天下制覇

With good reason.

I didn’t get around to really playing anything newish, mostly because they apparently do not teach geometry in Canada, so I spent a large chunk of last night cleaning up after lazy Canadians instead of anything ‘productive.’ Our foray this week into “things I’ve only played for an hour or two” is Tayutau, or if you want to call it by its full name, “That Eushully Game That Everyone Has Completely Forgotten Existed, No, Not The Pirate One, The Other One.” Or perhaps a more fitting title would be “Proto-Kamidori, No, Not The Gameplay, Everything Else.” But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I kind of cheated too for lack of time since I’ve played a bit further in the past under the false assumption that things would get better later. I was mistaken.

 

Because the people of the Eushully world have never heard of city planning, a certain town is built on top of a gigantic evil dungeon. No, not a mine that was later found to have monsters in it, this was always the dungeon of randomly generated nonsense. Like Castle Greyhawk, really, except not a parody. Anyway, everyone lives on a dungeon, but it’s not so bad that anybody actually ever really does anything about it. You are Fino, a simpering teenager who hates killing and cannot go three feet without tripping over a childhood friend who wants to bang you. You have an older brother who is just plain better than you at everything and is slightly snide about it, and want to go explore the dungeon for… I don’t know, treasure or something. Also, you have to pay rent.

Kamidori’s writing was not exactly its strength, but I’d still judge it as passable enough to not get in the way of the actual meaty game, endless declarations of “I’ve got to work hard!” aside. This, however… This is like its horrible rough draft version. I don’t think it’s even 50 lines in before one character is screaming “Onii-chan! Onii-chan!” in the traditional Japanese female mating cry and another childhood friend who has been gone for X years pops up to berate you for neglecting your training. And Fino’s only dream in the whole wide world is to become a great alchemist fake-word-for-adventurer like his parents but wants to get along with everybody and doesn’t wanna kill anything not even moooonsssttteeeers! Even the incredibly crowbarred in sex is using a rustier crowbar. A succubus drags him off to do… succubus things… but he ends up being so good at… succubus things… that she is helpless to resist his… dick. And dibs on getting to decide what a “rustier crowbar” is in sexual parlance.

As for the game itself, it’s basically a roguelike, only without the procedurally generated dungeons. While I’ve never really understood the appeal in things like Diablo where the only possible use of them could be if you played through the same area enough times to notice and even then, the same cookie cutter rooms stapled together in slightly different ways or the same giant empty fields/deserts with a cave in a slightly different place is enough to let you soar on the wings of explorative freedom. This however, takes the worst of both worlds, managing to look procedurally generated and yet not be.

 

Anyway, you explore the dungeon like you’d expect; collecting things and solving complex puzzles like “push box out of way,” or “push box onto glowing square,” or “use special widget to break special rock,” and every now and then rooms spawn monsters. Roguelike combat isn’t the most complex of affairs, but they managed to dick that up too. For one, it’s so so slow. For two, don’t use a goddamned isometric map with cardinal direction controls, and if you do, don’t have the character go sliding off in some random direction instead of bumping against a wall.

For three and new paragraph, there’s none of the quick progression/cycling of equipment either. It’s hard to feel like you’re making progress instead of just traversing an endless array of nigh identical rooms. There’ll be handfuls of change and berries and potions all over the floors, but that starter knife? Get used to it bitch. Eventually, you get more people in your party, and you can freely switch who you’re using even in the middle of battle, but it’s still always just one character at a time, so they just add extra HP sponges and instead of passing turns/bumrushing to get combat actually going, switching back and forth between ranged and not. It involves about as much strategy as Chutes and Ladders.

    

So no, it does not come recommended unless you’re really into roguelikes enough to stomach a particularly bad one with worse writing. The best I can say is that at least unlike certain other things in this affair (and that I attempted to prod at during the week off for Batman and OVAs), it gets to the game itself fairly quickly instead of two to three hours of gassing on about humanist philosophy. Goes nowhere good with it, but I got to spend proportionally a lot more time building up disdain for the game engine than the writing this time around. And if what you’ve read here somehow does intrigue you enough to play it, then gods, mod the never-changing dungeon music because it will drive you mad.