Tower of Druaga is probably the first great social game; and like the first week of Pokémon Go, like long offline MMOs, it's impossible to play Druaga the way it was meant to be played: at an arcade with other players, swapping tips, theories, or ideas as to how to get to the next floor in the tower of Druaga. It's no wonder this didn't catch on in the States, where you play arcade games with your friends, if you play them with anyone at all.

As it is today, Tower of Druaga is, genuinely, a fun combat puzzle game. I'm a fan of NES The Legend of Zelda's combat, and that same simple swordplay is here almost verbatim, though there's a little more friction here; the item-based puzzle/combat loop of Zelda clearly starts here (Miyamoto is an outspoken fan of this game). The puzzle solutions are fun to do, even if the solutions themselves are complete insane. To find treasure chests, you will rotate your joystick three times; you will swing your sword from your starting spot, but first you will turn your character so they're not facing the outside wall so when you do you don't also destroy your crucial pickaxe; you will pass through one enemy and then and only then kill three of a different enemy type.

I had a good time playing up the tower, sincerely marveling at its tricks and what it asked of you. Really worth playing for a while to see whats so special about it. Don't even feel bad using a guide. For a game like this, the guide isn't cheating so much as it is an analog to that social experience that's impossible to get today.

A Namco arcade game that is a prime example of that good ol' cryptic 80s bullshit design, yet I somehow can't hate it despite that? I was first introduced to The Tower of Druaga through Namco Museum Vol. 3 for the PlayStation, and there was something I found appealing about all of it: setting, art style, music and finding out that completing it always involved secret items. Dragging myself to keep climbing the tower over and over again, I've vowed that I would kill Druaga and get to Floor 60 someday, though I still tend to give up twenty floors in.

Hopefully I'll cross this one off my bucket list soon.

É um jogo relativamente obscuro, mas que inspirou outros jogos melhores, só ficou sem os créditos depois.
Com o clássico objetivo de salvar outra princesa desocupada, você deve subir uma torre, enfrentando os inimigos no caminho. Seu único ataque é a espada, mas a forma que se usa ela é o que quebra o jogo, você tem que segurar o botão de ataque, ai a espada leva um segundo pra descer... e dps fica apontada pra frente e você enfia no inimigo, e nem sempre dá muito certo, depende o timing e a movimentação do bicho.
Daí é repetir isso até alguém te acertar primeiro, não tem muito que esperar desse

It's deeply unfair and hard to read, but I kind of love it anyway. There are so many missable items that this game demands that you create your own strategy guide. I missed the candle and then loaded into an all-black area, and had no choice but to just restart. But it's not just the big upgrades, you have to read your enemies the second you load into a level or they can kill you very easily. I played this using judicious use of save states but still ran into many unwinnable situations. You need to meet the game at its level, but if you do you can have a good time with it.

This is a brutal game, but still pretty fun. It earned its role as the granddaddy of RPGs, but do not go into this game unprepared for it to be as punishing as it is.

A really interesting game and in my opinion a mustplay, even if you don't get very far it's worth experiencing for a bit. This game always does really poorly critically when it gets released in the west but Japan loves it. You need a tolerance for bullshit (if you don't have one literally don't even bother) and either to be prepared to write your own guide as you go, or find one on the Internet, because this shit can get really cryptic. I kinda like how the game forces you to play by its rules though. Definitely keeps you on your toes. I'd like to 1cc this someday.

Playing Through My Evercade Collection Part 6: Namco vol 2

I still think this is an absolute trashfire of a game. Its slow, its clunky, its full of vague nonsense and easily missable items and is no fun to play at all. I have no idea who at Namco has such a hard on for this game as its in almost every single compilation going and then some.

Really the only people who get anything out of this are sadists who should know better and tired Japanese salarymen who cant remove the nostalgia tinted glasses welded on to their face. PLAY A BETTER GAME.

You absolutely need to be a certain kind of player to enjoy this, ESPECIALLY nowadays. Tower of Druaga is the definition of "guide game". It has cryptic unexplained nonsense coded into its DNA from the instant you insert a coin into the godforsaken machine.

So the game itself is a pretty standard maze game, you move through the maze, find a key, use the key to reach the end, defeat enemies along the way, yadda yadda. The gimmick here is that each of the 60 floors contains an item, and the conditions to make the item appear change between floors. The requirements to make an item show up range from the simple-to-run-into "defeat all the enemies on the floor" to things such as "walk over these exact two tiles on the map in this order", "break your preexisting item" or my personal favorite, "press the game start button". Some items are mandatory to progress further, some items are optional upgrades, and some are permanent downgrades. You need to know EVERYTHING to even remotely have a shot to clear this game, and even then you'd still need the skills to navagate each of the 60 floors without getting a game over.

So how did people do it? Well, in western markets, they didn't. The game bombed all its western test placements hard and never got any widespread popularity. In japanese arcades, however, this game garnered a sense of community between players as everyone worked together to uncover all the secrets. Rumors would spread around, arcades would keep notebooks near the machines for players to write down anything they've noticed while playing and read what past players have discovered, and general word of mouth gave this game a rather substantial following, aided by the home ports which allowed players to discover the secrets at their own pace without needing to spend thousands of yen scoping out secrets. Basically this game took advantage of the social aspect of arcades in order to create a game experience that goes beyond the cabinet, and I think that's really neat.

But in todays day and age, all the secrets have long been found. Not only are walkthroughs on the internet commonplace, but rereleases of this game in Namco Museum titles typically have built-in walkthroughs to guide unsuspecting players through the tower. The Switch Namco Museum is the way to go as it not only has a guide at the click of a button, but also save states and a floor continue system to make this game essentially the most accessible it's ever going to be. I'd definitely reccomend giving the tower a challenge as it is certainly an interesting curiosity, but just make sure you have the proper knowledge onhand.

Sorta really cool. Putting this as 'Played' instead of Abandoned or Finished or Shelved, because I have no intention of returning but I didn't get all the way through either and I don't put it as a mark against the game. Because it's really interesting! It's a nice piece of history but also being really really well designed, especially with enemies and their very clear ruleset. The random mazes can be a bit tricky early on but it becomes second nature past the first few floors. The secrets are for sure intentionally obtuse but it provides charm especially since we're in the post-information timeline where it's easy to look up secrets. It's still too boring for my tastes, ended up feeling like coming back to Zelda 1 rather than navigating the maze for much longer past the 20th floor, but it gets a tertiary recommendation in the "worth a look!" kind of respect.