"There will be no whiny diatribes in this review."

My friend, prepare yourself for the greatest storyline known to man!

Everyone is going to die, and you're the only one that's able to stop this disaster.

This is Irony at its best, folks. To elaborate a little more, you play the role of a curious young man named Trykaar. Trykaar has a dilemma. You see, he's sent into the castle, Dragonia, to fetch a very rare artifact that cannot only save himself, but the rest of the world as well. What's the name of this artifact you ask? The Holy Goblet. Trykaar must put himself to the ultimate test of life or death to retrieve this item. Only he can save the world from its impending doom.

Where's the princess at? I FEEL GYPPED!

When the game begins, you'll be on floor one of the Castle Dragonia. Some of the very first things you'll slowly begin to notice are Fatal Labyrinth's gameplay mechanics. They are heavily dependant on older aspects of RPGs. One of the aspects is that you don't really choose when to ''attack'' a monster; it just happens. When you walk up to them, it automatically attacks the monster for you. After your attack, the monster will counter attack. You just keep walking into the enemy to defeat them. How much damage you do depends on several factors.

The first factor is what weapon you have equipped at the time. A spear, for instance, will almost always hit the enemy and will do minimal damage. However, an axe will miss most of the time, but the damage that is dealt when the hit is landed is tremendous, often enough to kill an enemy instantly. You have weapons that can be placed in the ''Middle Ground'' as well. Bows, swords, and other types of weaponry are among the ones that can be placed in this category.

Another one of the aspects that makes Fatal Labyrinth heavily dependant on older RPGs' mechanics is that every time you play the game it'll be different. The floors are randomly generated, which leads to an unimaginable amount of replay value. All the items and armor on the floor are randomly generated too. This means that you'll never have the same weapons and armor each time you sit down to play. Aside from picking up weapons/armor, you can pick up staffs; these act as the game's magic spells. You pick these up on the quest as well. Each staff is a certain color, which is assigned to its own effect. Green will make it to where all the monsters on the floors may no longer use magic against you. A black staff will impair your vision. You'll have to take the chance of using a staff to learn what its effect is. After you use it once, you'll know what it does for the rest of the game. When you die, however, you'll forget what the staff does.

Or course, you won't be able to get all the staffs at the beginning of the game. Stronger staffs will appear on later levels. This is the same with weapons/armor as well. You'll be suited up with leather armor at first, and then you'll find steel plate later. Some of it, in fact, is hidden within the levels. Since you have an overhead view, it shouldn't be too hard to find these. Just look for little fissures in the wall, which can not only lead to treasure, but secret pathways that have a boat load of monsters. And all of this leads to the present ''Level gain.''

You gain about one level per floor, if you find most of the secret areas on each floor. When you gain a level, it'll allow you to deal more damage with weapons, and you'll be able to evade attacks more often. You'll also be able to eat more food. Food is found so much around the castle that there's no need to worry about dying by starvation. They did add quite a clever feature in the game, however. If you eat too much, you die. All the gameplay aspects form a pretty solid adventure. It'll be hard to find something that might annoy you till this next section.

While going through the castle, you might notice something that's a little peculiar. The music never changes once throughout the whole game. It wouldn't be so bad if the game didn't have downright bad music to begin with. It's some kind of high-pitched anthem that repeats itself about every 20 seconds. It sounds just like a few notes playing over and over. If this isn't bad enough, when you hit a monster, they simply make some low-toned grunt. All the monsters make the exact same sound effect as well. So you won't get much variety in the sound and music parts of the game.

The whole game has the exact same graphics as well. Floors are all brown tiles with little fractures in them. These tiles take up the whole level. The walls are all red bricks with cracks in them. You would think that on the 5th floor, the textures would change, but they don't. Monsters look like they were drawn up in about ten minutes. Most of this is apparent when you look at the monsters. You have a giant snail that's light purple with a white shell. I thought the thing was just a giant party popper that you could blow at first. Then you have giant ice crystals that look like humongous floating mirrors.

With the graphics and sound aside, you should enjoy going through the game at least once in your life. Most likely you'll shelve it right after and not play it again. Fatal Labyrinth was one of the first Genesis games released, so that might be a reason on why everything else but the gameplay was below par. The best part is, if you die, you can start over on that same floor, even though it shows the whole town weeping over your grave (which is about four people may I add).

Final Verdict

Graphics = 4
Gameplay = 8
Control = 8
Sound = 2

Final = 7

If you're a big fan of old school titles, pick this one up for sure. If you're a Final Fantasy lover, the game may be too slow and boring for you. If you're a fan of both, still pick it up.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/12/03, Updated 07/29/03