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| Nightmare of Druaga Review Part 2 | Games Main |
This is Part 2 of my review of The Nightmare of
Druaga (Fushigino dungeon) by Namco for the Sony PlayStation 2. I
finally got the nephews together for a little family fun time. That
way, they could play while I wrote the review. Still forgot to take
pictures, though.
This also kept me from using their memory cards. I have an entirely undeserved reputation for ruining memory cards while trying to defeat autosave and anticheat features. Totally undeserved. Completely undeserved. Ahem.
Short version of this review: This is a good game and well worth picking up to try for yourself. It's just not the sort of game that I play on a console or that my nephews play, period. Keep that in mind while you read this review.
The game's storyline, I'm told, picks up where the old 1980's arcade game The Tower of Druaga left off. Or so I read on the Internet. In that game, Gil, our Hero, defeated the evil and brought piece to the Land of Babylim. In this sequel, he is soon to be crowned king and to marry his girlfriend, Ki. With evil defeated, what could possibly go wrong? Well, a surprise attack and kidnapping of Ki by a mysterious sorceress could happen, I suppose. And that's exactly what does happen. So Gil dons his trusty armor, picks up his trusty sword, mounts his trusty horse (which unfortunately was eaten by monsters), and heads back to the Tower of Druaga to save his girlfriend.
He starts in the basement and has to fight his way up to the highest room in the tallest tower. Just once, I'd like to see a dungeon game where the player has the option of scaling the outside of a tower, swinging in through a window, and taking the villian completely by surprise. And, of course, immediately getting defeated and locked up in the basement, from whence he breaks out and fights his way back up. Okay, just kidding.
The Nightmare of Druaga is what I like to call a dungeon crawl. You don't see those much on consoles. On computers you have games like Moria, Nethack, and (my personal favorite) Pits of Angband. In these, you explore a maze-like series of rooms, defeat monsters, collect items, and eventually perform a heroic deed which gets you declared a winner. In fact, you spend a whole lot more time exploring and collecting that you do anything else.
Nightmare of Druaga is much like that, just with better graphics. Of course, seeing as even (my personal favorite) Pits of Angband uses plain old ASCII text, that's not hard. In spite of my earlier dismissals, Nightmare of Druaga really does have some similarities to the 1980's classic Bard's Tale games.
Each level can only be completed by finding a key or other special item which will open the door or otherwise let you go on to the next level. Keys are never anywhere near where they need to be. Heck, if you're going to lock the doors, why leave the keys laying around where just anyone can find them, anyway?
Monsters roam the rooms looking for a snack. You can avoid them or kill them. At times this game almost approached the button-mashing fightfest that my nephews wanted it to be.
The Nightmare of Druaga has automap, which means that a little map appears in the corner and is updated as you move around. I'm not used to console games that require mapping. For some reason, I just associate that with computer dungeon games, not console ones.
Though this game looks like real time to watch, it is actually turn based much like Moria, Nethack, or (my personal favorite) Pits of Angband. You move, the monsters move. You move, the monsters move. Well, some monsters move slower than you, so you can walk up and pummel them before they can get their guard up. Others are faster that you and will pummel you first.
Battle is pretty simple: Walk up to your opponent, timing it so that you get the first strike, then stand toe to toe until somebody dies. The better weapons and armor you have, and the more healing you have available, the better off you are.
There are however some monsters which are much stronger than any of the others around them or, for that matter, you. These can't really be fought, since they can knock you from healthy to critical in one blow. You have to lose them by knowing the dungeon better than they do, or just rush to finish your quest so you can go to the next level. (Monsters apparently don't know how to use stairs or portals.)
Or you can just die.
Dying in a dungeon lets you be resurrected. Unfortunately, the nice folks who resurrect you never salvage any of your equipment. They also take half your gold.
You get a feather each time you enter a dungeon. This feather lets you leave and go back to town at any time. Which means that you'll have to traverse the same dungeon (and redraw the same map) all over again from the beginning.
Which is why a save game function would be a wonderful thing, but Nightmare of Druaga won't let you save in a dungeon. So you can't, for example, save just before entering a dangerous area and restart from that point if you die. You autosave when entering and leaving dungeons. You can save in town, but then you have to leave the game. And you apparently can't copy or move saved games on the memory card. That's the kind of thing which can cause a man to start trying to hack savefiles. If I was the type of guy who would do such a thing. Which I'm not. Really. Totally undeserved reputation. Completely.
Along with the main mission, there are some side quests that you can take from the townspeople, which put you in special dungeons. Without your weapons or armor or other items. You have to survive on what you pick up during the quest. And then lose it all when you finish the level, except maybe the item you were questing for. Not really worth it, is it?
After you've been through the same level half a dozen times, you'll be tempted to just kick down a door instead of wandering all over collecting keys. And you can do that, though you're punished by encountering tougher monsters. Or the same monsters with an ever so subtle difference in color schemes. Didn't you just kill some of those guys? "No, the other guys were red. These are green. Blues are coming up next."
The game does look pretty good visually, especially compared to Angband or the original Bard's Tale games. Of course, when you're comparing to a text-only game or a games from the 1980's... Still, the graphics are more than serviceable, just not anywhere near what I've seen the Playstation2 be capable of. And some of the monsters are a tad repetitive. The scenery is pretty good, what with underground rivers and lava flows and grass and trees and other things of interest, but after to pass the same set half a dozen times, they start to wear thin.
The major source of lighting in the game is Gil himself, which makes for interesting effects from time to time. The light will fade as the enchantment of his armor runs out, which you can recharge by using items you find in the dungeon. The sound effects and the music are serviceable but not memorable. In fact, I can't seem to recall the games main theme right now. Instead, I've got the intro music to a pinball game running through my head.
My biggest complaint is the absolute positive requirement that you have a memory card to play the game. This either is or is not commonplace among Playstation2 games, depending on which nephew I ask. I find it annoying. If I don't want to play the game to completion, just want to hack and slash a little, I shouldn't need a memory card. And I certainly don't need a game that lectures me if I reset the game without saving first.
So, the good:
And, the bad:
And the conclusion? Well, this just isn't the sort of game us old dungeon crawlers like to play on a console, especially without a decent save game system. And the pre-teen nephews didn't like the repetition and mapping. Though we all found the game entertaining as a whole, the annoyances started creeping up on us, which kind of killed the incentive to actually finish the game. So, if you like dungeon crawls, don't mind playing one on a console, and half a lot longer attention span than me or my nephews, check out this game.
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| This page last updated on Dec 03, 2004 by Troy H. Cheek | |
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