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Episode 227: Console Roguelikes (to Mystery Dungeon) (Patreon)

Published:
2019-06-10 14:00:00
Imported:
2026-06
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This week is a patron request episode... sort of. The request was specifically to cover Konami's PS1 roguelike Azure Dreams, which dovetailed neatly with my intention to tackle console roguelikes in general one of these days. Thus, I decided to combine the two. Sensible, right? 

Well, uh... the problem is that we didn't quite make it to Azure Dreams. 

So, Andrew... we'll revisit this in a couple of months. Sorry about that. We tried! It's just, well, we got an expert on the show this week: John Harris, author of @play, which is pretttty much the definitive online treatise on roguelikes. As a result, there was a lot to be said.

Description: The second part of our journey into roguelike history sees experts Jason Wilson and John Harris join Bob Mackey and Jeremy Parish to explore the protoplasmic origins of the genre's console renditions through the near-perfection of Shiren the Wanderer.

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Cody F

Ahhh guys it's like you made it just for me...

Cody F

Ok so, my first roguelike (though I did not know it at the time...) was Fatal Labyrinth. I would rent it from a local supermarket chain called Marsh (since purchased by a Brazilian capital group, and some years later, sadly closed and liquidated). I rented it a while after it was released so it had a tough-to-define creepy “old game” charm to it. The fact that it shows your grave on game over always spooked me out. Plus, if you collect more gold— Your grave looks nicer when you die. As far as I can tell, that’s the only effect of collecting gold in the game. Kind of grisly for a kid to wrap his mind around back then! Thanks for the episode guys; I’m looking forward to checking out Nightmare of Druaga and Shiren the Wanderer as a result of the discussion!

John Simon

Well, I bit the bullet and patched a copy of the SFC Shiren rom. I vaguely remember it being a name kicked around the SNES emu/translation scene. Yeah I'd definitely trade Super Mario RPG for this being released in 1995. This would have been totally my jam back then. And yup, this game writes the state of your game to the battery backed ram with every darn step - no save scumming, if your legendary item thingy breaks, no sense reaching for the reset button, it's GONE. The talk about 8bit consoles and squeezing a Rogue onto it is a nice thought experiment - 2kb RAM on the NES lets you track the barrels Donkey Kong is throwing, and that's about it. Thing is, here's rogue for ZX Spectrum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cMiDpkdZN4 FWIW: here's a live commentated nethack speedrun in two hours, which is nuts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIB0y_kwFuY

RoryDropkick

Nightmare of Druaga represent. ❤️ I can't say much more about it because everything was already said on the show and in my email. It's too frustrating that no one appreciated this game.

Daniel Worthintendo

is all the music from Etrian Mystery Dungeon out of interest? Been awhile since I played and wasn't sure.

Jesse Onland

No video games podcast can resist miring themselves in a conversation about the criteria which make a game roguelike, whether existing criteria are good, whether conversations about such criteria are good, etc. We need some kind of international moratorium on this so that discussion of roguelike games becomes bearable again.

Kenneth Nelson

I finally got to listen to this episode and I'm super sad you guys didn't get to Azure Dreams. Since for all it's flaws I really love that game and it was my first roguelike. I would like to point out that when you do get to it, it predates the Mystery Dungeon games in the US. Chocobo's Dungeon came out the year after and Torneko came out the year after that. Which makes it kind of an odd beast, and a risk for Konami. The GBC version released after at least was trying to rip off Pokemon, which is totally understandable.