BRIEF: Ring of Elanor (1987)

 

        

Ring of Elanor

United States

Independently developed; published in UpTime disk magazine

Released 1987 for Commodore 64

Did not finish because: Bugs

    

You rarely expect genius in diskmag games; at best, they might have one innovative thing or might do a good job evoking a better RPG without actually replicating it. The best we've seen so far are probably John Carmack and John Romero's Dark Designs trilogy (1990-1991) for Softdisk, evoking elements of both Wizardry and Phantasie. John Mattson's 1991 RPGs for the Commodore 128 had enough innovation to keep things interesting. These games weren't meant to compete with commercial titles, so you have to cut them a little slack.

   

But Ring of Elanor, at least in the only version I can find, is so completely broken that I really can't find anything positive to say about it. It was written by Mike Cooke and published in the Commodore 64 version of UpTime, where John Romero got his start on Apple II games. If it's consciously emulating anything, I don't know what. It feels like games I've played before, but I can't put my finger on a specific title.

      

A bit of the backstory.

     

The backstory is that you're in the land of Elanor, which used to be full of chaos and demons, until Elric the Lawful and the Brothers of Law banished Chaos and its minions from the mortal world. Elric created the Great Ring of Elanor and placed it on his statue in the center of the town of Homeland. The ring generated a magical "lawful" field that kept Chaos at bay. But now the ring has been stolen, and evil is returning to the world.

   

Character creation has the player give a name (in response to the question, "What durst thy name?") and then choose from elf, cleric, and human classes. The game randomly rolls between 1 and 15 for strength, intelligence, dexterity, charisma, hit points, and armor class. You get five chances to reject the statistics before you have to toss the character and start over. Each character starts with a different collection of spells, including "Invisibility," "Healing," "Web," "Create Food," and "Fireball." Finally, each character starts with around 10 food and between 50 and 85 silver.

      

My character sheet at Level 3. I had to cheat to get that much silver.

      

The character begins one step south of the city of Homeland, which is roughly in the center of the 40 x 22 game map. The text interface has a "word map" of the immediate surroundings in the upper right corner. The player is prompted to move any of the four cardinal directions, through fields, forests, swamps, and mountains, encountering random enemies and the occasional fixed encounter or treasure.

      

Get used to this message.

      

The game's first major flaw, though not its most fatal, becomes clear in the opening rounds. Every single movement and action requires 1 unit of food. The moment you hit 0, you starve to death. You never find food in the wild. In town, it costs a whopping 5 silver pieces per unit. So even if the starting player turns around, heads back into town, and spends everything on food (after buying a starting weapon), he'll at best have about 20 units. That's only barely enough to make it to the next-closest town before starving. And if you're thinking "Create Food" will help, it costs 1 unit to cast and only creates 1 unit.

        

If you try to use a spell too often, you get this message. Spelling is not the author's strong suit.

        

In most games, the solution would be to grind against monsters, amass money, and use it to buy more food. But here we have another problem in that random encounters at Level 1 are extremely rare. The only place that you can travel likely to have any random monsters at all is the swamps to the west of Homeland, where you might find a couple of golems. But even then, you'd be lucky to get 100 silver pieces from them, which would get you just enough food to pay for the trek and back.

     

I figured that if I just kept exploring until I died, I'd find some solution—something within the radius of Homeland that would give me enough money to move onward. My characters kept dying of starvation, almost never encountering even one foe, but I kept creating new ones and going off in different directions. Eventually, I had mapped everything within 20 moves of Homeland, and I was still no closer to finding a way to avoid starving to death, let alone attaining any loftier goals.

         

Any battle, let alone a victorious one, is rare in the early game.

            

In addition to food, the town sells all kinds of other items necessary for long-term survival, including armor, better weapons, healing, lanterns and torches to see in caves, and horses, which are necessary to enter mountainous areas. Since horses cost about 350 silver, there is no functional way to get there the way the game is programmed. The best I can figure, the author meant for food to deplete less rapidly, or for food to cost 1 silver for 5 units instead of the other way around.

       

Some of the items sold in Homeland village.

       

Thus, in an effort to see any part of the game beyond 20 moves from Homeland, I edited the character file to give myself enough money to buy plenty of food. With that, I was able to map the rest of the available world.

   

Combat comes along randomly, with enemies determined by the environment. You meet golems and swamp rats in swamps, werewolves and black bears in forests, goats and mountain cobras in mountains, and giant gophers and rattlesnakes in fields. In combat, you specify each round what weapon you'll use and then whether to attack the enemy's head, torso, or "rear." The annoying thing is that you have to type the full name of the weapon that you're using, no abbreviations. You wouldn't think it would be that hard to accurately type BROADSWORD, but I get it wrong at least half the time.

       

The sword isn't a great weapon, but at least it has fewer letters.

      

But even more enraging than that, there doesn't appear to be any way to attack with some of the magic items that you can find—silver dagger, +1 sword, +2 mace—because the game won't let you type a space in the name of the weapon. I tried just DAGGER and +1SWORD and other combinations, but it wants that space that it won't let you type. This is particularly infuriating because you're always breaking regular weapons. [Ed. The space thing was my stupid mistake. I'd mapped the SPACE bar to the joystick button in some previous game. The other bugs, alas, remain unconquerable.]

  

There are two fixed battles on the part of the map that I could explore, one with a brown dragon and one with a blue dragon. They offer additional body parts to attack. It didn't matter, because even at Level 10, I couldn't kill either of them without breaking all of my regular weapons and thus having nothing to attack with.

       

Sure would be nice to use one of my better weapons here.

      

Random battles come faster as the levels get higher, and the food issue stops being so much of a problem, though it never completely goes away. You gain a level every 1,000 experience, earning extra maximum hit points and (I think) greater attack accuracy. I never found a way to get spells that the character doesn't start with. "Fireball" came in handy for me often, and I imagine "Healing" does the same.

   

I explored as much of the map as I could. In addition to the fixed battles, there are two fixed treasure chests, one with a +2 mace and one with poison gas. There are two other towns: Outpost Village to the southwest and Northerly Village in the northeast. They sell exactly the same things as Homeland. I can't figure out how to get across the river to the northwest quadrant, but I suspect a pass becomes available after you defeat the blue dragon, which I wasn't able to do. 

       

As much as I could explore of the game world.

       

As you explore, the game saps your hit points by having random disasters befall you: falling trees in forests, quicksand in swamps, landslides on mountains, and ditches in fields. The accumulation of these misfortunes can be deadly.

        

The game says you're a "bold fighter" no matter what.

      

The final blow to the game's playability comes in the form of a large area of "foggy fields" to the northeast. Entering any of the foggy squares causes the game to crash with an error. I suspect it has something to do with checking to make sure the character has a lantern. 

      

My mother warned me about crashing in the fog.

      

On the plus side, the auto map works pretty well. X's indicate fixed encounters.

        

A small part of the game.

              

Finally, each town features a "town crier" who will offer a hint for half his money, but one of the hints is that town criers sometimes lie. An inspection of the file indicates that the hints are:

   

• "Werewolves are harmed by arrows." I know from experience this is a lie.
• "Werewolves are harmed by silver." Probably, but since SILVER DAGGER has a space in it, who knows?
• "One water passage is in the north."
• "One water passage is in the southwest." One of these might be true. Maybe you have to try every water square to see if the game will let you swim across in that location.
• "Mountains require horses." True.
• "Swamps require horses." False.
• "Ropes will save you in the swamp." True.
• "Ropes are needed in the caverns." False.
• "Evil hides in the northwest." Probably. I couldn't get there.
• "Evil hides in Homeland Village." That would be a cool twist, but where? In the menu? 

           

A little bit of information costs as much as 11 meals.

      

The same text file indicates that when you arrive back in Homeland with the ring, the end message is:

    

As you enter the village, a shout goes out and a group of people gather around you. They are amazed you returned so soon with the ring and are astonished by your battle scars and increased power. They lead you over to the statue of Elric, where the ring once rested and protected men, and where you must replace it. As the ring slips onto the statue, a smile slowly replaces the sad frown that has adorned its face since the loss of the ring. The journey is ended, and you are now the king of the world of mortal men and the keeper of the ring. 

 

Author Mike Cooke seems to have written at least two other games for UpTime: Battleship 64! and Memorizer 64! It doesn't appear that he wrote any other RPGs or that UpTime published any more RPGs. It's possible that the errors in this one are in the surviving copies and not the original.

 

Game 552: Magus (1993)

 

      

Magus

Sweden
Independently developed; released as freeware

Released around 1993 for DOS
Date Started: 25 June 2025

Date Ended: 5 July 2025

Total Hours: 7

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)  

         

I know some people don't understand my problem with mouse-only interfaces, and it occurred to me that maybe you just have to be of the right demographic. Maybe if you were born so long ago that the mouse still seems like a miracle, you resent that I'm always disrespecting it—but if you were born in the 2000s, you've already gotten used to doing everything from inside a browser, where keyboard shortcuts may exist, but they're inconsistent and a little janky. Maybe you have to have been born right between 1970 and 1990 to understand my perspective. But even those of you born outside that range, when you go to type an email, you still type it on the keyboard, right? You don't click every letter on a virtual keyboard with a mouse. Maybe if you thought about how annoying that would be, you'd understand where I'm coming from. 

     

Both of my active games have mouse-only interfaces, and moving my characters through them is like one of those nightmares where you're trying to get somewhere quickly but your legs are stuck in quicksand. To this, add inconsistent, undocumented rules about left-clicking and right-clicking and you can see why these two titles have not helped facilitate my return to regular blogging.

       

Approaching a castle in Magus.

      

Magus is otherwise a tolerable graphical roguelike (see the glossary). It doesn't break a lot of new ground, but it's enjoyable enough for a free game. You create a party and explore a 200 x 320 game world, fighting monsters and picking up items. The manual says that the goal is: "To have fun—or as an option to waste the bad mage in the citadel." I wish I could take the game at its word, spend the minimum amount of time "having fun," and call it a day, but since killing the bad mage "wins the game," I have to believe that that's the "real" quest.

   

During character creation, you can select from shaman, wizard, elf, barbarian, knight, dwarf, druid, duck, and duck mage classes. The "duck" characters look like the Donald variety. Apparently, they can walk across water. Beyond that, the duck has comparable statistics to the elf and the duck mage has comparable statistics to the wizard. Each class has different values in mana, health, strength, agility, and wisdom, but these can be manually adjusted. Clicking on the portrait changes the sex for most classes. I have no idea what the party limit is. The game let me create a party of 24 characters without any complaint. 

         

Creating a druid character.

     

The party starts in a tower in the top center of the overall game map. The map is fixed in geography, but new items and enemies are distributed across it for each new game. From there, they can begin moving around, fighting, and picking up items. You can play the characters cooperatively, independently, or, I suppose, antagonistically (i.e., if there was more than one player). The problem with all of these methods is that each character only gets a small number of movement points (between 4 and 6 on average) per round, so you're constantly having to switch them after only a couple of actions, then hit "End Turn" when all of the characters have gone. Again, this is extra annoying where all your actions have to be done with the mouse.

   

You start with a small selection of items appropriate to the class and immediately start finding more. A strict encumbrance limit keeps you from loading up on too much inventory; spellcasters do the best here because spells weigh nothing. You left-click to identify an item and right-click to move it around between "in pack," "carrying" (i.e., equipped), and "using" (i.e., wielded). You have to stand on an item and left-click on yourself to pick it up. If you right-click on yourself, you attack yourself, so you can see how this control configuration sucks a bit.

        

Lots of goodies in these rooms.

     

Weapons and armor have bonus values between -7 and 7, but the negatives aren't "cursed"; they're just worse. There's no viewable statistic that tells you the base value, so I don't know whether, say, a short sword +3 is better than a long sword +2 or a silver shield - 2 is better than a wooden shield +3. There are missile weapons. Spells are wielded like weapons and deplete mana when cast. There are potions and amulets that raise attributes. If any of them have negative effects, I haven't found any, so the game is perhaps more "roguelite" than "roguelike," but it does enforce permadeath. The moment you load a saved game, it wipes it from the drive and only writes a new one when you quit.

        

Enemies are standard fantasy types, including goblins, trolls, zombies, skeletons, ghosts, minotaurs, sorcerers, death knights, demons, and dragons. They have a variety of melee, ranged, and spell attacks, but I don't think the game has any resistances; fire attacks seemed to do just fine against fire-based creatures, for instance. To fight enemies, you right-click the mouse on them. You need to be standing next to them to attack with a melee weapon, but spells and missile weapons work at range. You can also left-click on them to bring up a menu that lets you shove them, say "Booh!," and swear at them, but I don't know whether those options actually accomplish anything.

        

Some of the non-combat encounters.

      

Enemies only get to move and attack after the party has ended its turn. They respawn at a pretty good clip, and it's rare that I can't see at least one somewhere on the screen.

   

Experience is rewarded for successful actions (hits and spells cast) instead of kills. This includes healing and buffing spells cast on party members. Leveling up occurs at regular intervals of experience (I think 50, 50, 100, 100, 100, 100, 200, 200, 300, 300, 500, 500), with a level maximum of 11. Level-ups are accompanied only by +10 maximum mana and health. Finding potions, amulets, and other items that increase attributes is probably more important than leveling.

       

I get myself surrounded.

      

I tried playing for a while with a party of four characters—knight, barbarian, wizard, shaman—but I found it so annoying to constantly be switching between characters that I decided to try a single character. I went with a wizard because the variety of spells seems like it's going to be one of the best parts of the game, but even here I think the game makes a distinction between arcane and divine magic, so I'll miss some. Druids, interestingly, don't bridge the gap but instead have their own spells. They come with 4 of them that can summon allies of fire, earth, water, or air. This is cool in concept, but those allies just become party members with the same movement point annoyance.

      

My party meets a couple of foes.

      

The wizard starts with a dagger, a cloak, and three spells: "Fireball," "Vision," and "Portal." They're all pretty cool. "Fireball" is naturally a ranged damage spell; it kills most of the starting-area creatures in two hits. "Vision" lets you see everything on the active screen, including stuff normally hidden by buildings or behind trees. "Portal" is a teleport spell that lets you go anywhere on the visible screen. The problem, of course, is that these spells all cost points, and magic only restores at a rate of 3 points per turn. You restore as many hit points between turns as you had movement points left over when you ended the turn. Some items give regenerative effects that let you restore more. Throughout the game, I was always looking for safe places (usually dead-ends, or behind doors) where I could rest for multiple rounds undisturbed.

      

There are "NPCs" of a sort in the form of what I guess are supposed to be little gnomes in pointy hats; again, I find it hard to perceive any real graphic detail at this resolution. They're labeled "nicey" in the interface. The manual warns that if you attack them, dire consequences will follow. You can sidle up to them and give them your inventory items—supposedly, they like heavier items—but I never noticed any advantage for doing this.

     

He looks pretty much the same as me.

       

The game has some interesting "set pieces" across its territory, including dungeons and caves in the various mountains, towns, castles surrounded by moats, deserts, and swamps. Because all there is to do in the game is fight and find items, these areas aren't really used for any special encounters, but they're at least fun graphically. Most of the best items in the game seem to be behind doors, so it's always a slight thrill to find a keep surrounded by a moat or a cluster of buildings.

        

The world map, courtesy of cxong's GitHub site, linked below.

          

Enemies get harder the farther you get from the starting area, so to succeed with a single mage, I had to explore slowly, in east-west strips, moving south in increments. I found potions and items that boosted my character, including an elven cloak +3, which I think increased hit point regeneration between rounds, a Dragontooth +3 sword for when my spell point ran low, and "focus" bracers that increased my strength (and, thus, encumbrance) to 20. In my winning game, yellow potions (and a few items) increased movement, which is probably the most powerful buff you can get in the game. Higher movement means more attacks and more time to flee, although it also means you deplete your spell points faster and have to recharge more often.

      

Even "focus -3" made my strength go up to 20.

           

I experimented with spells. The game has both individual-damage and mass-damage spells. Oddly, one pair of these—"Fireball" vs. "Inferno"—mirrors a similar pair in Sandor II. (One solid rule is that if you pick any two random RPGs, you will find strange parallels in their mechanics.) There are buffing spells like "FastFeet" and "Berserk" and enemy debuffing spells like "StoneFeet." I got several ally-summoning spells like "Skeleton" and "Zombie" as well as exploration spells like "Vision," "Portal," and "Hyperspace."

       

Casting "View" on the bad mage's castle.

       

Mostly, I just blasted things. Having a missile weapon or an offensive spell that works from a distance makes a big difference in the game. I soon replaced "Fireball" with "Fireball +3," and when I found scrolls of enhancement (which increase the value of anything by 1), I tended to use them on "Fireball." Increasing the potency of spells not only improves their effects but also reduces the cost.

   

If I overextended myself, "Portal" was there to rescue me, especially if I left an ally behind for the enemy to concentrate on. I eventually found another quirk of the game, and another parallel to Sandor II: While enemies will move and attack in the same round, they will not attack and then move. If I found a particularly difficult enemy, I could summon an ally, attack him a few times, and then escape with "Portal" or by walking through a door. The enemy would kill my ally and then just sit there. Next round, I would re-enter his range and do it again. This was the only way my lone wizard could kill dragons, who otherwise had enough movement to pound away my hit points in a single round.

     

Fighting a dragon in its chamber. He won't move to chase me as long as he has a summoned skeleton to attack.

     

The "bad mage" and his citadel are on the southern border of the map. The mage has three tough guards in his large room. The rest of the citadel has no enemies and lots of equipment. The only way my single wizard could defeat the mage's guards and the mage was to adopt the "hit and run" tactics discussed above. I had to save scum several times as I figured it out.

    

A shot from my final battle with the bad mage, who can walk through walls.

       

The game ended after I killed the bad mage and then ended the turn. The denouement was odd. A screen came up that said, "Pure luck . . . " and had a button that said, "Blah!" I clicked that and then got a new screen that said, "Look, guys . . ." and a button that said, "Please?" Next combination: "Noooooo" and "Aaargh!" Then no message with a button that said, "Horray!" I guess maybe the idea is that the bad mage was saying the things on the screen and I was replying with the things on the button.

          

I don't know why I'm saying, "Please?," though.

       

Finally, it brought me to the leaderboard with my character on top. It showed me with 1,000 more experience points than I had before ending the game, which got me to the highest level and rank.

 

I'm just glad I did better than "Servant."

            

In a GIMLET, Magus earns:

   

• 0 points for the game world. We're told nothing about it at all.

• 3 points for character creation and development, most of the credit here going to the variety of classes.

            

The game is very generous in the number of characters you're allowed to field at one time.

      

• 1 point for NPC interaction. There are no NPCs unless you count those gnomes. I'll give a point here to give it the benefit of the doubt, but I don't know what purpose they served.

• 3 points for encounters and foes. There aren't really any encounters other than foes, but the enemies have a variety of strengths and weaknesses. I just wish they had names.

• 4 points for magic and combat. The magic and combat system are relatively robust, with quite a few options. The major problem is a lack of feedback. You don't ever see the names of the spells enemies cast against you, and you don't see how much damage your attacks do or whether your spells are successful.

• 4 points for equipment. Finding items is a major part of the game, but the game should offer more information about them.

     

A rare item. I wasn't able to wield it.

     

• 0 points for no economy.

• 2 points for a main quest.

      

Peeking into the bad mage's chamber at the end of the game.

     

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I give none for the interface and 1 point each for the others. The PC speaker sound effects are tolerable.

• 5 points for gameplay. I would consider it relatively nonlinear. The different experiences of different classes plus the randomization of loot makes it somewhat replayable. The length and difficulty are about right.

   

That's a final score of 24. Magus is a good outline of a game. It needed a bit more content and some interface refinements to compete with commercial games of the period.

   

The version I played was the second edition. I have been able to find out no information about the first edition and when it would have been available. This GitHub site archives both the second and a third edition, but thanks to a lack of copyright date, it's unclear when the third edition was created except that it must have been after 1994. 

   

The author is listed as Ronny Wester from Stockholm, Sweden—"better known," according to the same site, for Cyberdogs (1994) and C-Dogs (1997), neither of which I'd heard of. They seem to be mission-based, top-down action games. The third edition of Magus reportedly adds Sound Blaster support with effects from Cyberdogs, some of which were cribbed from Doom.

    

Wester would have been about 24 years old in 1993. His c.v. shows him working at Orc Software during the same period, which despite its name had nothing to do with fantasy or games. Wester's old web site (no longer online) describes how he got into gaming by playing old ZX Spectrum games in the 1980s. In the 2010s, he wrote that he had just tried one of the old games on a Spectrum emulator and "won the game [on the] first try, using the keyboard." He added, "Is that good or pathetic, I wonder?" I'd say "ironic," Mr. Wester. Definitely ironic.

     

***

 

Credit to Pixelmusment's YouTube video on Magus for various bits of trivia and for helping me figure out a few elements. 

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 (1983), 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, 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 tilted perspective and much more detail on the various objects. 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. 

 

 

Sandor II: A Midsummer Night's RPG

 

My party stays up all night in a forest.

                

Since I was teenager, I've tried to adhere to the tradition of staying up all night on the Summer Solstice, which isn't at all that hard given my natural circadian rhythm. I'd like to say that I'm usually doing something interesting during that time—gamboling in a forest outside Athens, for instance—but I suppose most of those 35 years have been spent on a computer or in front of a television set. This year, I spent it playing Sandor II. There was a time I wouldn't want to admit that, but I'm old now and have no one left to impress.

       

It became clear this session that the game is a lot larger than I thought. What I took for the entire game world in the automap was just the portion that I was able to see based on my current "Cartography" skill. When I pumped that skill up to 100% and saw the entire thing, I realized it's more than a dozen times as large as the small, walled-in starting area in the northwest.

      

The full world map. In this session, I didn't go further east than Column D or further south than Row 4. The opening area is basically A1:A4.

           

A second revelation was that there was more to the interface than I realized. Thanks to Buck for cluing me in. Right-clicking while in dungeons brings up some options, including the ability to see the current time and to wait. I tried it in the dungeon with the three fountains, and the same NPC who I had met outside came along. He told me of the importance of two words. "One word opens the fortress, but the other you must tell the gatekeeper! Now listen carefully. Whoever forgets the 7th letter of my first name gets one. Whoever swaps the first 4 gets the other. Well, farewell to you."

   

The NPC is named FLORIAN, so one of the passwords is FLORIA and the other . . . well, "swaps the other four" could mean several things, and I would have saved myself 44 guesses if I had realized that it meant "put them in reverse order." Instead, I interpreted it as "changed the order" and I listed all 23 possibilities—but really 46 because I didn't know whether I should keep the IAN or not. When FLORIA didn't work on the guard at the gate surrounding the starting area, I tried FLRO, FLROIAN, FORL, FORLIAN, and so forth, before getting it at the end of the list with ROLF.

       

Waiting until midnight in the dungeon.

           

Unfortunately, while ROLF let me through the gate, it didn't work when trying to get back. I left some undone stuff in the starting area. That was particularly unfortunate because I had a third revelation in the first dungeon I found on the other side of the gate: Dungeon doors haven't been locked. What I took for "locked" doors could be opened with an "open" command on the same screen as the clock. Some of them require forcing the door or picking the lock, and you have multiple tries to do so. I still think there is some door that's going to require stones (as per one of the tavern tips), but I haven't found it yet.

       

Exploring the island kingdom.

      

I didn't explore this first dungeon very far. Instead, I hopped a ferry across a channel to another walled-in area. Eventually, I came to a house with a woman who offered to ferry me across yet another river. There was no river nearby. I said yes anyway and found myself on a couple of islands connected by a bridge, with no way back. I wandered to the southern island and met a mage who said I was in the Island Kingdom of Bramos and that I had to pass a test; specifically, this riddle:

      

German	English
Ein Glanzmetall steht hier am Anfang. Ihm folgt in tiefem Schwarz ein Anhang. Ein Mensch mit einem Angebot. Man wählt. Er schleppt herbei, was Not. Wir aber sehen bei der Verschmelzung der beiden schließlich nur noch Rot.	A shiny metal stands at the beginning here. It is followed by an appendage in deep black. A person with an offer. One chooses. He brings what is needed. But when the two merge, we ultimately see only red.

     

I couldn't get anywhere with it; fortunately, commenters matt w and Michl figured it out: ZINNOBER, or CINNABAR in English. The shiny metal is meant to make you think of tin (zinn) and the person with an offer is meant to make you think of a waiter (ober). "When the two merge, we ultimately see only red" refers to the vermilion color of cinnabar. I'm not sure what the "appendage in deep black" is about.

    

As a consequence of answering the riddle successfully, teleporters bounced my party around several islands before we met the "representative of the King of Bramos," a cyclops, who gave us Kotalan's Ring. I assume that becomes vital later. (Kotalan is the evil wizard who has kidnapped the three princesses.) A ferry took us back to where we came from.

       

That is one ugly cyclops.

         

Other findings in this new area were cities called Lunosa and Terosa; schools offering to train "Cartography"; "Hunting"; "Negotiation"; and "Trap Removal"; and a spell school. At this latter location, my spellcasters learned "Strength 1," "Ninja 1," and "Flame Jet 1." "Flame Jet" turns out to be awesome, damaging every enemy on the screen.

     

As I continued to explore, I kept getting trounced by the enemies in the wilderness, so I returned to the dungeon near the entrance to this area. Amidst a few battles, I met an NPC who told me that I'd left the "Old Land," and that to get back, I would need a different password. He gave me instructions to go to a grove of trees to the southwest and wait, which I did. A voice gave the password as GORF.

      

I guess technically I wasn't supposed to wait after sundown, but it didn't seem to have any negative effect.

       

I had picked up a fifth party member, Iain, in one of the towns. In the dungeon, two more offered to join the party. I only had room for one, and I took the one (Bridget) who had better spellcasting statistics. That gives me three fighter characters and three mage characters.

         

The last character.

         

Now that I had the password back to the starting area, a full party, and a better sense of how the game worked, I felt better equipped to explore things comprehensively. I broke the world map into quadrants and began exploring them starting in quadrant A1. Most of these places, I'd already been, but here we go anyway:

 

• City of Kolono (A1). Trainer. Tavern tip is about the king's daughters.

• Cartography School (A1). I pumped Sirus up to 100%.

• City of Malonga (A1). Has a guild (where you level up). Tavern tip is also about the king.

• King's Castle (A1). Already been here, got the quest to rescue the princesses from Kotalan.

• Cave that's looking for a 4-symbol combination on the door (A1). No clues yet, but see below.

• Dungeon (A1). Wolfsstein Ruins. I thought it had a locked door when I entered before, but it didn't. I find no enemy parties in here, just a lot of adventurers who offer to join my already-full party.

      

If Sirus had entered this dungeon first, he could have completed his party all at once.

       

• Dungeon with the Three Wells (A2), as described above.

• Cartography School (A2).

• Locksmith School (A3). I trained Iain up to 50%. 

• Ferries (A3/A4).

• Cave with the Mosaic (A3). I can't get in until I figure out the pattern. I later found a mosaic picture in the B4 dungeon, but it doesn't seem to be the one that this cave is looking for.

• City of Paradiso (A4). Guild. Training. Tavern tale is about putting stones in a gate to make it open.

• City of Kassada (A4). Red and platinum gems for sale. Tavern tale is about creatures whose charms are irresistible to men but not to women.

• Magic School (A4).

• Dungeon (B4). This is the one with all the traps. A spiral hallway ended in a door that wanted 3 symbols out of 5. That's only 10 possible combinations, and I got it on the first try (the first 3 buttons). Beyond was a message and a picture of a mosaic, but not the one for the cave in A3.

      

Actually, I may be wrong. The top image shows the mosaic in the dungeon; the bottom my (nearly complete) attempt to replicate it in the cave. I just realized that I had the top bar in the second glyph wrong. I'll try again before the next entry.

       

The message in that last dungeon was:

      

There is a gate and a secret mechanism that opens it, there in the temple of the deceased. Whoever solves the riddle will receive his legacy as a reward and my help in the fight against the hordes of the Kotalan. He who can see, let him SEE.

       

After this, I got thinking: assuming no buttons are pressed twice, and the order doesn't matter, how many possible combinations can there be of 4 buttons out of 8? (I didn't know for sure that no button was pressed twice and the order didn't matter, but my experience in the last dungeon made me suspect it.) The answer is 70. I decided that was just on this side of "too many," returned to the cave in A1, and got to work. The door opened after a couple of dozen guesses.

      

I still wonder how I was supposed to do this "for real."

          

The dungeon beyond the door was the largest in the game so far, with numerous combats and messages:

      

• In many great vaults there is nothing but nothing.
• We've already been there and took everything! Signed, Olaf the Red.
• You have a choice: Take the short road or the long road. Both will lead you to the Realm of Madness. It's not worth turning back!
• You have chosen the long road. You will starve.

      

The only other encounter I found was with a guy who demanded all my food. I gave it to him and he laughed about how much of an idiot I was and disappeared. I reloaded and said no, and nothing else came of the encounter. I don't know whether I missed something, but I found nothing else in the dungeon; perhaps those first two messages were meant to be taken literally.

         

Note from the automap the size of the dungeon level.

          

Except when I got ahead of myself and started meeting Level 6-7 enemies, combat has been relatively simple so far, but that's partly because I learned an early trick. The party always goes first. All characters get 5 movement points. Moving a space costs 1; attacking costs 2 unless you have only 1 point left, in which case you can attack for 1; spells cost 2. Characters can move and attack in the same round, but it doesn't appear that enemies can. Thus, you're safe from melee enemies as long as you don't end a round next to them. Spellcasters and missile enemies can hit you from wherever, though, and some spellcasters have the equivalent of "Flame Jet." Other than "Flame Jet 1," "Firebolt 1," and "Healing 1," I haven't experienced much with spells myself.

       

Conleth blasts the enemies with "Flame Jet 1." The game cycles through each enemy and gives the damage done.

        

There are two tedious parts of playing the game. The first has to do with equipment. Trying to identify everything after combat (you often get 8-10 items), figuring out what's more powerful than what I already have, then testing to see which characters have the strength to equip it, takes so long that I know I've been overlooking potential upgrades. The second tedious part of the game is having to click on everything. I would pay good money for the numberpad to control movement. 

     

Like most Motelsoft games, though, there's something charming about it overall. Character development is palpably rewarding, and there's a minor thrill that comes with overcoming each puzzle and challenge and opening up a new area, perhaps heightened for me because I also have to struggle with the language. Something will probably block me permanently before the end, but I'll do my best to get there.

   

Time so far: 14 hours