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Dungeon Explorer: Warriors of the Ancient Arts Impressions

By Brad Shoemaker, GameSpotPosted Jan 28, 2008 4:47 pm PT

Hudson's old TurboGrafx dungeon crawler will make a comeback next month on current handhelds.

Long forgotten in the annals of history--that is, the late '80s--Hudson Soft released a game for the fledgling TurboGrafx-16 called Dungeon Explorer. This was an early, class-based dungeon-crawling action role- playing game not too different at its core from the Diablos and Titan Quests that you still see today. Hudson has apparently been planning a revival of the Dungeon Explorer franchise for a while, starting with the release last year of the original game on the Wii's Virtual Console service. Now the company is prepping a new portable installment subtitled Warriors of the Ancient Arts to debut next month.

Explore dungeons and kill lots of monsters in Warriors of the Ancient Arts.

The PSP and DS versions of Warriors of the Ancient Arts are actually entirely separate games, with different but similar storylines. However, they naturally share a number of mechanics and themes. On the PSP, you're fighting in a kingdom that's been equally beset in recent years by internal strife and the strange appearance of monsters terrorizing the land. Luckily, the human-on-human violence tends to get put on hold when the monsters ramp back up, so you'll head into various dungeons and other unpleasant places to battle the hordes with multiple comrades in tow. The DS game depicts a demon king who has been magically sealed in a pyramid but who is nevertheless controlling monsters that are rampaging through the kingdom (noticing a pattern here?). You'll have to discover various ancient fighting arts to brave the unknown reaches of the pyramid and dispatch the demon lord once and for all.

The PSP version of the game gives you a greater number of classes to choose from: fighter, hunter, monk, thief, shaman, and bishop are all on offer. You can also choose among three races: the humanlike izark, the elven ist, and the olff, which is a sort of scaled lizard man with horns and a tail. Of course, your choice of class will primarily determine the sorts of abilities you have in battle, though your racial selection will also have some bearing on the amount of hit points and such that you receive. The game's leveling works on a point-distribution system, whereby you can dump new points into categories, such as strength, intelligence, and luck. Each class will have a number of special attacks to use, and then you can team up with your allies in some situations to perform tandem attacks, as well.

There are no touch-screen controls in the DS version; you'll control your guy with the ol' D pad and buttons (remember those?). The DS version has only three classes (warrior, hunter, and mage) in contrast to the PSP's six classes, and its three races all appear basically humanlike (though they do affect your stats differently). Strangely, you won't gain human companions here. In the world of the DS game, people use ancient automatons discovered via archaeological means as servants and helpers, so instead of hiring or recruiting living comrades, you'll simply shell out some cash to buy a few robots that can fight alongside you. The game also offers a number of different fighting "schools" associated with different animals that you can study in to learn new techniques. You can focus on one school to achieve more advanced techniques or dabble in several disciplines to acquire a broader repertoire of attacks.

Neither of the new Dungeon Explorer games is going to win any beauty pageants on their respective platforms, but they both seem to have a good bit of depth to their mechanics. Both versions of Warriors of the Ancient Arts are slated to ship next month, so wait for the full review to find out just how much depth.

12 Comments

  • Hatefish2

    Posted Feb 24, 2008 3:22 pm PT

    It's kind of sad, I feel my DS has been a complete waste of money.. not because the system itself is bad, but because developers honestly don't see to care when they make games for it.. the DS seriously gets the shaft every single time a game I might like comes out. If they had just put the time into making it less choppy in the graphics department and had touch screen it'd be an instant buy for me. Oh well..

  • greater_bird

    Posted Feb 24, 2008 5:15 am PT

    Odd that the DS version not only gets cut-down content, but also has no touch screen controls. Didn't put in much effort for this version, did they?

  • -starman-

    Posted Feb 18, 2008 8:28 am PT

    i was looking forward to this game... now i'm not so sure. it's a shame that the remake feels dated before it even gets released. Seems like the developer had a real opportunity here, but wasted it.

  • _AbBaNdOn

    Posted Feb 12, 2008 3:07 am PT

    That means all the screenshots gamespot has been showing are for the PSP version which means the DS version is going to look even worse.

  • _AbBaNdOn

    Posted Feb 12, 2008 3:05 am PT

    I was looking forward to this game until they mentioned the fact that DS gets screwed again on content vs PSP. That mean that the DS version has probably been finished for 6 months but they had to wait for the PSP version to be finished and tricked out.

  • rybread13

    Posted Feb 6, 2008 10:06 am PT

    why not just put it all on the DS u wud make more sales with more options...still gunna be a good game but still gunna suck hard for the PSP.

  • theKSMM

    Posted Feb 1, 2008 1:45 pm PT

    Having two separate but complimentary games is an interesting conceit though maybe giving them both the same name is confusing. I'm also impressed that they resisted the urge to give the game unnecessary touch-screen controls.

  • fireemblemgamer

    Posted Jan 30, 2008 3:44 pm PT

    why the heck does the psp get so many more options? It sounds like a better game to me.

    too bad. I was going to buy this game, but now i am just gonna wait for the ds version of fire emblem, if it comes to north america.

  • Waza19

    Posted Jan 29, 2008 10:42 am PT

    men why does the ds has less class
    im getting tired of having nothing else then flash quality games for the ds when i know they could make great game for it.

  • mariojoe

    Posted Jan 28, 2008 8:13 pm PT

    I wasn't crazy about the original, mainly because it was so difficult that having more people play wasn't an option, it was necessary.
    Hopefully this one improves that particular aspect of the game.

  • Yadish

    Posted Jan 28, 2008 7:07 pm PT

    hope it has multiplayer

  • jmanw

    Posted Jan 28, 2008 5:08 pm PT

    looks ok.
    i hope the ds version has depth

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