@Tulpa has probably made a closer read of the actual scholarship on the topic but afaik it is because the first mazey underground adventure was an outgrowth of a tactical fantasy wargame and involved troops entering a fortification via an escape tunnel dug from its (literal) dungeon. The popularity of this scenario and its iteration led to the writing of D&D. The usage of the word “dungeon” to mean “dark hostile puzzle space” is entirely a coinage from tabletop gaming.
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Hell a lot of games have levels on their dungeon that are inexplicably grassy plains with full on “sunlight” despite being in a tower or underground
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dungeons were a mistake
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counterpoint: no they weren’t
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Literal dungeons were a mistake definitely
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This is basically it. It started as an outgrowth of wargamers toying with the medieval tactic of sappers undermining the walls of castles. This led to a fantastical arms race: if those sapper tunnels connect to the dungeons, might as well fill them with traps and monsters to make it extremely difficult for anyone to sneak into a castle and this also doubles as a means of preventing anyone in a dungeon from escaping out of the castle.
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Dungeons are good training tools for how to facilitate rpg scenarios. By limiting the options a player has to the physical constraints of an underground series of interconnected corridors on a gridded map, you make the game much more manageable. Most gms cut their teeth on the dungeon crawl because it is one of the easiest formats to prepare and run
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Does anything today compare to 3D Dot Game Heroes? Fuuck
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has anyone put like, game controller level vibration into a keyboard
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i can imagine the clickin’ and the clatterin’ as if the holy ghost was possessing the keys.
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i am trying to beat breath of fire dragon quarter:
long complaint about breath of fire dragon quarter
I’m trying it again after playing it many years ago w Dylan, and i remember feeling quite sour on it because we got to the “final” boss (phase 1 of 3) and couldn’t beat it and would have had to start over so we just watched the ending on yt.
anyway, I’m trying again because all the heads rave about it and i am feeling insane because this game is nickel-and-dime-ing me with every possible resource and asks an insane amount of buy-in to even get from one save-point to the next (apparently there was a field-save option that was removed for the western (maybe just European) release because of course) and the battles are evil hard and fiddly and every room looks the fucking same and i have to fight groups of 10+ enemies one at a time in order to keep things manageable and i just??? surely i am playing wrong!? surely this is not the experience that has been so lauded? but i don’t know how the game wants me to play – and as a game designer: i think that’s a failure of the game to communicate, but as a person who has time-and-again had the experience of struggling with a game due to playing it “wrong” i don’t want to miss out on a good thing just because i am a fucking idiot have fallen outside the playtest average.
i think my key problem is that i never use any dragon abilities because i “know” (game has not told me this) that i will game over if the meter reaches 100, but maybe I’m supposed to do that? maybe that’s the release valve and I’m fighting it because it’s shaped like a punishment.
i also feel like maybe I’m avoiding restarting too aggressively. i have apparently restarted 4 times but i think that’s only once from the very start and a couple times from checkpoints. how many times does it expect me to restart to beat the game? again: is this a normal system shaped like a punishment? obscured by poor translation decisions? the fact that it tracks my restarts makes me feel even more like it’s mocking me for having restarted!
the more i try to express how i feel about this game the more i realise it’s stressing me out and making me feel like an insane idiot.
how does one play this game and have a good time? i deeply want to understand this object that is beloved by so many.
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awaiting a response to this, because this mirrors my own experience with Dragon Quarter
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You are definitely supposed to restart. It’s a lot like Dead Rising in that regard. I am pretty sure you get more cutscenes and stuff every time. You don’t have to be super stingy with the dragon powers or whatever.
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They only removed ‘quicksaving’ from the european version, I know this because I spent an entire day playing the game and had to save so I could sleep and at the time had no idea how people got 1/4 in a run nonstop and the answer was they (mostly) didn’t
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When I played through the game (and liked it well enough to put on my top 100) 15 years or so ago, I restarted upon a death about 1/3rd of the way through and then again because I somehow fucked up the first boss. I then used the dragon form on the bosses and when it seemed necessary. I arrived at the ending at a razor’s edge of 98% Dragon. I barely carved out seeing the ending, and made peace I’d win or fail.
So you are absolutely supposed to fail a few times on the way to stressful maybe success. Using your Dragon form when necessary, and the tension that it means game over, is the whole game/challenge/joy.
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This is wild, I had to find more sources to confirm because this rumor has persisted unquestioned for so long that I figured it had to be true. Now I’m really questioning the european players who completed the game without a restart as if that was the normal way of playing the game.
Being kicked back to the start of the game because of your failure is 100% intended as part of the game design. It’s why you start the game 1000 meters beneath the earth, your goal is to reach the surface, and there’s a depth counter on screen at all time that updates even when you so much as walk up a staircase. Falling down is supposed to incentivize you to get back up again.
I did a playthrough of the game without using the dragon powers once, and ended up at the final battle at 12%. It gives you leeway use them when valuable, or to blow a huge chunk of meter so that you can at least kill a tough boss before doing a reset.
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There’s also a way to farm for exp through D exploitation right before the final boss that it has to be intentional.
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Dragon Quarter is a game where you have to ignore its biggest fans who are sickos and need to walk in prepared. There were some tips I saw online many years back offered for those who just want to play it once (or at least those who’d want to play through it all the first time and decide about extra playthroughs later).
Of course I barely remember what those tips were all this time later, I believe the big one was putting aside a big stretch of time for the first session and skipping the first save point to get ahead of the save point recourse curve. I believe the way is to skip the first one, only save before boss battles so that the sequence is save before boss, fight boss, go through the following section until right before boss, possibly backtrack to a save point and only then save, fight the next boss and repeat.
For the sake of making one’s life easier I’d also say just look up the environmental details of an upcoming area (ex. an ice section is up next, better equip fire attacks/ice defense stuff (generic example, I have no recollection what the areas were actually like). I think there is one mid-game boss that really benefits from dragon powers killing it but since you will be saved right before each boss a death to them isn’t a huge deal/setback.
FWIW I died once against regular enemies and got sent back to before the prior boss, that was a slight pain but I had already beaten it once so I at least knew what to do.
Basically there is enough info out there to give you advice to better mold the game into what kind of experience you would prefer and I suggest taking full advantage of it. If I had to restart it a bunch I’d have hated my time with it so I didn’t, whatever you specific likes and dislikes are you can probably shift the game significantly towards them.
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EU version removed quick saves but you get to start with 9 save tokens instead of IDK 1? It’s actually easier if you just leave the console on / play 10 hours a day
I didn’t have too much trouble with the game but I knew going in there was an easy way to beat anything without consuming too much dragon (There’s a move that doubles attack power and can be stacked so you just use it three times for 8x atk + whatever is the strongest attack, and any boss is dead) The game gets easier without bosses, turns out
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