Category Archives: Roleplaying On The Road
Role Playing on the Road – Dungeon Village
In this week’s installment of Role-Playing on the Road, I’m going to touch on a compelling, but unfortunately shallow mobile RPG experience:
Dungeon Village (played on Android)
This is the first RPG effort from Kairosoft, the minds behind Mega Mall Story and, most notably, Game Dev Story. (Dungeon Village was originally and unsurprisingly titled RPG Story.) Like most Kairosoft games, Dungeon Village follows a number of cute sprites as they perform their day-to-day activities, and it’s up to the player to give them the resources to make them happy and productive. Unlike other Kairosoft games, this one introduces traditional RPG elements such as battles, quests, and item creation.
Role Playing on the Road – Zenonia 4
I’m going to start this column off with some back story. I’ve been doing some traveling lately, seeing friends from all over Canada. I’ve been between jobs, homes, and cities for the last two months. It’s been a blast. But, without my computer and PS3, I’ve been going through some separation anxiety.
How to sate that thirst? Buying a PS Vita or a 3DS seems the logical answer, but unrealistic for a jobless, homeless fellow such as myself. (As much as I love video games, I still have to eat.) So you can probably guess the route I had to take: mobile gaming.
I know, mobile devices make the Wii look like a modded Northwest Falcon Mach V. But I became enticed by a certain genre: the mobile RPG. RPGs don’t really seem all that well-suited to mobile gaming: they’re time consuming, addictive, and story heavy. Not the kind of games generally tailored to 15 minute playing spurts. But, despite that, I saw an opportunity, in the cute sprites and simple button layouts of the touchscreen, to recapture some of the golden age of SNES RPG gaming.
So do any come close? That’s what this column is here to discover. I’m happy to report that a few are actually very good. (And yes, as expected, some of them are very, very bad.) None will replace Skyrim, but a few might make that morning metro commute a little more bearable. Without further adieu, let’s start off with a good one: Read the rest of this entry
