Dungeon Magic: Magic and Dungeons

Don't get your hopes up, I'm not writing about mid-90's fantasy themed isometric arcade beat'em up from Taito that was pretty fucking cool, I'm writing about the late 90's fantasy themed first-person NES RPG from Taito that was pretty fucking boring. While the RPG was known everywhere as Dungeon Magic: Sword of the Elements, the beat'em up was called Lightbringer in Japan. Another difference between the two games (other than the fact they are different games entirely), is that while the arcade game was developed by Taito themselves, Natsume developed the NES game for Taito back before Natsume became the Harvest Moon company.

 At first I wondered why Taito would rename a game to shoehorn it into having a vague connection to an older game of theirs that nobody really cared about, but the change probably had more to do with avoiding the name Lightbringer because it is associated with Satan, and nobody wants to piss of Christians. Both games are fantasy based and have a plot about killing some asshole wizard, so I'd guess that someone at Taito made the connection and went home early for the weekend instead of coming up with something cooler.

Dungeon Magic is just like a billion other D&D-inspired first person RPGs from that time. Even though the NES didn't have nearly as many as PC, there were still better options for this sort of thing. This typeof game just isn't my genre, and I don't have much tolerance for first person dungeon crawling without maps, but the way I hear it, Bard's Tale is a classic, and hardly anybody remember Dungeon Magic. I don't know how much grind is required by this game, but seeing as it is an NES RPG, I'm probably not going out too far on a limb to say it is probably a lot. At least it doesn't have that whole going-into-a-menu-to-talk-to-people thing that makes Dragon Quest completely unbearable to me.

I don't have a whole lot to say about the game because it just doesn't do really anything I like. Maybe it is good at what it does, but I don't care enough to find out.

These things happen.