Spectral Tower - One of the Worst RPGs Ever Made

let me tell you about a company called idea Factory they're a Japanese game developer and unlike a lot of the Obscure Japanese stuff I get interested in there's a reasonable chance that you might have heard of them before this idea Factory specializes in RPGs they broke off of data East in the mid99s when that company was struggling for a very long time hardly any of their games were released outside of Japan the first one to make it to the United States was black stoned magic and steel for the Xbox and I'm going to go out on a limb and say you've never heard of it idea Factory finally had their breakout hit in 2010 with Hyperdimension Neptunia an RPG that mainly got by on the strength of its weird concept personifying the console Wars people noted how unique it was to have video game consoles portrayed as young girls who then fought monsters and then they also noted how awful the game was was see the thing was neptunia's low quality wasn't an outlier for idea Factory there's a reason their games weren't released outside of Japan in Japan they had a nickname idea shouldn't say that word they were known for cranking out huge quantities of terrible RPGs and they have been known for that right from the start I'm flipping back to 1996 and idea Factory's first RPG a game that had a few interesting ideas that were completely obliterated by being awful in so many other ways this is spectral Tower it's a game that is n impossible to beat and if it wasn't for the fact that I found two videos of people completing the final dungeon I would have been pretty confident that no one had ever beaten it spectral Tower is a Rog likee there are five dungeons in the game to conquer or Towers I guess and your goal is to get to the top of each of those all of the towers except the initial tutorial one have randomized floors so you'll get into the familiar gameplay Loop of creating a character fighting things when you think you can get powered up running away and just trying to advance when you can't collecting items that might help you out on the way and hopefully making it to the end now all of that is very straightforward elements of a Rog like there isn't a single one of those that spectral Tower doesn't do wrong and before I drill in any further here I need to point out that the manual for spectral Tower is disastrously awful it doesn't explain any of the basic game mechanics at all I happen to have the spectral Tower strategy guide which also has many glaring omissions but at least it told me how all of the basic Mechanics Work the strategy guide also has a short story and a 20page comic to introduce players to the game's world don't worry none of it even matters the game doesn't even have a proper plot let's start with character creation you enter a name and then you enter a number up to eight digits and based on the number that you entered you get assigned to class obviously the number is acting as a random seed though not for character stats or anything like that every class has their given stats and starting equipment 11 of these classes are relatively common you've got the fool the wander the thief who have to get out of this place of course the Nomad the merchant the feral child Free Fighter cleric light Mage dark Mage and finally the item Hunter the 95 advanced classes are supposed to be kind of combinations of those though honestly I don't see it these classes are not created equal and not just in the sense that it's impossible to balance 106 character classes I mean that most of these classes are garbage that are very unlikely to be able to beat the game they just have no functional ability that will smooth over the rough edges that come from the terrible game design in spectral Tower I'll have to get a bit deeper into the game systems before I get to that though characters are rated on 10 stats first there's Max hit points then six stats that determine how effective you are against different types of monsters you'll encounter then there's item level that determines what type of items you can equip Food level that determines the types of food you can eat and finally search level that will determine How likely you are to open a chest again none of this is explained in the manual and there's only the most perfunctory explanations in the game My explanation there is actually better than what they have in the tutorial once you found a character class that you like you then pick what tower you're going to play technically you have to complete all five Towers in order to beat the game but at the start only three are available the 10 story Goblin Tower is the tutorial then there's a 20 story thieves Tower and a 100 story queen's tower after you complete the queen's tower then you unlock the titular spectral tower that tower has 1,000 floors no I did not misspeak with a number that high you might be saying well I'm sure there's a lot of variety here and there is not every floor of the tower is built out of a small set of blocks and so by the time you've done 10 randomized floors you've pretty much seen all the terrain the game has ah but I did tell you there were five Towers not four beating the spectral Tower unlocks the final Tower which has 10,000 floors now I've actually beaten the 100 Floor Tower in the past not while I was recording this time because I was trying to get a lot lot of different footage but I've done it it's a process that took roughly 4 hours to complete so using that as an estimate for how long it will take you to progress beating spectral Tower will take you approximately 450 hours of play in those 450 hours you'll encounter 52 different monsters most of which you'll have seen by the time you're halfway up the 100 Floor Tower you'll encounter a possible 23 different weapons 10 different magic wands eight different foods and discover 15 different usable items and that is literally everything in the game what I'm saying is the content would be pretty thin for just the 100 Floor Tower it's mind-bogglingly small for something that expects you to play for 450 hours special tower is an enormous game that has effectively nothing in it you might be going well sure that doesn't sound like much but I bet they all have wildly different effects are any there some creative uses for them no no there are not but to drill into that I need to explain a bit more about how the game is played on every floor of the dungeon you have to locate a key and then get to the exit stairs on the top floor of the tower the key is held by a boss monster while exploring the dungeon floor you'll encounter tiles that can have different effects on your character butterflies make you go slow frogs reverse the controls the laughing face does both of those at the same time the magic symbol thing either makes you dizzy and uncontrollable or causes you to shrink those effects wear off over time the cloud is poison that damages you if you encounter an enemy while you're on a skull tile then they get a first attack and finally there are teleporter tiles there's no traps or anything like that no special terrain features Beyond those tiles the only other item you can find are treasure chests there are also so Monsters of course and these wander around randomly that's right they just follow a random walk path around the dungeon there's no chasing or anything like that you don't have to do any fancy maneuvering to deal with them they'll ignore you 450 hours of this if a monster CES with your back then they get a free attack at the start of combat but otherwise combat is determined by your stat relative to that particular Monster's level so you have a stat for attacking mon moners that would be things like Cobalts goblins Orcs And each of those monsters has a particular level in combat when you choose to attack you roll one six-sided die and then you get a result based on the chart on the left hand side rolling a one is always a critical hit and rolling any other number that has a DOT next to it is a hit that does one heart of damage you have to get pretty close to the 100th floor before you start regularly encountering enemies that have more than one heart when you defeat an enemy combat ends you don't get anything for it why would you expect that well you do get something if you beat an enemy with a critical hit your stat for defeating that kind of enemy increases a bit now different character classes do have different progression rates but what that means is if you're already strong against a particular type of enemy then you just gain even more strength faster if you can already easily beat ghosts you don't need a lot more power to beat ghosts but you get extra growth in your stat for defeating ghost weapons modify your stat as a multiplier so for example the knife the weakest weapon in the game will give all of your attack stats a 1.2 modifier the best weapon in a game gives you a three times multiplier to a stat in weapons that are specifically good against certain types of enemies give you a two times multiplier for that enemy while giving you A8 multiplier for everything else if your stat and the enemy level are exactly equal then you hit on a 1 to three and as that difference grows then additional numbers will come up or if you encounter a very powerful monster you might only be able to hit it on a one or a two one aspect of the combat that might not be immediately visible to people is that it is a flat probability curve in other words you're just as likely to roll a six as you are to roll a one or any other number now that's not necessarily a bad thing but not using some kind of curve leads to some weird probability behaviors it makes the combat here all or nothing it winds up being kind of boring as a result besides attacking you could also use your killer move or one of your killer moves almost every character has three of these special abilities there are a few that have two instead and sometimes they have the same ability multiple times there are 57 different killer moves in the game and there's a lot of overlap with the basic characters but many many of the special characters have a unique move just for them these moves can include running away that's right many characters don't have that ability stealing from your opponent casting a dangerous spell or attacking twice there's a lot of characters whose killer moves are effectively worthless like the fortune teller who can run away has a 50% chance to hit a ghost so the same as if they were regularly attacking or can their fate which will either give the fortune tiller a status ailment recover all of their health or kill them instantly and not a small chance to kill them instantly either 3 and 16 somehow the magic spells are even worse they have a hit point cost and the most common magic spell costs 40 hit points to use magic using characters start with lower hit points usually around 30 so spellcasters start with an ability that just kills them and it is extremely difficult to increase your maximum hit points so there's a very real chance that they would have to play for 10 hours or more before they could use their basic ability which at that point will put them on the edge of death instead of outright killing them the game doesn't tell you what any of these special abilities do until you use them and many of them have probabilities attached with only one chance to get it right if you miss your 50% shot to run away then you will always fail that in this combat with no explanation of how to use any of these abilities you're going to have to break out a strategy guide there are two primary status ailments that you could get inflicted with that will affect combat these actually show up as numeric values on your status screen you can get cursed which prevents you from using killer moves and this is normally inflicted by certain enemies the other status ailment is sickness which can be inflicted by enemies or by eating food that's above your food level and that status effect prevents you from using the killer moves okay there are a couple of killer moves that spend those status ailments to do something but it still feels weirdly redundant there's two other things that you can find as you explore a dungeon floor you can find these goddess statues and they act as safe points since they are randomly generated you can go quite a while without finding one it's even more annoying if you've cleared a tower because clearing a tower doesn't save your game you have to enter another Tower Tower and then wander around until you find the goddess statue and then you can save goddess statues occur maybe once every five floors so it's possible to go quite a while without seeing one and if you cancel out of the goddess statue or cancel out of anything that you approach then whatever you are interacting with vanishes so be careful about what button you press the only other thing that you could run into on a level is this Baker the baker will offer you some bread which will have one of three effects it can completely heal you and remove all status effects it can increase your maximum HP by one or it can turn you into a pig when you're a pig well everything still works the same except you can no longer open chests that effect goes away when you advance to the next floor and there's no other way to undo it that risk doesn't mean you should avoid the bread in fact you should always eat the bread healing and maximum HP increases are so rare in spectal tower that you need to use every opportunity you've got what you'll wind up doing though is clearing out the floor of treasure chest then eating the bread that way turning into a pig has no effect at all let me tell you about some of those Treasures that you can collect I've already talked about the weapons so I won't go further on those then there are the rods rods are used to create a magical effect and mostly they are garbage there's a rod that can act as a save point a rod that gives you a fery that acts as a compass to the stairs on that floor and a rod that can turn a rusty weapon into something useful there's also two rods that do absolutely nothing unless you get another item to turn them into some other kind of Rod there's a rod that will kick you out of the tower letting you start over if you wanted to for some horrible reason but really there's only three usable rods one of these is a full heal and the other two lets you skip floors a jump Rod that will take you up a random number of floors between 1 and 15 and the warp Rod that will teleport you up 50 floors those rods are pretty much the only way that getting through the tall towers is even remotely possible naturally the useful rods are incredibly rare because they can't make this too easy using a rod will leave you with a junk item in your inventory as well and you have 20 inventory slots but you might not want to throw away junk the reason for that is that there are a lot of enemies that attack your inventory if you fill your inventory with garbage then the trash might Shield items that you actually want to use maybe the most important thing to find are metals these act as level ups and each of them increase a stat okay there's one special metal that will dramatically increase one stat while weakening another but for the most part you're going to find these and want to use them instantaneously food restores Health it's very difficult to find it and if the Food Level is higher than your character's Food level then it makes them sick instead of healing them finally there's a loose assortment of usable items the most important of these items increase your maximum HP though again they are very rare and of course there are items that can heal your curse or sickness so with all of the game systems laid out it becomes pretty obvious just how badly broken spectral Tower is if you don't have a method for consistent healing then you're probably going to lose consistent healing doesn't mean the heal spell though which by the way uses up a random item from your inventory and only has a 50% chance of healing you being able to turn through a lot of items is actually the most consistent way to get healing and because it's also how you level up it's the quickest path to power too so characters like the item hunter or the thief have really strong advantages and the second most effective thing you can do is kill monsters faster so the fighter skill that lets you roll twice is a pretty big boost especially when you consider that increases your chances of leveling up against that type of monster but past that good luck the best thing you could do is grind low levels for a while hoping to get enough metals to boost your item finding ability but that's a bit of a long shot if you could complete the 100,000 or 10,000 floor dungeons you could take a picture of your screen and send it to idea Factory and they would give you a medal for your completion it's believed that most of the 10,000 floor medals that are in circulation were taken by an idea Factory employee the really scary thing is that spectral Tower is the first game in a series there is a spectral Tower to which is just a straightforward RPG no Rog like in no 10,000 FL dungeon and idea factory made several other games set in the world of spectral Tower though I'm not really sure how you could tell they were set in the world of spectral Tower since there is no real setting here obviously I do not like spectral Tower at all but I do find it to be fascinating it's a game where they made every single possible bad choice there are a lot of bad games out there and a lot of terrible RPGs that were released on the PlayStation that never made it out of Japan I find spectral Tower to be fascinating among those from its sheer audacity every once in a while I'm compelled to pull this one down and poke at it because surely it couldn't have been that crazy and that bad I own the strategy guide because that was the only way I could get information on the game and maybe find something else here that I missed but no spe Tower is one of video game's greatest disaster pieces worthy of standing among the Giants of the awful games it's something special and it set a tone for the new company it's games like this why idea Factory is known as idea f

Channel: RndStranger

Views: 195,813

Keywords: Playstation, PS1, JRPG, bad game

Id: p-skIBPWOPE

Length: 19min 45sec (1185 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 03 2024