It's new to me: Taloon's Great Adventure: Mystery Dungeon
Or, as it's known in Japan, Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon — the first entry in the long-running Mystery Dungeon series.
This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Chunsoft was the Dragon Quest studio. They had made other games, and would make other games, but Dragon Quest was a phenomenon that could not be easily escaped, not with the level of success it had and with how influential it was for the growing console role-playing game genre. After Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride, however, Chunsoft declined to keep making more games in Enix’s flagship franchise. That’s a bold decision, to step away from something as surefire as future Dragon Quest sales, but Chunsoft had other ideas, and they needed the time to actually see them through.
One such idea was a translation of the game Rogue to the modern day, and to consoles. There had been other roguelikes since 1980’s Rogue, of course, though, the term didn’t yet exist when titles like Cave Noire and Fatal Labyrinth released on the Game Boy and Genesis, respectively, over a decade later. Cave Noire is a little known niche title that never left Japan, and Fatal Labyrinth didn’t exactly light the world on fire in any of its iterations despite its quality, but Chunsoft, like it had with Dragon Quest and console RPGs, would allow the budding genre to bloom with its introduction of the Mystery Dungeon series of games.
To give their game more mass appeal and make it seem friendlier to players who weren’t familiar with Rogue and its ilk, Chunsoft decided to soften some of the game’s structures, and settled on including a Dragon Quest character as the protagonist, which also meant translating some of Dragon Quest’s well-known rules into this “roguelike” universe to make them more easily understood to newcomers. Which is how the first Mystery Dungeon game ended up having you controlling a shopkeeper, Torneko, from Dragon Quest IV, in his quest to find treasures and goods to fill his store’s shelves with. Mystery Dungeon wasn’t supposed to be about saving the world or defeating a great evil, and the choice of Torneko as the playable character — a merchant associate of an actual world-saving hero — helped to make that clear from the outset, as Chunsoft’s founder Koichi Nakamura explained in an interview back in 2014:
Compared with mainstream RPGs like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, I felt the rules for Rogue—including the system wherein you lose all your equipment, money, and levels when you die—were a little hard for new players to understand.
I thought we should at least let players know the names of items and monsters, and as we thought further about how to make it easier to grasp, we started to think that using Dragon Quest characters might be the best way to achieve that. Then we asked which Dragon Quest character would be most appropriate… if we made Torneko the hero, it would be easy for players to understand the goal of collecting items and treasure. So we asked Yuji Horii and he gave us his permission, and Torneko no Daibouken was born.
(A fun side note: game designer and Chunsoft’s resident Rogue lover Seiichiro Nagahata wanted to use The Legend of Zelda instead of Dragon Quest for their first Mystery Dungeon title, but since Chunsoft was just then setting out on their own away from Enix and DQ, they didn’t think they had the industry sway to make that kind of ask. Chunsoft would eventually partner with Nintendo for the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games, which is an even bigger deal worldwide than Zelda, and Link would eventually gets his crossover roguelike, anyway, with Brace Yourself Game’s rhythm roguelike, Cadence of Hyrule. Which — drumroll — was published in Japan by Spike Chunsoft.)
As it was a Dragon Quest game even as it was something else entirely, Koichi Sugiyama composed the soundtrack, which is mostly a series of arrangements of one primary theme. It’s a catchy theme with some excellent arrangements that help with the idea that these different floor types are different, however, and that floor 12 isn’t the same as the first floor in both visuals and what’s going to happen on it, but all while maintaining the truth that this dungeon is a singular entity with one set of rules to remember. And Akira Toriyama, the artist behind Dragon Quest, also worked on this game. Just because these were existing Dragon Quest characters with existing Super Famicom sprites doesn’t mean there was little to do on the art side: Mystery Dungeon was a top-down experience with monsters seen on the map, and from angles they had never been shown from in prior Dragon Quest titles. And the difference in visuals from the last time we had seen Torneko was also significant, as that was back on the NES, while 1993 was a few years into the SNES’ lifecycle.
Now, Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon — or, Taloon’s Great Adventure: Mystery Dungeon, to use what would have been the localized title for the canceled European release of the game — wasn’t an easy game. “Easier than Rogue” is a pretty big space to exist within. Taloon — the English localization of Torneko — would still lose half of his gold when defeated in the dungeon, and he would lose all of his levels whether it was because he failed or because he retreated back to the outside. His equipment would all be lost if he died, too, and only so much of it could be saved in a vault even if he successfully exited the dungeon to then put a few pieces within — you don’t even have a vault to put things in until you’ve already had some success in the game and have the space within your store to store it — and even less of your recovered equipment could be taken back in to the dungeon at a time for a future expedition. But compared to Rogue’s setup where you die and that’s the entire game for you, yes, Mystery Dungeon’s approach was on the easier side.
The game opens with you needing to make it 10 floors down and then 10 floors back up in a Trial Dungeon before you can even enter the actual Mysterious Dungeon, as it’s referred to in-game, and the Trial Dungeon really just exists so you can get a basic handle on how it all operates. Like with Rogue, the floors of the dungeon are different each time, so you’re not trying to memorize paths or anything like that, but instead familiarize yourself with the way your different foes operate and what items do, so you can strategize your way to your goal and back without dying and losing everything. The more you know which monsters to attack and when, which items to deploy, which ones you can afford to drop to pick up a different one, which enemies to run from because you don't have the levels, strength, hit points, or item to properly combat them… that’s what you’re learning each time you’re in there, not room layouts.
You have plenty of time to consider each move, too, as Mystery Dungeon looks like it plays like an action game, but it’s turn-based: for every action you take, whether it’s a step, equipping an item, healing, or attacking, a turn is taken, and then every enemy on the map will take their own turn. Given this, fighting one-on-one against one difficult enemy can sometimes be safer than being surrounded by a bunch of weak ones, as at least the tougher foe only gets the one turn, just like you: if you’ve got 4-8 weaker foes around you all taking a swing at you before you get to make a second move, it’s going to feel a lot worse than one strong enemy hitting you once.
The Trial Dungeon doesn’t hide the identity of items nearly as often as the true Mysterious Dungeon, and cursed items — which have some defect or another, tend to have negative strength or defensive numbers, and can’t be unequipped until they’re uncursed — are a far rarer occurrence, as well. Enemies just a few floors into the Mysterious Dungeon are more difficult than anything you’ll find in the Trial Dungeon, with the concept of foes whose speed far exceeds your own — meaning, foes who can move and attack in the same time you do one of those things — waiting until the Mysterious Dungeon. This kind of design, with the unidentified bits waiting until later in the game, happened on the advice of Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii. This wasn’t his game other than in giving permission for Dragon Quest to be used as the base, and it seems as if he mostly stayed out of the development process, but this one bit of counsel was both offered and taken.
And that Mysterious Dungeon, with its cursed items and unidentified items that might actually make life worse for you in ways you won’t notice until the damage is done, is no joke. After descending at least 26 floors in one trip, you’ll find the Happiness Box, which ends up being the point of all of this, as it’s a named long-lost treasure the king has asked for you to recover if you happen to find it. Then you need to make your way back up all 26 or 28 or however many floors to actually have succeeded in recovering it. Normally, you can use an “Outside” scroll to warp if you have one in your inventory, which is a great way of making sure that you can deposit all your gold and hold on to some items you don’t want to lose, but you can’t do this with the box in hand. And in fact, if you’re not careful, you could fall down a pitfall to the 29th floor while walking around on the 28th or what have you, and have to work your way back up for an even longer time.
Bringing the Happiness Box back will roll the credits and end the game, but there’s an additional, even more difficult dungeon to complete after this. This one is 99 floors deep and has you recovering the Mystery Box starting at floor 30, while once again introducing new enemies and items into the mix. Obviously, it’s for those who have mastered Taloon’s Great Adventure’s systems and their own worst impulses.
There’s a real rhythm to the game that starts to come through in the Mysterious Dungeon. Descend, return, deposit, descend, return, deposit, and so on until you complete it. Dying obviously interrupts that rhythm, and in more ways than one, since you’ll lose whatever you had equipped, which is a negative whether you’re talking about whatever random gear you found on that journey or if it was something you specifically saved and set aside for later use. These deaths almost always feel fair, too, rather than due to bad luck. Sure, sometimes you might die because you didn’t expect to step on a mine, or to fall through a floor, or to stumble into a monster lair that’s more monsters than open spaces in the room, but the vast majority of the time, death occurs in Taloon’s Great Adventure because you decided to swing your sword one more time instead of any other number of options. Like using a “Return” scroll to warp to a monster-free room on the same floor, or consuming an Elixir to heal, or using a Blaze grass to breathe fire for massive damage and basically guarantee an enemy’s death, or throwing a Confuse grass, or using a “Change” staff to attempt to make this tough enemy into a weaker one, or just calling it quits and using the Outside scroll to bail on this run.
Chunsoft created a claymation commercial to promote the first Mystery Dungeon, which was uploaded on the Mystery Dungeon subreddit in 2022.
You should always have options in your inventory: remember that Taloon is a merchant, not really a fighter, and relying on these items he finds is vital to his survival. You can find a sword and a shield and upgrade both again and again with the proper items you find in the dungeons, but in the end your making it out alive is going to have a lot to do with whether you have the items you need, and the knowledge to use them when you should. Otherwise, how are you going to get by with being poisoned, which doesn’t reduce your hit points but does sap your strength, and therefore reduces your attack damage? (Use an Antidote to cure poison, and before using your Strength items, so that you can upgrade your max strength level and damage.) Or how will you figure out how to upgrade your hit points outside of a level up? (Take a risk and eat an HP-refilling Medical herb while your HP is already full.)
And managing your hunger… you’re going to spend a lot of time doing that. You might not be hungry all the time, but just like a real person, you have to be thinking about Taloon’s next meal and where it’s coming from, lest he starves and begins to lose hit points with each step. Bread fills a big chunk of your belly, and Big Bread fills all of it. Moldy Bread will also fill all of it, but it’ll sap five hit points from you, and, more troubling, lop off one point of strength as if you’ve been poisoned. If you find a “Belly” ring to wear, hang on tight, as it’ll let you avoid feeling the pangs of hunger, but at the expense of equipping some other major accessory, like a Strength +3 ring or one to make you impervious to traps.
Weapons, shields, rings, attack items, healing items, upgrade items. That’s the core of your inventory. You can find a safe on floor 10 of the Mysterious Dungeon, and keep it in your inventory as a way to avoid losing gold when you die, but item spaces are precious, too, so the temptation to not have it will eventually be there. You might need to discard an item you haven’t identified yet to make room for one you know you need, or test out an unidentified staff to see what it does and hope it was, say, attacking or confusing instead of cloning and enemy so there will be two problems to solve. In a desperate bid, you can equip an unidentified weapon assuming it’s better than no weapon at all, but if it’s cursed and then you find a better weapon before you find an Uncurse scroll… you can see the strategic dilemmas revealing themselves to you, and it’s in the solving for them that the game is played and success is found.
Weapons can be upgraded with one scroll, shields with another, and shields can also be covered in plating to keep them from corroding, which hidden acid traps or the juices in a zombie’s mouth can cause. A corroded shield will lose one point of defensive effectiveness, which could be the difference between living and dying at some point, especially since they can be corroded again and again. Leather shields halve the rate at which you get hungry, but are exceptionally weak: still, they can be useful if you find yourself low on bread, and just want to treat it as a walking-around shield rather than for combat. Know, too, that anything you have can be thrown at an enemy, much of it causing damage. Short on arrows but want a distanced attack? Hang on to some weapons you find, even if they’re weak ones, then throw them at the first opportunity, or drop them when a more important item is discovered.
While the game’s tutorial is very much tossing you into an easier dungeon and saying, “Good luck,” there are also loads of helpful NPCs to speak with who can give you some quality starter advice, and maybe let you in on a few secrets you might not figure out on your own. Dialogue for them changes after major events, like finishing the Trial Dungeon or upgrading your store with enough gold safely returned from the dungeon, and you should always be chatting with them just in case they’ve got something worthwhile to tell you. It was also a good call to make this information optional, in case anyone wanted something closer to Rogue’s experience, where it all has to be figured out through experience alone. Maybe you don’t want to know off the bat that you throw a Confuse grass at an enemy to confuse them, but hey, you’ll figure it out after you accidentally eat one like it’s any other grass and confuse yourself instead.
One thing that’s striking is just how much of what we still know as Mystery Dungeon gameplay was here in 1993 when the series originated, and just how many problems the designers imagined coming up and preemptively squashed. Monsters constantly spawn within a given floor of a dungeon, so in order to keep a player from grinding against weaker enemies to level up and make the rest of the dungeon that much easier, an earthquake will open up a hole in the floor for you to fall through if you’ve taken too long. The game is already set up with controller shortcuts for attacking enemies diagonally, or for being able to change the direction you’re facing without it taking up a turn. An option to grab what’s beneath your feet to avoid using additional turns walking away and then back onto the space already exists. Similarly, when on stairs, if you choose to stay put rather than descend or ascend, the menu will change to allow you to reopen the stairs options without using a turn to get back on them once more. Your view is narrow in tunnels, with just eight squares on the grid around you visible, and some of those only half lit, but everything within a larger room can be seen at once. The map is translucent and can be overlaid with the actual dungeon you’re traversing, and it does so in a way that doesn’t block your view and avoids centering over your play, so you aren’t ever wondering what’s “behind” either you or the map. This wasn’t Chunsoft’s first rodeo, as it were, and it certainly doesn’t play like it was, either.
Figuring out how to translate the essence of Rogue into a more approachable — but not easy! — console game while also making the established world of Dragon Quest fit within it paid off. Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon would sell 800,000 copies, which might not sound like that many until you recall that this was a Japan-exclusive game, and the next year would introduce the 32-bit generation of consoles with the Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn. Dragon Quest was the hottest thing going in Japan’s RPG space at the time, outselling even Square’s Final Fantasy titles of the day, and its fifth entry picked up 3 million sales. A brand new series with significantly different gameplay, that’s a Dragon Quest spin-off but with emphasis on the spin-off parts, selling 800,000 copies in 1993 in Japan alone? Well it’s no wonder this was the start of a new series.
There would be two more Torneko games: one for the Playstation, and one that appeared on both the Playstation 2 and the Game Boy Advance. Chunsoft’s relationship with Dragon Quest didn’t end with the kind of immediacy they were thinking, no, but sticking around in that world a little longer did offer them the freedom to make the games they wanted. To remove the restrictions imposed on them by the licensing situation with Enix, they decided to create a Mystery Dungeon subseries that was entirely of their own creation: Shiren the Wanderer. Chunsoft also had their hands in just about everywhere they could in between their Shiren titles: the Dragon Quest affiliation gave them a partnership with Enix, but making the Chocobo Mystery Dungeon games had them profiting off of Square’s work, they worked with Namco and The Tower of Druaga for The Nightmare of Druaga, and, as said, the Nintendo relationship would eventually come to be through Pokémon. These crossovers continue to this day: Etrian Mystery Dungeon is a crossover with Atlus’ Etrian Odyssey series of dungeon crawler roguelikes, and Mystery Chronicle: One Way Heroics is even based on an indie game, One Way Heroics. Mystery Dungeon might still be niche, comparatively, but it’s one Chunsoft has certainly been powered enough by for decades now.
While Taloon’s Great Adventure never did receive an official English localization due to the cancellation of the European release, an unofficial translation patch has been available since 2004, with modifications made it to into 2016. There are a couple of text formatting issues in there, and it doesn’t play well with every emulator available — the stock emulator on the SNES Mini, for instance, has trouble registering the autosaves, and it sees backing out of the game to go to the main menu as an attempt at messing with the autosaves, which then counts it as a death — but there are plenty of other emulators out there if you want to give this one a shot.
If you’re familiar with the Mystery Dungeon formula, you might be surprised at how much Mystery Dungeon was just already here in this first entry. And if you’re new to the games, well, there’s no better starting point than the literal beginning.
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