance, and that kind of thing happens several times in this game. It's in the final dungeon, but there's also a segment that reminded me a lot of that part in FFVI where everyone gets split after Lethe River. Granted, not all of these segments are a barrel of laughs given the roughness of the game's mechanics, but I enjoyed the attempt and the opportunity to try out characters I'd been neglecting. 

I think the point at which I realized "hey, I actually kind of like this game" was during an optional colosseum-style segment late into the game. It's a combat challenge in which you're tasked with clearing 28 encounters in a row to get a specific reward. Technically, you can get different rewards depending on how many you manage to clear, but of course I was set on doing the full 28. I thought I was cheesing the game by bringing Nephi, Aurora, and Rogurd, but the strategy wasn't foolproof, particularly when the game started throwing Pest Spirits at me, an improbably tanky enemy that ruthlessly blankets your characters in status ailments. I hadn't planned ahead to protect my party from ailments, so getting past the Pest Sprits took a significant amount of trial and error. It was the level of strategy I needed to employ to get past them that made me realize I was actually having a really good time. 

Once I'd scoured the game's world for all the most powerful items and accessories, I started really conquering those enemy encounters that seemed stacked against me initially. Even when running from a good 70% of enemies, I still felt like I got overleveled. Most bosses in the last quarter of the game got absolutely annihilated. Eventually, I transitioned to a team of Kairu, Vai, and Rogurd, all of which could almost hit the 9999 damage cap on their  own. I would normally start to sour on a game once the difficulty has been trivialized, but it had the opposite effect in this case. This game that I had been playing purely from an analytical perspective suddenly became this triumphant act of revenge against a game that seemed determined to prevent me from playing and enjoying it.

It's clear that I had pretty mixed feelings on this game. It's almost objectively a bad game, but an experience that I nonetheless found pretty enjoyable. It's also a pleasant epilogue to this game's story that the lead game designer went on to helm Fell Seal, which is not without its own flaws, but holds up as a much better game overall. I can only hope that the next game I try for this project doesn't take me 50 hours to get through.