What a surprise!

I'll be honest, I don't know if I need to spend $25 on this given that I assume it's more archaic than the two excellent Shiren games I already own on Switch, but it is very cool that this exists, and the graphical style is neat. If this gets Dragon Quest fans excited about Mystery Dungeon too, all the better!

Secret_Tunnel said:

If this gets Dragon Quest fans excited about Mystery Dungeon too, all the better!

ME.

I've never played a Mystery Dungeon because I've always wanted to play this one! Never would've expected it to get a localization 33 years later! Between this and Terranigma next year, my Translation Wishlist is starting to be very happy! I think I'll pick it up today, 25 bucks and all.

@TriforceBun

You're in for a treat!

Use your items extremely liberally; no megalixir-hoarding in Mystery Dungeon. Two common enemies bunched together often warrants an all-out onslaught of your most precious consumables. Like BOTW's weapons, you'll always find more.

While I had heard of this game, I don't think I knew that this, a Dragon Quest spin-off, was actually the very first Mystery Dungeon! I figured it was Shiren or one of those. Wild. I'll probably grab it as a curiosity when it goes on sale, see where it all began, though I'll get it for Xbox instead of Switch.

@Mop it up

The first Shiren the Wanderer game was released in Japan as Mystery Dungeon 2: Shiren the Wanderer. Torneko was first!

The ending of GMTK's video on the history of JRPGs touches on it:



Roguelikes and roguelites are hot these days, but Mystery Dungeon is the one series that has really sought to specifically preserve the gameplay of the original PC dungeon crawlers that founded the genre. That it did so while also presenting a UI that feels good to use on a controller is pretty magical. For how complex it is, it feels very fast, almost like a 2D action-adventure.

I played a few rounds of this and it's fun! I like it quite a bit. The Dragon Quest charm helps a lot, as does that classic SNES (Super Famicom) feel. But the core gameplay is solid and I definitely am taking the "no megalixir hoarding" tip to heart.

I'm not sure if it was in the original but in this one there's a 10-level "intro" dungeon that I think is meant to ease you into the core gameplay. After 3 attempts or so I made it to the 10th floor! ...But then got wiped out after I forgot how diagonal movement/attacks worked (and the hallucination herb got me killed). Still, I feel like I'm amassing plenty of knowledge with each run so there's an addictive quality to it all. Looking forward to playing more!

I'm curious about this game's historical impact though; the Mystery Dungeon series started here, but weren't there similar rogue likes before this? For instance, Fatal Labyrinth on the Genesis (which I played as a kid) is less-polished than Torneko here but the core concept is pretty similar and it came out in 1990. You still have the randomized, tile-based, turn-based dungeon-crawling. Maybe Torneko refined the formula the same way DQ1 refined what Wizardry and Ultima had been attempting.

@TriforceBun

The Wikipedia page for Mystery Dungeon cites an old article by Jeremy Parish on this:

Jeremy Parish said:

Chunsoft wasn't the first developer to have come up with the notion of a console adaptation of Rogue. Sega had made its own attempt to bring the roguelike to its Genesis (also known as Mega Drive) console in 1990 with a game called Fatal Labyrinth. A simplistic take on the genre, Fatal Labyrinth's format appears to have been a pragmatic choice by Sega to produce a role-playing title for their Japanese Meganet distribution service. As a downloadable game distributed in the days before broadband and expansive rewritable memory options, Fatal Labyrinth's procedural design and lack of any real built-in narrative allowed the game to offer expansive play value despite being contained in a tiny amount of memory space; this in turn reflects Rogue’s own design, which lacked graphics simply because it was created for play on shared text-only terminals. However, both Fatal Labyrinth and Dragon Crystal (its 8-bit downconversion for Master System and Game Gear) lacked the depth of a proper computer roguelike and failed to make much of an impression on gamers.

Nakamura, on the other hand, wanted to capture the substance of true roguelikes for consoles in a way Fatal Labyrinth had failed to achieve. He and his team decided to take a literal approach to “doing for roguelikes what Dragon Quest had done for RPGs” by making his roguelike an actual spinoff of the Dragon Quest series. Although Chunsoft was wrapping work on the fifth Dragon Quest chapter around this time, series lead Yuji Horii recommended they look back to the series' final 8-bit entry for inspiration: Dragon Quest 4.

The end result was a game whose protagonist was as unlikely as the prospect of transforming a genre geared toward hardcore PC gaming fanatics into something true to the genre while simultaneously being accessible to a young, casual console audience. Called Torneko no Daibouken: Fushigi no Dungeon (Torneko's Big Adventure: The Dungeon of Mystery), Chunsoft's interpretation of the roguelike retained key genre elements like item identification, procedural dungeon generation and item placement, and permanent character "death." But it starred one of Dragon Quest 4's most charismatic side characters, a portly middle-aged merchant whose efforts to support his family by running a humble weapons shop caused him to become swept up into a grand quest to save humanity.

"I figured that if we were to bring a roguelike to a console, we'd kind have to take a similar method to [our approach with Dragon Quest] by lowering the barriers of entry to get people interested in the game." says Nakamura. "There's a lot to take in at first, and if people get overwhelmed, they're not going to want to continue. I wanted to give the players a familiar setting, and the Dragon Quest setting was great for that because people were already familiar with the monsters and the items. So even if they didn't know how the game system works, they could kind of guess, you know? This monster will probably move this way. This item will probably have that kind of effect. So it's easier for them to get in and learn the nuts and bolts of the system from there.

This game is pretty darn cool. What have I been missing? I'm tempted to look into some of the Shiren games down the line but I gotta say that the Dragon Quest aspects are a big part of the appeal to me.

I see a lot of people fussing about the difficulty but it really doesn't feel super harsh IMO. I did get dumped into a monster room and ambushed on all sides but I also could've saved my Bang Scroll for that so, live (die) and learn I guess.

@Secret_Tunnel
Neat! Good history lesson.

@TriforceBun

You might be surprised by how charming Shiren can be! Its bestiary really starts to grow on you after a while, and I imagine that treating the DQ analogues as a jumping-off point ("Ah, the Mamel is Shiren's version of the Slime...") would give you a lineage to appreciate.

Sounds like Torneko's Bang Scroll is that game's equivalent of Shiren's Windblade Scroll. Always fun to use that one in a Monster House, yeah.