RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

Dungeon crawlers tend to have some fairly predictable faults; a weak plot, shallow characters, and overly simple combat are par for the course. Dungeon Explorer: Warriors of Ancient Arts has all these issues and more, compounded by a completion time that can hover around ten to fifteen hours. The game’s strengths lay in its character growth system, which provides a surprising level of control over development, and in its multiplayer, which allows players from all over the world to compete and co-operate in dungeon exploration and monster slaying, but these are largely overwhelmed by the overall shallowness of the game. On the whole, Dungeon Explorer: Warriors of Ancient Arts is a fairly simple, predictable dungeon crawler, but it does have a few points of interest.

Being about as hack and slash as you’d care to imagine, the combat system of Dungeon Explorer is a rather simple affair. Throughout the game, the player is given tasks to complete by the residents of Confine, which invariably lead to one dank dungeon or another. Once there, your task is to wander through said dungeon, slay whatever slimy critter lays at its core, and return to town with the spoils. In these dungeons, characters are presented with a series of monsters, and more commonly, the unimaginatively named monster generators known as Generators. Given that destroying these Generators is usually required to unlock doors and other dungeon passageways, a great deal of game time will be spent standing next to a Generator with the A Button held down, watching the character swing and swing until the Generator expires. This simple method of combat is fairly common, especially with the short-range melee characters, where standing next to your opponent and swinging repeatedly is more or less the most effective method of attack they have.

Combat does have pretensions towards greater complexity, however. The power of an attack, for example, is largely determined by the Charge Gauge, which empties after an attack and then slowly refills. Once the gauge is full, the player can use a secondary attack which is unique to the School assigned to the character. Characters also have access to a number of skills, both magic attacks of every element and passive skills such as attack boosts and enchantments. There’s even a series of helper robots, called Owons, that a player can buy for assistance on adventures. Unfortunately, most of these subsystems are largely unnecessary, given that brute force will eat even boss characters alive with little difficulty. Secondary attacks tend to be useful only when a melee character needs to hit a foe at long range, or vice versa, and Owons are so poorly balanced that they tend to be useful only as cannon fodder.

On the other hand, the character generation system provides players with some interesting choices. There are three classes and three races to play with, leading to a grand total of nine different characters, each with a unique focus. On top of this, the player is given a School, which determines their secondary attack and which skills they’ll learn over the course of the game. On the whole, the character creation scheme is fairly deep and actually rather satisfying. By switching between Schools, a player can determine what kinds of skills their character will be able to learn, from strong magic skills, to powerful support moves, to even a mixture of the two. Unfortunately, this is seriously curtailed by the length of the game, which ends just about the same time a player’s character comes into maturity. But overall, the development of characters in Dungeon Explorer is better than most, and it provides what is more or less the major point of interest throughout the game.

Dungeon Explorer tackles the age-old problem of item shortcuts that faces every hack and slash dungeon crawler not on a PC with an interesting solution called a Battle Palette. Essentially a three-by-three grid wherein each row is linked to a face button, the player can drop items and skills into the Palette and switch between them using the L button in combination with the D Pad. This isn’t a bad solution to the problem, although it does force the player to stop moving when they want to switch items, making changing items a bit of a problem under pressure. The only other serious problem with the interface is the camera position. The 3D dungeons are presented in an isometric view, which allows enemies to hide in the blind spots caused by walls facing the camera, so it isn’t uncommon to get blindsided by an enemy you couldn’t see simply because the wall itself was in the way. The rest of the interface is fairly solid overall, and although the lack of any touch screen support does stand out as being odd, the menu layout and general control of the game is simple and easy to follow.

The story of Dungeon Explorer is about as simple as can be, but the backstory provides a bit of counterpoint to the simplicity. Where the actual story of the game is merely another take on the old, “Demon God is awakening from its ages-long slumber, save us, O Nameless Warrior of Legend” chestnut, the mythological backstory has to do with the God of Light, who fell in love with the Goddess of Water, and their battles against the game’s antagonist. The backstory is a bit hard to follow, seeing as it’s told mostly through stone monoliths and carvings left haphazardly around dungeons throughout the game world, but it relates an interesting tale nonetheless and provides a bit of relief from the unimaginative drudgery of the mainline quests.

Possibly the worst part of the game overall, Dungeon Explorer‘s visuals resemble some of the prerendered shtick that came out near the end of the Game Boy Advance’s lifespan more than anything else. Character sprites are grainy, undetailed, and move with all the grace that two or three frames of running animation can provide. Monsters are limited to a double-handful of sprites, with palette swaps being the order of the day. The visual style the game seems to be going for is somewhere between generic Medieval fantasy and very early Industrial Revolution, largely due to the Owons running around, but the overall style the game ends up with is not one that causes a great deal of impact. With palette swapped monsters fighting nameless characters in nondescript locations, the overall style generated by Dungeon Explorer is about as dull as can be.

This lack of creative spark is mirrored in the music. Though there are a few interesting songs to be heard over the course of the game, the sound quality is so abysmal that the soundtrack has been rendered down to bleeps and boops, sounding for all the world like it came out of a late-era Game Boy game. The game’s sound effects are a bit better, with some limited, obviously untranslated voice acting brightening up the grunts and sword noises of combat.

The amount of time a player might take to complete Dungeon Explorer is actually a bit fluid, given the unusual way the end of the game is structured. The actual plotline peeters out at around ten to fifteen hours, the player having slain the final boss and brought peace to the land once more. However, Dungeon Explorer features a long and rather lengthy optional dungeon known as the Pyramid, the completion of which will unlock the “true” ending. Unfortunately, the Pyramid is balanced rather differently than the rest of the game, being more geared towards multi-character parties or extremely high-level characters, and will require a significant investment in time to levelbuild over the difficulty spike. This sudden jump in difficulty is even more surprising given the speed with which a player can breeze through the mainline plot, with little attention to character build or even equipment.

As Dungeon Explorer is essentially a re-imagining of a series that got its start on the old TurboGraphix 16, it isn’t hard to see it being conceived as a new take on an old game, which may go some way towards explaining some of the title’s more archaic conventions. However, with the most basic of basic story hooks, combat that easily degenerates into wild swinging, and visuals and music that come off as brazenly amateurish, the game’s better points of character development and multiplayer are easily drowned out by the wave of poor design choices. Dungeon Explorer: Warriors of Ancient Arts may appeal to people looking for a fast, easy dungeon crawler to play with their friends, but for everyone else, the lack of a meaningful story or challenging combat will make this game tough to get into.