Who are Team Muramasa? What is Generation Xth?

Team Muramasa, to exaggerate slightly, are responsible for the resurgence of Wizardry-clones (old-school, first-person dungeon romps) in the East, and subsequently in the West. The popularity of their official Wizardry games, Xth and Xth 2 on the PS2, caused a flood of games like Elminage, Etrian Odyssey, Unchained Blades, and many more.

The Wizardry Xth games boasted a fairly open world, an extremely intuitive but in-depth crafting system, and many overall improvements to the Wizardry formula, particularly focusing on speed and efficiency of controls. They took that formula to the indie PC scene in 2007 and created the Generation Xth trilogy, the first entry of which, Code Hazard, is the reason why you are here now.

Team Muramasa continued after the Generation Xth trilogy to create Meikyu X Cross Blood, then Students of the Round, which was successful enough to warrant a 360 and PSP port, and now they're working on two new dungeon games for the PSVita and 360 under Kadokawa publishing, called Demon Gaze and The Stranger of the Town of the Blade (Tsurugi no Machi no Ihoujin).

Info website: http://www.exp-inc.jp/xth/

Hope you all find them as enjoyable as I do.

Always wanted to play these games

Sadly, the wizardry-clones didn't came back to the west, and it appeared that the audience really isn't there anymore, since we never had a fan-translation done before...

I hope your translation succeds and helps to introduce this series to westerns, showing people how great those games are, and hopefully showing companies that there is still an audience for this kind of games, that more of them should be made & localized.

The hardcore ones never seem to get localized for whatever reason. Etrian Odyssey seems to do well, but I assume that's because of its light tone and cutesy graphics. Elminage got localized, but I hear it has bad "japenglish", which is a shame, because I'm really digging the Japanese version I'm playing.

The next closest thing is Grimrock, but that's not quite Wizardry. More like Eye of the Beholder.

Yeah, the entire 'dungeon game' phenomenon fascinates me, and it's great to finally get to play one of the "new but oldschool" Wizardries.

I can't really think of any decent PC dungeon crawler in the West with that's come out in the last... 10 years? Devil Whiskey comes close, I guess -- and no, Grimoire doesn't count.

shram wrote:The hardcore ones never seem to get localized for whatever reason. Etrian Odyssey seems to do well, but I assume that's because of its light tone and cutesy graphics. Elminage got localized, but I hear it has bad "japenglish", which is a shame, because I'm really digging the Japanese version I'm playing.

The next closest thing is Grimrock, but that's not quite Wizardry. More like Eye of the Beholder.

yeah the translation for Elminage Original is bad and they've put the music from Elminage 3 in original too. it's sad, because it's probably my favorite series, really liked 3 and gothic(gothic is really hard though).

I finished Demon Gaze yesterday...now playing Etrian Odyssey 4, when you played on a vita for a while and go back to the 3ds, wow those 2 screen are small lol.
Etrian Odyssey 3 was my very first real dungeon crawler and I really liked it but now EO4 feels like a downgrade, it's a lot simpler and the menu kinda annoy me a little.:S

We did get Wizardry Tale of forsaken land on ps2. Everyone seemed to like it, so I had to try it and to be honest I don't really understand why it was getting so much praise. The script was well made, but god making those stone to learn spell one by one....takes forever. but then I played the sequel Wizardry Alternative Neo which never released here and in my opinion that one is really better and fix many problem the first game had , more classes, better music....

We got Wizardry on ps3, which isn't bad in my opinion but it got bashed really hard and probably didn't sell very well. kinda suck because the sequel was nice.

I don't have a Vita or PS3 yet, but I need them for the Wizardries and Demon Gaze (and a few other Vita games).
I like almost every game of the style, though I'm not that big a fan of Etrian Odyssey. I started the 3rd one in JP recently and it's not too bad but I prefer other games more. One reason is the shoddy DS screen and graphics and the absolute waste of time that manually drawing the map is. Really, might as well not even have an automap, just a waste of the bottom screen. I was playing some old sega CD dungeon crawlers a few months ago and had a blast using this app
http://www.zerker.ca/zzone/2010/01/10/dungeon-mapper-0-1-alpha/

I really like Class of Heroes (Ken to Mahou to Gakuenmono.) Final, but for some reason other people are stuck on bringing over the first two games in the series first, which if you ask me, suck pretty bad. The 3rd game was better, and Final improved it the most -- honestly, the others aren't even worth playing...

I was honestly surprised by Elminage, it's very pure. Not a lot of frills, just solid dungeon crawling. The Unchained Blades sequel is also very good, fixes the issues in the first game with the irritating monster recruitment system.

And believe it or not, the Legend of the Legendary Heroes PSP game is really, really good. It's a Wizardry-like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsYqACZgJs0

I did not like the first two Etrian Odyssey games. I did like the third one, however. I think I liked the third one because the ship broke things up some. The fourth one interests me because you have a world map and and all.
I really enjoyed the first Unchained Blades. It kind of reminded me of Arcana. It was a dungeon crawl but very linear and story driven at the same time.
I'm really curious to see how Elmiange plays. I like how many of the monsters seem large and epic.
I think they leave the hardcore ones out because they don't think they will sell as well.

shram wrote:I don't have a Vita or PS3 yet, but I need them for the Wizardries and Demon Gaze (and a few other Vita games).
I like almost every game of the style, though I'm not that big a fan of Etrian Odyssey. I started the 3rd one in JP recently and it's not too bad but I prefer other games more. One reason is the shoddy DS screen and graphics and the absolute waste of time that manually drawing the map is. Really, might as well not even have an automap, just a waste of the bottom screen. I was playing some old sega CD dungeon crawlers a few months ago and had a blast using this app
http://www.zerker.ca/zzone/2010/01/10/dungeon-mapper-0-1-alpha/

I really like Class of Heroes (Ken to Mahou to Gakuenmono.) Final, but for some reason other people are stuck on bringing over the first two games in the series first, which if you ask me, suck pretty bad. The 3rd game was better, and Final improved it the most -- honestly, the others aren't even worth playing...

I was honestly surprised by Elminage, it's very pure. Not a lot of frills, just solid dungeon crawling. The Unchained Blades sequel is also very good, fixes the issues in the first game with the irritating monster recruitment system.

And believe it or not, the Legend of the Legendary Heroes PSP game is really, really good. It's a Wizardry-like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsYqACZgJs0

First time I hear about lengendary heroes...well I had couple points to spend so I ordered the game, one more dungeon crawler to my collection

I agree, class of heroes 2 is mehh, even the third game was mehh in my opinion. The games has some good idea but I dunno, it just feel very unbalanced...but I haven't played Final yet.

I am doing some post game stuff in Etrian Odyssey 4 atm, not a bad game overall but at the same time I can't wait to play something else.