Game 414: Tritorn (1985)

 

The game's title is the only thing not in English.

      

Tritorn

Japan

Sein-Soft (developer and publisher)

Released in 1985 for PC-88, Sharp X1, and PC-6001; 1986 for FM-7, MSX, and PC-98

Date Started: 18 May 2021

Date Ended: 20 May 2021
Total Hours: 11
Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5)
Final Rating: 9

Ranking at Time of Posting: 9/417 (2%)

     

The other day, we coined "hydlike" for Hydlide-like games. We need another term for the type of side-scrolling action RPGs that debuted in Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II. "Xanaderived?" In any event, these games share a lot of similarities with hydlikes, but they add chutes and ladders and platforms. As with hydlikes, they walk a fine line between RPG and non-RPG. I just rejected King Kong 2 because it had no character development (except maximum health, which I don't count) and combat was based entirely on action and weapon. Tritorn does a bit better: In addition to health, it has a strength attribute that improves with experience, and that strength statistic determines attack power. The game does not have a classic RPG inventory, but I didn't really become cognizant of that until I'd already spent a few hours on it, and by then I figured I'd just finish it.

   

Tritorn is one of those games that despite being released only in Japan is entirely in English. It was released on multiple platforms, and sometimes in multiple formats for the same platform. The MSX version, for instance, had both a cassette release and a cartridge release. I played the latter, and from what I gather, it's considered the hardest version, with several features not present in its cassette counterpart or on other platforms. I am indebted to this Japanese site for solving many of the mysteries of the game, including a game-breaking bug right at the end. I never would have been able to win without it.

     

The game's opening screen.

      

The framing story is that a demonic knight named Pay-Valusa is threatening the Island of Luwanda. It is up to the hero, Tritorn, to stop his evil machinations. Some sites offer alternate spellings of those names (e.g., "Pei-Barusa" and, amusingly, "Rwanda"), but I'm using the ones that appear in the endgame text. I have no theories on any of the origins, except that "Tritorn" sounds like "Triton."

    

With no character creation, the player is dropped into a maze of 100 screens, each with constantly-respawning enemies to slay. At the outset, he has 200 hit points, 200 strength, 10 magic balls, and a sword. Screens transition to each other on the right, left, top, and bottom, and through various doorways. There are only six game commands to start: left, right, jump, go through a door, attack, and throw a magic ball. Your current enemy's stats are listed in the lower-right block. When you're not fighting anything, this block just says "Sein." This makes sense because aside from whatever foes he faces in-game, a CRPG player's real enemy is the game's developer.

   

You're essentially in combat from the moment the game begins to the moment it ends. I found it very hard. I probably reloaded once per minute throughout the entire 11 hours. Just like King Kong 2, the main problem is that you can't really attack enemies out of range. If you can hit them, they can hit you. There are a few more tricks to exploit here; for instance, they only damage you if they're facing you, and you do more damage with jump-attacks than by standing still swinging. Still, this sort of action-oriented combat doesn't come easily to me. The only reason I stuck with the game was that I had to watch about 8 hours of training videos this week, and I was looking for something mindless to do at the same time.

        

Dragons are tough enemies, but this was a good grinding spot because their breath passes over me until they get to my square, at which point I can hit them.

      

The one good thing is that standing still causes your hit points to regenerate 10 every two seconds. Later, you find a potion that makes this even faster. 

    

A rare screen with no enemies. I just have to avoid the lava and hole in the floor while testing the portals.

     

Every 1,000 experience points, you get another 100 maximum health and strength. The "experience" meter then rolls over to 0 after 1,000, so I don't know why it has four digits in the first place. I had to grind a lot, particularly at the beginning, a process the game discourages by scaling the amount of experience you earn with your level. Eventually, you earn nothing for low-level foes and you have to move on to more difficult ones.

   

In addition to experience, the character develops by finding "inventory" items. I put that word in quotes because they cannot be dropped, used, or equipped. They're basically permanent "power-ups" that provide some new ability or status. You get some of them by killing large numbers of certain creatures, and you find others. The ones you find always tell you what they do. The ones that enemies drop are mysterious, although that Japanese fan site had a rundown. The first item you find is a potion that speeds up your walking speed for the rest of the game. Other items include shields that protect against physical and fire damage, a holy book that protects against spells, and a potion that increases the speed at which you swing your sword.

      

An item awaits my arrival at the bottom of the screen.

     

A few items are absolutely necessary for navigation. There's a key that opens certain walls, a candle that lets you see previously-hidden doors, and a potion that greatly increases your jumping distance.

     

Acquiring the ability to jump higher.

   

The only option you have other than physical attacks is to throw "magic balls," which stun enemies for a few seconds. These go quickly. Eventually, you find some object that allows you to collect magic balls from slain "worms and crows," although the names of the enemies in-game are actually "woams" and "crus." At first, this is capped at 9, but later it increases to 24. These enemies are found in such limited places that you can't become too careless with your use of the balls. Still later, you find a scroll that lets you use the "M" key to cast one of two spells: "Hold," which freezes everything on-screen, and "Flash," which kills everything on screen. These consume magic balls. I only ever cast two or three of them.

    

Navigation is as much a challenge as the enemies. There are ceilings, floors, and walls that you can pass through, so you spend a lot of time looking for secret passages. Even worse, there are a couple of places in which you have to use magic balls or spells to progress, with no hint or warning from the game. For instance, there's one place where you have to shoot three magic balls at a particular rock to open a shaft downward. There's another where you have to cast a "Flash" spell while standing on a rock to open a hole in the floor. It never would have occurred to me to do those things without the aforementioned guide.

     

To get into the doorway beneath me, I have to know to stand on this particular square and cast "Flash."

    

Oh, and there are also lots of dead-end screens from which there's no way to return. Pity the player who saves there.

       

I slowly die in lava.

     

The moments I hated most were the platforming ones. Tritorn isn't a real platformer, in that it doesn't have platforms that move or grow or shrink or whatnot. But an awful lot of gameplay does involve leaping from nub to nub, often having to move or twist in mid-air. Some of the jumps require you to freeze an enemy and use him as a springboard. The constantly-respawning enemies often show up at the worst time to block you from where you're trying to go. There were times I had to save with every inch of progress I made and reload when I fell.

     

The endgame has two parts. The first requires you to slay a fire-breathing dragon. Even though I somehow got there, I wouldn't know how to direct you to his chambers. You have to go right off a particular screen, but that screen normally dumps you in a different place when you go right. The Japanese fan site just indicated there was some kind of "trick" to switching the screens. I'm not sure what I did, but after about 100 tries, using different key combinations, timing, and anything I could think of, I finally happened to wander into the correct screen.

  

The dragon isn't very hard. He breathes a line of fire at regular intervals, and it knocks you off his platform, but you can just wait, heal up, and return to continue the attack.

       

Lurking in the dragon's chamber.

     

Once you kill the dragon, a platform appears under a door that was previously just hanging in the air. That takes you to the chambers of Pay-Valusa, a giant man with a giant sword. He also kicks. To kill him, you have to keep jumping over his head as he changes his facing direction. It took me a few tries, as health does not regenerate in his chamber.

I should mention that in the native MSX cartridge version, you can't enter the final area without the game crashing. Fortunately, that fan site had instructions for hex-editing the active memory so that the crash didn't happen.

       

The screen flashes different colors as Pay-Valusa dies.

        

Once Pay-Valusa dies, the screen flashes and the endgame message appears:

           

The battle of Luwanda Island is over. A courageous man, Tritorn, you win a victory. On the Earth and under ground, you fight. The instant you knocked Pay-Valusa down, various monsters died out. After this, it will preserve peace in Luwanda Island. I have a desire to last it for ever.

            

Just like King Kong 2, Tritorn is not my kind of game. It would be incorrect to say that I dislike action RPGs, but I do dislike them when they offer so few options, and when success is so clearly about the player's fingers rather than the character's attributes. Tritorn doesn't even have any NPCs, clues, or plot interludes to break up the monotony of killing and dying. On the GIMLET, I give it:

      

• 1 point for the game world. It has a basic framing story.

• 2 points for character creation and development. I'm counting the inventory bonuses as "character development" here rather than "inventory."

• 0 points for no NPCs.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. The enemies are nothing special, but I'll allow a point for the navigation puzzles as a kind of puzzle.

• 1 point for magic and combat. You aim and swing, and the couple of spells aren't worth anything extra.

• 0 points for inventory, since I regarded the items you find more as character development. My feeling is that if you can't equip, unequip, use, or drop it, it's not an inventory item.

• 0 points for no economy.

• 2 points for a main quest.

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. It gets all of that for the interface, which, being simple, works well. I found the graphics ugly and the shapes indiscernible. (Other platforms offer manifestly better graphics.) Sound cannot be turned off independently of the relentlessly-repeating music track.

• 0 points for gameplay I don't like awarding 0 in this category, but the category looks for nonlinearity, replayability, an appropriate challenge level, and appropriate length. None of those factors apply.

        

In fact, I have to subtract a point in the "bonus" category, not just for the bug, but for those couple of puzzles that would have been completely unsolvable without some kind of hint. Again, my understanding is that these are unique to the MSX version, so mentally bump up the final score for other platforms. That final score is 9. Nonetheless, the game occupied me for about a dozen hours of boring videos, and it contributed to our picture of the Japanese RPG scene of the 1980s, a subject for a later special topic.  

     

Sein-Soft (later stylized as Xain or Zainsoft) followed this game with Super Tritorn in 1986 and Tritorn II: Road of Darkness in 1988. Super Tritorn just seems to be a remake with better graphics, but Tritorn II reportedly adds more RPG trappings, like an economy, towns and shops, NPCs, and weapons and armor. (Alas, I don't believe an English patch exists, so I probably won't get to try that one.) Sein must have had a bad experience with that one, because they went back to pure action for their final game, 1990's Valusa no Fukushù.

      

Back we go to another round of regular entries. Let's see if we can wrap up both Mission: Thunderbolt and Darkside of Xeen in this batch.