A look back at: Deep Dungeon 3

I haven't been frustrated at a game since Golvellius. It really does take a special kind of unfair to throw me over the age.

What the third Deep Dungeon game is compared to its previous iterations is what Dragon Quest II is to the first. It adds the multiples of party members and monsters, and it tries to combine it with the Deep Dungeon gameplay style. Not to mention more towns and dungeons to deal with! Good, right? Well let's get to the gameplay issues. "But it wasn't very useful" GREAT JOB NOT HAVING A MAGIC STAT and making spells act like the ones from Dragon Quest where they randomly don't work. But it's WORSE than Dragon Quest because usually they apply to just the damaging spells. Here, they apply to buffs and debuffs. Holy crap. So for a boss strategy I would get my priest and wizard to use attack and defense buffs on my main character, except it will never work ever. I literally set every character to infinite HP, had my main be the only one attacking, and everyone else attempt to buff the main guy, and it took a boatload of turns and not a single one of those turns did any buffs work! It gets way worse when you factor in the spells that remove poison and paralysis only work outside of battle, never inside. WHY? At least the Acid debuff spell actually works. Even stupider is that the enemy buff spells always work, even though their own offensive spells for some reason always fail.

And then you get into what you're fighting against. Some enemies have evasion rates that literally have you hoping for a deathblow, because you can spend a turn of four people attacking and failing and the lone enemy with high evasion seems completely impervious, all the while kicking your ass all the same. I can spend nine turns attempting to hit a Vampire enemy and never do it. Even his weaksauce weakness Sunshine (which would normally instakill because he's undead) doesn't want to work. And he can paralyze with his hits and such. Enemies after him have abnormally high defense, I mean actually abnormally high defense, because I can buy and equip the best weaponry prior to fighting them and my swordsman only does single digit damage. The fact that I am required to use the debuffing Acid spell until it works is more than enough to piss me off.

Perhaps the explanation behind all this utter unfairness (and I loathe having to use that word, cause it elicits a "git gud" attitude from some other players, but honestly just know that this borders to unplayable) is the fact that the fan translation of this game ended up being a straight up ROM hack. Some coding changes were made that really tweaked certain "bugs", although it made things way more impossible to deal with. This is likely either my worst RPG so far, or second worst. You have to know that it must frustrate me greatly to actually put it at a worst category, and only Golvellius has done that so far.

A look back at: Deep Dungeon 2

Deep Dungeon 2 is a basic sequel game, with the emperor somehow still being alive in the underground and making a few marginal improvements that don't really mean all that much. I appreciate the sentiments though, especially with picking bonus points upon leveling up, something that is very rarely seen especially for a FDS RPG.

It's so easy to forget to equip the first items you buy, meaning that when you encounter your first enemy, you're dead. You'll be missing, and should you actually hit you'll do mere scratch damage, but it hits home when you're always hit. Now that's of course assuming the character is unarmed. With a weapon and armor, survivability is now possible. For leveling up, my strategies were to up the hell out of agility so that enemies always miss and I always hit and give a few points to luck too (for critical hits I'm pretty sure). Then just sort of sit in a place, hit the turbo button and speed the emulator up and watch the HP as my guy just sort of steamrolls through things. It's already boring enough to grind, but standing in place and having enemies come to me at least alleviates the need to run around like an idiot until an encounter appears.

The ending of Deep Dungeon 2 from a gameplay standpoint makes me angry. I can get all the six items needed to get to the fourth dungeon floor (which in itself is actually a problem, again they take up inventory slots), but the map I followed is somehow different than the one I was given. I was forced to do the standard D+D navigation to even understand where I was really going, and then once I find nothing of interest, the only way out is to use the Pegasus Wing, oh wait, it has a random chance of just killing you! That's just a huge headache to get through. Also how come none of the guides mention how to get the Jewel item? I'll make it easy for the viewers, once you have the Crest, go back to town and attempt to sell it. You won't lose the Crest, but will gain the Jewel. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, and it seems that the only uses for these items are to instantly end battles against fake demon kings or in the case of the Demon King Ruu, the Crest makes him confess something. It's weird. It really doesn't make sense that MY game had a screwed-up fourth floor, even after I do all that stuff well before I even step foot in that floor.

A look back at: Deep Dungeon

(Player attacks!)
(But the enemy dodged!)
(The enemy attacks!)
(But Player dodged!)
(Player attacks!)
(But the enemy dodged!)
(The enemy attacks!)
(But Player dodged!)

Just repeat that over and over and you have the gist of Deep Dungeon: Madō Senki. With Phantasy Star dungeon navigation and Dragon Quest gameplay AND plot, there's next to nothing here that is interesting. Well other than standing still and an enemy shows up, which is better than making paces all over the place. But then the combat is basically the sentences above and it is b-o-r-i-n-g. Throwing a few bones helps, enemies in trash, enemies that escape since you can be overleveled, traps on the grounds, the invulnerable fake princess, numerous empty rooms. Does it all save the game? Not really. Heck, the final boss does exactly what the Dragonlord from Dragon Quest does, offer the player a choice, except you'll just fight the guy because the bad ending isn't interesting at all.

The other shortcomings are the inventory spaces, especially when key items are concerned. Cool, lemme throw away a key item, it stays where I threw it away right? Well then I need to backtrack, ah crap, gotta find it again. It would also help to have more than 9 of Bread or Holy Water, but I'm guessing due to limitations it ain't feasible. Man, I can see loads of potential with this dungeon crawler, especially considering it's so similar to the PC Wizardry games and such, but the modern gamer sure as hell won't be pleased with this stuff at all. When your game requires more luck than ever just to hit something, there's a huge problem.

A look back at: MOTHER 3

Only 13 days? Even I'm genuinely surprised by how quickly I managed to beat MOTHER 3. I was all looking at this being quite a long one, but in actuality the game was quite short. However, being short means that it would have a deciding fun factor to it, and MOTHER 3 delivered. Memorable characters, funny NPC dialogue, heartbreaking moments, familiar tunes and characters, a beat-themed battle system, frustrations and fun were had when they were had.

Growing up, I've taken interest in a few things I never thought I'd take interest in, most notably politics and the economy. MOTHER 3 surprisingly does well in molding just how corruptible society is with the introduction of wealth to a backwater village (in Chapter 3) as well as promises of happiness. It's so crazy how this subliminal political message makes a statement so well. Tazmily in the beginning was just a nice village without worry, then Fassad comes in with the promise of happiness and wealth, Tazmily evolves, and residents become more cynical. It's truly maddening. Then they all migrate in the end, reaching a richer city of riches, leaving their old homes behind.

That isn't the only cool thing MOTHER 3 manages to convey. The heartbreaking loss of Hinawa has a huge effect on the rest of the family, the horrible tortures Salsa has to put up with, the always messed-up ambitions Porky has, it all makes the experience so much more memorable. And while the fabled exposition dumps that other RPGs have tend to bore players to death, the one offered by Leder in the final chapter is something that is not boring. It is actually interesting, calling back what I said earlier about how corruptible humans are, as well as the loss of memory and the greed Porky so gleefully displays. The fact that an exposition dump manages to be interesting is truly a high mark for the game.

If there's only one thing I can say I don't really like that much in MOTHER 3, it's trying to time my button presses to the beat of the background music. Of course, it's not really necessary, but it does make battles faster. I'm never really a fan of action command-centric gameplay all that much anymore. It did not detriment this game enough for me to put it out of at least the Top 20 in my opinion though.