Fatal Labyrinth

The Good
This game, with its simple graphics, non-existent story, looping MIDI track music, and Atari-esque sound effects, remained burned into my mind as the epitome of loss and frustration. The rage-quits, the restarts, the button mashing, the anger, it all stayed with me. I wasn’t the only one either, as evidenced by this game appearing on the ‘Sonic’s Greatest Genesis’ compilation for the PS3. I didn’t buy this 25 game medley to play Golden Axe, or Ecco, or Phantasy Star IV – I bought it to beat this 8-bit looking plot-less exercise in playing grab-ass with a tower full of monsters and random loot.

And I did. And it felt GOOOOD.

What’s good? Well, aside from Ultima Underworld and the Hard mode of Ehrgeiz: God Bless the Ring's: “Brand New Quest” this is probably the purest form of dungeon survival I’ve seen. You throw a guy with a knife in a Labyrinth and he fights a dragon on the other side – pretty simple.
The premise is simple enough – you have floors and stairs. You can go up the stairs anytime you want, but the monsters on the higher floors are tougher, so it’s best to balance progress with experience.

Equipment is found on the floor – You can carry 10 of each category (weapon, shield, armour, rod, scroll, ring, and bow). What you’ll find is random, leading to one play through seeming easy, and the next disastrously hard. This is good in that is rewards smart planning, conservation of useful items, and flexibility of thinking. It’s not just a matter of having the ‘best’ stuff, either. Because you can throw any item in the game at your foes, you need to decide whether carrying disposable items to chuck at spell-casting enemies is a good idea.

I did enjoy that each class of weapon actually has a feel instead of just being dropped in a ‘crap-to-good’ fashion as you progress along. The knives are highly accurate but weaker weapons, the spears are pretty accurate and give good criticals, the swords are a balance, the axes miss 66% of the time but deal high damage and criticals.

The floor-traps that activate the security robots and tell all the monsters where you are were very clever.

The Bad
The bows are almost pointless – you will rarely find yourself in need of a bow aside from facing spell-casting enemies from out-of-sight.

There’s no real plot to speak of – a giant castle surges out of the forest, a magic cup is stolen, and the hero goes to the newly risen castle to fetch it. Some of the dialogue of the peasants in town as you walk up to the castle is humorous, if limited. A young boy wonders if “I’ll have to go to school tomorrow.”

The Status effects the monsters (and you) can cast are extremely frustrating. This game teaches you that the four worst words in English may well be “You Feel Like Dancing” – after you see these words you lurch randomly in all directions for a set number of turns. You can inflict this same status on the entire floor of monsters with a scroll, but unless you are in dire straits it will rarely be necessary or beneficial. The ‘teleport’ spell is spammed by monsters at the higher levels, and worst, by the Dragon herself. I’ve got nothing against status spells, but the monsters should have had MP limits to some extent. Getting blasted with teleport upwards of ten times by a monster you can slay with 3 hits is enraging.

The music is, I swear, the very thing of madness itself. Apart from the opening and ending theme it is a grating, looping, bleating, blooping mess that stays with you for decades. Can I hum the bridge from FF7’s first over-world theme? Most days. This Casio nightmare is harder to kill than the Duck Tales theme! You could drink ethanol-cut prohibition hooch and still be able to remember this. And it doesn’t get any better as you go! It just starts playing FASTER! I highly recommend turning it off if you can – put on some epic gladiator music or something instead.

The trap doors – I hate them so much. They’re almost pointless.

The Bottom Line
Over-all, this game stands up there with the ones I remember being really challenged by – along with Beyond Oasis, The Immortal, Herzog Zwei, and Phantasy Star IV. If you like the idea of fighting through 20 floors of monsters with just a knife and what you find on the floor, check it out.

One of the strongest memories I have associated was the first time I got really far, back as a ten year old. The different floor colour felt dangerous – there were giant eye-balls and sharks attacking me from the floor – I was terrified! They finally took me down, and my gravestone (which gets bigger or smaller as you accumulate gold in-game) was huge! That was a really clever, but dark, way for the game creators to acknowledge how hard this game is.