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.

This marks the sixth post since I started The Great Console History Reorganization, and we’ve already reached a sequel. The third post in the reorganization was about Deep Dungeon: Madou Senki, a Japan-only first-person grid-based dungeon crawler for the Famicom Disk System, released by HummingBirdSoft in December 1986. We’ve now reached May 30, 1987 — a mere five months later — when HummingBirdSoft released the second Deep Dungeon game, Yuushi no Monshou: Deep Dungeon, also for the Famicom Disk System. But that doesn’t mean there are only two games in my timeline that released in between; since the Reorganization is all about filling in games I missed the first time around, I’ve actually covered ten games that released in that interval. The ninth of those was our last Reorganization entry, Ai Senshi Nicol. After that would have been Zillion, if I’d had my timeline in order from the beginning. Yuushi no Monshou: Deep Dungeon released a week later.

Still, five months is pretty quick. But it’s clear that Yuushi no Monshou: Deep Dungeon shares much of the same underlying tech as its predecessor. It’s still a grid-based, first-person dungeon crawler role-playing game, with a single playable character and one-on-one menu-based battles. Maps are built on the same 32 x 32 grids. The view is largely the same as well, although the screen space has been reorganized a bit, and the art for walls and doors has been sharpened up. Moving around the dungeon feels faster and more responsive too, lacking the small pauses between actions from the first game. Everything is a bit slicker, but it’s clearly using the same engine.

Amusingly, the premise is nearly identical too. The hero from the first game defeated the demon king, bringing peace to the town of Dorl, but as generations passed people grew complacent and forgot all about it. Until strange things started to happen at the castle. Merchants entered and never returned. Sinister noises were heard. No one had seen the king for a while. A darkness seemed to emanate from the castle, spreading fear among the people, until finally undead figures emerged and announced that their demon lord had returned to dominate the town. No one knew what to do. Until, that is, a mysterious swordsman — a descendant of the first game’s hero — arrived just when all hope seemed lost. His ancestor had begun his quest under similar circumstances; it seems the conflict between good and evil moves in cycles. Kind of like how fascism is reemerging in the real world, and we’re going to have to fight it again.

Like its predecessor, Yuushi no Monshou was only released in Japan, but fortunately there’s a fan translation available from KingMike, snark, Darkness Savior and Paul Jensen (KingMike also led the translation I used for the first game). The translation includes a tool for importing one’s character from the first game, something that was somewhat common for PC-based role-playing games of the era. Since the Famicom Disk System allowed players to save their games onto the Disk Cards, it could allow for importing characters as well. Unfortunately, a snafu with files on my computer meant I had lost the saved game from the first Deep Dungeon, and despite attempts to recreate it from a save state, I was unable to get the import working. But importing a character just lets players start with a level 2 hero, rather than a level 1 hero, so I didn’t miss much. Besides, it doesn’t really make sense for it to be the same hero, since so much time had passed since the first game.

Starting at level 1 was easier than I expected. As I stepped into the ground floor of the cursed castle, my explorations felt even faster than they did in the first game, with quick movement and brisk battles. Enemies still tend to attack if the player is standing still (for me, this was usually when I paused to draw bits of my map), and seem to do so at an even higher frequency. But the battles themselves are quick, especially when holding the B button to accelerate the text messages. I was also landing attacks far more reliably, and had a good chance to dodge attacks, so I didn’t feel too threatened by my opponents.

What did scare me a bit was the realization that enemies never drop any money, and I’d spent all my starting cash on equipment. I could retreat to town, but the temple charges for healing services, so I needed to find some of the treasure chests lying around the castle quickly. These replace the garbage piles from the first game, and always contain coins, never surprise battles, so they are at least reliable sources of money. Soon I had enough to pay for healing when I needed it, and was able to explore further. And once I’d gained a few levels, the random battles stopped entirely, and I only faced enemies at specific places on the map. There seems to be a level threshold for each floor at which this happens.

Speaking of leveling, there are choices to be made when gaining levels this time. The first Deep Dungeon operated in a manner similar to the Dragon Quest games, with levels automatically increasing health and stats. Now, when leveling up I was offered a few points I could spend on different stats. I could directly boost attack or defense power, or I could boost Agility or Luck. According to the manual (which I read using awkward machine translation), Agility increases the hero’s ability to dodge attacks, while Luck increases his ability to run from battles. Given how important defense was in the first game, I opted to put all of my early points into Agility, and was soon dodging nearly every enemy attack. I came to suspect that Agility affects more than just dodging, too, perhaps helping my hero’s accuracy for his attacks. At one point, I found a cursed item that reduced my Agility to 1, which caused my hero to take far more damage from traps and bramble patches than he did before, implying that Agility also helps mitigate some of that damage.

Ah yes, cursed items. Equippable items are somewhat expanded this time around. In the first game, new equipment — whether purchased from a shop or found in the dungeon — automatically replaces whatever the hero was currently using. Equipment was never actually put in the player’s (very limited) inventory. This time, however, equipment is treated just like any other item, stored in the player’s inventory and manually equipped when desired. This means enemies can drop equipment, and indeed some of the best equipment can only be found this way. But some of it is cursed, offering high damage or high defense at the cost of reducing some other stat. Fortunately, it’s easy to figure out when this has occurred, and switch back to a non-cursed piece.

Monsters drop stuff based on which dungeon floor players are on, which is a bit odd. For example, on a certain floor, every single battle ends with the enemy dropping a weapon, whereas on other floors they might drop shields, or armor. This proved to be a much better way to get money: my character’s inventory is still small, but grabbing a few of the nicer equipment drops, lugging them back to town, and selling them left me overflowing with cash, and easily able to buy all the best stuff.

Recalling how powerful the magic items were in the first game, I eagerly purchased them, but this time around I was disappointed. In the original Deep Dungeon, I was using these items in every battle, to either incapacitate enemies, or just outright kill them with a powerful magical blast. Here, I found enemies would evade magic most of the time, and when my spells did hit they did less damage than a regular attack. I wondered if perhaps my neglected Luck stat might make magic more effective, and I did eventually put a few points into it, but by then I was mostly past the need for magic. My hero was dodging everything and landing powerful physical attacks, so spells were superfluous. There was just one exception: a certain enemy liked to cast a sleep spell on me, which negated my dodging abilities and let them land a bunch of hits before I could retaliate. That’s exactly the kind of situation where my own spell that can seal an enemy’s magic would have been helpful, but these enemies always seemed to dodge it.

Part of the problem may have been that I wasn’t supposed to go there yet, and was therefore underleveled. The dungeon structure is different this time around: there are still eight floors, but four of them are above ground in the castle, and four are the subterranean dungeon underneath. I’d misinterpreted an early clue and ventured into the dungeon when I should have climbed the castle instead; it’s a testament to the power of a high-Agility hero that I was even able to survive down there. Generally, however, this new dungeon style makes exploration more interesting. The castle has four towers that are accessed separately from the rest of the floors, so there’s a lot of vertical back-and-forth through different sets of stairs. There are even pits that can drop players down to lower floors. In fact, the lowest depths of the dungeon can only be reached this way, which means it’s possible to get trapped with no means of escape, unless players have found a critical item first. Fortunately, saving is disabled on the lower floors unless players have that item, so there’s no danger of overwriting a save and getting permanently stuck. But it’s easy to accidentally descend too far and have to reload, which can be annoying.

The dungeon feels like a sinister puzzle to unravel, with important items (and clues about how to find them) scattered around, and many different routes that must be taken and re-taken before players can face the demon king. It’s thematically appropriate given the premise of evil having corrupted the castle and its king, making every corridor feel actively hostile. I may have been evading enemy attacks until they barely felt like threats, but the dungeon itself was my true opponent, goading me through its twisting corridors and tricking me with traps. The process of exploring it and finding the critical items I needed felt like slowly breaking the curse, until I was ready to strike at its source.

This is a highly satisfying process. But it has a different flavor compared to the first game. In that first adventure, I was exploring a dangerous cavern that led to the demon’s stronghold. This time, the entire dungeon is the demon’s domain, its evil palpable and pervasive. There’s no room for some of the quirkier aspects of the first game. The original cavern had a few standout special locations, like a wide open graveyard, or an underground river. There are no such surprises in Yuushi no Monshou: Deep Dungeon, which is a shame; I missed that feeling of exploring a subterranean world that was larger than my quest. Instead, I found a tightly designed and nefarious labyrinth to pick away at, which was rewarding in its own way, but it gives this second adventure a darker and bleaker tone.

That’s not a problem, of course; sequels should offer something new, rather than just a rehash of what came before. And Yuushi no Monshou: Deep Dungeon is a solid sequel, streamlining and improving upon its predecessor’s design. It even improves the music, the weakest aspect of the original game. It’s still not amazing — contrast it with our last entry, Ai Senshi Nicol, which uses the Famicom Disk System sound hardware to its fullest — but it grew on me as a played, and the themes for some of the later floors are quite nice. Where most Famicom music uses the pulse wave channels for treble melodies and the triangle wave channel for bass, here the pulse waves often dip into lower resgisters too — something Rygar also tried a month earlier. This gives the sound a rough, grungy quality that, at times, approximates the heavy harmonic sound of a pipe organ. It makes for some moody music that reinforces the dark and creepy atmosphere of the game.

I had fun with this one, and look forward to the next Deep Dungeon game. At the time, these adventures might have seemed basic in comparison to their inspiration, the Wizardry series, but I appreciate their simpler mechanics and relatively short run times. Yuushi no Monshou: Deep Dungeon, in particular, highlights the joys of exploring and mapping a dungeon, never letting anything else interfere too much with that core experience. It may not have occupied players for long, but it’s a fun time while it lasts. If you want to try it yourself, you’ll probably need to use emulation, as I did. I used the Retroarch frontend and Mesen emulator core to play, after applying the fan translation patch from KingMike and his team.

Up next, we’ll jump past Glory of Heracles: The Labors of the Divine Hero to mid-June 1987, for another Famicom Disk System game. Stay tuned!

Next on Console History: watch this space!