[Baines]

[LordGek]

The "new game smell" has finally worn off a game I so much WANTED to like.

I finally beat the story mode, unlocked the TRUE roguelike dungeon I'd waited so long to see and now get that this can never be a true classic in the same way as the better Mysterious Dungeon games were, at least to me, for two kind of weird but still meaningful reasons:

1) No Scoreboard!
I don't mind having an impossible dungeon I might never complete ahead of me...but without some sort of scoreboard to gloat over the times I made it all the way to the 25th level once, it just feels so empty and pointless to me.

2) No Metagame Left Anymore!
While I far prefer these "Going in with Nothing" dungeons in my Roguelikes, I also kind of liked in games like Shiren and Torneko that there were dungeons I could actually use all of this stuff I somehow snuck out of the big end dungeon. So after a zillion futile runs in the "Going in with Nothing" dungeon I could assemble a set of some of the better equipemnt and make a stab at one of the "No Chance Unless Fully Equipped" dungeons and see how far I could get. This alone gave my normally futile runs a little more purpose...like sure I died on the tenth level but I was able to send back to base some pretty cool loot right before I died. In Izuna I was already 99th level nad had already beat its biggest equipped dungeon. I could still try to beat the Gods but there won't be any scoreboard to gloat over if I do and I'll still have to wade through 5-40 levels of completely meaniningless cake walk shit to get to these interesting parts. Bah.

[Elder Toups]

So how do we solve the problems with this game?

I think a lot of us want something different from this game, but we also know that its unlikely that if the game gave it to us, that it would come to the united states.

What makes it a profound shame is that almost all the ingredients are here, if not from a purely gameplay point of view, from a programmatic point of view. The engine for this game could be tweaked into something fantastic with a little more faith in the American market.

For some reason Advance Wars comes to mind. That game had a "tutorial" which introduced the main game concepts but was pretty fun to play itself. Could we imagine some sort of gentle introduction to a roguelike which would then blossom into a full on Roguelike?

What if, for example, we had played the trip up to the Valley Inn in Shiren, which had consisted of a few five or ten floor dungeons which served to introduce the mechanisms without being challenging and then we started the main game?

Do you think American's NEED to keep their levels. Is it really that bad to lose them? Levels in Shiren are not even really the same thing as levels in other games anyway. Maybe we could just call the "level" stat something else and people wouldn't even notice? Make it more like an "Action" game than an RPG? The RPG trappings are misrepresentative anyway.

Any ideas?

[Shapermc]

[LordGek]

[Shapermc]

I think my expectations are lowered enough that I can play this game. And the games I had ordered for my trip to SanFran didn't come yet. So, I just picked up the game.
_________________


The bad sleep well at The Gamer's Quarter