Ok some absurd info related to Darkness:
www.hardcoregaming101.net/korea/part2/games-other3.htm#darknessI sat down and actually finished this game. For those who haven't played this game before, you don't even begin to comprehend its design. Its looks like a cool action rpg in pics, but oh man when you actually play it...
Nothing in the game makes any sense at all. The starting town is fill with absurd upscaled pixel houses and tonnes of NPC's playing their idle animations at ridiculous speeds. Some doors you can go into but most you cant, with no indication either way. Exploring outside towns is even more ridiculous, you never know if the edge of a map will be a wall or actually lead to a new area, so you spend heaps of time randomly walking into either invisible walls or suddenly entering a new area. When you enter new areas they usually make no sense visually with what the previous area was, and the way back to the previous area is usually nonsensically placed far away from the spawn point of entering the current area. Its literally mind blowing how absurd it all is, like the designers were either mentally unsound or just trying to make a joke game.
Anyway like derboo says in the article, you grind constantly respawning chests until your strong enough to kill the 1st boss, the big turtle. After that your into the next ludicrous stage that consists of forests and marshes, and you have to hug the edges of all the maps to try find the invisible entrances to new areas.
I realised around this point that, for the most part, the game is actually linear. No big overworld and backtracking, its really actually a linear set of about 7 stages. I found the general fast paced arcade feel kinda interesting, and I was curious as to what stages and bosses were to come, so I kept playing.
So onwards you go through absurd landscape after absurd landscape, most of the transitions making absolutely no sense whatsoever (suddenly your in a marsh, then cliffs, then maybe a fire cavern, etc) and the map designs just gets dumber and dumber. One desert area is absolutely gigantic and the exit is in a small hole in the ground, so you have to spend about 20 minutes just combing this huge map to find it. Other cave areas seem like they are completely blocked off with no means of progress, but then you realise you can sort of glitch jump your way up specific parts of the rocks to access new areas.
An ice area near the end makes it seem like there is nowhere to go, everywhere just leads to a dead end or a neighboring town. the edges of the ice area are cliffs that you can fall into and lose health. After some effort I realized you have to actually jump randomly off one of the cliff edges to touch a teleporter out in the middle of nowhere that you cant see unless you deliberately tried jumping off all the cliffs. A castle area of the game also has a stupid maze leading to 2 entrance doors of the castle. The right entrance is the correct one, but the left entrance just teleports you back a few meters on top of some stairs.
I've literally never seen such ludicrous design in any game before that takes itself seriously, ever. What the heck was wrong with the designers? Were they all about 10 years old, or did they quickly whip up all these stage layouts in about 2 hours?
Anyway, eventually you get to a cave where a dragons roar can be heard. You progress through the cave, get to the end, and then you get a cinematic of a dragon's shadow going over a town, then the 3 'supporting characters' watching on from a cliff side, then the credits. Those 3 supporting characters are those pictured along with the main sword guy on the advertisement, but I never saw them once in the game until the ending.
Also, THAT TURTLE BOSS WAS THE ONLY BOSS IN THE GAME. You would think there would have been a boss at the end of every 'stage' or at least one at the end, but no, the turtle is all you get.
What is the deal with this release? This is worse than just a rushed product, the maps make no sense at all both visually and gameplay wise, the supporting characters never appear until the ending, and the first boss at the beginning of the game is the only one. The game appears to be only about 15-20% complete at best, but this is what was released in stores, and as late as 1996 no less? Its just mind boggling.
After some searching on the internet, I cam across this bizarre release:
Seems to translate to 'New Darkness". Couldn't find anything on the net about this apart from the pic, and despite having the cdgem watermark it appears to have been sold as it cant be found on the site.
If you look at the artwork carefully, you will see that the main sword wielding character is actually the exact same pose/design of the character on the cover of the original Darkness, just drawn in a more realistic style, which is the proof that definitely links the games:
So despite the fact that they somehow managed to commercially released the horrendously unfinished and messed up DOS version of Darkness, maybe this 'New Darkness" for win 95 was an overhaul, or at least a more complete version for what the original vision for the game was? I wonder if it came out before or after the announcement of the Darkness sequel that was unreleased, or maybe the sequel was just reworked as 'New Darkness"?
