"There is a big difference between being old school and simply being old. The Dark Spire does not know that difference."

If you're looking into The Dark Spire, odds are you've played Etrian Odyssey. Atlus created Etrian Odyssey as an homage to those first-person RPG games from the 1980s and early 1990s where you moved one tile at a time and various RPG-like things would happen -- fighting monsters, completing quests, going on an adventure, saving things and all the rest. But here's the thing: those games faded out of memory for a reason, that being these games weren't very good. They were slow, boring, old even for their time, badly paced and had some terrible combat and exploration systems. Etrian Odyssey however was able to pay tribute to the genre by improving pretty much everything wrong with it in one cool, if not tedious video game.

Then Atlus got greedy and decided to try and use Etrian Odyssey's success to develop The Dark Spire, which might as well be a game from 1985. Where Etrian Odyssey was modern and playable, Dark Spire is intentionally old and just... bad.

You'll see it at the very beginning, too, when you start in your guild and start rolling stats and deciding whether or not your character is neutral, lawful or chaotic. You're given no actual hints or direction on what any of this stuff means -- get used to that, by the way -- and worse yet is the random stats you roll determine what class your character can be. So we're already starting off on the worst of foots. As a general rule of thumb, a game grows worse as more and more influence from Dungeons and Dragons is put in.

Eventually you'll suffer through making a party and going through the introductions, and your ultimate task is really simple. There's a local tower and a mage named Tyrhung sits at the top causing worlds of trouble. Don't expect some huge reward or awesome ending for killing him, for the record. You're treated to nothing more than the final credits with no background music, and a vague hint that something more exists. Even the characters that whined for you to invade the tower barely thank you for it, which goes to show you what type of game this is. And no, this paragraph spoils nothing. The game is just that rushed and shallow.

But you can't just run into the 7 floor tower and fight the final boss, of course. You have to gear up, level up and do all the normal things you do in any RPG to win. It comes with a lot of catches in The Dark Spire, though, not the least of which is the game is very, very difficult. Well, difficult in JRPG terms that is. The Dark Spire isn't "hard" per se as no JRPG is truly difficult due to the ability to level past any challenge, but there is a major balance problem. You're going to die. A lot. Then once you get going in levels and learn some magic, the game ends and you cannot die unless the enemies ambush you with broken magic of their own. Eventually you'll learn a spell called Extincto that ends the game by itself.

Getting the EP necessary to do this can be hard at first, since at the beginning of the game you're relying on physical attacks that never actually hit anything, on top of jumping into the deep end with a bunch of mechanics and symbols and terminology that are never fully explained correctly. For example, if you ambush the enemy you automatically do the honorable thing and will only have the attack, defend or run options available to you. Enemies of course don't have this problem, meaning the best way to actually get into a fight is by NOT ambushing or doing things preemptively. Another dumb game mechanic is having the ability to equip things on certain job classes that "turn off" the job class, such as being able to physically equip something on a mage at the cost of the mage no longer being able to cast spells. Well if that's the case, why am I even able to equip that gear at all? The entire game is designed like this, with no rhyme or reason other than intentionally making itself old and out of touch. People who liked these types of games in the 1980s may appreciate shoddy stuff like this, but those games died out for a reason and assuming it can hold up to modern standards is ridiculous.

Another thing The Dark Spire sells itself on is graphics and atmosphere. The back of the box uses the term "nostalgic wireframe design". Don't buy into any of this, because the graphics and atmosphere are more or less bottom-tier awful. For one, they're lazy. Right on the very first floor, you'll be introduced to palette-swapped enemies. More importantly, everything in the game is really ugly. Almost none of the monsters look any good, several features are hidden by bad lighting, and the floors themselves are very dull with the exception of the last two. You're also forced to deal with the camera not being centered and having a bunch of crap on the screen getting in the way of your view, which gets really distracting really fast. Ironically enough, the game gives you the option of using a classic graphics display that literally only gives you the absolute bare minimum for graphics and music. Somehow, this actually makes the game look better. How that works, I have no idea.

Lazy design isn't only in the graphics, either. You're given almost no hints for what to do or where to go, all the quest chains use recycled text, and even after beating the game the first time you'll see NPCs not get updated dialogue. "No progress has been made toward defeating Tyrhung" is really stupid to read after you've already killed him, but that's just what Dark Spire does. It is lazy and half-assed in every respect. You're also forced to deal with one-item-at-a-time menu-hopping stuff, a terrible interface, tedious character building involving a lot of trial and error, and the unbelievably stupid mechanic of only being able to level up in town. To use all those experience points, you have to go to your guild hall and "Learn" things. You can't do it while in the dungeon, of course, because that would involve the streamlining this game so desperately lacks. It even does the always stupid, always lazy secret doors and walls stuff. There's more stuff wrong with The Dark Spire, but you surely get the point by now. It is a bad, lazy, rushed game not worth playing.

It does only two things well: music and exploration. The soundtrack is rather pleasant, even if it sounds like crap on the DS. Why all DS audio requires headphones to be fully enjoyed is just beyond me, but Nintendo has clearly long since stopped caring about designing good hardware. The exploration is actually rather good, if not also half-assed like the rest of the game. If you'll recall, the leader designer of Etrian Odyssey gave players the option of filling in a map on the DS touch screen because he enjoyed making maps for RPGs like this as a child. You don't get to draw a map in The Dark Spire, since the touch screen is too busy displaying useless and repetitive information, but you do still get the experience of exploring the place. It just involves pressing Y a lot. Enjoy it well if you decide to play this game, because it will seriously be the ONLY thing you enjoy.

In conclusion, The Dark Spire is destined to be a forgotten, bad title. The game actually has three endings, but two of them almost forcibly require use of a guide. Games have more and more been using the "this is impossible without a guide" strategy of design, and for whatever reason no one is getting the memo that this isn't what gamers want. Thankfully, the internet exists to bypass stuff like this in bad games, and bypassing is exactly what you should do with this game. Don't play it under any circumstances. If you absolutely require a retro RPG fix, the Etrian Odyssey series has three games at the time of this review's submission and all of them are good. Go play one of those instead.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 08/29/11

Game Release: The Dark Spire (US, 04/14/09)