Cirnozardry (Cohost backup)

 

Cirnozardry - Review

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.