Dungeon Crawling's Strange Journey

**Kugyince** · 04-19-2010, 03:54 AM

Of the nuances of RPGs that have had me interested lately, one thing in particular that's grabbed my attention lately are differences between Jeremy (Parish) and myself. We're both nominally into , but we very much gravitate toward different niches. At the risk of over-generalizing, I enjoy a good strategy RPG like Final Fantasy Tactics, while Jeremy enjoys something more along the lines of Etrian Odyssey; that is, unforgiving dungeon crawls.

I've occasionally dabbled in the genre myself, but I've never managed to stick with it long enough to reap the dividends. As I enjoy my vacation though, I'm taking brief breaks from Pokemon to work on Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, which about as much of a grind-it-out dungeon crawler as I've ever seen. As I play, I'm doing my best to unravel the mystery of what makes these games so darn appealing.

On the face of it, Strange Journey and its ilk have a great deal in common with the average roguelike. Both of them thrive on a constant sense of danger; the terror of suddenly losing hours of work to a stray hit by one of the mooks wandering the dungeons. The story is secondary to simply pressing ahead and trying to reach the end, battling plenty of dangerous foes along the way.

There's certainly plenty of strategy involved in these games, some of it more subtle than you might think. There's the need to balance defeating the bad guys with conserving magic points and the art of building a balanced party. But even more important is being able to set reasonable goals so that it's possible to plunge deep into a given dungeon without becoming exhausted and dying.

Full article here:
1UP's RPG Blog : Dungeon Crawling's Strange Journey

**Dudebro** · 04-19-2010, 05:31 AM

I love dungeon crawlers and I wish we'd see more of them but I'm not holding my breath.

**joz** · 04-19-2010, 11:00 AM

I like dungeons and puzzles in my RPGs. But yeah, I can get a bit annoyed from time to time if it's a bit too long. Good thing there are save points.

**Kong** · 04-19-2010, 02:06 PM

I have no idea why but I like Dungeon Crawlers. On the surface it looks like you just take all the worst bits of an RPG and throw out everything else and grind and grind and grind. But they can actually be a lot of fun. I can see how they are for a small audience though.

They involve lots of experimentation to figure out what everything does and how strong everyone is and what special powers they have.
They require memorization and patience and paying attention to stats.

Fun but not for everyone.