The Dark Spire - Atlus - DS

[Rendakor]

Dark Spire is a new 'old school' dungeon crawl for the DS, similar to Etrian Odyssey. You form a party of 4 adventurers and venture into a Tower to recover the crown jewels...or something. There are 4 starting races: Human, Elf, Dwarf and Halfling and 4 starting classes: Warrior, Mage, Priest, Thief, with unlockables available eventually. You can also pick your alignment (zomg nerdgasm) and ROLL your stats; did I mention the game seems to draw heavily from D&D? When killing monsters, you earn Exp, but do not level up automatically; instead you spend your EP to buy class levels (in any class you qualify for), stats, skills, etc. This gives a decent variety of customization that most modern games are lacking in. Want a tank-mage? Go for it!

By the way, this game is HARD. Much harder than EO2, about on par or worse than EO1. There are numerous random encounters on the first level of the dungeon that can easily result in a wipe (Scoundrels, Killer Bats, I'm looking at you). Poison is a death sentence if you get hit with it and are more than 10 steps from the door without an antidote. As a result, you end up spending most of your money on reviving and healing your party and barely squeezing in a cheap gear upgrade when you can.

Of course, this isn't always a bad thing: you have to be very cautious, heed warnings, and know when to fall back. You cannot simply plow through the first level with no regard and expect to wtfpwn everything, you will die. This makes Dark Spire feel like a D&D game, where you actually have concern for your characters, as opposed to most modern RPGs where you can just mash a single button through the random encounters and only the boss presents a slight challenge.

If you're looking for a challenging, customization-heavy, story-lite RPG, Buy it.

[trias_e]

I tried to get into EO but the level grind just bored me to tears.  Running the same route over and over again while leveling up very slowly was not fun at all.  How bad is the grind here?  Sounds like the character customization is better, which is a huge plus.

[Rendakor]

To be honest I'm not sure, I'm only level 2. Had to restart once and lots of resets. I'm still on the first level of the dungeon; I found stairs up and down but I prefer to explore the entire level before moving on. It also depends on what you want to level up. Class levels cost more the higher level you want to raise a class, but multiclassing seems fairly cheap (Ex: Say you're a Lvl 1 Warrior: Lvl 2 warrior costs 600 xp, Lvl 1 thief costs 400). Stats, on the other hand, are CRAZY expensive, like 10x the cost of levels. So if you wanted to grind to straight 18s, you have some grinding to do.

[Slyfeind]

How is saving? I was turned off from EO because you have to return to town to save your game, and I like playing my RPGs on the bus while commuting to work, so I like to save my game anytime, anywhere.

[Rendakor]

You can save anywhere as long as you're not in battle.

[Slyfeind]

Sold! 

[LK]

This makes me think of a double-persistant system for a roguelike game. You start at Lv. 1 each time you die, but you accumulate perks and stats on your, I dunno, mercenary captain or what have you that helps you out or gives you new options to play with. So if you lose your character in a particular instance of a game, you still have a record that's overreaching and affecting you.

[Hoth]

There are 4 starting races: Human, Elf, Dwarf and Halfling and 4 starting classes: Warrior, Mage, Priest, Thief, with unlockables available eventually.

There are at least 2 unlockable classes: Dark Elves and High Elves, the ability to create them depends on the faithlevel of all your chars combined. For an easy route play your Priest to faithlevel ~10 by praying regularily at the temple and create a ton of new chars since they start with a random faithlevel 1-10. If you reach a determined total (100 total faith or something) you can create them. For High Elves make lawfull chars, for Dark Elves chaotics.

There are numerous random encounters on the first level of the dungeon that can easily result in a wipe (Scoundrels, Killer Bats, I'm looking at you). Poison is a death sentence if you get hit with it and are more than 10 steps from the door without an antidote. As a result, you end up spending most of your money on reviving and healing your party and barely squeezing in a cheap gear upgrade when you can.

Train the sleep spell with your Mage, the game is much easier since you can sleep every group, exept the mushrooms, on level 1 of the tower. If one of your chars get poisened run to the exit, fleeing from every encounter. You won't die from the poison because you don't drop below 1 HP while simply walking. But if a fight starts you loose your last HP in the first round and have to pay the much more expensive revival fee.

[Rendakor]

Yea I saw on GameFAQs that there were High/Dark elves, but I didn't feel like doing the shenanigans to unlock them. Good call on the sleep spell though; I'll have to pick that up on my mage's next level.

[Hoth]

You don't even have to wait for that. Just go to the guild and redistribute your spells if you wantto have it now.

[Rendakor]

Wow, didn't know you could do that either.