Throne of Darkness, a Japan themed Diablo clone from 2001. It's set around the Sengoku era, only there's demons.
The twist here is that you travel as a party of four samurai, with three more on retainer back at your lord's castle. If someone dies or is badly hurt, they can be teleported back to the castle to be healed. Healing isn't instant, so you'll be traveling with a constantly shifting configuration of people.
Playing it is pretty fucking rough. For one, gold is an item (a cardinal sin even then) and not, as would be sensible, stored in a shared wallet. Thus, if you want to repair, craft or identify an item, you have to take the item, give it to the priest or blacksmith (who you thankfully interact with remotely), switch to the character who's carrying the money (ideally the "Leader", because he gets a discount due to his high charisma), pay, then give the item back to whoever had it before. Irritating, to say the least.
There is also no stash back at the castle, forcing you to leave stuff you want to store strewn about on the floor. Inventory managment in general is a chore, as you have to sub a character into the current party to trade with them. And yet the smith and priest can offer remote services...
Even the controls are cumbersome. This is a click to kill game where the monsters are difficult to click and your own party members frequently get in the way. Further aggravated by knockback effects moving you or the monsters out of range. This was not at all well thought out.
To combat this (?), the devs created a formation system, which is hampered by the fact that you have to pick and manage the orientation. Put all your frontline fighters in front, and the archer further in the back, point it south to advance south. Want to go west? Select the formation again, point it to the west. You get the idea. Baldur's Gate, a game released three years prior did this better...
Progression is as straightforward as it is boring. Str, Dex, Life, Mana, Charisma (only useful for the Leader). For some reason, every character has access to spells, even though only the mage will be able to take full advantage of them. The rest are passives that increase your attributes, so level-ups are very rote and braindead.
What's weird is how XP is gained in the first place. Your samurai receive one point of XP for every point of damage they deal to monsters. With a group of seven, only four of which are in play any given time, and frontline fighters typically stealing all the glory things quickly get lopsided. My mage for instance is still level 2, because his early spells suck, drain his still limited mana too quickly and him being so squishy that he frequently dies, forcing me to either wait for him to be revived and healed before I proceed, or just keep things moving... My swordman on the other hand is already level 6, because he's first into the fray and usually does the most damage, too.
Gear seems heavily based on crafting, only the mat's tooltips don't betray what they actually add to the items you're slotting them into, forcing you to tab out to a FAQ.
Needless to say, I won't be finishing this one. I'm gonna give it another hour or two, then it's on to the next one. Shame, too, as I remember seeing this one in magazines back in the day. I had hoped for some comfy retro ARPG action, but I suppose it wasn't meant to be.
