RPG Maker Dungeon #5: Unterwegs in Dusterburg
Link: https://aranael.itch.io/unterwegs-in-dsterburg-english-version
Originally published November 13 2022
Western RPG fans and Japanese RPG fans have always been at war. The former insist on choice and consequence, the latter on ease of use. The truth, though, is that games from both fields borrow from each other. Planescape Torment famously cited Final Fantasy VIII in its credits. Meanwhile, Japan has kept the Wizardry series alive long after it lost relevance in the United States. There's a shared affinity between these two design traditions, even if they diverged long ago. That's what makes German RPG Maker games so interesting. The RPG Maker engine imposes certain limitations on these games, but many of them do everything they can to break those limitations. The most famous are the Vampire's Dawn games, which let you play a good or evil vampire in sprawling open worlds. The fact that they were huge, free and included on demo discs distributed by PC magazines made them legends in their own right, comparable to local cult classics like the Gothic games. (The first Vampire's Dawn is quite bad, but I digress.)
Unterwegs in Dusterburg was released just after the first Vampire's Dawn, in 2003. I had my eye on it after a Something Awful Let's Play sung its praises, but it wasn't until this year that an English translation for the game was finally released. It's a classic story of a young man with amnesia named Grandy who teams up with his wife, the mayor and a cute dog to save a nearby town from a cruel vampire. You've heard this tale before, but the attention to detail is notable. Grandy wakes up in a moody forest cloaked in fog. Birds fly through the skies, hills hide hidden caves and a nearby ghost demands you find their bones. The mayor asks you to go find his holy amulet, but you can go rooting around in nearby sabretooth tiger caves instead if you please.
Unterwegs in Dusterburg is visually impressive for its time. Cutscenes choreograph the flow of character dialogue to music. There are some very impressive parallaxes that look like something out of an SNES RPG. The game makes heavy use of shared RTP assets, but your party members have a variety of facial expressions for each occasion. I particularly appreciate the battle animations, which work around traditional RPG Maker menus without being intrusive or overly long. Your party members trade insults with enemies in the midst of battle and call out when they're near death. The graphics aren't always consistent, but there's always an intentionality to how they are used.
Unterwegs in Dusterburg simultaneously requires more preparation than your typical RPG Maker title, while being far simpler than a traditional Western RPG. Going exploring often requires you to buy ropes and even a grappling hook in advance. But interact with the end of a rope or a grappling hook that has been tied to something, and you can remove it for later use. Inns are relatively inexpensive, and there are few consequences to using them in the early game so long as you have an escape route. My personal favorite touch is the dog, which you can heal via various types of dog food. Buy dog food from the shop, season it with herbs or healing potions, and you have discrete control over how much healing to give your dog at any given time. Of course, you need to buy a bowl to put the food in as well...
The music is fascinating, because much of it is ripped right from Japanese RPGs. Yes, this is a Western RPG that uses multiple songs from the Final Fantasy VI soundtrack for recurring motifs. It's a ballsy move, but then, that's always been the way of RPG Maker games. At the same time, you could never mistake the game's quest design for that of a traditional Japanese RPG. An early dungeon allows you to evade danger by disguising yourself as a dwarf. Later, you may sneak into the vampire-haunted city of Dusterburg by giving a powerful grim reaper a porn magazine for skeletons. There are bad outcomes, too; push too hard to uncover a family's secret, and they reveal themselves as werewolves in hiding. Speak to them later with the mayor in your party, and you learn that they pose no risk to anyone; fight them too early, and you find yourself murdering children with little wolf heads.
Unterwegs in Dusterburg is also very funny. Grandy is a likable himbo who constantly gets into trouble. He has fun chemistry with his mage partner Libra, who loves him despite having lost her own memories as well. A "turtle race track' in the town of Dusterburg features turtles named Michaelangelo, Leonardo and Donatello; you can skew the race in your favor by giving the turtle brackish fountain water out of an empty beer mug. Every time the turtles race, you hear the sound effect "Cowabunga!" All these little details sometimes make Unterwegs in Dusterburg feel more like a classic adventure game than an RPG. This comes with the flaws you'd expect, like arbitrary puzzle solutions. But the game's charming enough that I don't really mind.
I still have a long way to go in Unterwegs in Dusterburg, but I'm excited to play more. The second chapter especially opens up a dense city for you to explore, a common enough move in a Western RPG that is significantly rarer in an RPG Maker game. The game certainly plays like a game made in 2003, with finicky battles and number scaling. But it's far more manageable than the Vampire's Dawn titles, even if it sacrifices ambition and complexity in the process. I'm glad that this classic was finally made available to folks in English.