Video games have been knocking around for so long now that they've even started making games about making games. From project.
Yoshiro Kimura is a Japanese game developer that has always had wonderful, sometimes crazy and yet always unique ideas for video games. His pedigree are the most niche of niche games, Chulip, Little King’s Story, Rule of Rose, among others. His latest outing is a game, Dandy Dungeon – Legend of Brave Yamada, is so niche it sort of defies any explanation. Part puzzle game, part RPG, part dungeon crawler, part story-driven adventure, the game is completely absurd, silly, thoroughly well-written, and constantly pokes fun at both itself and the games industry at large.
I sadly missed the opportunity to put a lot of time into the mobile original, so I’m ecstatic the game has found a new home on Switch – and the game is vastly bigger and better. Read on to find out why!Dandy Dungeon – Legend of Brave YamadaPublisher: Onion GamesDeveloper: Onion GamesPlatform: Nintendo SwitchRelease Date: June 27th, 2019Players: 1Price: $24.99The visuals in Dandy Dungeon are pixelated and extremely heartwarming.
Despite the fact that the entire game is built with retro visuals, the sprites and environments have so much charm it’s almost too much to handle. Onion Games really nailed a throwback design, but made it wholly unique.The character sprites and monster sprites in particular are very animated and really add to the overall ridiculousness of the game, as well as its humor.
The poses and faces that even just Yamada himself makes had me laughing every time, and his enemies can be evil-looking, and yet silly too.While Yamada’s apartment tends to never change, the various dungeons and their layouts change every time, between the monsters, themes, and so on. The game has enough visual flair to really give it a charming, ridiculous, yet whimsical nature to it all. The team really knows sprite-work.Dandy Dungeon is at its core a roguelite RPG, where you enter various randomized dungeons spawned in the home-made video game that Yamada himself is slowly building throughout the game itself. Each dungeon has Yamada start at level 1 in terms of stats, but you can upgrade your gear.As you progress through each dungeon, you’ll slay monsters, uncover treasure, and overcome traps.
Each obstacle gives Yamada more XP, to which he levels up and gets better stats. If you clear more of each floor or perfect the entire floor, you’ll get even more XP. The core loop is grinding dungeons, collecting random loot, and upgrading your gear – and it’s pretty darn fun!If you take too long to clear the floor or you miss tiles after clearing the floor, you’ll get attacked by a flame for each tile missed, or every second until you clear the floor. The goal is obviously to clear the floors as fast as possible, and as soon as you move your cursor – or Yamada – the timer starts ticking down. Floors are randomized each time, so it provides new challenges every time.Once you make a path to the exit of the floor, Yamada will move automatically and begin slaying monsters, opening treasure chests, and overcoming traps.
You’ll have to watch Yamada’s health, as well as the monsters, so you can make use of potions, magic scrolls, and more. Once you get confident you’ll be replaying levels just to ace them every time.The other half of the game is the story-driven personal life of Yamada- kun, a 36-year old programmer at a large game development studio that is unhappy with his career. We’ll get more into the story in a bit, however the primary love interest, Maria, becomes Yamada’s entire focus. As you progress in his game, Yamada’s romantic confidence improves as well.Dandy Dungeon was originally released as a free-to-play mobile game, and as such, had some elements that had timers or low drop rates for certain items. Rice balls, which revive Yamada in dungeons, are still hard to come by, as well as Clovers, which let you buy rare items from the shop. As the Switch port is paid, the drop rates should be more fair.Overall though, the Switch port for Dandy Dungeon is quite excellent and is definitely the way to play the game now, especially considering the mobile original was pulled. If you’re competent at video games you’ll probably have no problems clearing the various dungeons, and then you can just focus on farming items to upgrade your gear.The soundtrack in Dandy Dungeon is a hilarious mix of chiptunes and goofy vocals that are the perfect compliment to the extremely awkward game itself.
Keiichi Sugiyama made the game’s humming and offbeat theme song with fellow musician Caorinho Fujiwara. They even did an English version that is equally as goofy, and it’s pretty great.The majority of the game’s actual background music is a mix of nostalgic-sounding chiptunes, melodies, and sound blips. All of the characters have silly gibberish like voices when they talk, most of which involves Yamada himself yelling or making various noises.
If the gameplay is a satiric love letter to classic games, the music and voice work perfectly matches this feeling as well.The story in Dandy Dungeon is easily the highlight of the entire affair. When Yamada gets obsessed with his own game, he stops showing up to work – and promptly gets fired. Things go off the rails, however, when his boss shows up and steals his game idea, hacks the build he has, and implements several new dungeons for Yamada to complete.The game quickly breaks the fourth wall when Yamada asks you, the player, to help him build his game and traverse his own creations, so that someday he can win over his new neighbor, Maria. He immediately falls for Maria, and even puts her into his game as Princess Maria. The entire story is mostly outrageously silly, and pokes fun at common tropes in games and anime.Writing in the game is actually pretty hilarious and clever, there are tons of digs at lame or annoying tropes in games like calling onigiri a doughnut, or the fact that Yamada never leaves his bedroom and is basically a complete shut-in otaku.
Yamada comes off as awkward, sad, even desperate – but the writing makes him likable and silly, and just want to root for him.Dandy Dungeon – Legend of Brave Yamada is an irreverent and extremely silly yet enjoyable take on classic gaming themes and tropes, all bundled into a package that only Kimura and his team could produce. The game has quite a lot of charm, and really cannot be properly experienced or explained properly until you’ve played it yourself.There may be some minor things lingering from the game’s mobile release like the rarer items, however, Dandy Dungeon is definitely an extremely unique game with a-one-of-a-kind experience that you can’t get anywhere else. If you’re looking for something completely different and are bored with the usual gaming fare, you should check the game out!Dandy Dungeon – Legend of Brave Yamada was reviewed on Nintendo Switch using a review copy provided by Onion Games.
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Yamada works in the trenches of the game industry, toiling away on other people’s creations. One day Yamada comes home, throws off his suit and decides to program a little game.
Nothing major, just something to blow off steam and reignite his creativity, which as it turns out, is like trying to light a single drop of gasoline. One idea leads to another and his cute little dungeon-crawl turns into Feature Creep: The Game, but Yamamda is finally making something all his own and can’t stop now. His suit stays on the floor as he stops going to work and anyone wanting Yamada’s attention needs to drop by his small apartment. An assortment of friends, weirdos and other uniquely bizarre characters all show up to influence Yamada’s game in one way or another, making it bigger, richer and deeper in unexpected ways.Dandy Dungeon: Legend of Brave Yamada is a fantastically strange little RPG featuring a hero questing through a series of 5×5 dungeons. Each floor is 25 tiles and the object is to clear the level by drawing a line from the entry square to the exit.
On most levels this is a simple puzzle with multiple solutions, but later on you’ll need to take into account monster placement or other hazards. One you’ve drawn the line, Yamada travels along it automatically, fighting monsters and picking up treasure along the way.
If you miss a tile it generates a fireball doing a single HP of damage once Yamada reaches the exit, stinging only a little compared to the shame of imperfect clearance. When you start a new floor you can stare at it as long as you’d like figuring out the best path, but once you start drawing it in (joystick or touch screen) the timer starts ticking down to zero. Take too long, and again, the fireballs show up to knock one HP per second off Yamada’s health.Initially the dungeon crawl is a relatively passive experience, once you’ve drawn the line and set Yamada traveling, but it doesn’t take long for items to pop up. There’s a five-item inventory at the bottom of the screen where you can activate one at any time past its cool-down period, and the variety of effects are necessary not only for survival, but also clearing certain levels at 100%. Magic shields and barriers are nice, and health potions or scrolls are always helpful, but a summons of a peach-headed deity who unleashes a tsunami that both damages any monsters on the effected tiles and also clears off the impassable water can change a good run into a perfect one. The advantage of a perfect run is not only the satisfaction of a job well done but also a powerful item only rewarded after earning the dungeon’s gold cup.Each dungeon starts off with a list of findable items, and earning the gold cup requires not only collecting everything, thankfully over multiple runs, but also clearing all floors of the dungeon by walking on every accessible tile. Water tiles don’t count, but if there’s an island in the middle of water or a series of tiles blocked off by walls, then you’ll need to figure out how to access them.
Once the path is set it can’t be changed, requiring you to live with any mistakes, but even an eight floor dungeon can be cleared in a little over four minutes. Once you’ve beaten all monsters and maybe a boss encounter it’s back to Yamada’s small room where the other half of Dandy Dungeon takes place. For someone hanging around in his boxers and never leaving his apartment, Yamada gets a lot of visitors.
A friendly co-worker comes by and fills him in on events in the outside world, less friendly ones visit to fire him in person, a mob-manager lets him know when dungeon bosses have respawned and of course the woman he’s fallen in love with sometimes shows up with a pile of baked sweet potatoes or an encouraging word. There’s a world filled with strange characters outside Yamada’s apartment and most of them are determined to add their influence to the game.There are also a pair of menus accessible outside the dungeons. The smaller one keeps track of progress, including of how many dungeons are left on the way to the story’s completion, outfits found, etc. The other, bigger menu lets you manage inventory and crafting, which is where you’ll spend the bulk of the time outside of dungeons.Each dungeon has a number of predetermined treasures kicking around in it somewhere, distributed randomly and not all available in a single run. There are a huge number of weapons, armor, shields and headgear to find, most of which can be combined into outfits that provide a new skill or stat bonus.
The Wind outfit, for example, gives a nice speed bonus and frequently activates a whirlwind attack skill. The poop outfit, on the other hand, features a high-accuracy poop-on-a-stick weapon, which makes a certain kind of sense seeing as even a light graze by poop is going to be deeply unpleasant. Each piece of equipment can be upgraded multiple times, with the weaker ones going up to level five and the stronger ones all the way up to level twenty or higher.
Weapons and some armor pieces can then be further upgraded into new stronger gear, generally requiring a specific group of items of varying rarity. The menu system is friendly enough to not only let you know what you need but also, when (touch-screen only) clicking on one of the requirements, telling you what set of dungeons you might find it in as a random drop.Closing Comments:When story, mechanics and general weirdness and humor are taken all together it adds up to a wonderfully-unforgettable RPG about making an RPG. The story feeds into the game and the game leeches into the story until the two are utterly inseparable, but even if they could be divided the dungeon crawling is incredibly playable.
While Yamada auto-fights all his battles there’s still more than enough left for the player to do in both plotting a path and working out a strategy for items. Certain dungeons require specific spells to complete at 100% and the reward is usually a piece of loot worth chasing after. It’s true that there’s more than a little grinding for items, but when the standard three-floor dungeon can be completed in ninety seconds or less, it feels like an approachable challenge instead of a chore, and the humor that saturates every aspect of the game from plot to monsters and the dozens of outfits Yamada can wear make the entire game lively from start to finish. Dandy Dungeon: Legend of Brave Yamada is a treat of RPG weirdness and a fantastic way to let a surprisingly large number of hours gently drift away as one man’s epic quest to create gets completely out of hand.