The Dark Spire

Many, many years ago I played Final Fantasy 7 and spent a lot of time breeding Chocobos towards the end goal of getting the Knights of the Round spell so I could beat the life out of the Emerald Weapon. It was a lot of work, a lot of time spent in a dark room with a bright summer day on the other side of heavy bed sheets I’d thrown over the windows. The payoff was that my crew of badasses became the most powerful beings on the face of the world. Many lesser beasts who even dared to stand in the presence of my crew were immediately blinded, their eyelids burned away by the sight moments before the molecules in their body simply melted away and all that remained was a smoldering pile of xp and gil.

But after all that, I turned the game off and thought, "There has to be something more." Outside of some boss fights, FF7 was never a difficult game in the first place. Like a child born into wealth, I’d invested my money and seen a return of even greater funds than most people will ever see, much less possess, then felt empty inside because I’d only conquered the world and everything in it.

The Dark Spire is not a game to lie down and be steamrolled. My tried-and-true technique of button-mashing from one cutscene to the next counted for nothing in the Spire. In fact, I never bothered to save after creating my first crew of "heroes" - they were slaughtered within minutes of entering the Spire, and no one will ever see them again. Talk about one mean bitch of a learning curve.

But I’ve come to respect The Dark Spire; and from respect, I’ve leveled-up into addiction. You create your crew from the ground up. You will never "see" your adventurers, as this is a dungeon crawl reminiscent of old-school Western RPGs - your stats sit at the bottom screen, the enemy stares at you from the top screen. You navigate a network of tunnels, the appearance and difficulty change with each floor. There are puzzles, there is plunder, there are fetch-and-murder quests. It’s a dungeon crawl from which all unnecessary components have been stripped away. Sure, there is a town where the people will show you some modicum of civility, but for the most part you’ll be spending your time in the Tower itself, a place filled with psychotic kill-hungry freaks, malevolent wandering mushrooms, all manner of evil dead, and ex-adventurers who are perverted mirror-images of your own crew.

The graphics are two-dimensional, inanimate, flat. The graphics are simple... but the graphics are beautiful. The visuals never try to impress, never try to fool me into thinking I’m playing a high-end game. I don’t think SUCCESS necessarily cares about keeping up with the Joneses. But with the limited palette that is the DS, The Dark Spire shines through. Enemies glare in tasteful monochrome, labyrinth walls glow in bold, colorful uniformity, as in a nightmare. A Nine Inch Nails soundtrack might have worked better for combat, with some dark ambient tracks for exploration - the music is slightly less inspired than the stark, artful visuals.

If today’s RPGs are the modern equivalent of epic poetry, then The Dark Spire is a haiku.

Sometimes the save and reload feature is your only friend in the Tower. You can’t nap during enemy encounters and then rouse yourself to wakefulness during boss encounters, as we’ve gotten used to with RPGs of late. You can’t plow through an unexplored area without any fear of setback. You can’t expect to buy a special sword that’s going to revolutionize the way you stack up bodies. No, even simple encounters in the Tower are in a class with games like Monster Hunter, meaning that better gear might give you an edge, but it will never win your fights for you. There’s frustration, sure, but there’s also never any sense of emptiness that comes from wielding godlike power in a world filled with creatures too weak to present any sort of challenge. That special sense of gameplay with meaning, of purposeful gaming, the reward of growing strong in a world that’s completely hostile to your existence - those are rewards born on the forge of Hell. They have to be taken, never given freely. The gameplay of The Dark Spire is tailor-made for RPG purists who might enjoy eye candy and relaxing play, but also long for the abandoned idea that games are supposed to be difficult.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not some old has-been who complains about how great games used to be and is too dense to realize he’s living in a new golden age of gaming. For the record, the old PC games of which The Dark Spire is reminiscent are practically unplayable for any modern gamer. (Just try to get DOS on your computer and then play any old Wizardry game and you’ll see what I mean.) The Dark Spire can be played in Classic Mode (easily toggled on/off anytime), in which the graphics degrade into a sickening minimalist mush straight out of the 80s and the music sounds something like R2-D2 whistling. Nostalgia truly is the greatest perversion of memory. So while The Dark Spire might be stark, simplified, streamlined, and a little bit like those ancient dungeon crawling games, I’ve found it to be an altogether new and unique experience. This is coming from an old game-head who remembers games that were both addictive and not fun. Fortunately The Dark Spire utilizes the "charm" of yesterday’s imposing inaccessibility and mixes it with the artful genius of modern gaming.

I have a terrible feeling that The Dark Spire is going to fly right under the radar when it’s quietly released. Or derided for its lack of visual flair. Or misunderstood because of the idea that even a tired, cliched story is better than no story at all. I could spend some more time to ramble on about how The Dark Spire transcends any idea of what we think an RPG is "supposed" to be. But fortunately... I don’t think Atlus really cares what we think! Atlus will ship it when they feel like it, a few of us will enjoy it, and so be it.

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