Fatal Labyrinth (Genesis/Mega Drive) - Replay

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay 2014 - Game 3

With a distant rumbling that sounds more like screechy irritating static, rises the lavender fortress of the Fatal Labyrinth! Again!

Today I'm going to take another look at this classic Sega roguelike on the Genesis/Mega Drive. Though I don't mean I'm literally going to take just one glance at it and then turn it right off like I did last time, I promise.

Despite being a first party Sega title the game doesn't start with my beloved 'say-gah!' jingle, but just this once I can forgive them for not including it as the game is tiny. There's around 128k of content here, eight times less than your typical Genesis/Mega Drive cart. In fact this is even smaller than the average Master System game, though there's a good reason for its diminutive nature and that's because the game was actually a download only title in Japan.

Seriously, you'd connect a 1200 bit/s Meganet Mega Modem to your Mega Drive (only 47 times slower than 56k) and then download the game onto a Sega Game Library cart. Or more likely you wouldn't, as it was never released in the West and nobody bought the device in Japan. Even the home banking keypad add-on couldn't make the poor Meganet into a success! Sega eventually had to admit defeat on this one and redesigned the console in later revisions to remove the EXT modem port entirely. And that's the story of what the EXT port was for.

The game starts with the the camera panning down from the title screen castle, across the magic eye picture standing in for a forest, and over this standard JRPG village. Then the game just kinda freezes up.

Oh, I'm actually controlling that guy in brown now am I? Well okay, time to drag this camera all the way back up to the castle again then. But seeing as I'm trying to take the game more seriously this time around I probably should go and chat to all these NPCs first.

Destroy the dragon, got it.

Just... one question though. Who am I and what am I doing here? Am I a skilled blade for hire from distant lands, or some poor bastard villager who drew the short straw and was handed a short sword? I don't suppose it matters much in the end, as the only difference between a green rookie and a hardened vet in an RPG is a few minutes of grinding down in the rat mines.

Well it's nice to meet someone in town who has sensible, practical concerns about this potential apocalypse situation. Sure ghouls are invading the town, an evil dragon has cloaked the land in darkness, and the end of the world is coming, but worrying about that doesn't get the laundry done. As long as some fragment of humanity remains, those survivors are going to want their clean shirts to be dry and ironed.

Okay, before I go off looking for a shop, I should probably check my inventory to see what items I'm already carrying.

Whuh? Either this is a Terranigma-style walk-in menu system or I just jumped straight into the first level by hitting Start.

It seems that the last adventurer to come this way had a hole in his bag as he's dropped swords and food all over the place. Or maybe that abomination on the left just ate them whole and then spat out their gear, who knows?

The demon only seems to take a step when I do, so I'm going to step two spaces to my left, grab the sword, then pick up the meat on the way out and make a run for it.

Alright, it seems that the short sword I picked up is a bit of a mystery, with '?????' written where the stats should be. I haven't really played many roguelikes, but I'm pretty sure using items before identifying them is supposed to be a VERY BAD THING. On the other hand, it's just a sword, what's the worst it's gonna do? Inflict an ancient curse upon my hero that slowly consumes his soul and turns him into a warped shell possessed by a being of pure evil? Uh... well I'm gonna equip it anyway.

Oh, it turns out to give me 2 points of attack power, compared to 1 from the knife. That's not so bad.

Man, I can only see a single square ahead of me in these corridors, it's ridiculous.

No, this is ridiculous. This is a dead end here, but it doesn't even get a wall tile. It's just a solid block of blackness that won't let me pass.

Speaking of wall tiles, I wonder why they only made them one tile tall, when the hero almost has the height of two. He's a clear two foot taller than where the ceiling should be.

Wow, the whole room appeared at once when I stepped inside; I can actually see what I'm doing in here. Alright, there's a red potion down there on the left, I'm gonna sneak in and grab that.

The red potion... is actually a purple potion and unfortunately my hero has no idea what's in it. But will he drink it anyway? No of course not, he's not that dumb. I'll hold onto it until I get back to town or find a scroll of identify.

Here's something that annoys me, when the shadow on the floor begins from the top of the wall like this. I realise that the area behind the wall is impassable to my hero so for all intents and purposes it is only a one tile wide corridor, but unless that wall is leaning 45 degrees to be aligned parallel to the camera, that shadow just shouldn't start there!

See, isn't that much better? Well, slightly, almost imperceptibly better at least.

Now that I've got some new gear equipped I've decided to try my hand at some combat. As far as I can tell, I just press the d-pad in the direction of the enemy and the fight plays out by itself, with each action indicated with messages like "MISSED!", "PARRIED.", "MISSED!", "PARRIED.", "MISSED!" and "YOU'VE BEEN DAMAGED 3 POINTS."

Once the worm had finally been slain I was free to loot the room for all its treasures, such as food, a bag of gold, and a scroll! Probably not a scroll of identify though, as the thing itself needs to be identified.

Food cannot be stored for some reason and has to be eaten immediately, and I really should walk over to it and do that as I've only got 26 food points left. When I'm well fed my hit points recharge over time and when I'm starving the opposite presumably happens.

Well that's one floor cleared out. I don't see any way to get back to town to sell my loot, so I guess all I can do is climb up to the next floor. After I've killed this flying eyeball that is. I've gotten a level up at some point by killing enemies, so I've been inspired to wipe out the whole floor of them.


THREE FLOORS LATER.

I was going to mention how every floor in this is just more of the same, but this is something new. Up until this point I haven't had to hit the A button on every bloody wall to find the unmarked secret passage I need to continue the level.


ONE FLOOR LATER.

Okay I've been missing a bit more often than usual against this ninja and now I'm starting to get concerned about my health being in the red all of a sudden. Maybe my accuracy's gone down because I'm using an axe instead of a sword now.

I can heal up if I get some distance, but he'll be chasing me around throwing shurikens at my ass wherever I go. Monsters only seem to appear in rooms, but they have no problem with chasing me out down the corridors once they get my scent.


BUT THEN:

They don't seem to have any kind of pathfinding! Enemies head right at me even if there's a wall blocking their way, so I'm free to keep taking steps like this until I get my full health back.

I decided to take a risk and put one of these rings on that I've been finding everywhere and it turned out to be the Blizzard Ring! What a Blizzard Ring does though, I have no idea. I guess there's no point carrying around multiple copies of them though if they're all the same thing, as I doubt they ever wear out.

Hey, I wonder if throwing a ring at an enemy will hurt them.

Oh, apparently it just makes the ninja I can't beat even stronger. Well that's good to know for the future.

Let's try these canes then. Maybe I can prod the ninja with one from a distance.

That's what I like: my magic cane made this ice crystal fall asleep! I bet my hero still manages to miss it five times in a row.


LATER.

Crap, that robot just utterly annihilated me. Though it's probably my own dumb fault for getting into a fight after I ate one piece of meat too many and my message box turned red. I knew that couldn't mean anything good, but I kept on stumbling onwards anyway like the impatient bastard I am.

Wow, I guess that Labyrinth really WAS Fatal!

And so the townsfolk buried the hero under a rock and then got on with doing their laundry. I like to think that the monsters dragged his corpse out of the tower and dumped it in the town square to demoralise them. The joke's on them though, only four people even gave a shit!

I don't see much point in continuing really, seeing as the gameplay doesn't seem to change a great deal from floor to floor. But I'm going to go and do it anyway, just to make absolutely certain that nothing new is ever going to happen in this game.

Hey, it put me back on the same floor I was killed on! That's surprisingly charitable for a roguelike. The place looks a little different to how I remember it though. No they haven't changed the floor tiles, that would be absurd, but they have rebuilt the entire room layout in the meantime.

Chaotic shapeshifting castles seem to be pretty fashionable amongst video game villains, showing up in the Castlevania series, Rogue Legacy, the Mario games etc. and I can see the appeal. For one thing, it saves them a fortune on redecorating each time a hero drops by and hits the place like a one man house party. Plus it also turns finding the bathroom into an adventure!


ONE LEVEL LATER.

Aw crap I'm getting harassed by a robot again. My only hope of survival: to escape down that corridor ahead of me!

Well I'm entirely fucked... unless I can pull some kind of miracle from my backpack.

Any one of these potions could be a bottled beverage of salvation or a beaker full of death. I'm going to take a chance and go with purple. No one would ever make a poison purple.

It's a 60 point healing potion! I can live with that, literally.


TWO FLOORS LATER.

KILLER FLY!

I managed to parry him with my ass a few times (thanks no doubt to my epic ARmour stat of 8), but in the end I found escape impossible and defeat inevitable.

Well it's a step up from a rock at least. This is the sole purpose of gold in the game by the way: it buys you a better funeral. In stark contrast to real life and all other video games, money is only good to you when you're dead. There is no shop, no way to trade in the gear you find, and you'd probably want to hold onto all those swords and helmets anyway, so you can throw 'em at people.

Right then, back to floor eight. Let's see if I can at least get far enough to see some different looking tiles. A change of music would be nice too.

Aw, I've been respawned all the way back on floor five again? Suddenly any interest I had in continuing with this has evaporated. I'm done with it.


CONCLUSION

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Well I didn't hate Fatal Labyrinth, it wasn't an experience of constant unbearable frustration, but I wasn't exactly enthralled either. I walked into enemies and if I did it enough times they often died from it. Sometimes I found better gear or something mysterious. Sometimes it was hard to find the exit. This was my experience for eight floors in a row.

I took a look at some of the later stages out of curiosity and after the 10th floor the music switches and the graphics do finally change (colour)! Also enemies start being able to destroy your weapons or permanently reduce your max hit points. Plus there's invisible traps that drop you down an entire floor. Yeah, I think I'm happy to have given up where I did.

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