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.