In Progress Lets Play: Shining in the Darkness

[Damned Registrations]

No weak ass save scumming, automapping dungeon crawl is this. No sir, behold, the monblutian RPG for the hardcore elite, Shining in the Darkness:

(This is in fact the title screen.)

Looks like they had Snuggies back in the day too.

Note that you can't make multiple saves from one game; the 3 slots are just to facilitate multiple people playing on the same cartridge. Since, you know, game companies weren't dicks back then.

There can be only one answer to such a question.

It barely fit too,

He must be lurking our forums. He certainly looks like a deviant.

Sorry, thats not quite enough tropes, could you ladle in a few more?

Those sound like totally useful friends and not at all like useless children.

Hear that? The king awaits us. SIR Codex. We must be pretty damn important huh?

Indeed.

Video game tropes/minute rate approaching critical mass...

What? You mean the king is actually willing to outfit someone (a single someone) with gold to equip themselves for the sake of his own daughter? How generous!

200 gold pieces must clearly be enough for proper equipment. It's the princess after all, and we're the best knight available. We'll be geared at least as well as sir Barristan Tristan.

Behold the 3D display of a lifetime, as only the genesis can perform:

Technically I missed a few frames, but I'm sure you were sufficiently amazed by those two.

Well, to the arsenal!

So we were given precisely enough gold to buy a sword, (a short sword at that) and nothing more. That's a bit stingy. What else does he have anyways?

Geez, looks like our pay was missing about 2 digits off what we actually needed. We should check and see what we already have before buying anything though. Would be stupid to buy a sword if we already have one, right?

With an IQ of 8, I suppose that explains why we can't speak and aren't trusted with enough money to buy a decent set of clothes, let alone armor and weapons.

So we're entirely lacking a shield and helm. Lets see what stats our current equipment provide compared to our innate stats:

The knife is kinda shitty. 5 attack on top of 18.

The robe on the other hand, is tripling our defense. Lets see what armor is for sale. Maybe we can get that instead.

Dear god he's smoking a pipe! Think of all the children this profane imagery must have corrupted. Thank god such things are censored these days. Anyways, what is for sale?

I have a feeling a cloth hood won't exactly make us invincible. Looks like mage armor. Shields?

A gauntlet seems more reasonable. And for armor?

We can't even afford better body armor yet. Even a straw robe is 250 gold, and we're already wearing a woven robe, which is worth 200. Whats the other armor?

God damn. Only 15 more princesses to rescue before we can afford that. Hope the king is a busy man.
________________________________
So codex, what do you think? What should we buy? Where should we go? How many pages will this reach before it gets abandoned?

 

[Yeesh]

Three pages, buy the caveman club and save up for the cloth kkk hood, and move in the direction of the nearest white woman who needs saving.

My but this site does know how to get its 16-bit on.

 

[anus_pounder]

This looks like it has potential.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Update 1

And so our noble and not at all cliched quest continues. First, we buy a very expensive stick worth a large quantity of gold (you'd think a gold club would be cheaper and more effective at this price.)

Of course, if we have a club, we don't need our knife do we?

Even the merchants weren't such dicks back then. 75% value for the sale. Sweet. Lets go pick up that hood then.

Oh fuck. I guess we don't want it after all. We'll have to settle for a collar grabbing implement:

The club is, shockingly, hardly any better than the knife. A single extra attack point. Oh well. With the sale factored in we only spent 45 gold on it anyways.

The gauntlet is pretty sweet OTOH, bumping us up to 18 armor, a 50% improvement. Those giant rats will surely tremble in fear of us now. Incidentally, there are other buildings in town:

But we have pressing business to attend to.

Mind = Blown.

You'd think he'd be busy with at least one other person.

Why are you even here if the minister is telling me everything?

Well, given that the only 3 places in the kingdom are here, the town, and the labyrinth, labyrinth is probably a safe bet at this point.

But suddenly!

Oh, the king has a name. Imagine that.

Almost, but not quite as cheesy sounding as our introduction was. Impressive.

*gasp*

I'll spare you my terrible gif editing skills and just tell you the screen flashed here.

And again. Apparently the badass minister is the only one that doesn't have to take any lip from Gargamel Dark Sol.

He vanished in a flash of light! He MUST be evil! Either that or he dressed up as Theo.

Of course. Leave the Sol popping to us!

The court has a few words if you bother to talk to them:

So what you're saying is, we should have bought that hood after all? Duly noted.

The Nameless One The minister is clearly wearing the pants here. I mean literally. Everyone else is either in a robe or armor. He's the only one with pants.

You're just hoping I find an ancient dwarven cure for baldness, aren't you?

At last, adventure is upon us!

Very next-gen. All this brown, they were decades ahead of their time.

We came in through here:

Lets start walking!

First dead end found in 3 steps. Such a fiendish maze!

The enemy! Can our arms possible prevail over the darkest of foes... animated piles of snot?

Well our armor is certainly holding out just fine.

And our weapon seems good enough too.

Glorious victory is ours!

An awesome blow. Truly we are blessed with majestic talent.

Phat lewt is ours. Now we know why pipes are so popular around here. HERB is pretty easy to acquire.

Aha! Of course, we fail to kill even a single enemy with our first attack.

And to make things worse, our second attack hits a different foe, since we can only target groups of foes, and not individual foes.

Of course, we win anyways, being the best knight in the kingdom and all.

After a bit of exploring we find:

Clearly a noteworthy find. We can't pass through it, however...

Our 8 IQ is performing as expected.

The dungeon actually branches a lot quite early. We quickly find this little hallway. Nothing special happens when we enter it, but it'll help us keep our bearings.

Constantly being accosted by slimes is wearing us down.

But we put off healing for as long as possible, to get the best use out of our HERB.

Excellent! We don't raise our current HP with a level up, so increasing our max hp here will let us benefit a lot mroe from the healing.

At this rate it'll be quite some time before we reach Clevian levels of intelligence, it seems.

*low whistle* Thats about 200 gold worth of attack power, I bet.

And thats about 20 gold worth of defense. *sigh*

We take some time to chill.

Much better. We should head back though, now that we have no healing items left. It would suck to kick the bucket by exploring too far without any contingency. We poke around for just a little bit more,

finding this other landmark we don't go past:

And getting ambushed by mysterious shadows we can't possibly identify:

We also find one more dead end before heading back:

Ah, it will be good to enjoy the feedom of the outdoors again. Except for the part where we become rooted to the spot and only able to turn in place and enter doors.

16-bit bloom is awe inspiring indeed. But our eyes adjust much faster than a vault dweller's.

Lets check out the local jew stronghold.

I shit you not, I just npw while writing this, realized the colourful thing above his head is a stained glass window. I always thought it was his hat before. He seems so much less impressive now.

Apparently being molested by slimy ooze isn't a problem for the priest. What a revelation.

That's actually pretty close. This is the only place in the game you get this information, btw.

We save the old fashioned way, since savestates would disgrace our monocles.

We duck inside the tavern. It's quite busy:

And they couldn't find me? There's like, not two dozen people in this entire kingdom. Their IQ must be on par with ours.

Yes. Avoiding additional party members is definitely the first order of business.

You can talk to everyone in the tavern by the way. Panning to the right reveals Andyman, shirking his LP duties.

This is also where we can rest, which iirc costs a whopping 10 gold, of our currently stashed 65 or so.

In the next update we shall proceed further in the labyrinth, but things from the local druglord ALKEMIST, and possibly talk to a bunch of furries in the tavern.

 

[Yeesh]

Fiend of fiends!

By the Blood of the Ancients!

 

[Majestic47]

Game looks very painful.
Nice LP btw.

 

[lightbane]

So many furries Even so, I remember the game was really good for what it was.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Yay! This is a pretty fun game.

 

[spekkio]

Another proof that Snes >>> Genesis.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Update 2: This one is a bit shorter, since I had planned to have filtered screenshots on this one. However, apparently Kega doesn't give a fuck if the game is filtered, and pops out the originals anyways. Oh well, these take up way less bandwidth anyways.

First order of business: we destroy our credibility by talking to a furry.

This is actually some pretty dialogue compared to all the corny light/darkness stuff. I was quite impressed. Mind you, I was also like, 8 years old or something. But this part held up surprisingly well. Ambition and death doesn't pop up very often in most other jrpgs.

Yeah he did seem like a bit of a dick. Lets talk to the owner's wife next.

That's SIR CODEX to you.

So far behind it feels like I have no support at all, in fact.

You know, I never thought about this beforehand, but don't I live here? I have friends here, I'm a knight at the castle which is apparently not far away, don't I have my own bed to sleep in? How did I manage to live before now?

Anyways, the tavern empties out when you wake up, which is a nice touch:

In order to have a nice day, we're going to need some drugs, I think.

Most shopkeep ever.

Wow, stuff we can actually afford!

Kind of obvious what this does. Better safe than sorry, especially at that low a price.

We'll see what this does

as well as this, later when I use them.

Actually, I use the wisdom seed almost right away when entering the dungeon. This is the same torch hallway as before.

Thats right ladies and gentlemen, you need a consumable to open the map in SitD. Note that it isn't a perfect map either; it only shows tiles we've stepped on, and shows no details. The dungeon entrance is at the bottom, directly below us. To our right is an actual dead end hallway, but the winding path ahead actually forks at the second corner.

We also get our X/Y coordinates, which is handy.

We move onward, depper into the dungeon this time, past the puddle we stopped at before.

Shortly after, we are accosted by multi-headed somethings in the dark!

These actually hit a little harder than slimes but have even less defense. But sicne we bought more armor early and are level 2 already, they're no different from slimes at this point.

The chest you see in the distance contained some more HERB, which we picked up. Unfortunately, I bungled the screenshots. Added to the two we bought, this gives us a total of three:

Note that that is our full inventory space. Equipment takes up slots too, so we currently only have 5 spaces for consumables and anything we find in the dungeon. And this'll be only four spaces when we finally buy a helm! If that seems like a rather harsh limit, well, it is. Carefully deciding what to bring with you remains an important factor to success throughout the game.

While exploring, we find devious manboons!

These can actually hurt us, even with our extra armor. If we were level one with default armor we'd probably have to flee from these guys. But we aren't so we kick ass instead!

More new enemies:

These can actually appear right at the entrance, but we just didn't encounter any until now. Aside from having better attack/defense/hp than slimes (but worse speed), they're also the first encounter we have that displays a special ability:

Cave Slugs can block attacks. This isn't due to low attack power, but just a flat chance of ignoring a melee hit. However, we push on and win the battle, gaining another level:

IQ+3
Speed+2
Luck +2
Attack+3
Defense+1

More slugs. They miss fairly often since they're so slow.

Another chest. I actually take screenshots this time.

Though I still fuck it up enough that you can't tell it's another HERB.

We can't take it since our inventory is full.

Fortunately leaving it just puts it back in the chest, unlike if we'd found an item after battle.

We use one of our herbs and grab this one before moving on.

Dear god, the dungeon has animated grape jelly as well as snot. The princess is in dire peril indeed.

These can also hurt us like the manboons. Additional, these buggers are fast, often moving before us.

But the rewards are significantly better than the green oozes.

Manboon enrichment squad. We defeat them, but lose quite a few hp in the process. However, we gain another level:

HP+7
IQ+3
Speed+2
Luck+2
Attack+4
Defense+2

We wander around a bit more, but realize we are completely lost, and not actually heading back to the entrance as we intended. Rather than risk a horrible death by blundering even deeper into the dungeon, we use one of our precious items, the most expensive we bought:

Yep, Angel Feathers serve as our popamole get out of jail free cards. However, they use up a precious inventory slot and cost 24 gold, which is fairly hefty right now. However, after resting at the inn, we've made some progress:

Two more levels have brought our stats up quite a bit. Our attack is rather respectable now, and our HP are high enough that it won't be a waste to use an herb without being on deaths door. We have 95 gold left after the stay at the inn, and we still have most of our supplies too:

In the next episode, there shall be more furry DISCUSSion, more dungeon spelunking, possibly some new equipment purchase, and we'll start drawing our own map (If anyone wants to recommend a good tool for this other than generic image editor, that'd be cool), because fuck if I can memorize this shit or afford space for wisdom seeds.

 

[spekkio]

A blonde shopkeeper with suspicious jew-bone, selling the Seed of Wisdom?

I feel strange Codexian vibes coming from this game...

 

[Damned Registrations]

After looking around a bit, I've come to the conclusion that existing map tools are made of fail. All I want is something that lets me paint tiles on a fucking grid, and quickly edit/make new tiles and a legend for the map. But everything is either drag and drop (which is retarded when you're trying to place dozens of tiles) or doesn't let you customize fuck all, or both.

Edit: Found something. Of course, it's not free. ARGHTREHGKRHG.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Found something else. It's not quite as good as what I'd hoped for (I have to edit mother fucking xml files to add new custom tiles and doodads made in another editor ffs!) but it'll do the trick.

 

[eric__s]

One of my first dungeon crawlers!

The guy who did the character designs in this and Shining Force, Yoshitaka Tamaki, is my favorite character designer ever. Check out the characters he made for FEDA: Emblem of Justice.

The characters are a little more serious or whatever, but you can see a direct progression from Shining in the Darkness to FEDA. It's pretty cool.

Good luck with this!

Uh, why does my post require moderator authorization?

 

[Luzur]

i never made it far in this game, end of level 3 if i dont remember it wrong.

prob look up some cheats and finish this puppy someday.

 

[anus_pounder]

Your commentary is the real highlight here. Pretty funny stuff. Keep going harder and I'll keep coming for you.

 

[Yeesh]

On the one hand, of course it's deliciously olde skoole to have to draw your own goddamned map. On the other hand, fuck dude. Can a man get too old for this shit, when this shit is retro gaming that he remembers from the first time around? Or is this a conceptual oxymoron?

 

[Damned Registrations]

SitD Update 3:

Our continued attempts at furry diplomacy fail us:

Lets try talking with the gnome or whatever it is instead:

Been what way?

Oh. Old? Pathetic? Drunk?

What a buzzkill. Why aren't you helping TACK? Don't you realize Gnorn needs internets booze?

We try talking to the only none hideous creature currently in the room:

According to the furry knight he's probably dead already. Tough luck sis.

I have no idea what edward is supposed to be, honestly. That face scares me. We retreat to the dungeon where such eldritch horrors dare not dwell.

God damn I love that glow when you first open a chest.

Excellent. Our jewgolds supply grows steadily. In fact, after some monster mugging and gaining a level, we had back out with just enough for a stay at the inn and buy an upgrade:

Leather helm ought to show those furries who's boss around here. Maybe next we'll pick up a fur hat and robe and really drive the point home.

Last time we were here we ignored one of the equipment sets, but we take a look this time:

Too rich for our blood just yet. We turn to leave, however...

He must have realized we'd be interested in some hot loot after dealing with that shady alkemist lady.

What is it, a gimp mask? Kinky.

Items like these aren't in endless supply like other stock, you can only buy one. They tend to be a good value though. They're sold under 'deals' at each shop.

We equip our stylish accessory before heading out. 8 armor isn't a lot considering we got 6 from the gauntlet, and that only cost 120 gold. Still, it's another sizable bonus. Our armor should be well above average for the next trip.

We return to the dungeon in search of more phat lewts.

A nice find, since it can be sold for another 75 gold. However, we don't have any empty slots right now. We'll grab it on our way back out of the dungeon.

More power! Raaah!

The dungeon is easy to get lost in, but we're carefully mapping things, so we stay on track this time.

Places like this make for good landmarks if you aren't mapping though. I never drew maps up when I played through as a kid, but I also took forever to get through the game, and only proceeded through the dungeon methodically (make a right turn at every fork for example). Such things are a lot less tedious when you're young I suppose. Though I never finished the game either, since I missed an important item somewhere in the labyrinth, and couldn't be bothered to scour everything to find it again.

We can map fairly quickly my recognizing how things look at different distances. The walls above are 3 steps away, so the room is at least 2x3 after the one tile passageway into it.

We encounter another new enemy type:

Our armor holds up well. And luckily, they don't poison us.

Reward is pretty decent for these enemies. We'll be rolling in bling in no time.

More new enemies:

They have the same damage resistance skill the slugs have, but otherwise don't pose a threat. However, all these battles are whittling us away slowly, so we eat an herb.

Our max HP is 54, so ~30 is the limit for herb recovery it seems.

We find another interesting dungeon object:

But not interesting enough it seems.

Admittedly it feels like I'm levelling up a lot, since I had to backtrack a few times to remeasure distances while mapping stuff out. I'm sure it'll save time in the long run though.

Now our slots are full again.

A nice haul.

We could buy a pretty decent weapon with that kind of cash. Curiosity beckons however. We still have 3 herbs and are probably overlevelled.

This looks interesting.

But it doesn't do anything.

Not even when we check the crotch to see if it's a TRAP.

We also find another door, differently colored this time. This one doesn't open up for us either:

Ho-hum. Maybe we should head back soon, we got lots of gold and have mapped out half this level it seems...

DANGER! DANGER!

Son of a fuck!

Run away! Run away!

 

[Damned Registrations]

I'll fix up a better key for the map some time tomorrow. If anything is bugging you about it just ask and I'll explain what it is.

Edit: Map inclined.

 

[Yeesh]

Watch out! The monster's packed full of zesty flavor!

 

[Damned Registrations]

One of my first dungeon crawlers!

The guy who did the character designs in this and Shining Force, Yoshitaka Tamaki, is my favorite character designer ever. Check out the characters he made for FEDA: Emblem of Justice.

*snip*

The characters are a little more serious or whatever, but you can see a direct progression from Shining in the Darkness to FEDA. It's pretty cool.

Good luck with this!

Uh, why does my post require moderator authorization?

Cool. I've been hankering for a TBS game to play, maybe I'll do a LP of this instead of Brigandine like I was planning. Blind LPs are more fun to read anyways, I think.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Out of curiosity, I looked up the release dates and grabbed some maps of the Might and Magic game released closest to SitD. It's MM3. 1991 for both games.

Now, MM3 had more maps than SitD does, not to mention the entire overworld. But still, the fact that SitD had 32x32 maps while MM3 generally had 16x16 (with the maze being the only exception AFAICT), and on top of that, the labyrinth is more, well, labyrinthy (A lot of MM3 dungeons have linear paths or lots of open space) is pretty damned of sega back in the day.

 

[anus_pounder]

Kaiserkrab ? Really ?

Do keep up the good work.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Another proof that Snes >>> Genesis.

Did the SNES even have any exclusive first person dungeon crawlers?

 

[spekkio]

SMT series?



But it also had Mario, Metroid, last good Final Fantasy games, Ogre Battle / Tactics Ogre... Did I mention StarFox?



To my surpise, I'm following this LP due to your commentrary - keep it up, and who knows - maybe this LP will reach page 2...