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So you’ve got your top-down RPGs, your tactical RPGs, your action RPGs, your roguelikes...
and then that weird class of first-person RPG like Etrian Odyssey or Shining in the
Darkness. Deep Dungeon is in that category, the product of HummingBirdSoft - all one word
- and published by the Disk Original Group, which was just Square in disguise. This series
is about half of HummingBirdSoft’s legacy today, the other half being a slew of MSX
games tied in to the Record of Lodoss War anime franchise product solution. There were
four Deep Dungeon games in all, with the first two on the Disk System and the latter two
on cartridges, having established kind of a following. Kinda impressive for a dungeon
crawler with a draw distance of... three.
And if that music gets stuck in your head, you’re already a goner. So let me try to
dislodge it with some plot. You’re a hero, the king’s in a panic, because in the midst
of an invasion of monsters, someone made off with Princess Etna’s soul. This, in turn,
sets off the events of Disgaea, where... no, wait. You’re a hero, the king’s in a panic,
because in the midst of an invasion of monsters, someone made off with Princess Etna’s soul,
and you’re the only hero in the city intrepid enough to get it back. So you’re outfitted
with the standard adventurer-equipment sum of 200 gold, shown to the town menu (where
you can visit different shops and get equipped with swords n’at), and eventually cast down
into the labyrinth. Your menu of stuff over on the right there, including your “Attack,”
“Run,” “Talk” commands and the like, rarely changes once you’re actually in the
underground, though the game’s pretty good at picking up contextual stuff like opening
doors if you try to walk through them. Even if you do hit your head the first time.
And from there, it’s pretty much exactly what you expect from an RPG of this style.
You run into monsters, you kill them, you get EXP, you kill bigger monsters. Befitting
the old-school nature of this game, though, you’re probably going to want at least eight
sheets of graph paper. Because there are eight floors. And it seems like the music gets progressively
better as you go down. Though this game does exhibit one of the significant problems facing
the Famicom Disk System today: Media degradation. The leftmost row of tiles for all the sprites
are sorta messed up on this copy, which thus far has been the only issue with any of the
awesomeness that Felicity from Worcestershire has bestowed upon us. And considering that
this copy, over the course of 26 years, has traveled from Japan to the UK and through
America to this intergalactic underwater gamer’s colony, it’s kinda remarkable in its own
right. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to play some Katamari Damacy to get that tune
out of my head.