Played through an interesting game yesterday.
Sugoro Quest: Dice no Senshitachi is a board game/JRPG hybrid for the Famicom, where you play as one of four heroes on a quest to rid the kingdom of evil.
You start out in the King's castle where you can purchase supplies and save your game. Each of the four heroes has their own personal equipment, but they share gold and consumable items. After you've prepared, speak to the guard to pick your character and begin your quest.
On the world map you roll a six-sided die to determine how far your character will move, and then you deal with whatever you landed on. Healing spaces, equipment upgrades, side quests, and other things are scattered over Sugoro Quest's six maps. If you land on a blank space you get a random encounter. There's not a lot you can do to control where your character goes. Most of the time you're on a one way path. When you do hit an intersection, you might get a choice of which path to take, but often your route is decided by what you've done in that map's side quests. The side quests themselves are surprisingly complex and fun for such a simple game. Depending on what happens in stage 3 you'll either peacefully sail across the ocean, strenuously swim across the ocean, or, most likely, sail part of the way, get shipwrecked, and then swim to the end, with a few possible variations within each outcome.
Combat is very luck-based, as you'd probably expect. Each character has an attack die and a magic die. Early on they'll only be able to roll low numbers, but as you level up their dice will improve. When you attack or cast a spell, your character throws the appropriate die and the enemy throws theirs as well. Whoever wins performs their action successfully and whoever loses misses their turn. If the winner chose a damaging action, the amount of damage increases based on how much higher their roll was. Obviously this can be frustrating as shit when your hero decides to start throwing a bunch of ones. Status effects, buffs, and debuffs always work as long as you won the roll, and some buffs and debuffs stack with themselves, so those are all good bets in a tough fight. Consumable items always work without needing to roll and
using one doesn't end your turn. Drop a stack of slow dice on anything in the game and they'll become a helpless joke.
If a character is incapacitated by, for example, getting beaned in the head and knocked out by a thrown die, they won't be able to roll their own die, meaning their defense roll will be zero and they'll take tons of damage every turn until they recover. A few paralyze spells can win you fights you had no business participating in, and an unlucky knockout can get you killed by the lowliest zako enemies.
Probably the best of the characters is the Half Elf, who is a fighter/caster hybrid. Her magic is almost as reliable as the Elf's, and she learns most of the important spells while still being a capable melee fighter. Indeed, Half Elf learns some valuable spells that Elf never learns, and she learns many important spells earlier than Elf does. The prime example of this is the DiceCall spell. DiceCall can only be cast on the map and allows you to simply choose how many spaces you want to move on that turn, from 1 to 6. The power to land on every single healing space, to avoid every penalty space, to move as fast or slow as you like is obviously ridiculously good. Half Elf gets it at level 6, Elf has to wait until level 16. I'd say the next best is the Elf, largely because she's the other character who learns DiceCall. Ostensibly she's a magic attacker, but attack magic is absurdly, laughably terrible while status effects and buffs are insanely strong. Elf's best strategy seems to be to cast paralyze and then do melee attacks until the enemy recovers and then cast paralyze again. The Fighter is a strong melee attacker with good stats and a few useful magic spells, including the all-important heal spell he picks up at level 3. Your hp and mp are always capped at 999, leveling up doesn't affect that, so Fighter can start a mission and immediately burn all of his mp casting heal to give himself a ton of health to work with. The Dwarf is probably the worst, being only marginally stronger than the fighter and not learning any magic until level 19.
I thought she was just talking shit
I don't believe the game ever tells you this, but to access stage 6 you need to speak directly to the king after completing stage 5. Also worth mentioning is that the first character to face the final boss in stage 6 will be automatically captured and permanently lost, so don't send in your favorite.
Sugoro Quest has no multiplayer, which is a bit disappointing. I like The Hundred World Story and Dokapon Kingdom for some bullshit multiplayer every now and again, and this might've been fun for the same reasons. There is a Super Famicom sequel which appears to be multiplayer-focused, but it's JP only. Anyway, Sugoro Quest is a big old luckfest, it's not very deep and it has serious balance problems, but it's also fairly charming and unique.
C+
The English fan translation can be found
here.