Throne of Darkness

In 1997, two former Diablo developers, Doron Isaac Gartner and Ben Haas, formed Click Entertainment. As far as I could find out, this meanwhile defunct company developed only a single game, an RPG that went largely unnoticed: Throne of Darkness. (A second game, Click's Online Fighting Game, obviously was never finished, only some concept art remains.)

Given its provenience, it should not come as a surprise that Throne of Darkness has many similarities with Diablo, far more than Cybermercs has. In fact, if you have played Blizzard's classic, most things will be rather familiar to you: the style of the graphics (now of course 800×600, hi-color), the gauntlet cursor, the chests that light up on mouseover and spit out an item, the portals, the inventory, the exploding barrels.

The biggest difference is that in Throne of Darkness, you control not a single hero, but a group. While the combination of party and real-time combat is never a particularily good idea, the solution chosen here is fairly elegant (in any case a whole lot better than in the Infinity Engine games, but that's not saying much): You control one character directly, while the others are on AI. You can select the character you want to control at any time.

Technically, Throne of Darkness is very well done. Compared with contemporaries like Morrowind or Neverwinter Nights or even the older Siege of Avalon, its system requirements seem ridiculously low. It comes on two CDs, and you can do a full install if you like, putting everything on the harddisk (about 1GB needed). Annoyingly, you still have to have one of the CDs in the drive: copy protection. I could find no crack for this.

Links

When I started playing Throne of Darkness, it looked like there were no fan pages for the game at all, at least none of any use, so I decided to build my own, which wasn't all that easy since I play the German version and had to guess the original names of things. So far I have three loose pages.

• Unique Armor (only what I found so far)
• Components for upgrading items
• Portals in the wildernesses

Then I did a better google search and found, yes, there were some, but very few. I'll continue working on my own though, and at least now I can check for the original names.

• Throne of Darkness by SHACHO-SOFT was created in the first half of 2002 and has everything you could want from a fan page: uniques (far more complete than mine, of course), maps (wildernesses and slopes), spells, components, the elemental combinations introduced with the latest patch (1.2.18), max character stats. This is a Japanese site, but in English language, and the only one that is fairly complete.
• French Site. Since there is a seperate French version of the game with different item names, it will be of limited use for those playing another version, but the weapon stats are still a good guide for building your characters.

Last but not least a few general links:

• Interview with Isaac Gartner
• Throne of Darkness Game Info on RPGDot

Quotes

Leif Jensen, producer, in an interview for RPGVault, about being compared with Diablo:

Being compared to Diablo doesn't bother us a bit. Diablo I and II are great games that definitely had some influence on our game. How could it not? Three of our development leads made the original Diablo and have credits in Diablo II. Being compared with Diablo is great in that we'll get the Diablo fan base to check out our game. Once they play Throne of Darkness they will see how different the game is, and be able to explore a whole new RPG genre about Japanese mythology.

At first glance, people may think this game is Diablo set in Japan, but looking closer, you will see Throne of Darkness has many features that are different from Diablo II, the most important of which is that you actively play and evolve a team of seven Samurai. We have created an entirely new way to control a squad of characters we call tactics. Using tactics, the player can set formations and roles for the charters to fall into. The 12 different tactics give you the ability to quickly switch the Samurai's formation, aggression, and weapon. Also, the Throne of Darkness engine runs at 800x600 screen resolution and 16-bit color display. This gave us the ability to design our characters and levels with an extraordinary amount of detail. I believe visually there is no other 2D engine that compares to richness and beauty that Throne of Darkness displays.

Isaac Gartner, president of Entertainment, in an interview for Khabal Gaming, about how Throne of Darkness differs from other action RPGs:

Throne differs in that there's a lot more strategic gameplay involved. It IS a hack-n-slash kind of game, but it's a more refined hack-n-slash. The depth to the game comes from having seven samurai to control, and having to decide on good party combinations to win in different battle scenarios. Having seven samurai also gives you more to think about in terms of whom you want to level up, because each character gets experience independently of the others. Everyone seems to have their own style in playing this game. Some people rotate their samurai so that they all level up, while some people stick to a single team of four samurai. Some hardcore players have been known to complete the entire game with just one samurai.

The interviews are meanwhile offline, I found the quotes on RPGDot.

Reviews

• A Diablo clone that muddies the clean and simple gameplay of the original, Andrew S. Bub mourns, yet it also adds just enough new things to make it worth a look:

  What we're left with isn't a bad game per se, but in many ways it's an unmanageable game that takes the simplicity of a certain famous clickfest of a game (whose name you can probably guess by now), complete with that game's inadequate AI, and renders it too complicated to be completely fun.

• An average game that suffers from severe "More of the Same" syndrome, Mark Smith thinks.

  More suitably titled "Clone of Darkness", Sierra releases yet another RPG game that gave me that eerie feeling of déjà vu, especially since I had just finished playing their other recently released RPG, Arcanum. I suppose if you enjoy these types of games and can tolerate the same monotonous gameplay with minimal changes in visuals and game dynamics then you will probably enjoy this RPG set in a feudal-Japanese setting.

• It will provide for a nice break between other games, is Brian Cavner's verdict:

  The more hardcore, epic-loving gamer may enjoy this game for a quick romp through a different world away from the deep and thought-filled ones that they are accustomed to. If, however, you have your sights set on a straight up, first-rate hack-and-slash adventure, you have found your perfect fit in Throne of Darkness.

• Not a terrible game, Rick Fehrenbacher thinks, just an average one, and one that falls conspicuously short of its own ambitions.

  Sierra's Throne of Darkness has many of the same elements as Diablo—hell, its development team is made up in part by members of the original Diablo team—but it attempts to overgo Diablo by allowing you to "control" up to seven different characters (and up to four at any one time). While this might have seemed like a good idea at one time—"Hey, let's make a game just like Diablo, but with, like, seven characters under the player's control! That means it'll be, like, seven times better!" this sort of calculus just doesn't work out in Throne of Darkness, partly because a clumsy interface makes exchanging items and managing characters an irritating exercise in tedium, partly because there just isn't that much character in any of these characters, partly because rabid friendly AI frustrates any attempt to implement the sophisticated group tactics the game's manual suggests are a large part of the game. In the end, Throne of Darkness is a Diabloesque hack n' slash punctuated by large periods of increasingly tiresome item-shuffling and character maintenance.

• Diablo in a Sarong, was Steve Smith's first, but soon recalled reaction. In his preview, which should be interesting to compare with what Throne of Darkness finally turned out to be, he says:

  But just as I was about to decide that Throne of Darkness was shaping up to be an enormously unimaginative clone, some of its uniqueness began to surface. Most important may be the setting itself, the magical realm of ancient Japanese myth, which the designers are striving to recreate in painstaking detail. A dense back story tells of the rise of a Dark Warlord among the five great castles and clans of Japan. I won't even try to summarize the intricate tale in the first pages of the instruction book. It involves the multiple houses of feudal Japan, the Gods taking revenge on their lazy decadence and the Warlord retreating when on the brink of total conquest because he believes mistakenly he has killed all his opponents. Of course, you control the small band of freedom fighters he overlooked, and your job is to "clear the land of the Dark Warlord's influence." In other words, as in too many games, it looks like the pages of gnarled back story still come down to, well, Diablo. Hack and slash your way through the levels.

• Small in stature but striking to behold, Jeff Haynes said about the game's graphics and concluded:

  With interesting plots and monsters, impressive graphics, and vigorous sound, Throne of Darkness is a strong offering for fans of mythology, samurai, or ancient Japan. However, the poor quality of the game's AI, the unbalanced multiplayer action, and the lack of customizable options, along with some gameplay issues, only slightly raise the product above an average Diablo clone.