The Stack

Early in Throne of Darkness, I decided to keep things relatively simple by playing only with the four simplest characters: the Leader, Brick, Archer, and Swordsman. (The special roles of the Ninja and Berserker weren’t obvious, and playing the Wizard would require learning the magic system immediately.) I did try using fewer than the full complement of four, but doing that for very long is risky. You never know when you’re going to find yourself suddenly outnumbered.

When more than one character is active, you directly control one of them at a time, switching between them at will. The ones you’re not controlling at the moment act autonomously, following you around unless they see something that they want to kill, like the dog in Nethack. I suppose the developers were trying to make the single-player campaign more like cooperative multiplayer play, since that’s generally acknowledged to be the best way to play Diablo.

This scheme yields ironic results. To explain: Each character earns experience points independently, and they seem to get them by hurting foes, not necessarily by killing them. So the more often a character can successfully strike a blow, the faster he’ll level. Now, the characters you’re not controlling at a given moment are pretty efficient about finding and attacking foes. They’ll rush at things that aren’t even onscreen yet, leaving the player-controleld character chasing after them. Melee is rapid, and it’s easy to misclick, either by clicking the spot that a moving foe has just vacated or not being able to distinguish friend from foe. These clicks are interpreted as instructions to move. Consequently, in most battles, the player-controlled character spends a lot of time running around aimlessly instead of fighting. Overall, then, the characters that you’re not controlling directly will tend to level faster than the one you are. If only there were a way to just abandon control of everyone, let the computer play the battle for you so that everyone would participate optimally! Which, come to think of it, is the idea behind the Final Fantasy XII “gambit” system..

I mentioned that you control a team of seven charcters in this game. Presumably this number was chosen by a Kurosawa fan. They’re not the same seven samurai as in the movie, though. The character classes in Throne of Darkness are:

The Leader
The Brick
The Archer
The Swordsman
The Wizard
The Ninja
The Berserker

(A ninja isn’t really a kind of samurai, of course, any more than a stoolie is a kind of policeman. Actually, if you read the character bios in the manual, a lot of them turn out to have been raised as farmers and the like, rather than as members of a hereditary military aristocracy. But why bother complaining about historical implausibility in a game with tengus and oni in it?)

In contrast, the character classes in The Seven Samurai are:

The Leader
The Leader’s Assistant
The Leader’s Buddy
The Stone-Cold Killing Machine
The Kid
The Loose Cannon
The Other One

(Like the Ninja, the one I’m calling “The Loose Cannon” isn’t really a samurai. So there’s some kind of balance there.)

This list may not be quite as gameworthy as the first one, but I have a long-standing fantasy about about the ideal game adaptation of The Seven Samurai. The player, as I see it, would choose which samurai to play, and that choice would fundamentally shape what kind of game it is. Playing the Loose Cannon, for example, would make the game more freeform and self-directed, like GTA: you could do your assigned missions, but you could also just wander off by yourself and try to steal the enemy’s guns. If you chose the Killing Machine, it would mainly be an action game. The Leader would be about strategy, the Leader’s Assistant would be about micromanagement. The Kid? Dating sim.

So, I’ve decided to start another game while I decide whether or not spending more time on my joystick problems is worth it. Picking one at random, I find Throne of Darkness, a Samurai-themed Diablo imitation from 2001.

Man. I haven’t thought about this game in ages.

I think I bought it mainly because it was cheap and the screenshots on the box looked appealing. I played it briefly when I first got it, but it turned out to be more complicated than I was in the mood for just then.

Installation Annoyance #1: It has two disks, and you have to swap them three times before you can start playing.

Installation Annoyance #2: Throws a silly error, even when patched. Finding a site that would let me download the patch without the hassle of “becoming a member” was frustrating enough (and I’ll save anyone else who reads this the frustration by offering my copy here), but discovering afterward that it didn’t help? Bleah. I eventually found help on a third-party forum. It turns out that the solution is to overwrite the game’s copy of msvcrt.dll with the one from WINDOWS/System32.

First session: The mechanics are pretty complicated, but I haven’t yet reached the point where I have to understand what I’m doing in order to make progress. Hopefully I’ll be able to learn and apply things as I go along. Like I said, it’s Diablo-like, but you have a team of seven characters with different abilities, of which four can be active at a time. It seems like it might be a valid strategy to play with just one or two characters at a time so they can level faster.