Dungeon crawler recomendations

[Sima Tuna]

I got most of the way through Undernauts before I lost all motivation to continue. The gameplay was too bland for me. I enjoyed Zangetsu a lot more. The ability to multiclass characters added a lot to the depth, I think. I think Experience Inc going with the more Etrian style of skill allocation is a mistake on their part. They should go back to the Wizardry/Stranger of Sword City system of leveling and reclassing. Characters stand out more when they have abilities beyond just "standard warrior" or "standard tank."

[Lander]

I kinda fell off of Etrian Odyssey toward the end of the second stratum. Seems like it was starting to pull out some interesting stage design, between dodging the wyvern, sorting out the spring, and hopping back and forth between floors. But even with QoL combat speedups, the core loop was starting to wear thin.

Seems a bit at odds with itself; the combat wants you to turn your brain on and get tactical, but it's so grind-heavy and encounter-frequent that you end up blowing past the difficulty curve and auto-resolve healspamming every encounter until the next boss.

Could have used the SMAAAASH! system from Earthbound where trivial fights get batted away for free, leaving the player free to wallhump in peace.

I think Experience Inc going with the more Etrian style of skill allocation is a mistake on their part. They should go back to the Wizardry/Stranger of Sword City system of leveling and reclassing. Characters stand out more when they have abilities beyond just "standard warrior" or "standard tank."

EO1 seemed pretty uncompromising where skills go. Easy to mis-build and then have to eat a 5 level penalty to respec, which doesn't even out quickly at all.

Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armor. You May Be Defeated, But Don't Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King

Cripes, what a mouthful. Hope they managed to fit all that on the case spine!

I swear, one of these days japanese creators are going to give up entirely and resort to dumping full plot synopses on their covers

[Ghegs]

I enjoyed Zangetsu a lot more. The ability to multiclass characters added a lot to the depth, I think.

My issue with multiclassing is that in the game's it's available in (also limited to games I've actually played, obviously) there's nearly always an ability that's so beneficial you pretty much need every character to have it. This was very prevalent in Stranger of Sword City, where there's an ability that makes the character immune to insta-death attacks. And there are bosses that throw those out like candy on Halloween, so you want everyone to have that to at least have a fighting chance. And then there's the ability that allows you to repeat an action multiple times in a single turn. Which means attacking and casting spells multiple times, so at the very least you want your damage-dealers to have that. Zangetsu has some of this stuff as well, but it wasn't nearly as much required as in Sword City, or that's what it felt like to me.

Having this means you'll have to figure out an esoteric character development path (or more likely, find it off GameFAQs) which is something to the effect of "To make the optimal samurai, create a cleric. At level 5 they get Holy Protection, switch them into a dancer until they get Fast Feet. Then change them into a warrior to get some STR buffs for a few levels, change them into a Guardian for HP boosts, and at level 25 you should switch them into a samurai. Now, for the character that will eventually become a cleric..."

And that's just pants-on-head-bonkers for me. It also means the characters have a lot of the exact same skills, which makes them homogenous and not stand out.

I preferred Undernauts' approach, where after a certain point, you can branch out into different, related character classes and take skills from them. Mon-Yu actually has something like this as well, later on you can make characters either take more advanced skills based on their class, or they can have access to some skills from other classes.

Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armor. You May Be Defeated, But Don't Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King

Cripes, what a mouthful. Hope they managed to fit all that on the case spine!

I got the Switch physical version and let me assure you, I was very disappointed to see that they did not. They just put in "Mon-Yu" there.

[BryanM]

Seems a bit at odds with itself; the combat wants you to turn your brain on and get tactical, but it's so grind-heavy and encounter-frequent that you end up blowing past the difficulty curve and auto-resolve healspamming every encounter until the next boss.

Could have used the SMAAAASH! system from Earthbound where trivial fights get batted away for free, leaving the player free to wallhump in peace.

Which is a standard jRPG dungeon crawler design. Really you're building up healing resources to be able to dive deeper, fundamentally.

One thing I feel that's mandatory in Etrian Odyssey games is the skill that shuts off enemy encounters so you can explore in peace without the distractions. It's on the Survivalist or Farmers, depending on the game.

Without extrinsic rewards, random trash encounters get boring very fast. It's perhaps even more extreme in Odyssey 2, where farming bosses gave the best EXP.

I feel like it's for the best random encounters have been eliminated from modern games, honestly.

I swear, one of these days japanese creators are going to give up entirely and resort to dumping full plot synopses on their covers

Really a consequence of saturated markets and mindshare. The title has to be the sales pitch, because the title is all most people will ever see of a game/web novel/tv show.

[Lander]

Which is a standard jRPG dungeon crawler design. Really you're building up healing resources to be able to dive deeper, fundamentally.

One thing I feel that's mandatory in Etrian Odyssey games is the skill that shuts off enemy encounters so you can explore in peace without the distractions. It's on the Survivalist or Farmers, depending on the game.

Without extrinsic rewards, random trash encounters get boring very fast. It's perhaps even more extreme in Odyssey 2, where farming bosses gave the best EXP.

I feel like it's for the best random encounters have been eliminated from modern games, honestly.

Yeah, that's how it felt - longevity and survivability as the main goal. Though I'm not sure being able to spec into 1MP full-party noncombat heals so early was very balanced.

I noticed the encounter rate skill on a couple of characters, but didn't touch it since it seemed foolish to stymie any source of EXP. Though on reflection I guess it probably works like the consumable item, rather than being a permanent passive.

Kind of undecided on encounter mechanics. I don't think I'm much for the combination of random with in-dungeon baddies that aggro and chase you around, though have to admit that the trick of having FOEs creep up on you turn-by-turn during combat is a clever one.

Reckon I'd rather take either one in isolation, and see it done right for balance and QoL. It got me thinking on random - in optimal conditions (i.e. when you're leveled enough for battles to be a fair challenge,) you're essentially wandering around drawing puzzle cards from a deck every so many steps. Beyond wringing out more playtime, what's the point after proving your party can solve for each one?

Almost seems as if there's something untapped there, like making enemy compositions an explicit thing that you wire up a solution to once each, with revisits being elective. Though that brings why combat at all then into the equation, and the whole thing falls apart

Really a consequence of saturated markets and mindshare. The title has to be the sales pitch, because the title is all most people will ever see of a game/web novel/tv show.

I was thinking just now that it seems like something you'd find in sales pitch or design document. That sort of thing used to go under the title in teeny tiny text as a characteristic genre, if at all. RPG of overcoming middle-management to discover the true self, and the like.

[Sima Tuna]

FOEs are an interesting concept but one I didn't enjoy from a gameplay perspective. I prefer to face dungeons where combat is the point and battles are difficult but winnable. Many of the FOEs in Etrian games just felt like they were not intended to be fought the first time you entered the dungeon. Maybe I sucked at the game, but from my perspective, the FOEs might as well have been instant Bad End triggers that force a reload.

I enjoy dungeon crawlers more when they don't have any kind of FOE or FOE-like mechanic.

[Lander]

I may well suck too, but it definitely felt like most FOEs were there as a Nemesis-like mechanic to have you running scared on the first visit to each floor, or as abstracted kiting / frogger / maze puzzles with a harsh penalty.
A little less at certain points, like the wolves, but I put that down to the natural push-pull of the overleveling cycle.

[Ghegs]

Many of the FOEs in Etrian games just felt like they were not intended to be fought the first time you entered the dungeon.

That's exactly their point, yeah. I felt that since their placement isn't random, but were put into very specific spots, they worked for both creating tension and some slight environmental storytelling. Like in EO1, in the third floor, there's a FOE in the middle of a large field who starts approaching you as soon as it spots you. But you can easily navigate around it, and exit the field. And right afterwards there's another FOE, of the same type, guarding a corridor. So, having learned how you dealt with the first FOE, you poke your head in to the same horizontal map row as the FOE so it sees you and comes out of the corridor to chase you, then you go around it into the corridor and get out. So it's like a mini-puzzle.

Later in the game, when you've got better skills, equipment and more levels, you can come back and just smack those FOEs easily, and it does feel pretty nice to see just how much more powerful you are now.

[BryanM]

It's neat how new FOEs met later in the games tend to be much more tractable, as your characters are much closer to their full potential. I think the math has Dragon Quest style diminishing returns as well, so the later half of the game is accelerated as levels and equipment just mean less.

FOEs in the Persona Q games are a bit more varied. Some of them are level-appropriate midboss fights, and others are hazards you definitely want to avoid until you've grown up a little.

Almost seems as if there's something untapped there, like making enemy compositions an explicit thing that you wire up a solution to once each, with revisits being elective. Though that brings why combat at all then into the equation, and the whole thing falls apart

Pretty much describes finite-resource games like older Tacticsy games. These games can be made all meat with no fat, but it kind of completely changes the point of a game. There are liminal games about simply being, relaxing low stress things. And there are active games that require active attention.

Numbers-go-up RPGs are very much the school of Cookie Clicker - victory is assured as long as you stick with it, and the gameplay is more about how you want to make the numbers go up. And vibes.

[Sima Tuna]

Many of the FOEs in Etrian games just felt like they were not intended to be fought the first time you entered the dungeon.

That's exactly their point, yeah. I felt that since their placement isn't random, but were put into very specific spots, they worked for both creating tension and some slight environmental storytelling. Like in EO1, in the third floor, there's a FOE in the middle of a large field who starts approaching you as soon as it spots you. But you can easily navigate around it, and exit the field. And right afterwards there's another FOE, of the same type, guarding a corridor. So, having learned how you dealt with the first FOE, you poke your head in to the same horizontal map row as the FOE so it sees you and comes out of the corridor to chase you, then you go around it into the corridor and get out. So it's like a mini-puzzle.

Later in the game, when you've got better skills, equipment and more levels, you can come back and just smack those FOEs easily, and it does feel pretty nice to see just how much more powerful you are now.

I get what they were going for, but I personally didn't enjoy it. Too many of the dungeons has a "puzzle" feel to them, when I wanted to just explore and fight things.

[BloodHawk]

Sure, I can do something like that. So with the obvious disclaimer that this is just my own personal view on the games...

S-Tier
Potato Flowers in Full Bloom (Fantastic title with which to dip your toe into the genre due to player-friendliness, short length, and massive amounts of charm)
Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi (The culmination of Experience's...experience in developing DRPGs. Just great overall)
Dungeon Encounters (DRPG stripped down to its very basics, and it's distilled to near-perfection. The whole feels much greater than the sum of its parts)

A-Tier
Labyrinth of Zangetsu (Wears its Wizardry-influence on its sleeve, though it's not quite as punishing)
The Lost Child (Fun puzzles and the monster catching mechanic allows for many customization possibilities to your party)
Demon Gaze Extra (Just solid overall)
Stranger of Sword City Revisited (Couldn't decide whether to put this in A or B tier. Another solid Experience title, with some mechanics that don't quite hit the mark)

I gave Potato Flowers in Full Bloom a shot and loved it. I haven't ever really got "into" Dungeon Crawlers before as I find myself losing interest in games/stories after 20 to 30 hours in, mostly due to the fact that I can only allocate a handful of hours per week to it. The shorter length and simplicity of Potato Flowers was perfect. Are there any others that share some of those same traits?

I see that Stranger of Sword City Revisited which is included in that combo pack is on sale on GOG, but I am worried that it might be too long or complex.

[Lander]

The first Legend of Grimrock is where I started with the genre, and is a nice fundamental crawler if you want something that doesn't outstay its welcome. Uncomplicated D&D-ish RPG party, no grinding, good puzzles, and plenty of secret goodies for the observant. Looks good too.

It hails from the Dungeon Master school of design, so combat all happens in the 3D view. Adds a nice bit of maneuvering tech if you're into that, but there's enough EXP knocking around that you can plant feet and slug out in most cases.

[Ghegs]

Class of Heroes 1 & 2: Complete Edition coming to PS5, Switch, and PC in 2024

[Steven]

Is that the one that released in Japan last year that everyone hated because it was really really bad or a different one?

[m.sniffles.esq]

FYI: the previously mentioned Islands of the Caliph is a couple dollars cheaper for the current Steam sale

I think it's quite good, and I definitely got my $8 worth. If I have one caveat, it's that I really wished it supported controllers. With turn-based combat it would be fine, but with real-time... I've suffered many a defeat due to hitting the wrong key, and having a spawn of Jahannam flay me alive as I struggled to face the correct direction. It wouldn't even be detrimental to it's antiquing, as all the games listed and obviously used as inspirations all had joystick support. Trust me, I played a lot of Alternate Reality: The City on the c-64, you could use a joystick.

[Steven]

Is that the one that released in Japan last year that everyone hated because it was really really bad or a different one?

Yep, it's a different one; the one from last year is a strategy game, it seems.

[cj iwakura]

Still weird we're getting those and not the one Gaijinworks never released, even though it was mostly done.


http://www.gaijinworks.com/about/psp-on ... -heroes-3/


The games are cute. Not great or anything, but cute.

[Klatrymadon]

Path of the Abyss has its 'early access' release on the 22nd. Looks stunning and has an irresistible FM synth soundtrack. I've been hoping for something a tenth as audiovisually interesting as The Dark Spire for years, and I guess this dev felt the same way...

https://vxtwitter.com/suzuki_suzuzou/st ... 6923407578

[Ghegs]

Metro Quester got released on consoles a week ago. I watched a little bit of a Let's Play on that and it looked very intriguing, so I stopped watching to avoid spoiling myself. I'm holding off on purchasing it for a while in case we get any announcements about a physical release.

I did just finish Infinite Adventures on Switch. The game doesn't seem to track your playtime, but I would guesstimate it took around 60-70 hours. I played on the hardest "Old-school" difficulty, but it didn't feel that difficult.

It's mostly made by one guy who was the producer, programmer, designer, and writer. Big props to him for accomplishing it, he obviously loves the genre. And the game costs only €13, so the money/hours spent ratio is definitely on the positive side.

This is my personal preferences showing, but the game started off the wrong foot with me because it makes you create a main character, who's happens to have lost his memories because that's how these things go, and only then you get into building your party or choosing from some pre-created ones. Just creating the main character took a good long while, not because I was agonizing over character class and race selections, but because there were so many selections that felt inconsequential to me. Like choosing from which part of the world the character hails from, what was his upbringing like, etc. Maybe they have some effect on the stats. I ended up choosing pre-created characters for the rest of my party, because the classes I wanted to use anyway were available.

There is a lot of story. Not quite Labyrinth of Refrain/Galleria levels, but still a lot of it. It's all delivered by the characters talking, and every single line is voice acted...poorly. It's like they just put out an open call, and people recorded their lines in their kitchen using their phones. Which has all the expected results. Though looking at the voice actor credits, some of them have their voices in big, AAA games, so I don't know what happened. I started fast forwarding through the dialogue maybe 10 hours in because these characters would never use mere five words when twenty works just as well.

Also, the game just isn't nice to look at. The few background images are really good, especially the town image, but the art for characters and monster...the designs are fine, but it looks they gave the notes to a 14-year old who kinda likes to draw. That is to say, they're very amateurish. The maze itself isn't that nice to look at either, and when I got into the second stratum I think my eyeballs bugged out from the garishness. Not sure if that's just a Switch thing.

But when it comes to game itself, it's perfectly fine and serviceable. There are a lot of nice ideas and quality of life -features, though oddly automove and combat log are not included in that list. I like how most spells, both offensive and defensive, can be applied to a single character, a row, or the whole party. You just pay more MP the larger your scope is. Alongside MP, there are three other types of similar resources that are used in battle, which brings some nice variety to combat since they behave differently. Unlockable skills can be classified into Active, Passive, and Chance -types. The first are what can be expected, but the Chance type was something I don't think I've seen before. Basically, the skill has a trigger, and then a percentage chance of that skill happening. Like there's a warrior skill Bloodlust that whenever he kills an enemy (that's the trigger), there's a chance he gets an extra attack that's then aimed at another enemy. Or the healer has a skill that whenever a battle ends, there's a chance that he automatically and without MP cost heals some HP to everyone. Spending more points on the skill usually means increasing the chance of the skill activating. I thought that was pretty neat.

On the other hand, late-game my warrior (and party as a whole) was pretty much immortal thanks all the skills he had. Having several different chances at extra attacks, with each attack having a chance to restore some life, and even a skill that allows ignoring some damage completely. And all that attacking also increases his Rage meter, which fuels skills that do even more attacks. So there wasn't really anything that could actually kill him.

The dungeon layouts were good, no plain, symmetrical labyrinths here. There's hidden passages, shortcuts, warps, sliding tiles, some small dark areas, all the basic stuff. I liked how there's quite a few puzzle rooms, which are just fairly simple Sokoban puzzles, made slightly more difficult that you have to figure out the box/goal positions and do the puzzle in first-person view. I only had to re-try the very last two such rooms. But I happen to like Sokoban, so I dig the idea.

One thing that pretty much kills the tension of delving deeper into the labyrinth and trying your best to get out before party wipe is that from the town you can warp into any floor already discovered. And the mage has an unlockable spell that allows warping back into town. So unlike in most games where you can only warp to the beginning of the stratum, this makes it much easier, and at the same time, not so exciting, to explore the place.

There are tons of little bugs. Not sure about the other versions, but the Switch version has some noticeable lag to the controls. Not a real problem considering the genre, but it's annoying to be in the menus and having to take things slow because the game can't keep up with my button presses. This did seem to vary a bit, so maybe it's some memory issue. Text formatting issues are largely prevalent, one time two music tracks started playing at the same time, and the game crashed on me three times. One of which happened right after defeating the final boss.

And speaking of, for a game that's got so much story in it, it was odd that after beating the final boss, there's like two text boxes and then it's straight to the credits. You can still keep playing afterwards, even though the story makes it clear that this would, actually, not be possible. There was an extra boss to be found when coming back to the final boss' location afterwards, and even a second hidden boss when coming back a third time, but nothing after that.

I must also mention that the game has a dungeon randomizer option. You choose the map's size and some other attributes and off you go. It's accessed through the main campaign, but you never actually have to use it if you don't want to, so I guess it's just if you want to grind the bosses for their unique drops. Having it that way is much preferable to how Galleria did it...

Overall, I think the game balances out to being just "Average". The core is fine, but at least to me the whole thing is brought down a few pegs by the graphics in general, the amount of story, and the voiced dialogue. I think it had worked better if they'd gone for a "simplified but stylized" -approach since obviously they didn't have the budget for higher quality art and voices. The price is good, but there are better options available.

[m.sniffles.esq]

because these characters would never use mere five words when twenty works just as well

I think is a 'state of the industry' type deal. I never did a VG script, but I swear they must get paid per word like magazine articles.

[Ghegs]

Legend of Grimrock on Switch on Jan. 15th. That's a really surprising release, the game's over a decade old. But a very welcome one, I've been wanting to play it and I've had it in my GOG library for a long while, but I just haven't gotten around to it because playing on consoles is so much more comfortable/fun for me.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I decided to ring in the new year by replaying the early Ultima games, and I made the mistake of trying to replay the precursor, Akalabeth. It's bad. Really bad. It hasn't just aged badly, it's bad conceptually, especially compared to Ultima 1 which is very playable and runs at a good speed on authentic Apple II hardware, or Wizardry I which has slow dungeon screens but has vastly better design in terms of character advancement, combat, etc.

In Akalabeth, you have your choice of the Apple II version which you can crank up to max speed in an emulator, a VERY buggy official DOS release, a better fanmade DOS release that's missing a key "feature", namely RNG exploitation, which makes it broken, or a C64 remake that ran so slowly I gave up and realized I was wasting my time revisiting something that wasn't ever particularly good.

The Apple II version is fine when it decides to run properly, but occasionally it'll crash and hard reset to the title screen when visiting the castle to submit a quest. Great. :/ The only way to meaningfully gain stat points is to use an amulet to randomly turn into a lizardman, which occasionally decides instead to halve your HP or turn you into a toad, putting all your stats to single digits. The only way to actually use this is to abuse the fixed RNG and how many moves in you can use an amulet in a dungeon. So you enter a dungeon, work out 2 moves in you'll become a lizard man, then you enter the dungeon, attack thin air, use amulet, repeat. Voila, your stats are now enormous and you win the game.

The fanmade MS-DOS version does not have this RNG behavior, and there is effectively no way to gain stats aside from using the amulet and having sheer luck, or spending a LONG time slowly fighting stuff and making very slow HP gains, building up a huge quantity, then spending it to fight stuff in lower dungeons with your abysmal base stats taking damage constantly while taking forever to kill anything.

I gave up trying to beat this when the Apple II version did the hard reset glitch on me twice and the MS-DOS fan version refused to cooperate with stat gains. Screw nostalgia, every version of this game is bad because it's conceptually a bad game, whereas Ultima 1 onwards are actually complete, playable, I daresay even user-friendly games.

tl;dr: There is no earthly reason for anyone to play Akalabeth.

[BryanM]

On the topic of retro computer RPG's, Moonring had gotten a lot of buzz last year.

Besides being $0 I'm not really interested in playing it, but cool guys might.

[Sima Tuna]

On the topic of retro computer RPG's, Moonring had gotten a lot of buzz last year.

Besides being $0 I'm not really interested in playing it, but cool guys might.

I've actually been thinking recently that I'd like to play the Ultima games. Maybe I'll dip my toe in with a more modern throwback first. Ultima IV looks very appealing to me, but it was way before my time.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Ultima I is extremely user friendly; it's very well made, runs at a respectable speed at a normal Apple II machine speed, is balanced decently, isn't terribly obtuse... I highly recommend it if you want to experience the series. AppleWin is an easy emulator to start up and play it on, and is the best way to experience it (as a bonus, unlike Akalabeth and Wizardry, the 3D dungeons load at a reasonable speed so you don't need to artificially crank up the emulator speed to make it tolerable).

The second game is a lot more obtuse and balancing is iffy; you tend to starve to death at the start of the game if you don't know what you're doing as food is lost much more quickly and money is more obnoxious to obtain.

Game III is a lot more feature rich, but is also a lot tougher than the average party-based RPG. The NES port is merely OK, but works if you'd prefer that. It's possible to screw yourself a bit by levelling up too fast before your equipment matches the enemies that appear, as enemies scale to your level. Great game, but not intended for a casual audience honestly.

Ultima IV is a great game. I highly recommend the NES release as one of the better RPGs for the system, and the best way for a newcomer to experience the game itself. The NES port isn't entirely faithful to the PC version mechanics, but retains the core story and plot elements and streamlines many other slightly clunky things (combat for instance is parties of 4 instead of 8 members) giving you a very refined, slightly JRPG take on the game. Once you know what you're doing, combat is on the easy side, and it's much more about the exploration and experience rather than a Final Fantasy style grind to beat the bosses sort of thing. I strongly encourage you to give this a whirl as it's a fun experience, with enough puzzles to work out without anything being exasperatingly silly. I once did a magic spells only playthrough which was pretty interesting.

The Sega Master System is a more faithful port in terms of accuracy to the original, but dungeons are overhead I think instead of 3D? The original Apple II version plays quite well, or you could play the MS-DOS version using something like the XU4 project that adds some quality of life options to the gameplay while retaining the core gameplay.

The non-NES versions of Ultima IV are more obtuse to solve though, and there's a particularly infamous bug where a hint for the last puzzle of the game was accidentally omitted from a key character, so you have to deduce it on your own from the hints you're given. Whichever version you play, I recommend reading the various manuals that came with the game as they're very rich and the art in them is nice (even the NES version came with a big chunky manual).

Ultima V's NES version should be avoided at all costs as it was made by Origin rather than the Japanese team that did the porting for IV, and is a fundamentally awful experience. The original game is apparently quite good, but I haven't played much of the games past IV so I can't really speak from experience about them.

[Sima Tuna]

Big thanks for the detailed response!

I know I already own the GoG version of Ultima IV, as they gave that one away for free. But I was looking at the SMS version of Ultima IV and that seemed like an awesome port in general. I think the console ports appeal to me primarily because PC CRPGs older than a certain point tend to have really obscure button combinations required to interact with the game world. So the console ports sound good. I guess Ultima IV is the game that appeals to me most, because the story sounds very intriguing. I've been playing a fair bit of Caves of Qud lately, and I like the notion of an rpg/dungeon crawler where murdering everything isn't necessarily the penultimate goal, and there's a sort of religious/self-improvement overtone to the hero's journey. I think Morrowind probably cribbed a bit of that too for the Nerevarine. The hero as a Chosen One isn't a new concept, but it's what you do with the notion, isn't it?

I've had a peak at all of the Ultima games and was impressed. Ultima 7's visual perspective was rather headache-inducing, but the classic 1-6 graphics were quite pleasing to my eye. There's something about tile-based graphics that I just love. Everything is so clear and obvious on the map and you can parse that information instantly. You can look at a little stick figure and say, "Ah yes! That's a Druid!" Or spot a little guy in a robe and instantly know "There's an Issachari Rifler!" You don't get that experience with modern games, typically. The visual information tends to be cluttered by too many dimensions and too many graphical effects.

Spoiler

Considering Ultima IV was given away for free, and that Lord British himself lobbied to make that game freely available to all, would you say it is legal to emulate all known ports of it as well?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I've been playing a fair bit of Caves of Qud lately, and I like the notion of an rpg/dungeon crawler where murdering everything isn't necessarily the penultimate goal, and there's a sort of religious/self-improvement overtone to the hero's journey.

Yep, that's basically Ultima IV's vibe. Very different from the first three games where the object was clearly "murder this bad guy".

The GoG version is just fine, it's the MS-DOS version bundled with DOSBox and I've put a lot of time into it and can vouch for its quality. I think GoG also includes PDF scans of everything that came in the box (I'm fortunate enough to have a boxed copy from a dollar store type place that included everything except the fabric map and the ankh) but if you're missing any of the books (the guide/instruction book, the book of magic spells) I can steer you in the right direction.

The MS-DOS (and thus the XU4) version only have one minor bug in the dungeon called Hythloth where a room on floor 6 or so is impassable if you try to walk through it, but it's an unimportant room in the middle of the dungeon and you have spells you can use (Y-Up and Z-Down) that you can use to zip through dungeons at record speed, thus you can bypass this room entirely by just warping to the next floor. All other dungeons are mapped correctly and you can walk through them start to finish if you want. There's also a patch out there that exists where you replace the file HYTHLOTH.DNG with one that fixes the one dungeon room that's incorrectly mapped. Not sure if GoG version comes with the patch, I think I've got the patched file though as I remember posting about this bug on the XU4 forums a long time ago.

The NES version does improve things in that you do NOT have teleport spells in dungeons, so you have to manually walk through every single one as opposed to being able to race through them at hilariously fast speeds (if you know where to go and have prepared accordingly). The dungeons are better designed than in the previous Ultima games so I'm very much OK with this change.

Spoiler

Considering Ultima IV was given away for free, and that Lord British himself lobbied to make that game freely available to all, would you say it is legal to emulate all known ports of it as well?

Considering the morals taught in the game are more cohesive and better ethics than most of the world's major religions, yeah I'd say people should be exposed to the game as much as possible.

[MJR]

I feel like getting back to Dungeon Explorer on PC-Engine, never beat it but always loved it though it's more like Zelda than "true" dungeon crawler. I don't know why I like that game so much, it really is almost too simple / shallow.

[Ghegs]

https://www.gematsu.com/2024/01/mushoku ... his-summer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3c_9ccCPho

Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation – Quest of Memories out this summer. Made by Lancarse, who co-developed the first two Etrian Odyssey games, so they've certainly got the chops.

[Blinge]

Youze all seen the remaster of Wizardry 1 in progress?

Well, Remake, I suppose.
I haven't played any Wizardry so i can't say for sure but it looks pretty rad.

As for me: making inroads into King's Field Additional 1 (psp)
weird little game.
Sadly my playing companion is google translate