The Dark Spire

The addictive nature of The Dark Spire is not to be underestimated. When I turn the game off, I feel like Martin Sheen at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, languishing in frustration and desperate to go back into that bleak, violent world.

I love games with engaging stories. Even a substandard, mediocre RPG can act as a medium for a solid story or a believable world and thus pass itself off as an enjoyable game. Stories drive RPGs. Which makes it strange that the story of The Dark Spire is... well, there isn’t one. Not really. None of your characters will ever fall in love or betray one another. None of the minds behind Spire woke up in the middle of the night and thought, "My God, I have it! An evil wizard steals the royal jewels, and then hides at the top of a monster-filled tower, and then... and then... wait, I’ve almost got it... yes, that’s it--only a group of four adventurers can save the day!" and then spent the next few years desperately shopping this story from studio to studio.

No, The Dark Spire is the celebration of a certain style of gameplay, an ideal dungeon-crawling experience in which every monster encounter, every hard-won experience point, every piece of gear matters. Strange, yes; addictive, definitely. But then again, what was the storyline for Sid Meier’s Civilization? What were the plot twists and character developments in Monster Hunter? Spire is in that same category--a pure gameplay experience that rewards the player with the feeling that obstacles are being overcome and that power is increasing.

It is a stark experience, but the beauty of it is that there are no Japanese RPG cliches. There is no annoying use of children for tension-breaking purposes, nor soft-faced prepubescent heroes with too much fashion sense for their own good, nor the big tough guy who is dense but has a heart of gold, and definitely no overbearing, shrill females constantly regulating on fellow adventurers. This doesn’t mean that The Dark Spire is completely bereft of personality or humor. During your training session, your team brutally beats and kills their instructor, then stands over his corpse worrying that they went too far. Spire is about a claustrophic network of tunnels where four badasses stalk about looking for the next murder, barely surviving even as they loot the bodies of the slain, and then the great release of rushing back to town for a spending spree.

Speaking of murder, The Dark Spire will not hold your hand in any way. You are born nearly naked, given only crap gear and rudely forced into a dank dungeon where survival demands equal parts careful resource management, strength of will, and abject cowardice--like real life, but with the ability to reload. This is not a big budget Final Fantasy where gaining experience means that the monsters go from "kind of easy" to "definitely easy". Be warned: when I first stepped into the tower, my crew of wimps and losers was immediately beset by a group of knife-wielding psychopaths who stabbed us all to death, then probably complained that our gear wasn’t even worth the effort they’d put into taking it. The flip side to this is the rush felt after surviving a few such encounters and then trying to escape, clutching just enough money to upgrade a few pieces of gear--and then the sense of power when each green recruit has had hard experience beaten into them, and each class begins to distinguish itself, to make itself more useful in its given field. And just when it seems that there is nothing more to Spire than fighting for experience, you’ll stumble on strange puzzles in which the solution is not immediately obvious, but the solving of which can bloat an ego and instill a mad thirst for the next challenge.

But what a bleak world it is. The graphics walk a fine line between total crap and inspired works of art painted on a limited canvas. This is the first time I’ve ever wanted my DS screens to be bigger: there’s something incredibly appealing about the simple hand-drawn imagery and the bold, almost monochromatic color palette. And, as a nod to the old-school Western dungeon crawls on which The Dark Spire is based, there is even a "Classic Mode" for the masochistic gamer. This easily-toggled mode can turn the graphics into utter and complete crap--a harsh reminder that while some might be nostalgic for those old PC games, nostalgia is a great perversion of memory. Classic Mode’s music, surprisingly enough, is somewhat appealing... in a sort of cold, digital way, like something a young robot child might listen to. Classic Mode is a fun place to visit, but nothing beats Default.

Any annoyances that crop up all but disappear a few hours into gameplay. That being said, here are a few: There are no visible weapon stats that I can find, though this is by no means crippling. Many will dislike that the handy automapping feature does not show where you are; you can get lost if you check your memory at the door, though there is a spell you can acquire to circumvent this. It’s strange that you have to trek back to the guild in order to level up, as if education and wisdom can only be acquired inside a school building. But what is perhaps the strangest part of the game is that, when choosing the alignment of your characters, it turns out that "lawful" and "chaotic" characters cannot work together on the same team. I can only conclude that this is some sort of strange Japanese ideal of "group harmony" in which the notion that co-workers can argue over differences of opinion and still finish their jobs is unthinkable. But really, when you’re curb-stomping goblins and disemboweling giant killer bats, one’s moral standing is irrelevant. (I won’t even go into how utterly baffling it is that you can’t create a chaotic dwarf--are you telling me that there’s an entire race in this world that is both sentient and lacking in free will?)

Bonus! My Special Recipe For Enjoying Dark Spire: I don’t suggest you start out with the default characters. They start out at class level 2, thus robbing you of the joy of overcoming class level 1, and their names are completely uninspired. You’ll want to make a team from the ground up, making sure to name them after your favorite rappers, curse words, famous American serial killers, or Play reviewers.

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