This is Console History, a special sub-series of my more general History Lessons series, covering console role-playing games, action role-playing games, Metroidvanias, and action-adventure games in nominally chronological order starting in the late 1980s. The chronology is garbled in the beginning as the scope of the series expanded, but it gets more organized later on. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

The Great Console History Reorganization continues, as I go back to fill in games I missed the first time around. Last time that was Ganbare Goemon!Karakuri Douchuu, the first console entry in the Ganbare Goemon series. If I’d had my timeline in order, after that would have been Metroid, and then our current entry: HummingBirdSoft’s Deep Dungeon: Madou Senki, a dungeon crawler role-playing game released on December 19, 1986 in Japan for the Famicom Disk System (for details on the Famicom Disk System, see my post about The Mysterious Murasame Castle), and ported to the MSX home computer in 1988. It went on to spawn three sequels, all Japan-only, which I hope to cover in this series.

The Deep Dungeon games are first-person grid-based dungeon crawlers, in the mold of the Wizardry games. I’ve covered a few similar games in Console History — Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei and Phantasy Star are good examples — but those both released later. When Deep Dungeon: Madou Senki came out, there weren’t many such games around. The Wizardry series, or perhaps the first Might and Magic game, are all that most players were likely to have encountered. Wizardry was incredibly popular in Japan, however, with official Japanese spin-offs continuing long past the original series’ final entry. As far as I can tell, Deep Dungeon: Madou Senki is among the first grid-based dungeon crawlers made by a Japanese developer, and it’s definitely the first one to be released for a console.

Somehow, I’ve still never played a Wizardry game. I’ll get to them eventually. They inspired nearly all role-playing games that followed, including Dragon Quest, which borrowed the menu-based combat from Wizardry and fused it with the top-down exploration from Ultima. Deep Dungeon, however, hews much closer to Wizardry. It does take the single playable character, one-on-one battles, and automatic leveling system from Dragon Quest, but puts them back into a first-person dungeon explored square by sqaure, with players drawing maps as they go. As such, it’s simpler than Wizardry’s party-based adventures, but it has a few ideas of its own.

The first nuance I noticed is that random battles can occur even if my character was just standing still. In fact, they seemed more likely to occur when standing still, versus when I was purposefully striding forward through the twisting corridors. This is odd because, like its contemporaries, Deep Dungeon is otherwise fully turn-based. Typically, nothing happens in such games unless players take an action first, so standing still is perfectly safe while players ponder what to do next. Not so here, although once a fight starts, it does wait for player input. I came to view these ambushes as a response to the manual mapping aspect of the game: as in similar games, I was drawing maps on graph paper as I went, and presumably so was the character I was controlling. Naturally, the best time to ambush him is when he’s opened his pack to scratch out a map of the caverns.

Once I knew this could happen, I was careful not to stand still for too long, taking calculated breaks to mark some rooms on my map while keeping one eye on the dungeon. It reinforced the feeling of exploring a dangerous cavern, far more so than I expected. And it’s not the only thing that’s a bit different from tradition. In most games, battling enemies would be the best way to make money, but enemies in Deep Dungeon don’t always drop anything, and when they do it’s not that much (at least in the early game). It’s much better to search the piles of garbage in the corners of certain rooms for cash, which means earning money is more about exploring than fighting.

And I was spending my money differently too. While I only had a crude machine translation of the game’s manual, it warned me to spend my money on armor first, rather than weapons. This is sound advice. Attacks in Deep Dungeon don’t always land, and their damage is highly variable, but a strong defense made a big difference in my character’s survival. I soon realized, however, that magic is even more important. In another break from tradition, spells aren’t cast via a reserve of mana points, but by using items. These take up a valuable inventory slot, but can be used as many times as players desire, only costing the hero a single health point each time (a price so small I didn’t even notice it was happening until the end of the game). Early on I was able to buy an item that cast a paralysis spell, reliably incapacitating enemies in the first quarter of the game and making them easy to defeat. Later, I bought an item that cast a Blast spell, doing reliable high damage (much more reliable than attacking), enough to defeat most enemies in the first half of the game in a single cast. I still used that spell all the way until the end.

Ironically, Deep Dungeon’s dungeon isn’t actually that deep. There are only eight dungeon floors in the game, although each is a large 32×32 grid (made slightly smaller in practice because walls and doors take up a full square themselves). And since enemies don’t attack that often as long as players are moving, exploration proceeds at a swift pace. I enjoyed mapping out each floor, and was pleased to see some features that go beyond mere labyrinths of corridors and rooms. I found a subterranean town where I could buy some fancier equipment and items, and a wide open graveyard that found me stumbling in the dark without any walls to guide me. One floor was dominated by underwater rivers that required a boat to navigate. And once I delved deep enough, I found the demons’ fortress.

Ah yes, the demons. Since Deep Dungeon was never released outside of Japan, I used a fan translation patch from KingMike and satsu, who translated the game’s subtitle as “The Heretic War”. But according to Wikipedia, a literal translation would be “Demon Cave War Chronicles”, which seems to fit better with what’s in the game manual. There’s a surprising amount of backstory included: long ago, humans fought a bloody war with the demons, who lived underground. The stalemate was broken when a lone human hero descended into the depths and defeated the demon king. That hero became a legend, but was eventually forgotten as time passed. But the demons did not forget. They rebuilt their strength, and struck at the town of Dorl, capturing Princess Etna’s soul. Dorl’s king gave the ancient hero’s legendary armor and weapons to the town’s best swordsman, Ruu, and sent him into the dungeon to recover Etna’s soul and defeat the demon king. But Ruu did not return. So now it’s up to the player’s nameable character, an untrained and poorly equipped youth, to head in after Ruu and find out what happened.

It’s still a simple premise, but it has more detail than many games of the era, and I liked how it justified the player character starting out as a weakling who must gain strength before he can face the tougher demons. As I explored I found written hints from Ruu, and met the occasional friendly face with some advice. I was pleased to find my explorations sending me back and forth through the dungeon as well, as I unlocked shortcuts or found items that needed to be used somewhere else. This helped the dungeon feel like a cohesive place, rather than something to be explored once before moving on, never to return.

For the first example of a first-person grid-based dungeon crawler on a console, however, Deep Dungeon is not as technically impressive as I expected. It uses the Famicom Disk System’s rewriteable disks to let players save anywhere, which is nice, but otherwise it feels less impressive than other Famicom games. Its color palette feels more limited; perhaps the different hue for each dungeon floor used up all the colors, leaving only a few for the enemy portraits? Mostly, however, it’s the sound that feels too basic. The music only uses the Famicom’s two pulse wave channels, for some reason, ignoring the triangle wave channel that provides bass in most Famicom games, and the melodies are shrill and distracting. It looks and sounds more like a home computer game, which is odd since it initially released only for the Famicom Disk System, and only got a home computer port two years later. Maybe HummingBirdSoft were used to home computer development, and were still learning how to take advantage of the Famicom’s hardware? If so, then the subsequent Deep Dungeon games may improve in that regard. I guess I’ll find out soon.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with Deep Dungeon. It’s a faster, lighter adventure than most similar dungeon crawlers, and it emphasizes the exploration and mapping aspect which happens to be my favorite part. I’m glad I went back to try it out. If you want to check it out yourself, you’ll probably need to use emulation as I did. As with all Famicom games in this series so far, I used the Retroarch frontend and Mesen emulation core to play (but since this is a Famicom Disk System game, you’ll also need a BIOS file). Then I applied the fan translation from KingMike and satsu so I could play in English.

Next, we’ll jump past Shiryou Sensen: War of the Dead, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, and Dragon Quest II, to a game that released in February 1987. Stay tuned!

Next on Console History: watch this space!