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Kids these days don't seem to remember King's Field. It's too bad, because those who forget the games of the past are doomed to play them again, and in the case of King's Field that would be a big mistake.

It's been a while, though -- more than 10 years, in fact -- since From Software's not-exactly-classic hit the scene in the early years of the PlayStation. So what does King's Field have to do with anything? Well, subtract the touch-screen interface and Deep Labyrinth is King's Field. And not in any good ways.

King's Field was a slow, clumsy, fairly-boring-to-look-at first-person hack-and-slasher with a legendarily lousy framerate. Deep Labyrinth is all of those too, except that its framerate isn't bad enough to pass into legend.

Mazes and Monsters

After a fashion, there are two games inside the Deep Labyrinth package. One is the scenario developed for the original version of the game, which ran on a variety of Japanese mobile phones. The other is a comparatively simple new quest with tutorial elements geared towards novice players.

To back up a little bit -- yes, Deep Labyrinth began life as a cell-phone game, and the apple hasn't fallen very far from the tree. Whether or not the DS has the ability to generate better, this is not an impressive showcase of the hardware's 3D capabilities. Aside from a few small set-piece locations that show off slightly more complex modeling, it's a maze of twisty little passages, all alike (or occasionally a bunch of near-empty square rooms, in the original scenario), stretching on and on in an endless succession of right angles and repetitive textures.

Those corridors are inhabited by badly-animated monsters that would shame most amateur 3D artists. The designs mainly come from the stock Dungeons & Dragons catalog, and many of them are just variations on a previous theme -- a skeleton with a different hat on, say, or another color of slime (there are at least four of those all told, plus four more variations with a slightly different shape).

When the level designers offer a change of pace in terms of background detail, that usually just means changing the default color of otherwise identical corridor textures. The original scenario has a few improvements in terms of the complexity of the background architecture, but it makes up for those (in the wrong way) with some shockingly garish color choices.

Touch-Tone

Whether or not Deep Labyrinth was much to look at, it still wouldn't be any fun to play. Its combat system and level design amount to lots of doing the same thing over and over again.

Every in-game action -- except for basic movement, using the D-pad -- results from a touch-screen input. Tapping the stylus in different parts of the screen produces sword swings, while spellcasting involves drawing different patterns on a three-by-three grid. (Observant players may guess that the latter system comes straight from the phone game, where the same spells were patterns of number inputs, one through nine.)

The lack of strafe commands (except when you're locked on an enemy) isn't as annoying as it initially seems to be. Most of the bad guys are slow enough to evade anyway, and the squared-off hallway layouts don't call for much fancy navigation either. That's not to say the interface doesn't have other problems, though. In particular, using the touch-screen for every combat action makes the DS hard to balance, since you can only grip it with one hand. That's a killer in a few hectic battles, when the screen keeps slipping underneath the stylus and throwing off complex spell inputs.

It's possible to cope with this most of the time, however -- it's not enjoyable, but it can be endured -- because combat is usually very easy. The lion's share of enemies require the same simple offense: walk up, kick in the automatic lock-on, strafe in one direction or the other, and repeat the same sword swing until the target disappears. Everything from slimes to enormous dragons will fall to those tactics. Most players could kill several bosses from either scenario blindfolded.

There's a lot of strafing and swinging to be done, too, because monsters continually respawn throughout the dungeon. Backtracking through a succession of identical corridors on a series of identical key-fetching quests means hacking through lots of monsters identical to the ones you already killed.

Mood: Bored

Deep Labyrinth's developer (and its unfortunate American publisher) made a point of touting contributions from a couple of famous names. Masato Kato, late of Square and games like Chrono Cross, wrote the scenario, while Yasunori Mitsuda (composer for Xenogears and others) produced the music.

Whatever they were paid to go slumming, it was too much. The first chapter's story is barely there, and what there is mainly comes from the mouth of obnoxious little anthropomorphic mice in silly hats (really). The second scenario is worse, and in fact comes close to offensive depths of pretense.. In between hacking at skeletons and slimes along a bunch of identical dungeon corridors, we’re treated to silly dialogue about loneliness and suicide – it’s like Wizardry crashed into a teenager's LiveJournal. Mitsuda's soundtrack cues aren't quite so depressing, but what there is of them would strain to fill an eight-track tape.

Whoever decided to hire the big guns did a fine job of putting the cart before the horse. A production like this doesn't need expensive writers and composers -- not until it has competent designers, programmers, and artists, anyway. Without them, it's nothing more than a footnote in history. It'll be lucky if anyone remembers it as fondly as King's Field.

Article by: D. F. Smith
Video produced by: Michael Benson