"East meets West in a flawed but good RPG."

In my review for Kaijuu Monogatari, I noted that it was one of the few console RPGs to draw fundamental gameplay ideas from the oldschool goodness of Ultima. Recently another fusion of the two RPG styles, a Data East production named Dark Lord, was translated completely after a four-year span of work. Unlike Kaijuu Monogatari, Dark Lord is far more similar to the AD&D Gold Box series, with an emphasis on discrete quests and a compact gameworld. Because this philosophy is more compatible with the Eastern style than the ideas used in Ultima are, it's not surprising that Dark Lord was more successful in its fusion.

In Dark Lord, you create a party of three adventurers to save the world against the evil god Ragmeila and his Demihuman creations. You only get to choose between two classes for each character--fighter and wizard--but the gender of the character also makes a difference to his or her attributes, and there are a number of attributes to worry about. Most of them are self-explanatory, affecting damage, speed, and movement ability, but there are also attributes which govern your ability to avoid and disarm the several traps which are in the game, determine your luck and ability to haggle prices at the shops, and even tell you how many times a character can be resurrected before permanently dying. Each class and gender has a unique, non-random base set of attributes, but you get a random number of bonus points to increase these attributes to your liking.

Once you've gathered your party, you will find yourself in Dark Lord's single town of Ishtar, which is the headquarters for your band of adventurers. This is where you'll do everything that isn't part of a quest, like buy and sell equipment and items, go to the king to level up, and save your game. Instead of having you walk about the town like in most games, travel is menu-based, showing a map of the town and your party's position in it. One of the most unusual aspects of Dark Lord is the occupation system, which only has relevance while in town. Each character has a job--farming is the default--and when the character works at his job, he gains experience, attributes, and sometimes a special skill. Working a job takes time, and characters age, which eventually results in death. You also have to trade off some attributes to make gains in others, and some jobs require a character to already have a minimum level in certain attributes in order to work. It's not necessary to use occupations to complete the game--I didn't--but they're by far the best way to min/max in Dark Lord.

Outside of town are the quests. Dark Lord is split up into several chapters, so to speak, and in each chapter you have to complete the available quests, which are discovered by talking to people in town. Though you have to do every quest, you can choose them in any order and some quests have optional items and situations that are sometimes difficult to discover. Even though these quests have monsters in them, they almost always require you to solve puzzles, and you get a lot more experience from completing the quests than from killing the monsters. The puzzles tend to be fairly clever (including when you have to figure out how to get an elevator to move using some chemicals and a bunch of iron rocks) and the dungeon designs are usually interesting. These quests usually don't progress the central storyline much, instead choosing to flesh out the idiosyncrasies of the gameworld.

Speaking of experience, Dark Lord's leveling system is a bit odd. Every time you level up, your experience is reset to zero and the experience needed to level again is (sometimes) increased. This means that any experience you get above what is needed to level up becomes wasted. That can be rather annoying when the amount of experience you get for completing a quest is far above what you need to level, and this is one of the cases when the occupation system can come into play. The actual effects of leveling, beyond the obvious HP and MP increases, are random; regardless of class or gender, a character can gain or lose one point in each of his attributes, or have no change at all in a particular attribute.

While each quest in Dark Lord takes place in an area reminiscent of any number of 2D console RPGs, the combat system resembles what can be found in the Gold Box RPGs I mentioned earlier. When your party runs into monsters, you enter a mode where each character can be moved individually. Your characters can walk up to the monsters and melee attack as well as use items and magic. Magic is usually either line-of-sight (where the direction the spell goes in depends on which way the character is facing) or area-of-effect, the latter of which sometimes is aimed within a certain range and sometimes centers around the caster. After the battle is complete, you can loot the corpses, which sometimes results in small amounts of money and other minor things. Due to the lack of reward, you'll usually want to avoid fighting when possible, which is made easier by the fact that you can see your enemies outside of battle like in Chrono Cross.

Magic is fairly simple; there are four levels of spells, each level containing a spell representing each Aristotelian element as well as a fifth "ancient" spell which is far more powerful than the others. The unusual aspect to magic is how you learn it. After you level up, you can go to the church and study with the priest. As with leveling, what spells you get each time are random, though you have to be a minimum level to get stronger spells. You also have to get a special skill from one of the occupations to learn the ancient spells. Even a fighter can learn spells, though he can't use them.

As implied at the beginning of the review, the literary side of Dark Lord is pretty sparse; it's a basic good-versus-evil plot and your characters are interchangeable from a story point-of-view. On the bright side, some of the NPCs do get some personality, especially the major town NPCs. There are also two possible endings, and the bad ending is as well-crafted as the good one. The story is also told with relatively good graphics; the sprites are big, the scenery varied, and many of the people in the town get their own little portraits which are shown when you talk to them. Unfortunately there is a flicker problem in battles which can be annoying when trying to target a spell, but this is minor.

There are a couple of major flaws in Dark Lord. First of all, this game can be really difficult, especially in the beginning when you have low HP and no equipment or spells. Some of this difficulty can be alleviated by judicious use of the occupation system, but the game doesn't make it very clear at all how this system works. This is part of a bigger problem, which is the fact that the interface is overcomplicated. For example, to cast a spell in battle, first you have to press B to bring the menu up. This menu consists of three letters ('D,' 'I,' and 'S') which are pretty uninformative abbreviations. Once you figure out that 'S' stands for "spell," you select 'S' and press Start (not A or B), then select your spell and press A, then press A again to actually cast the spell. This could've been simplified a lot, and I'm not going to insult your intelligence by telling you how.

Despite the interface problem and the rather generic plot, Dark Lord was worth the amount of time taken to translate it. It's a good fusion of the two RPG styles, and though the current translation introduces a few problematic bugs, you shouldn't be put off from trying it out unless you're overly paranoid. In truth, the worst thing I can really say about Dark Lord is that it's too short--you can beat it in about eight hours with sufficient luck and understanding of the puzzles--and that's not a bad criticism at all.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/05/06