Master of the Monster Lair Hands-On

Atlus is well known for its quirky role-playing games and hardcore dungeon crawlers. When you combine them, you have Master of the Monster Lair, a story about a prepubescent boy and his talking shovel. Instead of crawling through a labyrinth of premade dungeons filled with aggressive beasts, you get to create your own monster-infested lair where the goal is to attract the neighboring miscreants so that you can hunt them down on your own turf. We took awhile to get started but found that once we got into the swing of things, trapping our own monsters was kind of fun.

We started off in the small town of South Arc where we met Owen, a fresh-faced young orphan who had just turned the tender age of 12 and is ready to look for a job. Child labor laws clearly work differently in South Arc, but Owen is unable to find a job at the local furniture shop because the shop already hired too many youths. Luckily (or unfortunately) for Owen, he comes across a talking shovel that had been sleeping for 50 years, just woke up, and is ready to dig. The shovel is insanely chatty and borderline irritating, but the premise of this game is so silly that you can't help but find the shovel somewhat amusing. When you return to town to talk to the mayor about the shovel, the mayor tells you that he has found a job for you--find a talking shovel. The Castle (we're assuming that the orders are coming from a king or queen) has requested that someone find the shovel without touching it and bring it back, but because Owen has already bonded with the shovel, he is now the designated dungeon digger. The mayor, a greedy man looking for a way to boost the local economy, thinks that having a dungeon filled with creatures would be an excellent tourist hot spot. Being the mild-mannered boy that he is, Owen accepts his fate and heads off to the nearby caves to start digging.

A full day goes by each time you enter and exit the cave, even if you go up and down the ladder without doing any actual work. The town isn't very big, but you do have access to the furniture store, a poorly stocked weapon and armor shop, as well as a magic shop. When you're done for the day, you go back to your house to rest until the next morning. You can also eat a meal in evening, which is the only way your stats will increase because there is no leveling in this game. You'll have access to spinach and some dry fish flakes in the beginning, but tastier alternatives will come up later. Using food items that you find on monsters or purchase can raise your hit points, or a combination of strength and hit points, depending on the recipe. Your friend Kate, who makes a mean stew, is usually at your house when you come home to make dinner so that you don't have to eat spinach every day. Other townspeople will fill you in on new recipes or give you quests to perform while you're busy digging the dungeon.

Other than being blessed with the gift of gab, the shovel comes with magic points for you to use when you're digging out rooms in caves. His MP will regenerate the next day, so you have a limited amount of "work" you can do when you enter the cave. If you don't like the path that you've dug, you can fill it up as well, which will cost MP. Each room you dig takes up one MP, but once you've moved onto the next dungeon, the shovel will get an upgrade so that you can dig more holes in one day. The biggest problem that we ran into was the lack of an undo button. If you're happily pressing the A button, you might accidentally fill up a hole or even dig out a room that you had just placed. Money starts to flow once you've filled up the dungeon with monsters, but even then, it's not worth losing a room after you just dumped hundreds of gilberts (the in-game currency) on it.

In order to maximize the drops, as well as provide a dark and inviting place for monsters, you need to build three rooms with their entrances facing the center so that the monsters will all come out to attack you at the same time. The last monster you defeat is the one that will drop an item, so if you're looking something in particular, you should plan to fight the appropriate monster last because some beasts carry food, as well as weapons and armor. You can purchase more than 20 different rooms from town, which will become available to you as time goes on, to lure in various monsters. Some monsters like trash dumps, some like straw beds, and some prefer a cellar. There are also treasure chests you can plant throughout your dungeon in hopes that monsters will use it. You then fight the monsters in a standard turn-based approach for the key and unlock the chest for some nice items. When you have about 15 monsters in your dungeon, a magic hole will open where you'll fight a boss. Our first assignment was to get rid of the apple viper that was becoming a nuisance. Once we defeated the part-fruit, part-reptile troublemaker, we were given access to another level of the dungeon to dig.

Another bizarre creature that we came across was a friendly baby slime named Gloop that has the ability to mimic the monsters it fights. It joins your party because you happened to have been at the right place at the right time, but it's a rather interesting slime because after it defeats an enemy, it can copy some of its enemy's stats. Gloop can also learn magic and will keep the spell in its repertoire even if it mimics another monster.

The shovel started to grow on us after awhile, and crawling in our own homemade dungeon is an intriguing way to change the dungeon-crawling experience. As you progress, you'll unlock dungeon music that you can set as your background theme when you're busy working below. The controls are straightforward, with no option for the stylus, but the game does take advantage of the dual screen to present all the vital information. You can also share dungeons with friends via the Nintendo DS local wireless at the ruins outside of town, but we haven't had the opportunity to test that out yet. Be sure to check back and see how our dungeon is progressing when Master of the Monster Lair is released on October 21.