From the get-go, players are thrown into the game as Eventail, the Guildmaster welcomes them to his guild. It's a tall order to be sure – especially since the game allows for full character creation from the outset – so again, this is a hardcore RPG fan's type of game. The sword will in fact work, but smart players will watch their team closely, assigning equipment to only the right classes and leveling up the correct skills based on their strategy. In the case of that overly-ambitious mage, the spellcaster would lose the ability to… well… spell cast. A mage, for instance, can equip a sword of they'd like, but the wrong items will in turn cause negative attributes or status changes. Basic equipment menus keep things extremely mysterious, having a whole slew of items to equip but very little instruction on who should wear them it's all about trial and error. Given the game's traditional design, The Dark Spire makes use of a 3D engine for all dungeon exploration – with each press of the A button or d-pad movement counting as a "step" in the world, and thus leaving players vulnerable to random battles – and is exclusively made up of 2D panel art outside of that. We're just now kicking things off with the game, so while we're still just early enough in to get our bearings and figure out what the game is all about, we also felt compelled to show this one off, sicne it's certainly one of the lesser-known DS titles out there, and should certainly be on some of the DS hardcore crowd's collective radar. In this case, it's a royal sorcerer that has stolen away a king's treasure, and retreated to the looming darkness of the skyscraper of a dungeon. Like Etrian Odyssey before it (or really, like Wizardry way, way before it), Spire is played out entirely in first person mode, and follows a player-created party of members through a large, monster-filled tower in search for a final looming boss. The Dark Spire is, in every way, a hardcore RPG fan's RPG. The Dark Spire is a DS-exclusive tribute to the world of western-style RPGs, and while we're sure it won't see hundreds of thousands of sales here in the states, it's a unique – and from what we can tell so far, well-made – throwback to classic RPGs, and anyone digging on the Atlus-published Etrian Odyssey series should dig this lower-budget love letter from developer Success. The title is so unknown, in fact, that we nearly overlooked it in our first quarter of coverage, as we're all getting ramped up for DS titles like Dragon Quest V and Blue Dragon Plus, with games like House of the Dead: Overkill and MadWorld in our sights on Wii. Since the very beginning of DS's lifespan, publisher Atlus has been providing unique Japanese titles for US gamers to check out, and while some of them – Trauma Center: Under the Knife – are practically household names in the world of gaming, others are pretty "out there," living up to their niche design and targeting.
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