I picked up Deep Labyrinth DS on credit today because I was tired of owning only three DS games -- admittedly, they're the ONLY good games on the system -- but if I'm going to try and support this portable PSOne I'd at least better make some sort of honest effort. Bye bye several mediocre PS2 games, hello archaic dungeon crawl.
Anyway, I'm enjoying it, way more than the tacky logo indicates one might. It's like a really gay-ass King's Field (I've made the "Queen's Field" gag in like forty different IM conversations, and it's now officially negative funny) with stylus controls for sword slashing and magic. You play as a sixth-grader caught in some parallel dimension hunting for his dog and his abusive parents. It's fuckin' dumb as hell, but the translation is competent. The graphics are hard on the eyes, but the Mitsuda soundtrack is actually pretty good. The monsters all seem like giant non-sequiturs plopped down into the middle of the dungeons, but hey: I'm from the RPG old-school and I prefer my dungeon crawls to be devoid of logic and consistency.
That said, once you get past the initial areas, the mazes and puzzles get pretty devious, and the game becomes pure King's Field. I'm oddly compelled to keep playing, despite the amateurishness of the whole affair -- there's always an upgrade or loot or weird-ass encounter around each corner. Kind of like King's Field.
So WTF me. It's better than Tao's Adventure and Lost Magic, at any rate.
