Roguelike - Mainstream Success

Mainstream Success

Roguelike games long remained the domain of computer geeks. However, according to 1UP.com's Jeremy Parish, action role-playing games such as Blizzard's hugely successful Diablo can be considered types of roguelikes, due to their similar premise: players slash their way (in real time) through increasingly difficult monsters and obtain treasure while traversing deeper into randomly-generated dungeons to complete quests. Salon.com's Wagner James Au attested that, when he visited their offices, "Blizzard's designers readily acknowledged their debt to Nethack and other Roguelikes". Moreover, the permanent death feature of the roguelike is retained in Diablo 2's hardcore mode, as well as Runic Games' Torchlight.

Still, the first mainstream success of proper roguelike games (turn-based, randomly generated dungeon crawlers with no or limited save feature) was in Japan where the genre is now widely popular. The success is due primarily to the Mystery Dungeon series by Chunsoft. The series began as a Super Famicom game called Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon (lit tran. The Great Adventure of Torneko: Dungeon of Mystery), which is a spin-off of the Dragon Quest series. The finely tuned game balance as well as the use of easily recognized 2D animated monsters from a well-known franchise drawn by Akira Toriyama, who is the creator of various hit manga and anime such as Dragon Ball series led to the game becoming a sleeper hit in 1993 selling in excess of 800,000 copies. The game was also voted as the 78th best game of all time in the Japanese Famitsu magazine.

Subsequently, Chunsoft has built the Mysterious Dungeon series on well drawn, animated characters and monsters from easily recognized and well established franchises. Chunsoft managed to flatten the steep learning curve of roguelike games by introducing multiple dungeons with progressive difficulties, hence delaying the introduction of more punishing aspects of gameplay to later stages (or only after completion of the main plot). In some series, the permanent death feature applied only to the hard mode and has been controversial amongst fans of the older games who prefer more challenging (and some argue more addictive) gameplay. Due to the lower requirement for hardware specs, smaller data size requirement and the casual nature of gameplay, not to mention infinite replayability, the series has been particularly successful as games for hand-held consoles and, more recently, mobile phones.

This format resulted in four successful sub-series: the Torneko series based on Dragon Quest, the Chocobo (series) based on Final Fantasy, the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series based on Pokémon, and the Shiren the Wanderer series, which is the only one based on original characters (plus two failed series based on the Gundam and Tower of Druaga franchises). These series have become "the staple of the Japanese game market". The first Chocobo game, which had a less punishing save system for a much younger target audience, sold 1.165.798 copies and the first Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games, Blue and Red Rescue Team, sold 3.08 million together, popularizing the core gameplay of roguelikes to a global audience.

The no-save feature of the Torneko and Shiren series, which is the main premise of roguelike games, was described as "the worst flaw in any RPG is the lack of a decent save system" by Worthplaying.com and " against the very foundation of what an RPG should be" by Gaming Age. Eurogamer argued that "its sadistic, repetitive nature ....that's precisely what's appealing about it. The stakes are far higher, making the rewards much sweeter." The latest Mystery Dungeon series to be marketed to the West for console is Shiren the Wanderer 3 for Wii console which features 3D rendered characters. In the West, it is marketed simply as "Shiren the Wanderer", reflecting the lack of recognition of previous series in the West. The game has three difficulty modes, Easy mode where half of inventory and all the attained levels are saved upon defeat, Normal mode where you lose all the inventory but retain the levels you've gained, and Hard mode which features permanent death (rather than dying, characters are brought back to the entrance of dungeon, lose all their inventory and revert to level 1).

The genre has also received attention from Independent developers with the release of Strange Adventures in Infinite Space by Digital Eel in 2002, its sequel, Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space in 2005, and more recently, Dungeons of Dredmor by Gaslamp Games in 2011. Alec Meer of Rock, Paper, Shotgun mused in his review that its success might attract more developers to pursue the genre, commenting that "I’ve got a sneaking, and very pleased, suspicion that we’re in for a lot of roguelikes over the coming months. Perhaps they’ll be 2011’s indie comeback special, in the way leftfield platformers such as Braid and Super Meat Boy have been in recent years. For whatever is due to follow, it’s going to find the bar left pretty damned high by Dredmor."

In September 2012 Subset Games released FTL: Faster Than Light a space simulation roguelike which had been successfully funded by a Kickstarter campaign 7 months earlier. The game received largely positive reviews, holding average scores of 8/10 on Gamerankings and Metacritic. Leif Johnson of IGN stated in his review that FTL "demonstrates that the Roguelike genre still has plenty to offer almost 30 years after its first appearance"