Tired lesbian barely able to do much outside of survive work.
Been waiting so long to say this - we're working with Playstack to bring UNBEATABLE to Steam/PS5/Xbox, and you can wishlist it on Steam today!
To everyone at D-CELL and the friends, family, and fans who've supported us all the way across these many years, thank you <3
I wanted to get back into writing about the leaked Monster: Ancient Cline prototype and datamining stuff that's in there, but I never really explained what this is or why I'm so excited, did I?
Now obviously, saying "it's a furry 2D fighting game" should be enough. That's catnip to me. But there's more to it and why I love it so much.
Monster's a doujin game from 2005, and it's really unique in design. It feels like a midway point between the fast combo anime fighters that were dominating at the time and something more oldschool, with a slightly slower and more methodical pace. Its signature system, the "shift" system, also adds a huge amount of variety to gameplay; you pick a defensive, offensive or combo-based style along with your character, and can then spend a super bar during battle to switch into your alternate mode which transforms the properties of every one of your moves for a limited time.
The character designs are interesting, too. This was a doujin game for a small audience, so he knew that the audience was a self-selecting circle of freaks. Why make a game filled with simple, straightforward characters when you could make weird, intricate fighting styles tailored to the exact kinds of weirdos who're going to be playing your game? And listen: I love weird over-complicated characters. I don't pretend to be good at them but I don't have to be. I just want to mess with weird intricate systems and see what I can make out of them, and Monster is the perfect fighting game for that.
Monster was a solo dev project by a single guy, Sho Kawakami1, but there's one big collaborative element: the character designs. Out of the ten characters in the game, he designed a few of them, but the rest were borrowed from his friends. It's a cute little snapshot of the Japanese furry scene in the mid-00s, and even though it all gels together pretty well it's got that mixed character design/art style thing that really sells the idea this was a passion project for a group of friends.
It wasn't a huge breakout hit like Melty Blood, but it definitely had a little scene going on in Japan and internationally. I got to play it online with a random player just once, but it was a great experience - I wish I'd been there when it was at the height of its popularity, but I didn't find it until maybe 2008 or 2009.
2005 was right in the middle of the fighting game dark ages. It was honestly kind of a weird time to be into fighting games. (If you're a fighting game old head you can skip this paragraph.) Fighting games had been in decline starting in the late 90s, and the "dark ages" pretty much starts with SNK's bankruptcy and Capcom giving up on 2D fighters in 2001. There were fighting games getting made, but they were scrappier and weirder. Smaller devs making niche games for the people still playing fighting games.
It's also about the time that doujin fighting games were getting big, so small indie games were finding players who were getting left behind by big fighting games dying. Obviously this was around the time Melty Blood had made it big2, but there were a lot of smaller games getting communities and having fun. As much as arcades were struggling, a few companies saw doujin games as an opportunity and started offering the more polished doujin devs the chance to expand their games for bigger commercial releases in arcades—like Melty Blood, or Akatsuki Blitzkampf.
Monster: Ancient Cline was supposed to be the big update for Monster, its proud moment in the sun. It was picked up by publisher Examu, the Arcana Heart company, for a commercial release on their new PC-based arcade platform - it would have gotten it in front of far more people than the original PC version, and it really seemed like he'd finally made the big time. It was announced in 2008, for release the same year, and the announcement showed a kind of incremental upgrade over the PC game: high-res versions of the original art, and six new characters - pretty ambitious for a game that only had ten to begin with.
Development kind of dragged on after that, but it finally got location tested in 2010 and it seemed like it was finally going to come out. That version was very different from what was shown off in 2008: completely new artwork for every character, which was drastically improved over the original game, and a slightly smaller cast of 14 characters including four new ones.
And then, after the long anticipation, it quietly disappeared. It was never publicly cancelled, but as far as I can tell ShoK simply burned out and wasn't able to finish it. There were a couple attempts to revive it by someone who may or may not own the rights (I'm not getting into that today...), but otherwise it just disappeared.
...until a PC build suddenly showed up on archive.org a few months ago. As far as I can tell this is probably an online testing build from before the location test; I'd already known that a few western players had been recruited for volunteer online playtesting in the leadup to the location test, but I hadn't found anyone who still had their copy. I guess someone else did!
The file dates give it a build date of December 3, 2009, or about two months before the location test. It's a very similar build, with the same set of characters and what looks like pretty much the same gameplay as what was seen at the location test. It seems very much like development petered out after that location test, so this is pretty close to the final build before it was cancelled.
But what's here is really interesting. It's already very, very playable, and it's far more different from the first game than I expected. It really feels like he was making some changes to the game itself and to the returning cast, rather than just an up-port of the original game with some new characters like it was announced as. I can understand how he burned out under the pressure to make something like this, but I'm grateful to have had the chance to play it.
I've already made a few posts in the Monster: Ancient Cline tag, and I'll keep tagging the rest of my posts to make them all easy to find. I don't know how organized I'll be exactly, but I'm going to start with a general systems overview before I start digging into specific character changes and cut content.
And in the meantime, if this sounds cool to you: you should play with me online!! You can get the original game here and Ancient Cline here.
A pseudonym, which hasn't been active since Monster: AC was cancelled.
First release 2002, after French-Bread had been making smaller-scale indie fighting games for years.
Cirnozardry is a freeware DRPG made by doujin developer Morisoba. Released in 2014 and translated by an anonymous 4chan poster in 2022 (really!), it seems to be all but completely unknown in the West. I think that’s a real shame: it’s a solid game with some of the best and most consistent dungeon design I’ve ever seen, easily beating out the vast majority of commercial DRPGs.
I always find it hard to put dungeon design into words, but if you’re familiar with the genre, you’ll have experienced games that get it and games that don’t. Cirnozardry gets it. Each floor is cohesive yet internally varied, never giving way to cacophony or formula; each floor is big enough to explore and get lost in, but not so large that it becomes a slog or runs out of ideas (hello, Mary Skelter). Unlike many DRPGs, including most Wizardry clones, floors are also quite dense: events and treasure chests (usually with good items; eat your heart out, Experience Inc.!) are everywhere. It’s reminiscent of Etrian Odyssey in that way.
The dungeon is always challenging and often mean, but almost never unfair: a one-way door on the first floor drops you into the game’s first Dark Zone*, but if you get lost, there are multiple ways back to the light; there are secret doors aplenty and a near-mandatory one on the third floor, but they follow the symmetry principle and an attentive player should be able to find nearly all of them. With neither an ingame map nor a way to see your coordinates (something even the original Wizardry had!), silent teleporters feel a bit unfair, but they aren’t overused.
What’s more, the variety between floors is excellent. 2F is a tricky maze; 3F is a monster apartment complex; 4F is a brutal mapping puzzle that is mercifully optional (if you found the hidden door on the last floor, at least). Claustrophobic 7F gives way to wide-open 8F.
The combat system is unremarkable (if you’ve ever played an RPG Maker 2000 game before, you know what to expect), but the playable characters are well-designed: Cirnozardry excels at differentiation within a niche. For example, opening treasure chests without triggering traps requires a thief-type character in the party, of which two are available from the start. The first, Nazrin, is a terrible combatant with awful skills and poor equipment options, but with a completely unique ability: an overhead view of the dungeon.
The other, Kogasa, lacks this ability but has better stats, helpful in-combat skills, and the ability to equip heavy weapons and armor: in short, she can actually contribute in combat. In this way, Cirnozardry throws a bone to people who struggle with mapping without giving them a free lunch.
When it comes to presentation, Cirnozardry takes a turn for the strange. Wireframe dungeons give way to the usual RPGMaker battle screen and, occasionally, overhead-view cutscenes. Sprites are a mix of WolfRPG resources and assets ripped from other games. When you kill an enemy, they play the player death sound from Touhou; each floor’s BGM is taken from a different Touhou stage. An unseen audience cheers when you find a rare treasure chest and gasps when you trigger a trap or fall down a pit. This strange collage works extremely well in practice if you can tolerate a little bit of clash.
So Cirnozardry is an excellent game. But there’s one caveat: it’s very, very punishing. Most obviously, there’s absolutely no ingame map; you have to draw your own. Floor sizes and starting locations are inconsistent, so I can’t recommend paper—you’re liable to go over the edge of the sheet. I used Graph Paper, a Japanese tool with a functional machine-translated English release whose name makes it almost impossible to Google in English; it’s linked at the bottom of this post.
The economy can be brutal. Reviving characters is incredibly expensive; your income never outscales the fees (imagine early-game Wizardry 1 if it were the entire game), nor does any character learn a resurrection spell. This is compounded by an unfortunate lack of money: random encounters drop no gold and treasure chests from respawning fixed ones drop gold or an item, not both (and when they drop gold, it’s always a bizarrely small quantity). The only way to stay afloat is to aggressively sell items, which can feel bad if you’re the sort of person who likes to keep one copy of anything.
This also intensifies the strange dichotomy of hallway battles and room battles. Without the pittance of gold afforded them in Wizardry and the like, hallway battles feel like a complete waste of resources and effort. So fine, seek out room battles—except that a handful of floors, most egregiously 5F, have large areas with almost none of them. Exploring these areas feels unrewarding, and if you keep dying, you might have to take a break to grind rooms to afford Eirin’s revival fees.
So: if you can stomach manual mapping and money trouble, go play Cirnozardry. If you can’t, read on as I spoil the final segment of the game.
After ten floors of relatively normal exploration, you take on the Shining Needle Castle, a brutal three-floor gauntlet with a Final Fantasy VI-like multi-party system. Here’s where the game asks you to form a second team and use eight of its eleven characters, and where you become very grateful that it has two healers. This doesn’t entail a grind—characters not in the party always receive full XP from battle, and, unless you’ve gone crazy with the sell button, there should be enough gear to go around—but if you’ve used the same four characters for most of the game, you’re going to have to experiment with the ones you haven’t.
Like in FFVI, you can swap between parties with a button press, and progressing often requires one party to step on a switch that lifts a gate somewhere else. Unlike in FFVI, this takes place in a nightmare labyrinth that’s tricky even to map. Eventually, you’ll unlock a switch that opens a shortcut from 1F to 2F, followed by one that opens 3F for business.
3F offers a different sort of challenge. It’s small and easy to explore—the stairs to the final boss are straight down south, and the switch that opens them for business is a few steps north—and it doesn’t have any real two-party switch puzzles. Instead, it hosts five minibosses, each of whom grants the final boss a special skill and respawns whenever you enter the dungeon. Naturally, a party that fights all the minibosses won’t be in any shape to take on the final boss, so you once again have to use both parties: one to do the prepwork, the other to fight the final boss with its resources intact. (A conveniently-placed save crystal means you don’t need to redo the minibosses every attempt.)
Or, of course, you can take on the final boss with its skills intact. That’s what I did, and it wasn’t terribly hard; I beat it on my second try after taking too many level-draining (!) attacks at the start of the first. The game gives you more than enough tools to make it work.
Go play Cirnozardry. More people need to know about this game.
Creator’s website: http://tktkokiba.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-50.html
Fan translation: https://archive.org/details/cirnozardry-english-translation
Graph Paper: https://graphpaper-news.blogspot.com/2022/09/1.html
*For the unfamiliar, a Dark Zone is an area in which the player is completely blind, forcing them to rely on two things: their map, and the sound that plays when they hit a wall.
