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.