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.