Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 249: Roguelikes—The Road to Spelunky

Episode Date: September 30, 2019

Finishing out our patron request series on roguelike role-playing games, Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Jason Wilson, and John Harris explore latter-day roguelikes and how we got to the weird, wonderful world of Spelunky.

This week in Retronauts, we finally ascend. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish. And this week, we're continuing a conversation that we had a few months ago. And as such, this may seem familiar to you, but we're building on the topic of console roguelikes. And, you know, since we didn't finish that last episode and because we did not actually fulfill patron Andrew Duff's request to talk about Azure dreams, we definitely have to do that. But I've set an end point for this podcast to take us through console roglyphs. likes and ultimately end up with Spalunky because that is that is the big point in roguelike games.

I mean, you know, the mystery dungeon games were a big deal and especially Pokemon mystery dungeons, but Spalunkey was the point at which the rogue like passed into the mainstream and passed into other genres and became a thing in video games. So that's where we're going to end this particular journey. And taking this journey with me, we have our party. members. Hi, it's Jason Wilson. I'm back. Thank you for bringing me along. Absolutely. And as always, hey, it's Bob Mackey. And I think technically Andrew is getting two episodes, so we have to invoice him now. And finally, Skyping in, we have. John Harris. Hello. Hello. John, thanks for

joining us once again. So, yeah, to recap, last episode, we talked about kind of the history of console RPGs. Before that, we had talked about PC RPGs, the or not RPGs, rogue likes, like the true rogue games. And, you know, then we talked last time about how developers and publishers had to adapt the concepts of these extremely complex, very chewy and gritty RPGs into something that works on a console. And mostly we focused on the mystery dungeon games because they do it pretty well for the most part. But we also did talk about some outliers like To Jam and Earl and some of the early. roguelikes like Dragon Crystal and so forth. This episode we're going to be taking the next step beyond the mystery dungeon games

and looking at some of the, you know, some console roguelike games and some console games that have these kind of weird intersections with roguelikes. And you would not, in any real respect, call them roguelikes. But they kind of show, I think, developers saying like, oh, you know, these concepts laid down in this PC game are very interesting, and we feel like there's something here, you know, whether it's a way to create unpredictable difficulty or whether it's a way to create procedural content so that we don't have to design everything as much or because we don't have space to design, you know, a full proper console style RPG, whatever.

You know, basically people just trying to figure out how they could grapple with the tenants of roguelikes and turn them into something that works in, you know, kind of a different context or different milieu. And again, I feel like Spolunky is the first game that really did it right. But we're going to look at some of the experiments that happened along the way. And hopefully it will be an interesting discussion. What's amazing is that it took such a long time to get to Spilunky. When you say such a long time, you're talking in terms of from like what point?

From the points of, say, the mid-90s to where Spilunky came. Because do you think about there's a lot of those experiments that we're going to be talking about. True, yeah. I mean, really from Tojam and Earl, that was what, like 1990, 91? I think 91. Yeah. Yeah. So that's 17 years.

That is quite a long time. And I would have to say that the rise of indie gaming in the late aughts, whatever we call that decade, That's what made it possible was people saying, hey, you know, I'm going to create a game and I don't have the resources of a full studio. So let's see what I can, you know, what clever innovations I can come up with instead of, you know, just working in kind of that AAA game design socket. So I think that's really what it took was for basically video games to become smaller again after, you know, decades of growth. Yeah. Kind of like how with the rise of HD and how that brought, you know, it killed a lot of the mid-sized studios, but then those people went off and started their own things. I think what we're going to do to kick off this episode is actually go through the mailbag from last episode because a few people wrote in to talk about console roguelikes that they've enjoyed.

And I don't want their voices to go unheard. So I'm going to read these emails or maybe, I don't know, maybe pass them around so everyone can take turns and it's not just my. my voice. But guys, please feel free to chime in and comment once these letters are done, especially you, John, since I know you're kind of remote and it's a little hard to, you know, do the eye contact thing and know, you know, when can I jump into the conversation anytime as fun. All right, from Max. Not exactly inspired choices. But my picks are Cave Noir for Game Boy and Mystery Dungeon, Sharon the Wanderer, for Super Famicom. Cave Noir is really one of those very few Game Boy games that still manage to glue me to the Game Boy screen. And we'll talk about that a little bit. And Sharon the Wanderer appeals to me mostly for its presentation.

The traditional Japanese setting and the really great art and music sell the game. It's a bit too hard for my taste, though. I don't know. Actually, should we, maybe we can mix things up a little instead of just doing letters. We can talk about some relevant stuff. This might be a good opportunity to talk about what Cave Noir is because we actually discussed that. But, John, I know you have played it recently. I've dabbled it in a little.

I don't know about you guys, Bob, John. I played it emulated a long time ago. Yeah, so why don't we talk about that? John, do you want to do the honors? Yeah, I played it a couple days ago to refresh my memory of it. And it's great. Yes, Cave Noir is an excellent game. It's definitely got some like attributes, but I think,

It's more kind of a puzzle game with roguelike element is what it feels like. There's like four different themed dungeons, and there's 10 difficulty levels to each one. And as you complete each difficulty level, you unlock the next one. So you can play harder and harder versions of the dungeon. And each of the four dungeons has its own types of quests. Like one of the dungeons, the idea is to kill a certain number of monsters. Once you've done that, the exit doors start appearing in levels after that. Another one is to find orbs that are hidden in the dungeons, and they take up inventory slots.

So the more orbs you find, the less room you have for equipment and other items. Another one, you just have to find gold coins, which don't fill up your inventory at all. And another one, you have to collect, you have to rescue fairies, which you have to find keys to unlock their cages. and they're all sort of similar but they had this little subtle differences that makes the strategy different for each one and that kind of idea is like it's all over the place in Cave Noir

it's very well thought out the dungeons are sort of randomly generated but they're made of pre-made rooms so once you've seen a room and you know where it's you know it's little tricks like where they're a breakaway floor that when you step on them,

then you step off, it leaves a pit behind you so you can't go backwards. And there's, there are pits in some rooms that are actually have invisible floors over them that you can walk on.

But you have to learn where those are every time you play. And they tend to be in the same places each time. But you have different enemies in them. And they're arranged in different ways. So that adds, that varies the challenge of it

and keeps you on your toes so you can't just memorize your way through. Now, John, what makes it noir? Is it just because that's a cool name or is it because there's actually some noir elements here? I think it might have to do with the sort of difficulty. It doesn't take long for the Dungeons to become really challenging

and a sort of dark kind of way. you really have to use all of your resources. It pushes you to your limits, thinking your way through each dungeon setting. So it's kind of a little dark in that way. But overall, the game's really lighthearted. It's not, you know, an angst fest at all. It's pretty silly. Like when you finish a level of the monster dungeon, the game tells you the weights and the heights of all the monsters you've killed,

like they were sort of fish in a fishing game. Anyway, it's just a whole lot of fun to play. You know, the monsters generally each have a specific movement pattern, and that's sort of where the puzzle elements come in. Like there's the tarantulas, they crawl along the outside of the walls. Crabs move left and right. The death enemies, like grim reapers, they stay in one place until you walk in a direct line with them.

and then they shoot across towards you. And you have to manipulate the enemy movement patterns in these ways to get through. You can often get through levels without fighting at all, which is good because fighting tends to really sap your hit points. And you generally want to avoid combat whenever possible unless killing monsters is the object. Now, how does this work on the Game Boy screen and with the limited inputs that you have there?

Because this seems like that's a lot going on for that small little handheld. It is, it is. And remember, there's only two main buttons, the A and B button. And basically, one of the buttons is the, it's both an attack button and an item use button. If you're next to an enemy, then the game makes you attack it, if you step next to it. I mean, you don't get a chance to use an item in that case. but if the enemy steps next to you then you have one turn to use an item on it

before it attacks you and so in that case pressing the A button won't attack it'll use an item what is the B button the B button is I think it was the past turn button I forgot what it was from yesterday so that yeah I think that was it

that's just to like to waste a turn so that the enemies will move one more space along their movement patterns. Which is often an important strategy because if an enemy steps up next to you, it doesn't attack you right away. You get one turn to walk away from it. But if you step next to the enemy, then you have to fight it one round. It will probably take a hit. So a lot of the game is you taking advantage of that and passing turns so that you can get away. from the enemies without having to engage them.

Right. Yeah, and the interesting thing about Cave Noir is that, of all the companies to create it, it was by Konami, which I don't think people really associate with this kind of, this style of game. But, you know, I really think this game came around because, like I was saying earlier, you know, companies were like, oh, there's, you know, interesting things we could do with this sort of procedural style of game to make it fit into the constraints of a specific platform. In this case, I really feel like they said, how do we take this rogue concept and make it work for a portable system? And, you know, in 1992, I want to say. I forgot to write the date down. But it was, you know, early 90s. So this was before Mystery Dungeon.

It might have been before Dragon Crystal, too. Maybe not. But it's right around the same time. So, you know, the idea of a portable roguelike just really wasn't a thing at that point. Or even console roguelikes. So I think they kind of took these ideas and influences and said, you know, let's make a bite-sized rogue-like experience. Obviously, you can't go into a proper 30-floor dungeon and, you know, have ASCII graphics or whatever. But you can kind of make it a little actiony.

You can kind of make it bite-size. So it's, you know, a little puzzle dungeon that you can complete in 10, 15, 20 minutes. That's just right for, you know, portable gaming. It's the Tetris of roguelike. almost. And I think, yeah, from what little I've played of it, it's not one that I've experimented with a lot. But what I have played of it is, it seems very successful, very creative, and like you said, John, very kind of lighthearted and good-natured. Was Konami doing any other RPGs at this time? I can't think of anything really notable

until the Sweet Code N. Yeah, I mean, they had Lagrange Point on Famicom, and that was, you know, very much in the fantasy star vein. That was, I want to say that was like 92. You're right about that, yeah. It was right around the same time. So this never came out here, but there is a fan translation of it. That's very thorough. I don't know how much you need a fan translation for this game, but it's there. It never hurts to have it for items and stuff like that.

Yeah, yeah. They also made Esper Dream. Oh, that's right. It's sort of a role-playing game and a rogue like, yeah. A role-playing game and a Zalda game. So they made them, they just weren't really keen on bringing them here until the mid, until Swikoden, I guess. Yeah, and I think they had Madara or Maharaja, one of those two on, on Super Famicom.

That might not have been them, but I feel like I see Madara a lot at Japanese game shops and it has the Konami logo on it. But maybe I'm just conflating things in my head. But they did make some rogue likes, but they did not publish a lot of portable roguelikes, at least not early on. Or RPGs, sorry. Definitely no other portable roguelikes until Azure Dreams, which we'll talk about later. All right, next on the letters.

All right, next on the letters. Isuna, legend of the unemployed ninja Defense Squad from Luke W. I'm pretty sure I've heard Bob mention it before on the show, but I feel like Izuna, Legend of the Unemployed Ninja for the DS, is a woefully underrated super charming rogue-like

that actually introduced me to the genre as a kid. Sorry to make you feel old. I was a game reviewer at this point, so yes. I thought it was so cool how you could plan out your moves, knowing that enemies would only move when you did, not realizing at the time that this was indeed a hallmark of the genre.

Sure, it would have been cool to see items that took advantage of the DS hardware a little better, and the grind was sometimes rough, but Izuna had some cool boss characters and some neat weapon design. I never played the sequel, but I feel I owe at least part of my love of rogue likes to Uzuna, and the portable nature of the DS, with its closed-to-sleep functionality, meant that investing 10 to 15 minutes in a run was never a tall order. And I agree, the DS's clamshell design and how it just went to sleep, that was a godsend for RPG. I still feel like the DS was the best platform ever for.

role-playing games because you just want to take a break, close the lid, come back later, and you're exactly where you left off. For consoles, certainly. Is there anything similar in recent history that's similar to Izuna or Sheeran? Because Shearin seems like the last real game of this specific type to come out. So there is a game on Switch that I mixed around with a while back a few months ago called Alchemic Dungeon. And I don't know if you guys, any of you've played that, but it's very much a sort of pixel art,

retro-style roguelike game, but it has a crafting element where when you're in the dungeon, you like kill stuff and you can also gather resources. And then you can turn those resources. You can use recipes to create potions, weapons, other equipment, and then just kind of like modifier resources. So you unlock more recipes as you complete different dungeons of the game. But basically, you start out with pretty much nothing. then you create your weapons as you go.

And, you know, you can create like a basic wooden shield or something, but if you find some copper and then the right kind of potion as a sort of a reagent, you can combine those things and then combine those with a wooden shield and you'll get a copper shield or an iron shield or, you know, a higher level shield than that. You can also create magic rods that way or if you combine potions with a different kind of thing instead of creating a rod to cast spells, you can create, like, a potion that you can use. It's actually, it's very fun and very, very amusing.

It's got kind of like a lighthearted art style, and some of the enemies are kind of goofy. I don't remember who made that, but I was playing that for a few weeks pretty regularly. Often check it out. Through a few of the dungeons. It's very inexpensive. So, yeah, like, there are still people making games

and that kind of shear-in Izuna mold, but it is definitely something that you don't see a lot. make rogue lights these days as opposed to rogue likes. So the rogue like is still sort of an underappreciated, endangered species or something. I think we need to back away from Metroidvania is now that a bloodstain is out and start making these again, indie versions of these games. Metroidvania rogue likes. No, wait, that's Rogue Legacy, which I don't actually like.

It's weird. John, it seems like you have a lot of opinions about Izuna. I remember playing both of the games and thinking they were kind of fun, but the second game is you point out in your notes, really leaned into the fan service and got to the point where it was kind of gross. Like, I remember this one, there was like a wall scroll that came with it or something. She's like naked in the bath and she's holding these two large bottles of milk. I remember milk being the sexual innuendo there.

What is, what are you guys doing? I remember, I remember editing this from you and just going, okay, I'm done. Andrew, you finish it. So, John, yeah, you put a lot of notes in here about Izuna, and I actually, my memory of the game is a little fuzzy, so you want to walk us through some of the differences between Izuna and Shiren and what, what this game does besides take place and wacky ancient Japan as opposed to serious ancient Japan, that makes it so unique. Well, one step at a time, one step at a time, there was one game I played recently at the randomly generated Metroidvania. I don't know how rogue like it is But I found a lot fun It's called a robot called Fight

Okay, yeah Yeah, I really enjoyed that a lot lately So I just figured I'd mention that All right Yeah, I, Zuna was a bit fuzzy to me as well I guess it didn't make much of an impression on me But I went back, it turns out I did review it for at play

Like, by way back and I thought 2008 Right So I went and I found my review And also like found a YouTube video video, so I'm playing through it to remind myself of how it went. Well, you say it didn't make much of impression at you, and I'm looking at this big wall of text in your notes.

Well, I need something to remind me, but when I get reminded, I mean, the memories come flooding back. Let's see. I'm looking at the notes now, just to remember. One of the things about, Azuna does, at first,

it does obviously take borrow a lot from Sheeran. It's very much that kind of game. You know, it's got that rooms and corridors layout to it. Unlike Sheeran, the dungeons are a bit more complex.

And Sheeran, you generally, you know, there are a body of pre-made levels in some games that it can throw in. But when you actually get into the dungeons, they tend to have it all a similar kind of design where they have like

an array of like 15 rooms connected. It's sort of like a larger version of rogue's three by three room layout. And so once, and Sheeran, once you're used to how it generates the dungeons, then you can get kind of a sense thinking, oh, there should be a room

over there, and there must be a secret passage to it, because they haven't found a way to it yet. Well, Azuna's dungeons are a lot more complex than that. They have it tend to have passages all over the place. It shouldn't fewer rooms though

it's more windy passages and fewer open spaces or that's what I seem to remember let's see it does it is inspired a lot by Sheeran one of the big gameplay innovations it has our

talisman system where they're sort of the you know those traditional Japanese sort of like ceiling scrolls they appear in like anime all the time Right, they're like a strip of paper used by Shinto priests. Yes, those kinds of things. Yeah, I didn't know what they were, what they were called.

But that's what these are, these talismans. And you can either read them to get an effect, like a scroll and Sheeran or a net hack or something. Or you can throw them in an enemy and it will have an effect on the enemy. or you can attach it to one of your items, one of your weapons or armors, and then its effect will apply to that item. And there's a variety of them. I forget exactly which ones they were, but one of the things about it is that all of your items have a limited capacity of how many of these talibans you can attach to them.

Each Taliban has a certain sort of worth, I guess, and SP points. and each weapon has a randomly generated capacity that's the number of FP worth of talismans you can attach to it you can actually attach more but it lowers the weapon's durability which I'll get to in a second another thing about it though is that your character Azuna herself

has a number of SP points like skill points and whenever you read one of these talismans you use up that many points and they don't replenish very often. And the problem with that is when you run low in SP points, your attack strength

goes way down. So you might use a scroll to get out of trouble, but it means that your attack strength has been depleted and just being generally survivable from that point on may be a big problem.

And this is all for memory and what I remember what I gather reading my old review. So if I've gotten something wrong, I apologize. No, I mean, that all sounds right. And it all, you know, it sounds like systems you see in other RPGs like Etriene Odyssey has, which is also published by Atlas. That also has, you know, kind of like the weapon augment system or, you know, the number of things you can junction to a weapon is reminiscent of Final Fantasy 7 or 8 where you can augment your characters and their powers like material or something like that. So it's kind of taking some of the skill-based systems, those concepts from, you know, console Japanese RPGs and saying, what if we did that in a rogue-like context?

And also, for some reason, it's about a ninja who doesn't have any work right now. There is that sort of anime-style humor to the game. I don't remember much about it, though. I noticed before I read my old article, I didn't have a very high opinion of Azuna, but reading the article, At the time, I seem to like it more than I remembered liking it. So maybe there's something to it, and I've just forgotten. Could be. I noticed that the word unemployed is not part of the Japanese title.

So I think, is it Atlas that brought this over? They did, yes. They were taking advantage of the economic collapse. It was very relatable. I think this was before the collapse. It was right when it happened. Yeah, I mean, by the time they... What did they know?

That's what I'm asking. What did Atlas know? Okay. Hey, this is about to go full Alex Jones here. Yes. I'm putting it in retron. I'm turning it into that. So, Bob, your name was invoked in this letter that kicked off this conversation.

So do you have something to say about Izzy? I played a ton of these games through Gamefly, this and the sequel. I remember having a lot of fun with it. But it's been a long time. But these games were super addictive, and I just love all the items in them, just like the huge variety of items and all the different effects. That was the most fun. I had with these games. I feel the same, I mean, I'm sure it'll come up in conversation,

but I get the same feeling out of like things like Binding of Isaac, where everything, it's always a surprise. Not so much Spelunky, because Blunky, all the items are known. It's just how they interact with each other. But this feels more like, what are you going to find, what effects will it have? That's the fun of Zuna and Sheeran and games like that. I always like the title. Yeah, I think it's cheeky.

I want to say that friend of veterans, Nick Marigos, worked on the localization for this. I could be mistaken, but he, He was with Atlas at the time and did a lot of their localization editing, so we might have him to think for some of the punchiness of this game. Anyway, on to the next letter from M. Alasdair. My two favorite console roguelikes were Fatal Labyrinth and its handheld spin-off Dragon Crystal. And its handheld spin-off Dragon Crystal.

They might qualify as lights, but both have a really high and fun level of variance and have XP systems grinding as why I play console RPGs. They were the first games I ever played with. the randomized potion effects and item ID, and both of those are fundamental rogue-like traits. I think both games are basically the same except for their tile sets, but Fatal Labyrinth's

dungeon descent made more sense than Dragon Crystal's forest levels to me, but both are still a blast to play. Let's see. The only thing I want to note there is I really appreciate good dungeons that are made out

of forests or mountains, you know, anything besides a dungeon in the ground. Right. Yeah. So we already talked about those games last episode. So I'm going to jump ahead to the next letter, which is from Bo, a guy who works at Access Games, the company that brought us Sharon the Wanderer for Vita. So this is a cool letter. Hi, Jeremy, this is Bo from Access Games.

it's a pleasure to formally e-meet you. As a big fan of roguelikes myself, I was, I believe my first foray into them was with other life, Azure Dreams, for PlayStation 1 back of June 98, when it originally released. It's a good segue. I think what really drew me in

was not only the roguelike gameplay, but also the character corning aspect, as well as the Pokemon collecting of monsters that could traverse the tower with you. After that, I picked up the GBC version of it in February of 2000 and enjoyed myself with that as well. My favorite roguelike series would have to be Shiren the Wanderer. I first played Shiren 1 back on Nintendo DS back in March of 2008, and it was a delight.

I wasn't a huge fan of Sega Americanizing the cover art when the original art worked just fine. After which I played Atlas's localization of Shiren 3 on Wii that came out in February of 2010. This was really cool to play because it fused both roguelike gameplay with RPG cinematics and style. And finally, there's Shire and the Wanderer 5 on Vita, which I had the honor of working on over at Axis, along with my other co-workers, it came out in July of 2016. This game is great as it's a culmination of all the progress series is made and also allows for online co-op and dungeon rescuing. It also has passwords you can use to unlock certain things in the games.

I've also enjoyed Tornico's Great Adventure and Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon. So, yeah, I think that's one of the reasons Shire and Five probably came out in America is because it was kind of overseen by someone who got a passion for the genre. genre and the series. I love to see a switch port. I, yeah. Or Steam. Steam.

I feel like that game would just sing on Steam. It'd make a million dollars. I don't know if Spike would handle the publishing themselves now that they have their own U.S. branch. I think it wouldn't be Axis' call. I think they would probably release it if anyone would. Yeah, but, you know, Access probably has some stake in the localization of it. So it might be a partnership.

I know Spike Chunsov still kind of teams up with other parts. partners to publish things. And they're always open to that. Yeah. So I know, I feel like this is surely something that is in someone's mind. Yeah. There's no game. I want to set up an interview with the current head of Mystery Dungeon.

Just read them like. Sorry. No, I've been trying to set up an interview for a while and he's a little hard to get a hold of. But one of these days, I swear to God. The other thing about Spike is they're really into bringing things to PC nowadays. Yeah, they're really good about that. We talked about it on the last podcast, but there is no game too obscure that they would bring to PC. I think they're making a lot of good decisions.

Yeah. Okay, but we've talked already about Mystery Dungeon, but we have not talked about Azure Dreams. So here we go. Finally, at long last, let's bring this home and talk about, as it is known in Japan, other life Azure Dreams, which debuted in 98 on PlayStation, and they ported it in a slightly slimmed down version to Game Boy Color in 2000. And there was also a sequel, which was not nearly as good, and cut out a lot of the interesting, unique elements of it called Tau's Adventure in like 2007-ish, I want to say, on Nintendo DS. And I reviewed that, and it was a disappointment. Oh, I did not like that.

But Azure Dreams was good. Yeah. I forgot they were later. Yeah, I was looking at the credits for this game, and I played a lot of it when it came out. And it seems like it was a real passion project for the director because they were also the writer of the scenario and they had a lot of other major rules. and this was sort of their last major game for Konami. Yeah, and I feel like this is one of those games that probably was just, you know, put together on a shoestring budget by a very small team. And Konami was kind of doing, you know, they were doing both at the time. They weren't just like, hey, it's a big game.

They were doing Metal Gear the same year, Metal Gear Solid. That's right, yeah. And then you also had Azure Dreams. So they were able to kind of squeeze those big games and the tiny little games in there. There was room for that. But Azure Dreams is really interesting. I haven't played nearly as much of it as I want to. And I don't know if I'll ever have the time

unless I eventually get to the Game Boy version on Game Boy Works, my videos. But the whole thing is, I mean, it feels like quintessential late 90s Konami. It's got the same kind of, no, in a good way. Like, it's got the same kind of vibe as the Sweeget in games. There's just something very distinct about it. Like that Konami on PlayStation feeling,

I really, really liked that. I think only now are we equipped with the knowledge to play this game as it's meant to be played, because I remember reviewers at the time not understanding it. I played it for about 20 or 30 hours, and I was just kind of understanding it. But I think having played so many games of this type, and especially games of the like Harvest Moon Starry Valley type of which there are a lot of mechanics, I feel like we now finally can understand as your dreams. But with this game and like with a lot of random dungeon games,

I was of the opinion, a lot of viewers of the opinion, And it's like, oh, instead of designing a game, you just made a bunch of random bullshit for me. And try harder next time. But it's like we didn't realize they designed a cool system that we needed to figure out. Right. And this is a game that it really feels like almost kind of an attempt to take the roguelike and combine it with an RPG, like classic Japanese console RPG, and also Konami's previous work with Tokomecki Memorial. Because there's a huge dating relationship theme in here.

And you were starting, just starting around this time to see these elements in games that were being localized to the U.S. A couple of years later, you had Thousand Arms by Atlas that finally made it over. And that was very much about the dating and developing relationships with characters. But at the time, you just didn't really see that. I mean, I don't think even Harvest Moon had, did it have a marriage at that point? Or was it still just kind of like you're a guy with a farm? Harvest Moon did have marriage. Okay.

You could marry one of the four or five girls in the valley. On superanias? Yeah. And you haven't here that the marriage was taken out for the localization. If I had to guess, this is just conjecture, but I bet it was just like, oh, here's something that would save us work if we cut it out, like more things to localize, perhaps like more dialogue. Wait, it was cut out in localization of... As your dreams. You have it written down.

It could also be because of the age thing. Oh, oh, no. Yeah, there was... You still have the romance element in the American version, but in Japan, you could marry the character. Like, you can marry a character as kind of like the end game to the romance, but they took that out here. Yeah. And, yeah, the speculation is that it's because one of the girls is, like, illegally young. So, I don't know why they wouldn't just say, like, hey, you just, you know, you've got, like, a little sister now as opposed to saying.

She came back from college. No, you can't ever get married because you might marry a child. Like, that's a little extreme. It seems kind of. And what's funny is on the PC side, you know, one of the first, our. with those kind of relationship building in Boulder's Gate the next year. Well, there you go. So Azure Dreams is, you know, it kind of takes the idea of a randomized console

rogue-like a step further than Sharon the Wanderer in that, you know, there is this persistent world outside of the dungeons where in Scheran, it's like there's, you know, two or three towns and there's some characters you meet along the way. And, you know, as you progress, then those things become more advanced and more evolved. But here, like, there is a hub town, basically, in a tower, and you're always going into the tower, but you're also building the town outside the tower, and you're developing relationships with the young women who live in the city, the town around the tower. On top of that, there are animals, like there's monsters that you can tame and collect and take those into the dungeon with you to be your companions. So, yeah, you're going into the dungeon and you die. and you lose your, you know, your strength and everything, you get kick back to level one, your equipment's gone, but there's still this world outside, and your relationship with the women still develops.

Your monster training still, you know, expands. Now what the town, like you unlock bowling alleys and things, and those are still there, you can still go bowling. What benefits do you get from your monster companions? Do they buff you? Do they heal you? I mean, it's, yeah, it's all kinds of things. They join you in the dungeon and each one has different attributes. I'm not even going to pretend to know which monster does what.

But, yeah, like, that's the whole point is that you're kind of going into battle with critters. And it's a little bit on the Pokemon side. I mean, not coincidentally, this was about a year and a half after Pokemon exploded in Japan and became the huge thing. And I just started, you know, covering Game Boy Color Games on my video series. and like right from the outset you have games like there's a Hello Kitty Sanrio RPG with two versions and you're capturing monsters. There's RoboPon which has like a built-in clock and a rumble feature and stuff

and Atlas localized that one. But like right from the very beginning, you know, in 1998, everyone was doing Pokemon. And so this was this was Konami's Pokemon, but it's also Konami's Mystery Dungeon, but it's also Konami's Harvest Moon. It's a whole lot of things all at once. It's a really ambitious game. And like Bob said, it's just like a super small team,

which makes it all the more impressive because they were just, they were swinging for the moon with this one. And it's all wrapped in that great music, those very beautifully rendered 2D graphics that Konami used on the PlayStation. And it's even got, I don't know, there's something about like playing these games and the little bit of load times

and like the system screens where you're saving onto memory cards. It's all very nostalgic for me who played so much PlayStation 1 back in the day. And, you know, I kind of cut my teeth on PlayStation with Sweikiden, so it just takes me right back. It's a really, really cool game that does a lot with a roguelike to make it more than just a random dungeon game. I was thinking, going back to my comments about reviewers and the audience not understanding these, when do you think before Spalunky was the most?

moment we understood the idea of restarting progress as a good and fun idea. Because I remember as late as like 2004 and 2006 with games like Breath of Fire, Dragon Quarter, and Dead Rising, people were just like, I don't understand this. But I went back, so when Dead Rising came out again for PC and everything with the HD remake, I was playing it for the first time. I never played in 2006. And I was thinking, wow, this game is so ahead of its time with all of these ideas. But if you go back to the reviews, people either got it or they're just, why do I have to play this eight times in a row to beat the game? Like, they did not understand. it. Yeah, I don't know.

For me, Dragon Quarter was, I haven't really mentioned it in the context of rogue likes. I love that game. Yeah. But, yeah, the idea of like starting over and, you know, going back to the beginning and taking some progress with you to try again, like that, that seemed really interesting. And I was actually on board with it. But, you know, people, people, some people don't like the idea of, of video games, like progression. and accomplishment being ephemeral. I mean, look at the blowback to destructible weapons

and breath of the wild. Like, that's not a big deal. Like, there's always weapons everywhere. You ration things a little bit, you know, so you have the weapon you really need when you need it, but you can't carry a ton of weapons around with you. You don't have the space in your inventory.

The idea is that things are breakable, that they're temporary, that you're always kind of improvising. That's interesting, but some people just hate it. I wonder if it has anything. to do with, you know, the old guard of, you know, PC-R-P-G reviewers had pretty much gone by this point. And, you know, they're so used to restarting, you know, dead party, we have to restart again. Well, yeah, I think you're talking about a console lineage.

Go ahead, John. I remember from that time that was about when I was writing at play. And I worked really hard writing those trying to get people to understand this idea that, that, you know, starting from the beginning is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if your experience is going to be different on this next play. If the game is going to feel like a different game, it's like another adventure. If your character advances and doesn't reset, then it kind of limits the kind of adventures you had.

Like in Dungeons and Dragons, there's a lot of nostalgia among players for low-level play. The game feels different when you're like between levels, levels 1 and 5, then when you're between levels 11 and 16, the style of the game is completely different. And, I mean, to restart it, it lets the game show off more of its strategic options as you progress, because you get to go back and play the early type of game again where your character isn't very powerful, and you have to make every turn count, and you have to build yourself back up so you can handle the late game again.

It's a journey is really the thing. It's not the destination there. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, having kind of really cut my video gaming teeth on NES and playing games like Mega Man 2, 3, Bionic Commando just exhaustively, one of the things that I really liked about those games is that they gave me different ways to play every time. You had eight different levels you could tackle in Mega Man 2. So you could, you know, go the easy route.

and get metalman's blade right at the beginning and just destroy everything with a metal blade. But you could also maybe do metalman stage last and have to, you know, take a different approach to the game. Binaicamando had different routes. You could, you know, go the fastest route. You could go the comprehensive route. Rogue likes let you do that.

And I remember when Shear and the Wanderer came out, and I feel like that was the point at which I really, really got the genre. I was defending the series and the concept of roguelikes to a colleague in the press. And it was at an event, I think it might have been Craig Harris from IGN who really, really hated the mystery, like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games. It was like, it's so stupid that you start over at the beginning every time. I just don't, like, there's no appeal to that for me.

But, you know, the comparison I used was with the original Super Mario Brothers, that game did not have, you know, continues, or at least not that, you know, were documented. It was a hidden feature. So you started out with three lives and you played as far as you could. and when you ran out of lives, that was it. So you started over at the beginning. Was that a bad game because you had like finite progress? Because Sharon's the same thing.

It's just a different context, but you fail and you start over from the beginning. And unlike Super Mario Brothers, you know, when you fail in Sharon, there's still some persistent progress within the world around you. So it's like, you know, it's like if in Super Mario Brothers won, you died, but after doing a certain thing, then, you know, every time you started, you'd begin, you know, powered up with a mushroom instead of its tiny Mario or something. So there was like this kind of, you know, progressive additional change happening within the game world to change the experience a little bit, give you a little bit of a leg up and make each progressive attempt a little easier. And I think when you, you know, I think the reason Spalunky was such a success is because it fits that Mario sort of context, Millieue, you know, where you're, you know, where you're. it's a platform game. It's an action game. And when you die, you die, you go back to the beginning. But, you know, like, it makes sense because that's how that kind of game works. So I think, you know, recontextualizing the roguelike in that format made it a lot more palatable to people because it was in a way that they could understand like, oh, yeah, okay, this is how this is how this genre works. RPGs are supposed to be persistent. But action games, you know, you die, you start over at the beginning. Yeah, it's interesting to see how much more sophisticated the gaming audience.

as we come, where going back to Dead Rising, it's not a Roguelike, by the way, I don't think it is, but it has the same loop in starting over ideas that are in roguelikes. But people complained incessantly about it for the first three games. And for the fourth game, they're like, okay, that will not be something in this game, and it got reviewed badly, it got panned.

Nobody liked it. People thought it was boring all of a sudden, and then the studio closed down. So I feel like it's like, no, now we understand what the idea of a loop is. Now we understand that starting over is not a bad thing. And I think we crave that sort challenge now when before we just didn't understand it as a gaming public.

So to bring this back to Azure Dreams, I will say that the game, when you go into the dungeons, does have almost all the things that you expect from a roguelike. It has procedurally generated levels. It has traps. It has an upgrade system where you can upgrade both items and monsters. There's the persistent world state outside the dungeons. You can use ID things. You can throw objects.

Everything is finite. You have to deal with status effects. There's elemental classes for you to, you know, contemplate and build into your strategies. You have health regeneration. You have stamina degradation, the food clock, as John calls it. You can combine items to create better items. And you can stumble into monster houses. It is a true console roguelike that just happens to have a town simulation and romance and monster building

Sim built into it as well, which is, yeah, they need to bring this one back. I never got to play Azure Dreams, and I have to admit, I've wanted to, but they just haven't had the time. Yeah, that is a problem with games like these. But whatever you do, don't play Tao's Adventure, because it takes out pretty much all the stuff except the roguelike and the Monster Sim, and it loses something in the process. It's very sad. You know, I'm going to be able to be.

So, we're going to be. just keep doing the letters and branch off from there. I feel like that's kind of a pretty good format, actually. So this is from Rory Dropkick on Twitter. I'm writing in to talk about my favorite roguelike on PS2, the much underappreciated Nightmare of Druaga, Fisigu No Dungeon. I want to play it. Oh, you should.

It's super cheap. It's like you can probably buy it on eBay for like three bucks. I don't have a PS2. What? You can find one of those on eBay for 12 bucks. Oh, man. Are you the one who's, who put in the notes that you never had a PS2?

I don't, yeah, yeah. That's like the single best-selling console of all time. There's so many of them. I'll send you one. I have an extra. Sure, if you like, but each generation I can only really afford one console, and it's always a Nintendo one. I understand.

That's totally fair. But, yeah, I've got a PS2 that works perfectly, except it doesn't output RGB video, which why would you care about that unless you're, you know, doing ridiculous things like I am with recording so it's otherwise perfect so I'm going to send that to you I feel like you need to get on it before PS2 games become more expensive yeah for sure those children are becoming adults with money

yeah at some point Nightmare of Geraga is going to become like a $5 game and you're going to want to jump in before that anyway I actually own PS2 games I have Gradius 3 and 4 PS on PS2 disc you're halfway there all right so it's going to happen just do wait All right, so Nightmare of Duraga was a game that Rory Dropkick had bought based off his love for Tower of Duraga and the Mystery Dungeon series. He says, I was the only employee in my store who had pre-ordered it, and from my recollection, I sold maybe two to three copies during the entire time when I worked there, which is actually more than I would have expected. The game puts up a huge challenge, even tougher than most mystery dungeon games, even incorporating elements from the Duraga series, such as meeting specific criteria within the dungeon to obtain hidden weapons and items.

It also held a complex crafting system that took me a while to get used to. It didn't help that Namco left out the hints when they translated the game, and I had to go online to get that info. Years later, I finally obtained the massive-sized Japanese-only strategy guide, and it was a huge help. I sincerely wish the game we brought back for an updated release on Switch PS4 PC as I feel that fans of the Mystery Dungeon series would appreciate the game and its challenge. That is an interesting idea, bringing back Nightmare of Drag.

All right, from Lorenzo Hosebos. Rogue likes are probably my favorite genre that I almost never play and all of my actual experience with the genre comes from the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series which I now find to be here's the controversial part kids the best Pokemon games

I own several others like Sharon Forbita but I haven't sat down to them yet. My favorite Pokemon Mystery Dungeon I would have agreed with them until I started playing Let's Go Evie with my kids and to me we're going to play Sword and Shield

I used to hate those kind of Pokemon games and like the mystery dungeon games a lot more. Okay, fair enough. So Lorenzo says my favorite is the Explorers of Sky, but it could do well with some of Super Mystery Dungeon quality of life

super mystery dungeons quality of life improvements. Super Mystery Dungeon is great and even though the recruiting aspect makes it feel easier to finish the game, it just doesn't feel right to me. However, the game I've spent the most time with is certainly the original duo of Red and Blue Rescue Team, which I've gone through well more than a dozen times.

The last and hopefully final time was on the Wii U virtual console. Wow, I didn't know people would spend 200 hours and do a lot of gummy farming, but after 386 dungeon excursions, finally got all 386 plus 27 other unknown Pokemon in my friend's area. It was definitely not worth it.

But listening to retronauts while delving into the dungeons was pretty great all the same. Aw. I love that letter I love that letter I remember back of the day I actually gave a bad review to Pokemon mystery deck

I kind of regret that a bit I mean it was kind of not for me it was kind of made for people who aren't used to that kind of game you know for a Pokemon fan who'd never played something like that before so the most recent one that came out I sent down with my oldest kid

to say okay well this is how it works oh Jason I need you facing into the mic Oh, I'm sorry. I'm talking to Jeremy. So he totally did not get it. He totally did not like it. He said, Daddy, why can I just play the Pokemon I like? Did you call him stupid?

No, I didn't. Yikes. That's why I'm not a dad. Listen stupid. Parenthing advice. Here, Bob, why don't you read this next one? Sure. Oh, it's a long email.

So, oh, another gaming celebrity is writing in. Yeah, right? So this is from Mark Lentz, and it says, Hi, Retronauts. I'm Mark Lentz from Q Games in Kyoto, Japan. I was also on the Retronauts episode with Dylan Cuthbert and probably hold the record for the lowest word count. I love you, homies. So I fell in love with Rogue Likes during the heyday of 90s Square Soft back when cranking out hit after hit. I bought Chocobo's dungeon, too, sight unseen. I fell in love with it. Going into the dungeons, never felt like a waste or a grind. There was always something in each run, and you better believe I love stealing from the shopkeepers. I would go back to the game. every year to play because I thought it existed in a vacuum. It wasn't until the one-up.com era. Jeremy Parrish and his vocal support of Shear and the Wanderer that I found out the wider

rogue-like world. I had no idea it was a genre. I've since played every game I can find, but still feel the most love for the golden age of Chunso. So last year I had dinner with the CEO of Spike Chun Mitsutoshi Sakurai and you better believe my first question was when the next mystery dungeon was coming out. He didn't respond, but he paid for our dinner, so that was pretty cool. Thanks guys. So that

the stick confirms, there's no mystery dungeon in the future. We did mention on the last episode, I will say, I was just asking stupidly, like, we're going to play one of these games now. The Pokemon, sorry, the Chocobo Dungeon Switch game is still really good. It's a part of the Wii game from that day to go.

Everybody. Yeah, yeah. It's exactly of that mold, but with a job system, and it's really good. So that is the way to scratch that age right now if you want to. And again, there is an alchemic dungeon on Switch, which is bite-sized and fun. Oh, gosh. I'm sorry, I'm laughing just reading it.

Jason, sorry, I need you to the mic. Don't look at Jeremy. I know he's very well dressed. Actually, I was looking down on my back. As a solid dull child, I rented and disliked Fatal Labyrinth for the Genesis, as it lacked bespoke dungeon design in any kind of real narrative. As a peppy

dull adult, I look back on that in the Game Gear's Dragon Crystal's fun, infinitely replayable games. What changed? I really that many JRP stories from that area were kind of terrible and hard to go back to. Thank you for your time, Johnny. Wow, I'm surprised you'd have Bob read that one. I'm just trying to keep it, you know, even.

Let's see. Here's one I can get behind from Justin Frank. I know Pokemon has a passionate fan base, so I don't intend to offend anyone. But I think it's a shame that the Mystery Dungeon series is almost universally and solely associated with Pokemon. because Mystery Dungeons Share and the Wanderer is probably the finest console rogue-like of all time and definitely one of the most underrated video games ever. It's a combination

of beautiful graphics and music, charming and often legitimately funny characters in writing, simple but deep gameplay mechanics, and uncannily excellent procedural generation make for a game that is a joy to play with truly limitless replay value, especially the enhanced DS port. If anyone within earshot of this email

has not played it, I implore you to check it out. The sequel on Wii and Vita are also worth a look The DS port of Mystery Dungeons, Shear and the Wander, is as good as a classic console roguelike gets. So, you know, I'm just going to interject a little bit of cheerleading here. But one of the things, I look back at one up, and one of the best things I thought that happened there was the way you championed console roguelikes like this. I appreciate it, but I was one tiny voice, and I didn't do nearly as much heavy lifting as John did. Like his, I mean, I will say that John's at-play column was a source of inspiration for me, and I probably bit off more of that than I care to admit.

But, yeah, like, I think, you know, probably the best single body of work about rogue-like games is John's collective column. Is that still online, John? Yeah, everything I wrote for games that watch is still on the side. I've collected a lot of the best of it into an e-book that I sell on Itch I-O, but it's only like $10. You can get basically all of the best stuff that I ever did for App Play right there. What's it called, John?

This is AtPlay exploring Roguelight games. And when you say Ad, it's the Atmark, right? Yeah, yeah. It's also on Amazon. I get a lot less money from them. Yeah, yeah. Don't give money to Amazon. Give it to Itchio, whatever it is.

I'd also like to say a word real fast about championing these games because I got into Shear and to Wander in a similar kind of thing. Long ago, I actually read the story in App Play once, but it's a fun story, so I'll just repeat it shortly here. Long ago, back when the only rogue likes I knew of were Rogue and NetHack, I was looking through the NetHack Usenet column, Usenet Group. and a guy posted stories about this awesome-sounding Japanese rogue light called Mystery Dungeon or Fusigino Dungeon. He wrote a couple of really detailed stories of this place which is the game that made them sound like the most interesting thing about getting massacred by a master chicken

that got promoted into a great chicken because he zapped a staff that he thought was a staff of unhappiness but it was a staff of happiness and he promoted it instead and got one hit killed by it and he wrote another story about the food-oriented bonus dungeon

and there are these two great stories and they stuck with me throughout the years and then I finally got to play the game and it was better than he said. Wow, that doesn't happen very often. Yeah, and I've always remembered those stories. I even, he had an email address on his Usenet post, and it was at least 10 years after he posted it,

but I finally emailed it about it, and he responded. It was still good, even though it was a school address. It was just, that's just like one of those nice little things. Yeah, I'm glad that I'm glad that I could let him know that his, his two little throw-off posts had such an effect on me. And I probably wouldn't have actually started App Play of it weren't for those too because they showed me the power that a really strong story about a game could have how it could really engage someone, that narrative.

Yeah, I think I would have to say Sharon the Wanderer kind of strikes the sweet spot in terms of what's possible and what kind of stories you can tell about it and how accessible it is, because you hear these amazing stories out of Eve Online or Dwar Fortress, but those games are impenetrable. They require months of your life to even get a handle on. Like they are, especially Eve Online, like all the great stories, they involve hundreds of people doing these massive coordinated things over the course of a year or two. Like, I don't have time to take part in that, and I would just be like one little tiny blip

in the overall story. Those things are great to read about, but, you know, Sharon, you can pick that up and play it and, you know, it takes a little while, but you'll get a handle on it, and then you're getting killed by great chickens. What's nice, though, is with Door Fortress is there's going to be a graphical adaptation coming out from Kit Fox. Now with graphics. Well, the hardest thing for me to get into Door Fortress is I just, I can't read all the

symbols. Yeah. There's just too much going on for me. I need the visual metaphor there. Yeah. It is like trying to read the Matrix. Like, oh, redhead, blonde, yeah. It is a different language, visual language.

And hats off to those who could do it. I envy you. But I'm looking forward to that one coming up. I love Dwarf Fortress, but I have a friend who's even more into it than I am. And the most of his stories are great. Yeah. All right. Well, when we do the Dwarf Fortress episode, we'll definitely bring you on for that.

Because that is a game. All of our noses are going to start bleeding during that podcast. I threw myself at it, and it killed me. It said, no, you may not. Damien Lin and I tried to do a series on Door Fortress at One Up, and we said, okay, let's give each other a month to play this. And after every month, we looked at each other and we said, what the fuck were we thinking? I forget, I was cornered by someone who just told me about Dwar Fortress for over an hour, and it made me never want to play. I did not opt into the conversation.

I understand that. I think DoreFortress fans have to be pretty intense. Yes. All right. So from Richard, my only rogue-like experience was when I had to do Q-ROTR. Q&A on Shear and the Wanderer, the Tower of Fortune, and the Dice of Fate on the Vita for my job. I admired how pure it was as a game and how deep in the woods you could go with it if you wanted. It always felt to me like a casino game with a touch more skill involved.

Full disclosure, I don't think it really sold me on roguelikes as a genre, but definitely made me respect them and understand what people see in them. And frankly, I feel like doing Q&A on a game like that is the worst possible introduction I can even think of. because you have to do, like, I feel like that job would involve, you know, basically making five hours of progress to see how far you could get and then saying, okay, now it's time for some sort of weird edge case thing that no one would ever actually do in real life. But I have to QA it and see if it's going to break the game. That sounds terrible. All right. One last letter. It came out as a budget release is, in essence, a glorified physical release of a tiny Sega modem downloadable game in Japan.

and I think that it's long been the subject of groans and eye rolls as a fairly simple RPG experience on the platform, but I've long felt that Sega's fatal labyrinth on the Genesis is an excellently simple retro-gaming entry point for rogue-like genres that totally scratches the itch for going in and spending a couple of hours in a fortress to see if you can make more progress than your last attempt. It's a no-nonsense medieval fantasy randomized dungeon crawler

with armor and spells that have different effects with every playthrough. It has a bit of early Genesis charm with its pixel art, and being a project essentially held by a Sonic team prior to the release of Sonic 1, the game moves at a fast clip, something that isn't always true of console roguelikes, which can sometimes feel sluggish. If you do make it to the fifth floor or beyond, the game allows you to optionally continue, so does this qualify it as a roguelite?

But otherwise, it's a really early, perhaps overlooked example of a solid console roguelike. And I like its sly sense of humor. When you begin the game, one of the villager kids is mostly concerned about the ghoul invasion vis-a-vis if school is going to be canceled for tomorrow. And when you die, the amount of villagers that mourn you at your grave is entirely dependent on how much money you've accumulated over the course of your adventure. Those vultures.

Exactly. I also want to throw out a probably unnecessary with your coverage in the other letters. Shout out to the original Super Famicom DS Sharon the Wander and it's incredible sense of atmosphere. This is from Eric. So anyway... One thing about... It's real quick about

middle labyrinth is the village outside the dungeon I have never seen it because when you press start to begin a game if you accidentally pressed it more than once it will skip the village and go right into level one of the dungeon the village is entirely optional I mean I guess I've played it I just ended up skipping it that way

and so I never even knew it existed it's there you should hit start one less time next time All right, so we've made it through the letters here, and now I kind of want to run through some of these other console roguelikes. I don't know that we're going to say much about Spalunky this episode, so maybe that's a different episode, but that's okay. Oh my God, Andrew.

Making out like a bandit. I know. Well, no, no. We've done what Andrew wanted. I feel like if we do Spalunky, we should get Derek Ewe in here. He's local. He is, yeah. Belunky deserves its own episode. I think so. I think so. I think that generation should be its own thing. Yeah. All right.

So this is no longer the road to Spolunky. This episode has been recalibrated midstream to become the continuation of the console roglex conversation. Thank you all for your letters, which ate up so much time that we could keep this episode pure. Anyway, so. Yeah, there's all these games we haven't even talked about. There's Parasite E. Yeah, yeah, we'll talk about them.

Let's talk about them. Right, yeah, let's talk about them. So basically, at this point, we want to talk about some games that kind of intersect with the Rogue but aren't necessarily a roguelike in and of themselves. They're games that incorporate roguelike concepts and elements into stand-alone modes or side stories or, you know, just bonus dungeons and things like that. And I think that idea kind of was popularized with Lufia 2 for Super NES, which was a game by Neverland, published by, oh, crap, who published that here? Taito. Taito, yeah.

Weird. Okay, anyway, this is like, you know, the Lufia was pretty much a very sort of dated-looking J-R-P-G, very classic style with some crazy-ass butt rock, really great music. These games are very expensive now, but Lufia, too, was a massive sprawling game, one of the last super-n-ES RPGs to come out in the U.S. And to make it extra big, it had something called the Ancient Cave. The core game is kind of, you know, Dragon Quest-ish, Fantasy Star-ish, with, you know, the sort of standard turn-based combat. And Luvia 2 has a rogue-like bonus mode called The Ancient Cave, which also has, like, the standard RPG mechanics, but in the context of kind of this procedurally generated dungeon crawl thing that you can defeat and then go back after you beat the game and take on again, it's huge. John, tell us about it

unless there's someone else who wants to talk about it. I don't want to talk about it because I haven't had a chance to actually play much of it yet. Well, I was wondering if this was the very first one of these kind of bonuses because I can think of like a hundred other RPGs that have a hundred floor bonus dungeon

or more that has random elements things like Star Ocean 2 and Final Fantasy Tactics, even games like Yaksa Dead Souls which I love. It's actually kind of bad, but it's fun. Even that has like a hundred-floor dungeon in it as a bonus thing. Yeah, Lufia II was like 1995, so I think it predates these things a bit.

The following year, you did see Tobol number one, which we could, we've done an episode on that, but it had a bonus mode where it's a fighting game, and you were playing like a proper roguelike as a fighting game, which was pretty cool. But Lufia II is kind of where this all started, so we don't have to go super into depth in any of these, but... What it reminds me of, because I've never played... played the ancient cave. What it reminds me of is dungeon hack, which is a 1993 D&D game where it's a procedural dungeon every time you play. Not a rogue-like

in the movement and in the mechanics since D&D is a procedurally dungeon with a bunch of procedural enemies that, you know, whole different groups of enemies in each one. But that's what it reminds me of. Yeah, dungeon hack is a great game. I think it's a bit more rogue-like action you're letting on, I mean it uses the eye of the beholder engine as in like the graphics look very similar. It's

it's a great little game. It's very customizable which is something that Lefayor 2 doesn't have, but I could talk for a while on dungeon hack, but I just try to stick to the subject here. The ancient cave is

what I know about it is that it's just sort of you begin it and you start at level one I don't think it opens up in its entirety until you've actually won the game and you go back in gift mode

it starts to write it to pick which of your characters you take it that you've met during the game you take into it create a party of four and you find items as you play and you know monsters although it's not

bump combat the encounters are visible on the map as little sprites that move around and to fight one you have to walk up to it and touch it so you can still avoid combat if you want it's not random encounters one of the interesting things about it if I remember correctly I could be wrong about it

is that there are blue treasure chests scattered throughout the dungeon addition to the normal red ones if you find an item in a blue chest it's usually something good if you fight it, then even if you lose, the game debts you keep it into later play-throughs.

So, although you start to level one, you still build up your equipment, the more times you play it. So you can make it easier going that way. I have a little fondness for some of the Lufia games

because they're just, they're huge. And you can really dig into them, and I enjoy the RPG systems inside them. But I never realized that the ancient cave had this bunch of a depth to it. Yeah, it's massive. And, you know,

that became kind of a thing in the following generation. Final Fantasy Tactics had the Deep Dungeon, which was... My favorite parts. Like, what is it? Ninety-nine levels or something? I thought it was 100. Well, okay. I missed it by one. And, you know, what else? I want to say that

Tales of Destiny had... Oh, yeah. That too. Or maybe it wasn't Destiny. It was one of the Tales games had like a whole randomized Giraga reference. I think it was the one on... Oh, it was Tales of Destiny, the PlayStation one. It was the Tales of Duraga themed

bonus dungeon, yeah. Yeah, so you started to see this in more and more games, so it was pretty cool. But I really feel like Luvia 2 was the one to sort of introduce that. And then I guess Neverland liked it

so much that for their Gameboy color game, Lufia the Legend Returns, they were basically like, let's just do the ancient dungeon as the whole game. So I kind of feel like Lufia, the legend returns, misses the appeal of Lufia, because the appeal of Lufia was that it was really like puzzle dungeons.

You know, every dungeon had like movable blocks and, you know, puzzles for you to solve that were constructed and designed. And the ancient cave was kind of like the bonus on top of that to let you keep playing. And, you know, you saw that with, I think Wild Arms did a pretty good job of sort of replicating the Lufia style. But then the Legend Returns basically just goes all in on these very samey, dungeons and it makes it kind of weirdly complex. There's like a nine character battle system, but otherwise it's just

kind of like, I feel like they probably could have done this better but I don't know. John, do you agree, disagree? I agree. I own this back in the day and never really got past like the second leg of the quest. I had a roommate who played far more of it than I did and she enjoyed it. She enjoyed it there a bit. uh the lufia games they uh in general they just they just have all these charming little touches like forfeit aisle the place where every item you've sold during the game just goes to uh it's things like that they're just charming little bits all the way through them and and i agree that just making you know that the whole game it sort of it it it it misses out on a of what made the series grade.

And it's a shame that the Lufia games have pretty much, I guess they'll never make another one. I think they disbanded. There was talk for a while back then that they were going to make a Game Boy advance one. That completely fell apart, didn't it?

Well, Neverland, I want to say they put together, I think it was them, or like whatever spun off of Neverland, a Lufia sequel for, was it D.S or 3 D.S. Man, it's been so long. I think it was the original D.S. It was like

a remake of Lufia 2, but it wasn't anything like Lufia 2. It was a really weird choice. I remember playing it for a few hours and saying, uh, no, I don't want this. Um, but I think you know, someone who... Yeah, Lufia Curse of the Sinistroles. Yes, that's the one. That was D.S.

Right? Yeah. Man, it's been so long. It doesn't seem like that long ago, because I'm getting old. 2010. A game that did take the ancient dungeon concept and do something really interesting with it, I think, is Parisite Eve, which gave you the Chrysler building, which is, as you put in the notes, it has 77 floors, like the real Chrysler building. I never made that connection.

Yeah, it's only available after you complete the game. You can save, I think, every 10 floors. And at the top of the Chrysler building is the true final boss. Like, you beat the game, you beat the flying baby that takes over the ship. And, you know, once you hit the baby. the flying demon baby with a few RPG rounds and escape from the exploding ship. Then everyone melts and the game starts over. And at some point, the Chrysler building unlocks.

And you can go in there. And it is a randomized mystery dungeon style game mode, but it still uses the Parasitee combat engine, which is great because I love that combat engine. Isn't it nice to get a game like that that's in a different setting? That's not just fantasy or medieval? Yeah, you mean, at some point, you're like shooting up a hospital and then the Museum of Modern Art or whatever.

It's like the real New York. So, yeah, so this is, you know, someone, someone's ensorcelled the Chrysler building so that the floor is randomized every time you go into it. But it's a pretty cool little, like, semi-optional thing. Like, I guess how optional do you consider the true ending? Because it is a new game plus kind of thing. You carry over all your progress and fight. through the Chrysler Building, which has like randomized layouts, randomized enemies,

randomized item drops, randomized treasure placement. It's interesting. It's a way to take a game that is like eight hours long and make it much, much longer. How do you know the real Chrysler Building is it like that? Have you ever been there? Oh, I've never been inside. You know, yeah, I've only been on the outside. For all I know, it is a, you know, like an extra-dimensional reality distortion thing.

Who knows? Now I keep thinking Phil Hartman doing Leo. Ayacocca on Saturday Night Live. Another, a game that kind of took an interesting tack with the idea of procedural content is Disgaya, which is, it's all, you know, it's a tactical RPG kind of in the Final Fantasy Tactics style, and each, each map you face, you know, the same structure, the same layout, the same set of enemies, all at the same levels, but then there's something called the item dungeon. And this is the dangerous, chewy part of the game where you can get lost for dozens, hundreds of hours. Like, Descaya was where Nippon Ichi sort of came up with their idea of how big can we make numbers. And that kept getting more and more, you know, ridiculous with each passive iteration. But you can approach this, you can approach Descaya as a standard strategy RPG and it's fine.

but you can also just be like how crazy can I get my damage combos because it has all these systems like you can have characters attack in tandem like if you're standing on a panel attacking an enemy and there's another of your allies adjacent to the enemy each adjacent ally will also attack

so you get bonuses you can pick up allies and then you can have someone pick up the ally that picked up the other ally and keep doing that for up to like six or seven people and then throw the stack of allies at a bad guy and do crazy damage combos. So anyway, part of all of that is, we probably should do a disguise episode at some point. Yeah, you should get caught. Part of all of that is the item dungeon where you can go into a

special place and enter like the soul of your items. Any item you have in your inventory, you can enter it. And inside there are random dungeons with random enemies. And by passing through these dungeons and destroying stuff, you can make your weapons stronger. This reminds me of a In the realms of Ravenloft in Dungeons of Dragons second edition There was a realm ruled by a sentient sword That was evil

And it reminds me so much of that It's maybe something along those lines I don't know It's a very easy way to burn yourself out on this game Oh yeah yeah yeah That's what I did I was like oh you know like 20 hours later I'm like I need to stop doing this

I think I played like 50 hours Barely doing any story stuff like no I got to make my sword better And then it's just like, I'm kind of sick of this already, and I've made no progress. Yeah, exactly. And it's a shame because the core game is really fun and lighthearted, and it's very sort of presented in the style of classic anime where each chapter is an episode that has like a preview. And there's a guy called, he has a real name, but they call him mid boss because they're like, oh, you're not the real boss. You're just a mid boss. And he gets really offended because you're basically belittling him as being not really worth your time.

Yeah, so it's really fun. and the story has a lot of humor to it. But then, yeah, you can totally just get bogged down in these crazy bonus dungeons. But it is, you know, kind of cut from the rogue-like mold a little bit. Yeah, Atlas released the first one. And then Nipponichi basically built an industry around this guy by starting an American branch just based off of that game success alone. Yeah, I don't know if they still do it anymore. I think they're struggling a little bit.

But for years, I would go to Tokyo Game Show. and one of the few companies that would have their own press conference was Nipanichi and they'd always have like the company president come out dressed as a Prini and there would be like the voice cast you know would be standing up there doing like a live radio drama in their character voices it was pretty wild when I worked at Atlas about a decade ago the Nipponichi van was often in the parking lot and had prinnies all over it like prunee decals all over it So the Itansha, the pain cars. And I feel like that all kind of reached its culmination with the ZHP Zetai Hero project, which was a proper Disgaya style roguelike that was built around like, you know, Tokasatsu, Hinchin-type Japanese 70s, 80s, superhero imagery.

and you're like, it's been a long time since I played it, but basically a guy who tries to put things right in the world by helping kids and stuff like that, and there's also like aliens invading. It's very goofy and weird, but it was more of a proper rogue-like, but still used a lot of disguise-style systems. Anyway, we need to kind of come to a,

start wrapping up and come to a conclusion here. Maybe we should talk about our good friends at Idea Factory, who have a few games on this list, one of which is Baroque, which I know, John, you said you have played, because it came out on Wii, not PlayStation 2. I did not like Baroque. And I also played it on Wii, but I just could not get into it. Yeah, I mean the review subheadings write themselves with name of Baroque. I think I recall Jeremy might have done it that a few times, actually. I don't think I reviewed that one.

Okay. You might have used the word Baroque as like a joke to describe the game. at some point. I'm not, I'm not, it's like, it's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. I don't remember writing about this game at all, actually. Interesting, interesting. Well, one-up is gone, who knows?

Every time I figure out this game, I try to some one way to use, if it ain't Baroque, don't fix it. That's a good Bugs Bunny line. Yeah, but I've never used. I used, I hope I've never used it, but that's terrible. Yeah, I didn't really get into it either. And the thing is, when I heard about Baroque, there was someone actually is, in the comments to an app play article who mentioned it. It was really excited about it.

He really wanted me to play it. And I felt so guilty that I hated it. I just couldn't really get into it. I don't even think I don't even think I've played it more than twice. I'm sorry, guy who really likes Baroque. I failed you. I did look into the game a bit more recently. basically

it's a real time it's a real time action game you know in the tower in the neuro tower the story is really weird it's like your character is I guess unconscious and but he's hooked up to some machine

and yeah and the whole game was like his dream or something and he goes into this tower and kills monsters and there's a whole bunch of Judeo-Christian imagery. The way I put it, it's sort of like someone watched Evangelion a few too many times. This was right around the same, the right time.

It was a Saturn game initially. So there was even a big, like, collaboration with Evangelion and Sega. Like Aska, the game system she plays far in the future is Sega Saturn. She's sticking with it. I'm glad to see that some of them survive to that date. One of the things about Baroque that's interesting is that the dungeon, the Neuro Tower, changes as you play it. The first time you play it, it's only got four floors. It's not hard to get through and finish it.

But after that, it expands to 16 floors. There's a subquest you can do, I think it's been to the 20 floors. Each version you beat, there's like, I think, some different ending or something. I'm not sure again. I didn't get this far into it. The final version appears to have 40 floors. and apparently some people really like it.

I never got into it. Doesn't the Wii version have some really weird control scheme like interface design choices? I don't even remember. I don't remember how it worked. I remember being very frustrated by it and to the point where I just didn't want to play with it anymore.

I'm trying to remember, but I think they like mapped the camera controls somehow to the Wii tilt functionality, but you were also still like trying to control the game that way. It just sounds, you know, needlessly awful, you know, from the era where people were like, well, we've got this interface design technology. We have to use it somehow, even if it doesn't make sense. But they didn't have to. They didn't, but they didn't know at the time.

They were so, such innocent summer children. They had no idea. The one thing I remember really hating was the long opening. Oh, I remember that. I saw, for this, I, like, went and watched a bit of a play through it. I remember that extremely anime opening. Yeah, it is. I mean, it was an idea factory game, so that's what you're going to get.

It's better than their future content. One other game I did want to mention here, which was for my Dea Factory, and was based on an anime, was a very deep-cut, rogue-like, released only in Japan for Nintendo DS, called Dungeon of Windaria. And if that sounds weirdly strangely familiar to you, it's because you're an old person who. who watched localized anime in the early 90s when there was a show called a movie called, I believe, just Windaria. And this is a game based on that anime movie. You might think, how can you base a roguelike on a movie? And apparently what they did was they took like the four main plot beats, the four main parts of the story quest, and just turned them into a dungeon. There's no real connective tissue or story happening.

It's just like, well, this is the part where they were journeying through the woods. So here is a woods dungeon. And that is the extent of this game. It's a very – I played just a little bit of it because I was in like – in the mode where I was like, I have to own all rogue likes, even if they are not localized. And, you know, soon after it came to realize that was a bad idea. But it's, you know, very straightforward, very much in kind of like the – it's, you know, it's – you know, the mystery dungeon, but we don't quite get how to make a great mystery dungeon game mode.

That's where you come down with this. But, yeah, there's some interesting little side stories. Oh, another one that is probably worth mentioning is Rogueheart's dungeon, which maybe this was an idea factory one. I really want to play this one, too, but I know very little about it. Yeah, this was apparently the guy, who localized Rogue into Japanese. Oh, no, this was Compile Heart.

Yeah. Published by ID Factory. Okay, there we go. Yes, that's what I'm thinking of. So it is basically a sort of anime-style, you know, sprite-based remake of Rogue for PS2 that only came out in Japan. And now it's really hard to find information on because someone published a mobile game last year called Rogueheart, which is not the same as Rogueheart's dungeon.

So that muddies the waters a little bit. But yeah, this was, I guess, just like an unauthorized but not totally illegitimate take on rogue because it did have, you know, some of that connection to the Japanese edition of the original rogue. You know, you kind of see that with games like Spalunker, ironically, and Load Runner and that sort of thing where it sort of takes on a life of its own in Japan, wizardry. I guess they were trying to do that with Rogue. And it just didn't quite work out, but good on them for trying. Yeah, I really, really want to find this game someday.

Just to find out what the deal with it with, I mean, because I love the original rogue so much. It's original rogue, I still think, is one of the best of the rogue likes. It's just got such a sharp design. the whole game playing it makes you bleed it's so sharp and you get to like level at about level 16 the monsters actually start getting better than you

and eventually you get to the point in rogue where you have to do the dash where the monsters are so strong that unless you've been incredibly lucky with finding items, you just run. You just look for the staircase going down to eat the level 26. Get the enemy of you indoor and get the hell out of there

before a dragon finds you and just kills you outright. And I really want to find this game to see if they've duplicated that kind of play. Well, maybe some will do a fan translation of it someday. That seems to be the most likely way to play it. Although, you know, I guess if it's a true, true roguelike. You don't really need the fan translation because

it's all sort of without text. If it's really like rogue, then you need the translation because all the item names will be text. Right, right. That's true. Yeah. Okay. Well, fingers crossed, maybe someday that will happen. But in the meantime, I think that that wraps it up for this episode and

for our journey through rogue likes. Next time we talk about this genre, it will be rogue lights, which are something else entirely. And we will talk about some Spalunker and Spalunky and some other things along those lines. But that's not for this conversation. No, we're wrapping this one up. So, um, we didn't talk about time stalkers, which is perfectly fine. We'll no need to talk about time stockers on my account.

Yeah, I think, I think, um, I saw that on the list and said, uh, you know, this episode will be fine without that. What about Climax Landers? Yeah, same thing. I don't like that title. It makes me kind of uneasy. Yeah, I mean, they're kind of emblematic of what you see a lot on consoles, which is like sort of ambitious and interesting takes on the roguelike, but they don't really go anywhere and they don't work quite as well as the real thing. It's just hard to match the, as John puts it, the sharp design of something like rogue or NetHack or Mystery Dungeon. And sometimes you do get these, you know, sort of interesting takes that work on their own merits like, you know, like Azure Dreams.

But most of the time it's kind of like, I'd rather just be playing mystery dungeon. And I think that's, you know, something that I would like to see more of in games is some proper console rogue likes. I don't think we're really seeing a lot of those these days outside of little bite-sized indie pieces like alchemic dungeon or Yodongi or whatever. you know, those showed up on Switch. Like, they'll happen occasionally, but I feel like no one outside of Spike Chunsoft is really saying, like, let's make an actual, honest to God, deep, chewy, and, you know, substantial console roguelike these days, and we need more of those. So get on it, folks.

A lot of the energy seems to have moved back to the PC. Every year, the seven-day roguelight project, every year without a few, incredible ideas that people just come up with and develop in seven days that are great. Yeah, I know Jeremy mentioned that, what was the switch game you mentioned? It's also on PC.

Oh. Yeah, Alcomic Dungeon, right? It's also on PC? It is. Yeah, I just looked. Oh, okay. Yeah. I feel like whenever a genre, especially a Japanese genre, lace fallow for long enough, we get a great non-Japanese indie game

that will pick up the slack. Like Starter Valley, golf story, things like that. And so maybe that's what's going to happen with Sharon if Spike Chunsoft doesn't make a new one. Give us Sharon 6 is what I'm saying. All right, everyone. You just bought yourself a free dinner from the president of Spike Chunoft.

All right, folks. That wraps it up for this conversation about rogue likes. It's been three episodes this year. My God, that's so many discussions about rogue likes. Thank you, Andrew Duff, for requesting this topic. And thank you, everyone, for putting up with us and being patient. Thank you, John, for dialing in and Jason for sitting in. So everyone, why don't you tell us where we can find you on the Internet?

I'll go first. I am Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on the Internet. I'm on Twitter as GameSpite. If people still use Twitter after the new redesign, I don't know. You can also find me at Retronauts.com and check out my YouTube channel, which is called Excitingly, Jeremy Parrish, for the VideoWorks Project. I just started doing Game Boy Color, but I'm also tackling the chronology of NES games and Game Boy games.

And someday I'll get back to Super NES and maybe some other stuff. I don't know. Jason. You can find me on Twitter at Jason underscore Wilson, all lowercase, or you can see me running the show over at Gamespe, which is Venture Beats Gaming Channel, and see me writing about RPGs or strategy games. All right. John. I'm John Harris On Twitter

I'm Rodney Lives Which is a reference to rogue actually I sell books on IO and I often have things in story bundles When they're running Which this will probably be airing neatly right between two of them So let's keep a look out for it please But I also

Make the off-delayed fanzine Extended Play and I basically tried to do one of everything. I think there's at least two or three other things that can tell you about, but I keep forgetting them. I mean, one of everything, you've got yourself half a Noah's Ark right there, so that's not bad. Ah. Bob?

Hey, it's Bob. I'm on Twitter as Bob Servo, and yes, the redesign is terrible. I was forced into it, and I hate every second of it, but it's awful. And it's like I'm in frames or something. What century is this? But I also do other podcasts. If you like me talking about old video games,

I talk about old cartes. tunes on the podcast, Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon. And Jeremy has been a What a Cartoon. And he'll be recording one about Bubblegum Crisis with us soon. So maybe that'll be up by the time you listen to this. So check it out. And we're at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. If you go there and sign up, you'll have access to a ton of bonus content, including mini series about cartoons like The Critic, Futurama and King of the Hill and a new one coming in fall 2019 to be determined. So that's patreon.com slash talking Simpsons for the rest of my podcast. And of course, Retronauts you can find on iTunes and other podcatchers and at Retronauts.com.

Just look for Retronauts. That's like astronauts, not the number zero. You can also support us through Patreon, kind of like Talking Simpsons. If you support us through Patreon for three bucks a month, you get an episode, every episode, actually, all six we do each month a week early at higher bit rate quality with no advertisements. It's pretty cool. I recommend it. You'll love it. So thanks everyone for listening.

everyone for supporting us. And thanks everyone for conversing with us here today in the studio. Yes, very exciting. And we'll be back in a week. Look forward to it. It'll be awesome. Thank you.