Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Amazing"

Sometimes less is more. This is the main ingredient that makes Dragon Crystal on the Sega Master System what it is. This game is a dungeon crawler where you explore randomly generated levels in search for a holy Goblet; that's it.

With no introduction whatsoever, your nameless character is dropped into a dungeon from the start and that will commence your adventure. You'll have to turn to the booklet to get a cock and bull story about an antique shop and being sucked into an alternate dimension, but that's not the focus here. The focus is exploring levels, fighting monsters and nothing else!

Simple visuals create the random dungeons and monsters alike, but they also offer a presentable and colorful environment for you to roam. There are a handful of different terrains that each have their own feel to it. You might stumble on the same kind a lot of times, during the 30 levels, but the vibrant use of simple color textures makes going through each terrain very appealing. And if that wasn't sufficient, Dragon Crystal also contains the brightest, most cheerful 8-bit music I've ever heard. There are only a few songs, which last 2 or so minutes, but they are so damn catchy and uplifting, you won't ever tire of them. Hell, yours truly even has the songs as a ringtone and an alarm clock. Start your day up (b)right!

Each level is composed of square quadrants, which are greyed out to serve as fog of war. As you progress, these will either color to reveal a wall or disappear to create a path. You'll also make whole blocks disappear to reveal a room, which may be filled with monsters or treasure. The goal to exploring each level will be to find the star square, which will warp you to the next dungeon level. To help you win some time, this star square will always be in an upward wall and never on the outskirts of the map. And of course, the deeper the floor, the more difficult monsters will become, as you yourself gain levels.

Following on the general trend of the game, combat in Dragon Crystal is fairly basic. Moving against a foe will attack it, but you can also throw items at it or use a spell you found earlier. This makes the turn-based combat follow itself up in rapid succession and won't bore you with too many menus or items to click through. There are only 2 buttons on a Master System pad anyway, but they're used well to either go to your character screen or use items. You have dungeons to crawl through, so you can't waste your time. It's all about hacking and slashing and moving on!

To help you in your chasing conquest, most room floors will be filled with goods to aid you; such as rings, swords, scrolls, potions, staffs and armor. There isn't a character **** so you can use whatever you find, however you want to. But the neat thing about it is that you won't know what a magical item will do until you use it for the first time! Using color coding, such as Bronze Staff or Green Potion, you'll need to use an item before finding out its effect. This will lead to very small frustrations, because a spell can backfire on you; but mostly it's thrilling to gamble like that. It keeps you on edge in an interesting use of the risk and reward system. And although a cursed item might make you frown now and again, it will rarely destroy your game and will lead to a lot of comical situations. Based on pen-and-paper roleplay rules, this is how magic is supposed to work! You see something shiny and it could be gold, but it could also be active uranium destroying your immune system. That's the great beauty of things.

Dragon Crystal puts everything it has to great use, but there is one miniscule flaw. Adding more variation to gameplay, you can search dungeons for hidden paths. These can be found by clicking an appropriate section of a dungeon wall. But since there is no indication whatsoever about hidden paths, finding them are hard, especially since you have to click numerous times. And although even this is a nice addition to the game, it can sometimes feel unnecessarily complicated.

But the fact remains Dragon Crystal is a great game, plain and simple. All the simplicity it has is converted to ultimate efficiency and makes playing easy, accessible and massively entertaining. From its driving music and cute graphics to the effective combat and thrilling magic system, everything is focused on its key aspect and turned to solid gold. You can pick it up at any time and find yourself sucked into its dimension, like the protagonist. It comes as no surprise that its initials are "D.C.," as that doesn't stand for Dragon Crystal; it stands for Dungeon Crawling!