BRIEF: The Tower of Druaga (1984)

 

Although not officially released in the west until the late 1990s, all versions of the game have an English title.

          

The Tower of Druaga

Japan 

Namco (developer and publisher) 
Released 1984 for Arcade; 1985 for NES, Sharp 800 series; 1986 for Sharp X1, FM-7, MSX; 1990 for Game Boy.

Remade for TurboGrafx-16 in 1992 

Rejected for: Insufficient character development

            

When one speaks in absolutes, an exception almost always appears, so I would be cautious about saying that it's impossible for an arcade game to be an RPG. I would also be cautious about saying that no RPG has "lives" instead of hit points. Despite this caution, I suspect both statements are true. Wikipedia, GameFAQs, and several other databases offer The Tower of Druaga in response. For that matter, so does the early documentation for the game.

     

In The Tower of Druaga, the player controls a character named Gilgamesh ("Gil" on platforms that can't support a name that long) who has to ascend a 60-floor tower, defeat a demon named Druaga, rescue a princess named Ki, and find a magical blue rod that somehow keeps the peace in the unnamed kingdom.

   

Each of the 60 floors offers a maze with a key and a door. The maze structure is fixed but the key and door locations are randomized. The player must find the key and open the door while avoiding (or slaying) the level's randomly-moving enemies. He must do this within a time limit or face an assault by rapidly-moving, unkillable balls of energy. Each level also has an unannounced secret treasure revealed through a scripted combination of actions, some of them easy to stumble upon, some nearly impossible. The player has three lives, and any interception by the enemy ends one of them.

          

A bunch of monsters stand between me, the key, and the exit door.

         

The original arcade game does not appear to have been offered in a dedicated cabinet; instead, it ran on a conversion kit for Namco's Super Pac-Man (1982). This lineage has caused my authors to dub it "fantasy Pac-Man," which I find an apt description. You move the character through a Pac-Man style maze. You spend more time avoiding enemies than slaying them. The items that you find feel like "power-ups." And yet when the game was released in 1985 for the NES, the instruction manual called it "a new kind of action game that incorporates role-playing elements." What is it talking about?

         

The manual for the game's original NES release.

       

Namco (Bandai Namco since a 2005 merger) goes back to 1955, when Nakamura Manufacturing Company began as a maker of amusement rides and mechanical games. In 1975, it purchased the floundering Atari Japan and entered the arcade game market. It enjoyed unprecedented success with Galaxian (1979), Pac-Man (1980), Galaga (1981), Pole Position (1982), and Xevious (1993), a vertical-scrolling shooter written by Masanobu ("Evezoo") Endō. At this point, the story I found repeatedly is that Endō made a business trip to the United States, bought one or more Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks, and became interested in role-playing games. (Stories also say he was exposed to Wizardry around the same time but neglect to say how; however, later in the 1980s, he would executive-produce the NES conversions of the first five Wizardry games, minus The Return of Werdna.) He set out to create Quest, a fusion of an action game with an RPG, but grew dissatisfied with the RPG elements, scaled them back, and ended up with Druaga.

   

I'm not sure this standard story is quite true. After consulting original interviews with Endō (particular thanks to the anonymous translator that owns this site), I think the actual narrative is this: Endō became fascinated with role-playing games, tried to develop one called Quest, got frustrated, realized it would never work as an arcade game, shelved it, and wrote Druaga instead. The same sites also say that Quest was later released as Druaga's sequel, Return of Ishtar (1986), but as far as I can tell, Ishtar isn't an RPG either; it's Druaga with a larger map and two players. The idea that there's any Wizardry lineage in either game is simply absurd.

   

The best I can figure, the "RPG elements" that other writers (and perhaps some of the original players) are seeing in Druaga is that (a) the hero is a recognizable human, not an abstraction like a space ship or a construct like Pac-Man; (b) as a human, he has a mission and framing story; and (c) there are a bunch of items to find and use. I don't see (c) as being much different than Pac-Man's power-ups or Galaga's extra ship, but there are clearly more of them. As for (a) and (b), I guess I can see how your mind might turn to RPGs if your only experience with gaming was from arcade games, but the computer and console worlds by 1984 had plenty of examples of storied protagonists who were not RPG heroes, not to mention plenty of examples (including in Japan) of actual RPGs. My overall point here is that authors who try to fit Druaga into a history of RPGs are relying heavily on Endō's and Namco's own limited experience outside the arcade world. 

       

I've completed the level's secret quest, so the treasure has appeared.

       

Druaga's legacy is far less about any pretensions to RPG status and far more about its hidden secrets and the improbability of any one player stumbling upon all of them. The first winner certainly had to stand on the shoulders of thousands of predecessors. Of course, players shared tips and tricks for getting high scores in Pac-Man, Asteroids, and Pitfall!, but for none of these games is collaboration an absolute necessity on the road to mastery. Accounts tell of spiral notebooks left on Druaga's arcade cabinets, each player logging secrets as he discovered them, creating a community out of a single-player game.  

        

Playing the game without these collaborative hints is an exercise in frustrating, unfair trial-and-error. There are legitimate RPGs that take such an approach; I think of Sword of Kadash from the same year, which strikes me as a lot closer to the sort of game that writers think Endō made when they're writing about Druaga. One is tempted to draw a line from this kind of gameplay to Dark Souls or Elden Ring, but isn't every arcade action game an exercise in such failure, frustration, and learning?

    

I played the MSX version for no particular reason except that I like the emulator and it seemed closest to the original arcade version. As I started Level 1, I spent about a dozen lives trying to figure out how to kill the slimes on the level. The character's default position is holding a shield in front of him, his sword ready just behind it. Hitting the action button causes Gilgamesh to swing the sword. There were a lot of "game over" screens before I realized that the swing is just an animation: if you want to kill enemies, you have to hold down the attack key and keep the sword permanently pointed in front of you, then charge into them.

           

You don't swing your sword in this game; you charge with it fully extended.

       

Ah, but not so fast. Charging into them only kills them if they're still. If the slimes are moving at all when you touch them, you die. Since all enemies seem to stop and start at random intervals, you have to be exceedingly careful. You want to hit them just as they've come to a stop, and even then only if you must. If they're not blocking your path, there's no reason to risk it. (This is my experience with the MSX version, anyway; others might be more or less forgiving.) On later levels, Gilgamesh's shield blocks missiles fired directly at him when held in rest position or from the left when brandishing the sword.

    

Level 1's secret mission is just to kill 3 slimes, so it's not so bad. When you've killed the third one, a treasure chest appears. Walking over it gives you a pick-axe that you can use three times per level—twice before you've found the hidden treasure, once after—to open one of the maze walls and thus shorten your journey. If you try to use it more than that, it disappears. You "use" the pick simply by facing a wall when you hit the attack button; I found it extremely easy to use it accidentally and lose it.

     

Level 2 introduces black slimes as well as green ones; killing two of these is the key to unlocking a pair of boots that speeds up the character's movement; this is not a treasure that any player should overlook. 

   

Level 3 offers a couple of armored characters in addition to the slimes. They're paradoxically easier to defeat; as long as the character has his sword readied, he just needs to pass through them a few times. (Unlike the slimes, it doesn't matter if they're moving.) Killing one of the pair unlocks a healing potion that acts as an extra life.

       

I kill an armored guy and a slime.

       

It's important to reiterate that during your time on these levels, a countdown clock is constantly running. If you defeat the level before it runs out, you keep what remains as bonus points. If the clock gets to 60, it turns red and begins counting down in seconds. At this point, one or two "wisps" might appear and start flying around the map. They cannot be killed and kill Gilgamesh instantly. I'm not sure it's possible to survive 60 seconds with the wisps on the map, but if you do, and the clock runs out, you die.

   

Level 4 is where things get hairy. It introduces a mage enemy who teleports around the level firing missiles. The missile kills Gilgamesh unless his shield is in front of him, which is contrary to the way the player has learned to move around on the previous three levels. Worse, finding the hidden treasure—a bell that chimes when you face in the direction of the level's key—can only be found by going to the door before you've found the key.

       

I've run out the clock and the wisps are searching for me.

        

Level 5 has half a dozen of those wizards, popping up all over the place, and the only way to find the secret treasure—a sword that doesn't do anything but is needed for a later treasure—is to block three of their missile attacks while moving towards them. 

   

You get the idea. Some of the steps needed to get the special treasure are ones that I never would have come up with on my own. Even if I had, I probably wouldn't have realized what triggered the treasure:

   

• Level 7: Deliberately break the pick-axe to get a stronger pick-axe that can be used more often.
• Level 20: Open the exit door without defeating any enemies first.
• Level 24: Swing the sword as soon as the level begins. This gets you a gauntlet that you need to later collect a better gauntlet.
• Level 30: Walk over the same (invisible) point on the map three times.
• Level 39: Press a particular sequence on the directional pad or joystick to get a ring that is absolutely necessary later on.

       

The upper levels of the tower have individually difficult enemies who require specific treasures to slay, some of which must be assembled from multiple individual treasures found on lower levels.

         

A wizard jumps around firing magic bolts.

       

I was relying on walkthroughs to tell me the hidden treasures by Level 4. Even worse, by that same level, I had reloaded save states probably 20 times. It naturally didn't make sense to me to expend any more effort on a non-RPG that would have required several types of cheating to win.

       

I can tell from online sources that the steps necessary to defeat Druaga, recover the rod, and save Princess Ki are quite specific. You first have to not find a fake blue rod on Level 57. The real one is on Level 58, and to find it, you have to pass through three random points in order. On Level 59, you have to kill a few wizards and a dragon before Druaga appears, slinging spells.

      

On Level 60, the player has to first touch the goddess Ishtar, then stop and brandish his sword in a couple of precise places to make two candles appear.  Finally, he grabs Princess Ki from the end of a corridor, returns to the middle of the screen, and the winning message appears. I wonder who reached that point for the first time, when, and after how many cumulative hours of previous players' frustrations.

       

The final level, courtesy of YouTube creator World of Longplays.

              

Druaga's ports vary in maze sizes, colors, movement speeds, graphical detail, and several game mechanics. Some of them offer secret alternate towers whose puzzles aren't fully cataloged online. The NES version, perhaps the most forgiving, lets the player start a new game on the highest completed floor from previous games. The 1990 Game Boy version removes "lives" and gives Gilgamesh hit points, including some objects that increase maximum hit points. This version starts to border on an RPG, but of course by 1990, but by then, the games that Druaga supposedly inspired—including Hydlide (1984), Dragon Slayer (1984), Deadly Towers (1986), The Legend of Zelda (1986), and Ys I (1987)—had all done the same thing.

       

The winning message, courtesy of YouTube creator World of Longplays.

          

The 1992 TurboGrafx-16 version is unquestionably an RPG. Gilgamesh finds a full set of RPG-style equipment, and the player can spend accumulated experience points on boosts to his attributes. It is also the most advanced graphically, with a titled perspective and much more detail on the various icons. This version is different enough that MobyGames considers it a separate game—a remake rather than a port—and I'm inclined to agree.

         

A shot from the TurboGrafx-16 version. Note that Gilgamesh has 78 hit points.

       

Druaga kicked off a series of games known as the "Babylonian Castle Saga"; sequels and prequels include Return of Ishtar (1986), Quest of Ki (1988), Blue Crystal Rod (1994), and some later 1990s and 2000s spin-offs. (Curiously, game databases are less likely to apply the RPG label to them than Druaga despite those games having a better claim.) Related media included a theme park ride and two anime series: The Tower of Druaga: The Aegis of Uruk (2008) and The Tower of Druaga: The Sword of Uruk (2009). 

    

So: Influential game? Yes. RPG? No—or at least not until it had been around so long that its ports were drawing features from other games. As to whether any arcade game or any game with "lives" could be an RPG, I leave that to your discussion.