Volume 5: Dragon Ruins

This month’s column is pretty straightforward, readers. The stars aligned perfectly for not having anything else to talk about aside from the simple act of playing a video game like a normal person. I was in Salem for a wedding browsing the eShop, and saw a brand new (sorta) blobber up for sale. Kemco, a publisher that mostly churns out RPG Maker joints, got ahold of publishing rights for Dragon Ruins, a fascinating little DRPG from Graverobber Foundation (perhaps best known for Demon Lord Reincarnation). It was cheap, and I like when Kemco does weird stuff, so I copped it immediately and played through it… shockingly fast.

Dragon Ruins is described by its developer as “a dungeon crawling microgame for tired people.” It’s me, I’m Tired People. But what does this mean? Basically, it means this game takes the fundamentals of a DRPG, boils them down to their essence, and gives you something to fiddle with that looks and quacks like a duck but is more akin to, like, a chicken nugget. Or a duck nugget I guess, to make the idiom work a little better. The short answer is Dragon Ruins is light on options and halfway plays itself.

There’s an evil dragon hanging out in a dungeon, and you’ve been asked to do something about it. After picking a team of four characters from a list of dramatically filtered pixel art Dungeons and Dragons rejects (there’s a big guy with a skull face I particularly like), you can visit the Guild, the Blacksmith, or The Dungeon. The dungeon is as traditional as it gets, a wireframe maze of doorways and right angles, the only real gimmick being occasional warp points back to the entrance. Instead of gimmicks, that motherfucker is full of monsters.

Combat is where you learn what “microgame” really means. You enter a room, some monster portraits appear at the top of the screen, and battle plays out entirely by itself. The little portraits tremble to indicate damage, and you can watch your party’s own HP meter go down and, assuming you survive, EXP meter go up. You might get some money, too. You can still move while combat is active, giving you a chance to escape if you walk enough spots away from the enemy before your party wipes.

Returning to town restores your health, and you can then spend money to either level up your adventurers or upgrade their equipment. You can buy revival potions or a teleporter, which gets more expensive each time you buy one. With that, I’ve described the entire gameplay experience. Explore the dungeon, let combat play out, spend your money to make the numbers go up. Rinse and repeat until you’re sick of it. 

The dungeon itself is pretty big, with lots of winding paths to keep track of to make sure you can efficiently move around. There’s only one entrance/exit, and the teleporters in the dungeon itself are one-way. Using your own consumable one will let you return to where you left, but that’s the full extent of any checkpointing. Once you complete the dungeon by defeating the evil dragon, the Queen congratulates you. Instead of credits, a few years pass and the Queen hits you back up to let you know the dragon is back, and it would be nice if you’d beat it up again. This repeats forever, with the dragon getting slightly stronger each time. That’s what it means to be a dungeon crawler for tired people. A simple loop, simple mechanics, simple demands on the brain.

Obviously I’m enough of a sicko to enjoy DRPGs in their full, meaty, and oppressive glory, but Dragon Ruins is certainly an interesting gimmick. It was neat to breeze through something like this to just experience the conceit. A little more nuance would have been nice, perhaps for example some work done to make choosing characters feel like a meaningful choice. I couldn’t determine whether or not there was a difference between my big skull man and my little elf witch lady, so why bother offering the choice?

I do appreciate the attempt to make a Wizardry-like setup into a “podcast game” for less than ten bucks. I wouldn’t call this an entry point for the genre at large, but if you’re feeling the DRPG itch but don’t have the patience or energy to dive into a true abyss, Dragon Ruins is a solid option for a pinch of dungeon dopamine on the side.

Until next time, dungeon delvers.