Deadly Towers was one of those games I never really knew much of but have seen several people talk about how this is a really bad game, so it got me curious enough to play it and see if it's really as bad as people say it is. At first it didn't seem like such a bad game at all. Slowly but surely though, I began to realize why this game is hated, and that's why it's this week's Hall of Shame induction.
In Japan it's called "Hell's Bells", and I think I know why.
The story of this game is that on the eve of his coronation ceremony, Prince Myer is by the lakeside when he suddenly meets a kami called Khan who turns into a man. Khan warns Myer that the evil wizard Rubas is preparing to overtake the Willner Kingdom by using seven magic bells that can summon an army of monsters. Myer must travel to Rubas' castle and destroy the bells along with Rubas himself. For you wanted a more detailed explanation about the story, all you have to do is wait at the title screen as the long drawn out text shows up. There really is no point in reading the story, because odds are you'll spend as much time playing the game as you did read the backstory.
The first problem I have with this game is the weapon you use. You start off the game with a short sword that is so bad that Prince Myer hates it. Seriously, it says so in the instruction manual:
SHORT SWORD -- You start the game with this sword. It is so weak, you feel lonely (you have no confidence in this sword).
How bad does a weapon have to be for the main character to feel lonely? Imagine if the Master Sword wasn't as powerful as Link thought it was, making him so depressed that he decided not to bother with rescuing Zelda. But after having played the game a few times, I can see why Myer doesn't like his sword. Usually when you have a sword as a weapon, you swing it. In this game's case however, you throw it. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that you can only throw one sword at a time, which means until it leaves the screen, you are defenseless.
Fighting the enemies in this game is a pain in the ass. You start with 100HP, but the enemies deal so much damage for every hit that you'll die in about 5 or 6 hits. Doesn't help that sometimes they'll be a clusterfuck of enemies all over the place, and sometimes they will literally trap you to death. Since getting hit pushes you back a bit, sometimes you'll die by falling right off a cliff, and since you only have one life, it's very frustrating.
The sword sword really is as weak as the manual says. Either that or the enemies are ridiculously strong. One group of enemies you'll be coming across a lot are these blob circle things, and they take 21 hits to kill. Seriously, you have to mash that A button 21 times in order to kill ONE freaking blob. Why are there even blobs in the first place? Couldn't they have come up with better fantasy creatures to fight? In Zelda they came up with all sorts of enemies, but in Deadly Towers we get faceless, emotionless blobs. You'd think that the enemies that take way too many hits to kill would be the most hated, but I say it's any enemy that has the ability to fly. Because they can fly, they'll usually be far away, which means you have to aim good with your sword because of the one throw per screen rule. It also means that when you kill them, odds are the item they drop is going to be in a place you will NEVER be able to reach. The only thing I like about the combat mechanics is that when you hit an enemy, they freeze up for a second. So if you get real close to an enemy and keep firing at your sword, you can kill them very easily. This even works on the mini-bosses I came across.
The game apparently has other weapons you can use, but I never found one. Maybe they're in the shops, but this game was so frustratingly hard that I can only find one shop. Speaking of finding shops, they're made unnecessarily hard as well. Instead of clearly showing where a shop is, you have to just stumble upon them when you're in a room. The one I went to had a bunch of enemies and looked like a dead end. If you came across a dead end full of enemies, would you think there was a shop somewhere to buy items?
Can you guess where the dungeon is supposed to be
Exploring the game is split into two parts: The castle and The dungeons. The castle is pretty standard, though I could've done with less obnoxious enemies and cliffs where you can die instantly. The dungeons are what I'd like to call HELL because you're going to be stuck here for all eternally. Once I wound up in one of these dungeons, I was never able to get out, and it doesn't help that the only reason I entered this place was because of some stupid spacetime bending invisible gate! This is one of the biggest problems with the games, the invisible gates. You'll be walking around in a normal matter until you suddenly appear in a dungeon. You can't go back to where you just were either, and you don't have a map to help you, so if you go the wrong way and stumble into a dungeon, you're screwed. But just in case you thought you could navigate easily by just remembering the rooms, they made the graphics so stale that too many rooms look exactly the same.
Speaking of rooms, check out the map of the first dungeon. [credit: StarFighters76 on GameFAQs]
In the first dungeon alone, there are over 100 DIFFERENT ROOMS to navigate through! Times this number by ten (the number of dungeons in the game), and you have to play through over 1000 rooms to beat the game. Who the hell thought it would be a great idea to create over 1000 rooms for the player to go through without giving them any sort of map to work with?!
So when you combine the horrible fighting part with the horrible exploration part, you get one really bad game that I can't never play because I die within the first five minutes all the freaking time. At least when you die they give you a password to keep all the stuff you died with, but even then you have to start at the very beginning of the game. If you die in the middle of one of those hundred-room dungeons, you're going to have to do a LOT of backtracking, which is one of the main components of making a game not fun.
Overall, Deadly Towers is like a very horrible version of The Legend of Zelda. If the enemies weren't so cheap and the dungeons were easier to navigate, it would've been a much better game.
