5:52 This sounds painfully like the kind of game I imagined up in my mind when I was a kid. "And then after that tower, there's another tower with a THOUSAND floors! And then after that tower, there's another tower with TEN THOUSAND FLOORS! Oh man, I'm such a genius! Why hasn't anyone ever made a game like this before?!"
I once dreamed I was some kind of swordfighter that gained 100 hp, 100 mp, 10 attack, 20 speed... And a single defense point per level up. And that's supposed to be the main character and also the only human in the setting.
I saw this thumbnail at random and thought "Surely whatever this guy is talking about isn't that bad" and then you immediately open up with "Let me tell you about a company called Idea Factory" and I immediately started cackling.
Their pre-Neptunia: Rebirth releases are legitimately awful. Nowadays? Their games range from mediocre to surprisingly good. I am enjoying the Death End Re;Quest series right now but while the gameplay isn't flawless, the narrative from the creator of Corpse Party? It's good stuff.
@@sjake8308 Starting the player with a loaded gun that only works if you fire the bullet through their own head is generally pretty bad implementation, yeah.
Unlimited saga made slot reels do everything include open chests lol so many traps. I also think of the tediousness from shining in the darkness lol especially traversing town on a first person rail.
What do you mean, being able to save every 5 or so floors in a roguelike is awesome even if you can't save in between dungeons. I'll gladly take it instead of no save opportunities at all in 99 floor dungeons of Pokémon MD games where you die a few floors away from the goal and have to restart from the beginning...
I love how you didn’t call this just straight up “the worst rpg” and said it is “one of the worst rpgs” leaving room just in case someone makes a game worse than this, I love that optimism 😂
Someone somewhere in the wasteland has probably cobbled together the silicon and vacuum tubes of 1000 PipBoys to decompress and open a file they found on a pre-war storage drive, only to discover that it was Spectral Tower.
There once was a game called "Torneko no Daibouken - Fushigi no Dungeon" which had an enemy who would PERMANENTLY REDUCE YOUR STATS with no way to recover them besides dieing and starting over again AS HIS BASIC ATTACK!!!
@@robertwildschwein7207 i feel like a enemy with that attack COULD work , but you must be really good balancing the game , because not even Fear and Hunger has such a bullshit mechanic
@@ulforcemegamon3094 Demon's Soul had a boss that could drain levels from you, however it is both intended to be the final boss, and you could just grind your levels back.
i’ve literally never seen a developer go out of their way to make every aspect of their game as frustrating as possible like this. imagine losing all your progress in the 10000 floor dungeon because you couldn’t find a save statue 😭 the only positive thing i have to say about it is that the monster designs are cute
I'd argue that even the "cute monsters" is a bad thing, since the MC designs are pretty "blegh," and it makes the cute enemies more annoying because it makes me wish I was playing as them instead.
Japanese gamers seem to have a much higher tolerance for frustrating nonsense. For example, they consider Tower of Druaga to be a beloved franchise instead of a cruel prank somewhere on the level of Desert Bus.
@@billvolk4236 Ironically, Nightmare of Druaga: Fushigino Dungeon happens to be one of the best rogue-like RPG dungeon crawlers out there. It does everything this game doesn't. Also it's super hard, impossible post-game dungeon is only 300 floors.
Wow. As someone with a real love/hate relationship with Iffy, this is fascinating. Their basic design style of "too little content spread across too much game padded out even further with mandatory grinding" goes all the way back to the beginning! They're certainly committed to their niche, I'll give 'em that.
@@southanime Not the good ones. Really, grind-heavy RPGs went out of style 20+ years ago. It's rare for a company today to still hold onto that design. (Unless they're Korean.)
@@jasonblalock4429 The issue with the Idea Factory games I've played isn't that they're grind heavy, it's that there's not much of a payoff for all the grinding and grinding itself is especially dull because of how frequently the assets are recycled.
Games like these are so interesting to me. These super niche Japanese only games from the 90's that nearly no one knows about. The top google result for this game is simply an entry on PSX Datacenter (which also mistakenly assumes the game only features 3 dungeons lol). No wikipedia article, no forum posts, CERTAINLY no fan translation, this game is basically nonexistent in the cultural zeitgeist and that fascinates me so much.
Reminds me of Fire Heroes (PS2 firefighting game). You cant find any kind of wiki or even forum discussion but thankfully it was released internationally and thus theres LP of it on TH-cam.
A Torrent for a GBA Emulator I tried about 10 years ago had Japanese games that were quite interesting to me. One I think was called Killer Dice, and it had two versions, Pokemon style! I found no GameFAQ so I had to translate the Katakana and learn more words to figure out how to play...
There isn’t even a Japanese Wikipedia article for this game, lol. Although there appears to be quite a few results for the game in Japanese, including auction sites. Most Japanese-only games have little to no presence in the English-speaking side of the internet, so this isn’t strange.
I wound up getting my hands on Spectral Forces: Genesis for the DS a long, long time ago from a bargain bin at our local Walmart. It's this weird and not very good strategy game, but it had this feel to it like it was taking place in a well-established world that you had NO business being in, full of characters the game thinks you SHOULD know but definitely don't. This was a peek into a rabbit hole I'd pretty much forgotten about.
their games are extremely simple and reuse everything for example Neptunia has used the same gameplay, assets, models and engine for years and other games they have made have also reused these elements as well so each game only needs to sell a couple thousand copies to be profitable and that's IF/CH's strength, local sales are all that matters and international ones is pure profit
Because ecchi sells to niche gamers. That's why Neptunia series still surviving. Cute girls with boobs and short skirts doing cute things and flashing their panties. Remove it and will have a game like the one from the video.
Beyond being cheap, they also had a tendency to luck into making stuff that was fascinating (fun characters and/or interesting ideas) despite the weak mechanics, Neptune was just the peak of that. Also worth noting that IF got a *lot* better about a decade ago when NIS's execs went mad and started doing really evil stuff to with employees (shuffling them around then claiming this meant they only had to pay them as though they were new employees) and they picked up a lot of talent.
There's a reason IF is known as the "Landmine Company" in my country. Whether a game from them is playable or not is a literal gamble, because the basic concept of "balance" simply doesn't exist in most of their games. When the HD Neptunia series are the best games they ever came up with, you can tell the quality of their lesser-known titles... Speaking of Neptunia, they actually parodied this game as one of the minigame dungeons called Neptral Tower, also with 10000 floors. At least said minigame was made as an "idle RPG," not an actual dungeon...
And perhaps the saddest part is that there are elements of what clearly could be a very good game, but they just absolutely ruined it. Almost makes me wanna make a "rip-off" that's actually playable.
Idea Factory is a glib name for a studio that literally does nothing but pump out variations on the same game ten times a year with occasionally new still art for 'cutscenes' and narrative that is 90% VN style talking heads. At one point the Neptunia games seemed inviting because of their sheer level of sheen, but having played several of them I now realize this company is like a romance novel publisher.
tbh tho. in the otome scene they're well liked for their releases. compared to aksys the other company that primarily localizes otome games people like the releases from idea factory more. idea factory does nice limited editions while aksys usually just does a cd. although i think they are just a localizing company.
It says a lot when the Neptunia spinoffs are most innovative, because they are made by third party devs. They aren't always the best (like with Producing Perfection and U: Action Unleashed) but they are the only ones that doesn't feel like a total copypaste.
That's Compile Heart, not Idea Factory. Granted, CH is a subsidiary under IF but IF themselves haven't made a proper game in like over a decade. They instead focus on Otome, where they are actually pretty successful and liked.
Spectral Tower is honestly impressive I thought the 100 floor dungeons in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon was a slog I thought I'd NEVER finish Tower of Fate because of the difficulty I'm not even sure if I ever tried to play Toriko's Dungeon translated But this absolutely takes the cake A 10,000 floor dungeon might as well be an infinite one and with a game with as many broken systems as this, it might as well be purgatory.
Something real weird about knowing IDEA FACTORY from the Neptunia games and how mediocre of the games are but then finding out that they've got a track record of this sort of thing.
And then learning that A: Neptunia is probably the best thing they ever made B: They are a relatively ancient developer, that has never actually gotten better
If you want to put a 10k-story tower as a bonus or side-thing, go for it Don't make me suffer it to beat your marginally functional game Hell, don't make me suffer no matter how good the game is
There was actually an arcade crossover fighting game that crossed over Spectral Tower and Generations Of Chaos called Spectral X Generations. It was actually pretty good.
@Nathan-rb3qp It seems to me that game came out on ps2, at least here in EU, iirc. Maybe the one i'm referring to wasn't the game you think of, but a sequel.
After completing the video the only two people I can imagine willingly creating this game is either a TURBO-NERD, the king of geeks, someone who is so deep in the woods of dungeon crawl rpg's he decided to make a game that just had ALL OF THE SYSTEMS, just stuffing the game with every idea he had with zero thought given to how all the systems were gonna interact... OR the very opposite, a ULTRA-JOCK who so hated nerds that they decided to learn everything nerds like so they could create a honey-trap that would draw number-crunching nerds in and _demolish_ them. Not sure which of these persons are required to invent a game where you have to stuff your limited inventory full of junk to protect your necessary level-up and healing items from enemy attacks... but it has to be one of them, no other person could conjure such evil.
Have you played Azure Dreams before? The GBC version, specifically. That game didn't have *that* much content either, but I felt that the gameplay loop was satisfying enough (go in tower, find treasure/weapons/eggs, leave, sell treasure, hatch eggs etc.) that it was still a very fun game. More importantly though, you could tell the devs clearly thought about how to work the mechanics of a roguelike into a more typical rpg-like narrative format/context. One great example imo is how the typical "item hoarding" issue is rather naturally solved, because you only have a limited inventory, and the higher you go in the tower the higher-valued treasure you're likely to find. Even if your monster is only 10hp lower than max, you're going to use that healing herb because you need the inventory slot for the valuable piece of treasure you just found. Additionally, even if your monster is at max hp, feeding it a healing item increases its max hp by 1, so it's clear to me the devs thought the systems through and tried to have some synergy between the more "permanent" rpg elements and the more "transient" roguelike elements. There's nothing worse than when you have a regular RPG with roguelike elements bolted on e.g. Final Fantasy, except all the dungeons are randomly-generated. Never was a fan of that, it feels lazy and imo the two styles - JRPG and roguelike - aren't actually as complementary as one might think, and it takes some work to combine them in a satisfying way.
I *LOVE* this video. It's the perfect balance of spite and receipts, explained in a calm voice with just enough venom. I would absolutely watch more videos like this
I played Blackstone back in the day. It was one of only a tiny number of Xbox games released in the US with a bright anime aesthetic on the box, like so many of those cool ps1/ps2 rpgs! It was thoroughly mediocre.
Roguelike with 10K floors was bad enough but having each battle be a Face-to-face with enemies and not in-dungeon battles like Rogue just saps the soul out of me. Now you know why japan ranks so high in depression.
The graphics and sound of this game really reminds me of those budget multiple puzzle game packs of the late 90s and early 2000s for PC. Basically one step up from flash. I feel the same way about hoshi wo miru hito, so bad it's fascinating.
How is it that I lived my entire life without ever hearing about the Legendary Kusoge, but now I've run into references to it twice in a week? Now I'm actually tempted to try the damn thing just for the experience.
@@jasonblalock4429 If youre interested in it and don't want to experience it yourself, Bad Game Hall of Fame recently did a longplay on it. It was very fun to watch imo.
One of my aunts had one of those packs, but there was also a top-down beat 'em up similar to classic Gauntlet full of extremely shiny pre-rendered graphics. The main character was a bald man in a T-shirt named Buapha, who threw mallets (the rate of fire upgrade powerup had him shout HAMMER UP). I remember the health refills being Chinese takeout and while I don't remember what their effect was, another powerup was a pair of jeans called the PANTS OF POWER.
By making a series of games based on mostly underage anime girls who innocently flash their panties on a regular basis. They've found a niche and that's the audience they've been catering to for the last decade or so.
I still find amazing the obsesion of japan with "towers", "roguelikes" and "hard AF". It's like they have this competition to make the hardest roguelike, set in a tower ofc; so when adding sensible difficult mechanics to their games reaches a point of diminishing returns for gameplay experience, they start throwing in the bullshit mechanics; although idea factory here took it to another level from the start. That gotta be an acheivement... I guess. Thanks for the cool video Mr. Stranger.
Shadow Tower on PS1 is the quicker I got a game over in a Fromsoftware game. It's a first person Dungeon crawler and you start the game on stairs with no rails . Also remember kids Fromsoftware was also known for making some of the worst JRPGs of all time. Nobody liked Kings Feild back in the day. It's possible Neptunia could be called a classic in 20 years. You know that Bloodbore PS1 demake? If Bloodborde came out in the 90s it would be called one of the worst games on the PS1. Look up reviews of their RPGs pre Demons Souls.
@@Chelaxim Shadow Tower is messy, I'll grant you. Having recently played and beaten King's Field I-III, I can definitely see their appeal. They are highly unique experiences with a lot of high points to go with them. They're not masterpieces, but they're solid (also we need to take into account when those were made, 94,95,96, respectively).
Tower of Druaga was one of the first big RPGs (ok it's not really an RPG, it's more like Zelda) in Japan. Super long and cryptic, but thrived on the community aspect of figuring it all out. Probably where that influence comes from.
This game have some ideas that i could had when i was a kid imaging game mechanics for a game like "yeah this random save spot could be something cool as in real life where you have only a few safe spots in a dangerous place". It's beautiful
god, those menu character portraits. i don't like shitting on another artist's work, but all i can say is that seeing some of these drawings in a console game, presumably sold on real shelves in real stores in real life, makes me feel more confident about my own
this looks like something I would play while being sick and dont understanding if Im winning or not, it happen once with air management 96, played that thing for 14 straight hours with a strong fever, so yeah this game feels similar
I used to play this every so often, only because I didn't have anything else, and every time I would hate myself for it. I think Idea Factory just made games using interns; that's why there games just never got good no matter how many games they made, since they would just drop the older interns for more free slave labor. And yet, I still play their games, haha.
Every once in a while, Idea Factory puts out Game Jam level games like Dimension Trigger: Top Nep and Neptunia Shooter. The most basic games to ever exist that dont even have basic options like Fullscreen or resolution settings. So yeah, that proves that some of the games sometimes are made by interns.
@@collinsgichuhi8255 Uh, those were by Idea Factory International, their English publishing branch. And even then, they didn't make those games either, they were outsourced since they are sorely publishers. If I'm remembering correctly, they were just meant to be bonuses for some OVAs, or at least one of them was. But even past that, "Neptunia" is Compile Heart. How do people get away with spreading just blatant misinformation?
so they spun off of Data East? I'm sure that explains plenty. also started to lose count of the times I exclaimed 'WHY WOULD YOU DO IT THAT WAY?!' when describing something... I can totally see where the nickname Idea F***tory comes from, hahahaha.
Well, Data East did make some pretty good games (Atomic Runner on the Mega Drive is outstanding), though they were pretty hit and miss. Idea Factory are miss and miss: Loads of JRPGS with really stodgy gameplay that's simply designed to waste your time, and in the case of the Neptunia series, the payoff is basically getting repeated panty shots of underage anime girls. That's really all Idea Factory have to offer.
I mean Data East gave us one of the most famous twists (for western audiences) a decade before another game did it and became popular. I’m not going to spoiler either, but it blew my mind when I learned it.
I only know of Idea Factory from Neptunia (and I think Monster Monpiece, which was alright-ish). Neptunia is actually a fairly fun series, and the characters can be funny on occasion. They're not bad at all per-se, but my biggest gripe is how assets are reused in the remakes. I think it's unfair to call those games bad if the whole complaint is based on how repetitive they are, because they reworked the battle system later on as opposed to the original PS3 games and then re-released 1-3 with a rehaul of the graphics, music and battle system as well as the cutscene styles (3D models vs moving 2D ones). That boosted the accessibility of the games as they were easily ported to other systems compared to how expensive the originals were used at the time.
By looking at the speedruns of this game, reading the Spectral Tower Strategy Wiki, and playing the game a bit myself, I noticed a few anomalities regarding this video: * werevolves actually do exist in the game, both as a player class and as an enemy type * there are four different set pieces, each with one recolored variation (moldy attic, wooden mine, stalagmite cave and brick cave), and the game appears to change from one set piece to another, after every cleared third or fourth floors, and only Spectral Tower and Last Tower do have all eight of them * some enemies do indeed home in you, if you are within their perimeters, like Thief, Assassin and Item Hunter * being turned a pig disables you from interacting with almost everything (including the goddess statues), but you can still fight enemies normally (somehow, and as seen in the footage), get the key and unlock the door to the exit stairs, and eat any edible item without regard to their food levels, and not suffer any tummy ache penalties * Fairy Rod guides you to keys, floor exits, and boss monsters, too * Warp Rod can take you up to the maximum of sixty floors (as seen in the two speedruns of this game), and can also be used multiple times, unless Warp Rod breaks after one use, in which it does have a high chance to, but is still ain't guaranteed Just to make sure that we all are on the same page.
@zenksren8206 yeah you know what, Ronde at least has gameplay. Also forgot it was on Saturn and not PS1, so Ronde gets to win this round for whatever that's worth.
Gotta love the dedication here. They started making bad games, and by god, they're not gonna stop making bad games. Weaker creators would falter and maybe at least consider making something actually *good* for once, or maybe just calling it quits, but Idea Factory started by considering carefully how to make the worst fucking design decisions possible, and adopted this as their sole driving philosophy of game creation. That is true dedication.
Worst part is... Some of their games actually have some interesting ideas, that just isn't there most of the time. Being bogged down by questionable design choices or simply rushed development.
Honestly idea factory is a perfect name for them, since they just they endlessly produce games with some of the most baffeling design choices humanly possible
I’m trying to make an Excel spreadsheet of all JRPGs, and explaining what the general reception/what is worth playing, and knowing Idea Factory is a bad company will be a big help for sorting good and bad games Also having games exclusively for Xbox 360? Did they have Ninja Gaiden’s Itagaki working with them or something?
For awhile during the 360 era, Microsoft was actively bankrolling niche Japanese devs to try and improve their console’s relevance in the East. Besides a few exclusive JRPGs, this also resulted in the console getting a ton of shoot-em-up/bullet hell releases.
@@sjake8308The 360 predated the PS3 and Wii so that's why some of those games are 360 exclucive and while Record of Agarest War and Zero were on both PS3 and 360 Record of Agarest War 2 was only PS3. Neptunia Sisters Vs Sisters is the first Idea Factory game to come to Xbox in 15 years. Idea Factory has more games on the Playstation Vita alone than every Xbox combined.
@@ChelaximAah agarest another game that is just bad. Lets make the combat really bland, getting true ending stingy af, also make the game really grindy and dont give xp sharing so it means most of the character roster will never be used. good game design.
Eeeyikes. Thanks to an old Hardcore Gaming 101 article, I had known about Idea Factory's dire reputation in their home country, but I had never truly plunged into their output (didn't see anything that jumped out to me). I had vaguely heard of Hyperdimension Neptunia beforehand. It's a cute concept that reminds me of "Sega Hard Girls" (in fact, the two even had a crossover)...shame the game itself apparently isn't that great. I loved the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games, so I was wondering "how could they snafu a roguelike?" Turns out, they can snafu it pretty badly. Some of the design choices you mention are utterly baffling. I mean, randomizing save points?! Somewhere in Japan, there has to be a person who couldn't attend to important business due to playing for hours and not finding a single save point. Does Spectral Tower have the largest dungeon in any roguelike? 10,000 floors...man. How commercially successful are Idea Factory's games, anyway? Spectral Tower having sequels implies that the game was successful enough to warrant sequels, or that Idea Factory simply got enough money to produce them. Part of me suspects it's the decent artwork their titles boast, even though the style isn't my cup of tea. One last note: I seem to remember Takahashi Meijin making a cameo in one of their games...somehow.
It's worth mentioning that their output in Japan was massive... they were cranking out at least 4-5 games on average each year. Even if those games sold only 10-20k each time, it would have been likely enough for them to keep going. Probably that's what they were banking on.
@@mariusamber3237 The core Neptune games are pure grind. That's their big problem. They're twice as long as they need to be, with literally cut-and-pasted dungeons and mechanics that absolutely require grinding for both XP and crafting items. Which is a shame because they'd be decently fun junk food RPGs if they weren't so utterly tedious. The only way I can get anywhere in an IF game is by watching movies or TH-cam on a second screen.
Holy crap, seeing this on my feed and you opening up talking about Idea Factory right after I closed out of a Neptunia game gave me the funniest whiplash. Neptunia games certainly aren't good (barring the latest mainline entry which actually holds its own as a game) but like you said, there's a strange charm to its concept and meta humor that can sometimes carry the game, even if the actual gameplay leaves much to be desired. I actually just remembered that Neptunia also parodies the name of Spectral Tower in some of its entries, featuring an area called the Neptral Tower, usually used as a spot for an item collection minigame of sorts.
Spectral Tower is a perfect storm of terrible videogame design. How on Earth did the developers get approval to make a sequel? Also, it is really cool to see a RndStranger video get picked up by the algorithm. Great work, as always.
@@sjake8308 Neptunia 1 sucked but it's the one series where they actually LISTENED and LEARNED! Neptunia mk2 has a really good battle system and is mostly mangled by an awful protagonist, Neptunia V (the third game) is actually pretty good and I had a ton of fun with it! Then V-II got rid of the movement circles for no reason. I'm excited for the next one though because, no joke, the plot is about travelling back in time to try to save the Atari Jaguar (and 3DO and Pippin). Idea Factory is making a game about saving the Atari Jaguar. It's almost beautiful.
If you think neptunia is bad, you ain't played this companies worst. Still shudder thinking about trying to play Generation of Chaos... Mary Skelter is probably their best franchise.
!F may have had some issues in the past, but they brought us The Record of Agarest War series, which was actually pretty good when they were released. Sure the battle system was a little off, but it was fun none-the less, especially all the CE's they had. I have full playthroughs of all the Agarest War games.
Man, these pre-rendered graphics, and the text just kind of floating around, this looks like it should be on the 3D0. Kind of reminds me of a slightly saner Death Crimson. I'm getting kind of obsessed with this kind of 90s outsider art video game aesthetic.
Hey, great video! I'm new to the channel, been looking trough your videos and I'm very impressed. I think it would be great if you had a playlist with all the videos not related to Famidaily or your other daily series, like this one, otherwise they get kinda lost in the middle of your video library.
I have to admit, the idea of an RPG with hundreds of classes chosen at random sounds kind of fun, even if some of them really bad. There's no excuse for it to be hundress of hours of level grinding though.
Thank you for this video, because I otherwise wouldn't have known anything about this company otherwise! I have a feeling that this will be one of the better performing videos. It's crowd pleasing: It describes a terrible, unheard of JRPG, is under just 20 minutes, and it's amusing. I bet when I share this one, more of my friends will be clicking on it than usual.
Genuine question... Where do you share Rnd's videos that they may be clicked on? I share them with people when I want to explain some Famicom game I'm neurospicily obsessing over, in fact I found Famidaily when I was trying to challenge a speedruner to try to speedrun Super Monkey Daibouken. 😁
They seem kinda like Kemco - cranking out loads of RPGs of questionable quality every year, whether published or developed... I tried some of their games and thought none of them were particularly good/memorable. This looks like special kind of horrible though. (speaking of bad PSX RPGs - Ancient Roman retrospective when?)
Kemco's games are more low budget, low effort, generic games that sometimes hit upon a good idea. Idea Factory lives up to their name. Note that the ideas they manufacture are rarely good ideas.
@@EriChanTheRetroGamerNerd I'd say they're good ideas on paper that get fantastically bungled somewhere in the middle. Like I'm kinda interested in a dungeon crawler with 160 character classes.
After games like Wild Arms and PoPoLoCrois Monogatari this one seems to be a huge disgrace for PSX. It's worse than Hoshi wo Miru Hito and Maka Maka combined. I'd rather challenge myself with solo thief in Final Fantasy 😊
I'd love to see more deep dives on obscure and terrible PS1 RPGs, getting to see the most ridiculously awful specimens of the genre on a console that's largely defined by the standout quality of its RPG library would be a treat.
Thanks to this video I finally understand what the hell Iffy was talking about when she was talking about a tower that has a lot of floors in some of the Neptunia games.
Despite how notorious the studio is, I just want to say that Black Stone: Magic & Steel was a banger. Their attempt at a full-on co-op dungeon crawler ARPG actually worked out really well.
5:15 TL;DR- you fight 5 towers, and the actual spectral tower- tower #4- has 1,000 floors. In a rogue like. Tower #5 has 10,000. The rest of this is just a post mortem on every other failure this game has which makes even the diehard rogue like enjoyers not want to do all that.
By any chance did you show a couple seconds of gameplay in your first year of Super Famicom video? I had a whiff of deja vu somewhere in the middle while I was watching this.
I don't recall but it's very possible. Spectral Tower has been my go to for amazingly bad games for a long time. Now maybe other people will know what it is!
@@RndStranger I might jusy give it a spin for myself one day just to see how bad it is for myself, if anyone ever goes to the trouble of creating an English translation patch for it! 😆
@@sjake8308although I’m of the belief that most games should be translated, I prefer the more important and praised games having priority for translation as time is so limited on this earth
@@thomasffrench3639 Some folk have translated games simply because they're incredibly bad, though currently this isn't one of them. Basically, a person or group will take on a game translation if doing so just happens to interest them.
16:32 "If the food level is higher than your characters level, then it makes them sick" LMAO this game has a picky eater stat and tummy ache mechanics that rules
*Coughs nervously having only known Idea Factory only for their Otomate division* I didn't even know they had such a bad reputation since I never touched any of their RPGs. Like....the concept of the game sounds cool, but they ruined it with stupid mechanics. I've played Mystery Dungeon games, so I've suffered through 100 floor dungeons before...but 10,000 with these mechanics? Hell no.
The algorithm blessed me today. I thought I was prepared for a bad game. I thought I knew bad ps1 games as I have dug and found many bad ones (popular bad ones such as Bubsy 3d, hooters road trip, Spawn, Criticom, Vip). Then watched a guy named Sean Seanson (which introduced me to more horrifically bad games like Dreams, Ubik and Iznogood) But this? Oh God this? I didnt even KNOW what Idea Factory was! It as if I scraped the bottom of a barrel and hit some magical switch; which in turn, lead to another enclosed basement full of barrels... If you somehow talk about more of these games (I dont see too many reviews of these types of games tbh), I'd watch them all. Loved this one. Appreciate the work!
![CAMPปลิ้น | EP.75[1/2] ชวนแร็ปเปอร์เที่ยวประแสแบบไม่ต้องตามกระแส](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/J5ds2AxDp24/mqdefault.jpg)
Well, it's not like they're called Good Idea Factory.
Well that’s why they are known as idea fuu-
Randomly generated save spots may in fact be the worst thing ever put in a game.
Still better than micro transactions.
@@DKNguyen3.1415I guess, both still suck ass
Ubisoft/EA be like: "You know what? Let's combine these two!"@@DKNguyen3.1415
@@HeavyMetalAlicorn So save point locations as loot box rewards? GTFO.
@@DKNguyen3.1415At least these are optional, while the other isn't and you have to deal with it.
Micro Transactions aren't a good thing though.
5:52 This sounds painfully like the kind of game I imagined up in my mind when I was a kid. "And then after that tower, there's another tower with a THOUSAND floors! And then after that tower, there's another tower with TEN THOUSAND FLOORS! Oh man, I'm such a genius! Why hasn't anyone ever made a game like this before?!"
Sounds like a lovely kid 😭
Sounds about right
“Do you think God stays in heaven because he, too, lives in fear of what he’s created?”
I once dreamed I was some kind of swordfighter that gained 100 hp, 100 mp, 10 attack, 20 speed... And a single defense point per level up.
And that's supposed to be the main character and also the only human in the setting.
@@JoelHernandez-tz3vk If you want a hard game, that'd probably be it.
I saw this thumbnail at random and thought "Surely whatever this guy is talking about isn't that bad" and then you immediately open up with "Let me tell you about a company called Idea Factory" and I immediately started cackling.
Same here!
Their pre-Neptunia: Rebirth releases are legitimately awful. Nowadays? Their games range from mediocre to surprisingly good. I am enjoying the Death End Re;Quest series right now but while the gameplay isn't flawless, the narrative from the creator of Corpse Party? It's good stuff.
Yup, same
Hey, they release pretty good visual novels
I mean spectral soul is decent
11:45 The hilarious audacity of having "The Spell that Kills You Instantly" as a core feature of every spellcaster's base kit. Amazing.
That's actually based on very old school design, it's just that the implementation here is especially bad.
@@sjake8308 Starting the player with a loaded gun that only works if you fire the bullet through their own head is generally pretty bad implementation, yeah.
@@DoragonShinzui Unless it's Persona 3
Ultima always made you search for it...
It's not even Kamikaze, you just loose even if it kills lmao
The fact that this game has less item and enemy variety than the original Rogue is another nail in the coffin for this game.
Cait sith twins 😅😂
Reject modernity. Return to Rogue.
@@wiegraf9009 to quote The 1975, "modernity has failed us", but in the spirit of rogue, It does not in fact "love it if we made it"
A game in which you play as Cait Sith for 450 Hours, and your only attack is "Dice", is boundless madness
🤣🤣🤣
Ouch that hurts.
Isn't that just dnd for a martial class?
Unlimited saga made slot reels do everything include open chests lol so many traps. I also think of the tediousness from shining in the darkness lol especially traversing town on a first person rail.
@@KWHere2At least in D&D you get to pick your class
So, a rougelike that's 450 hours long, where the ability to save only comes up randomly? That alone is a terrible combination.
To people complaining about more popular Roguelite games:
*YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW LUCKY YOU ARE!*
What do you mean, being able to save every 5 or so floors in a roguelike is awesome even if you can't save in between dungeons. I'll gladly take it instead of no save opportunities at all in 99 floor dungeons of Pokémon MD games where you die a few floors away from the goal and have to restart from the beginning...
@@Diwasho OUCH
I love how you didn’t call this just straight up “the worst rpg” and said it is “one of the worst rpgs” leaving room just in case someone makes a game worse than this, I love that optimism 😂
I mean... Hoshi wo miru hito, the legendary kusoge exists, so...
Worse or not, it was a PS1 Classic released digitally on PS3/PSP in Japan. Game probably did good lol.
Hell, there was a even a sequel.
@@Manic_Panic Yeah, as far as I know it has the status of "so bad that is actually good" lol
Also if you get that one weirdo in the comments who grew up on it and swears that it's great.
@@imyojimboandiusehacks8878 seems like the kind of game to hit a guilty pleasure in a lot of people. Still sounds trash, though.
So this is what those references in Neptunia to 10,000 floors were about. Makes a lot more sense now.
The idea of completing a tower going into another then dying only to realize you have to redo the previously completed tower is agonizing.
oh that's why i got food poisoning at the hot dog stand, my food level wasn't high enough
This game feels like something vault tech would come up with in order to study the psychological effects of meaningless busywork on people.
"The Myth of Sisyphus: The Game"! :D
Someone somewhere in the wasteland has probably cobbled together the silicon and vacuum tubes of 1000 PipBoys to decompress and open a file they found on a pre-war storage drive, only to discover that it was Spectral Tower.
Enemies targeting your inventory is a diabolical 'f**k you' from the devs, damn
There once was a game called "Torneko no Daibouken - Fushigi no Dungeon" which had an enemy who would PERMANENTLY REDUCE YOUR STATS with no way to recover them besides dieing and starting over again AS HIS BASIC ATTACK!!!
@@robertwildschwein7207and i though the demons stealing your levels in the first megami tensei game was bad
@@robertwildschwein7207 i feel like a enemy with that attack COULD work , but you must be really good balancing the game , because not even Fear and Hunger has such a bullshit mechanic
@@robertwildschwein7207 Diablo 1 had an enemy or two that would drain 1 Max HP permanently when they hit you.
@@ulforcemegamon3094 Demon's Soul had a boss that could drain levels from you, however it is both intended to be the final boss, and you could just grind your levels back.
This has very strong "Tech demo that got greenlit for a release" energy
i’ve literally never seen a developer go out of their way to make every aspect of their game as frustrating as possible like this. imagine losing all your progress in the 10000 floor dungeon because you couldn’t find a save statue 😭 the only positive thing i have to say about it is that the monster designs are cute
I'd argue that even the "cute monsters" is a bad thing, since the MC designs are pretty "blegh," and it makes the cute enemies more annoying because it makes me wish I was playing as them instead.
Japanese gamers seem to have a much higher tolerance for frustrating nonsense. For example, they consider Tower of Druaga to be a beloved franchise instead of a cruel prank somewhere on the level of Desert Bus.
@@billvolk4236 Tower of Druaga is great though. Genuinely my favorite arcade game.
@@billvolk4236 Ironically, Nightmare of Druaga: Fushigino Dungeon happens to be one of the best rogue-like RPG dungeon crawlers out there. It does everything this game doesn't. Also it's super hard, impossible post-game dungeon is only 300 floors.
Counter point: tower of druaga is awesome @@billvolk4236
Wow. As someone with a real love/hate relationship with Iffy, this is fascinating. Their basic design style of "too little content spread across too much game padded out even further with mandatory grinding" goes all the way back to the beginning! They're certainly committed to their niche, I'll give 'em that.
Idea Factory/Compile Heart needs to have thier visual novel team to help out with their JRPG side.
I thought paddind and mandatory grinding were staples of the JRPG genre
@southanime, you've been playing the wrong JRPGs
@@southanime Not the good ones. Really, grind-heavy RPGs went out of style 20+ years ago. It's rare for a company today to still hold onto that design. (Unless they're Korean.)
@@jasonblalock4429 The issue with the Idea Factory games I've played isn't that they're grind heavy, it's that there's not much of a payoff for all the grinding and grinding itself is especially dull because of how frequently the assets are recycled.
Games like these are so interesting to me. These super niche Japanese only games from the 90's that nearly no one knows about. The top google result for this game is simply an entry on PSX Datacenter (which also mistakenly assumes the game only features 3 dungeons lol). No wikipedia article, no forum posts, CERTAINLY no fan translation, this game is basically nonexistent in the cultural zeitgeist and that fascinates me so much.
Reminds me of Fire Heroes (PS2 firefighting game). You cant find any kind of wiki or even forum discussion but thankfully it was released internationally and thus theres LP of it on TH-cam.
Funnily enough there is definitely Japanese games that are hugely popular but don't have their own page, although I don't remember the game.
Too much text to convey that this is an obscure media
A Torrent for a GBA Emulator I tried about 10 years ago had Japanese games that were quite interesting to me.
One I think was called Killer Dice, and it had two versions, Pokemon style!
I found no GameFAQ so I had to translate the Katakana and learn more words to figure out how to play...
There isn’t even a Japanese Wikipedia article for this game, lol.
Although there appears to be quite a few results for the game in Japanese, including auction sites. Most Japanese-only games have little to no presence in the English-speaking side of the internet, so this isn’t strange.
I'm sure you're exaggera-
"Let me tell you about a company called Idea Factory"
- you are probably not exaggerating.
I wound up getting my hands on Spectral Forces: Genesis for the DS a long, long time ago from a bargain bin at our local Walmart. It's this weird and not very good strategy game, but it had this feel to it like it was taking place in a well-established world that you had NO business being in, full of characters the game thinks you SHOULD know but definitely don't. This was a peek into a rabbit hole I'd pretty much forgotten about.
neverland is very much a hole to fall in
I tried it from a ROM Torrent long ago.
Almost got it from GameSpot but I ended up buying something else and next time it was gone...
So with this being the first game they ever released, and with their track record so far? How is it that this company never faced bankruptcy
their games are extremely simple and reuse everything
for example Neptunia has used the same gameplay, assets, models and engine for years
and other games they have made have also reused these elements as well
so each game only needs to sell a couple thousand copies to be profitable and that's IF/CH's strength, local sales are all that matters and international ones is pure profit
Because ecchi sells to niche gamers. That's why Neptunia series still surviving. Cute girls with boobs and short skirts doing cute things and flashing their panties. Remove it and will have a game like the one from the video.
@@Sigismund697damn
Beyond being cheap, they also had a tendency to luck into making stuff that was fascinating (fun characters and/or interesting ideas) despite the weak mechanics, Neptune was just the peak of that. Also worth noting that IF got a *lot* better about a decade ago when NIS's execs went mad and started doing really evil stuff to with employees (shuffling them around then claiming this meant they only had to pay them as though they were new employees) and they picked up a lot of talent.
@@kanrakucheese oh I heard about that
apparently is why Disgaea 6 was such a mess and there was a huge exodus of employees
There's a reason IF is known as the "Landmine Company" in my country. Whether a game from them is playable or not is a literal gamble, because the basic concept of "balance" simply doesn't exist in most of their games. When the HD Neptunia series are the best games they ever came up with, you can tell the quality of their lesser-known titles...
Speaking of Neptunia, they actually parodied this game as one of the minigame dungeons called Neptral Tower, also with 10000 floors. At least said minigame was made as an "idle RPG," not an actual dungeon...
I feel like they wanted to make an anti-game
every bad decision feels 100% intentional and damn did they create the perfect anti-game
Desert Bus is still better imo
And perhaps the saddest part is that there are elements of what clearly could be a very good game, but they just absolutely ruined it.
Almost makes me wanna make a "rip-off" that's actually playable.
just emulate pmd lol
The classic ol' "Batman Forever for SNES" treatment, eh? :D
Azure Dreams would be a better choice, hell, Torneko probably came out before this game and that's a better Rougelike as well.
Idea Factory is a glib name for a studio that literally does nothing but pump out variations on the same game ten times a year with occasionally new still art for 'cutscenes' and narrative that is 90% VN style talking heads. At one point the Neptunia games seemed inviting because of their sheer level of sheen, but having played several of them I now realize this company is like a romance novel publisher.
Nowadays that's true, but it was less true in the 90s / early 00s
Striking fools gold with Neptunia is what solidified their style.
tbh tho. in the otome scene they're well liked for their releases. compared to aksys the other company that primarily localizes otome games people like the releases from idea factory more. idea factory does nice limited editions while aksys usually just does a cd.
although i think they are just a localizing company.
It says a lot when the Neptunia spinoffs are most innovative, because they are made by third party devs. They aren't always the best (like with Producing Perfection and U: Action Unleashed) but they are the only ones that doesn't feel like a total copypaste.
That's Compile Heart, not Idea Factory.
Granted, CH is a subsidiary under IF but IF themselves haven't made a proper game in like over a decade. They instead focus on Otome, where they are actually pretty successful and liked.
I mean that was the same concept behind the Warhol Factory
Spectral Tower is honestly impressive
I thought the 100 floor dungeons in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon was a slog
I thought I'd NEVER finish Tower of Fate because of the difficulty
I'm not even sure if I ever tried to play Toriko's Dungeon translated
But this absolutely takes the cake
A 10,000 floor dungeon might as well be an infinite one
and with a game with as many broken systems as this, it might as well be purgatory.
I think we may have found the tenth circle of Hell! 😆
At least with PMD you get more story and bang for your buck!
Hell, even the Millennium Dungeon in Shiren 3 (1,000 floors!) isn't as bad as this game
What is Tower of Fate?
@@heroesoftomorrow3488maybe they were referring to destiny tower, the ultimate 100 floor dungeon of pokemon mystery dungeon explorers of sky.
Something real weird about knowing IDEA FACTORY from the Neptunia games and how mediocre of the games are but then finding out that they've got a track record of this sort of thing.
And then learning that
A: Neptunia is probably the best thing they ever made
B: They are a relatively ancient developer, that has never actually gotten better
If you want to put a 10k-story tower as a bonus or side-thing, go for it
Don't make me suffer it to beat your marginally functional game
Hell, don't make me suffer no matter how good the game is
"Hell, don't make me suffer no matter how good the game is"
Yoko Taro: "And I took that personally."
You are the one making you suffer if you choose to play an Idea Fuck game, nobody else.
It'd be like if you had to get to the top of that really long bonus dungeon in Parasite Eve before you fought Eve
He said "hell" just like Bob Ross used to say it.
@@imveryangryitsnotbutter I don't even need to Google it, Dark Souls?
A 10,000 floor tower reminds me of when the South Park kids tried to build a tower to get to Heaven so Kenny could help them win a candy contest
I’ve read enough manwha to know that someone is going to complete the 100000th floor of the terrible game and get sucked into the game world…
There was actually an arcade crossover fighting game that crossed over Spectral Tower and Generations Of Chaos called Spectral X Generations. It was actually pretty good.
Only because IGS made it
@@zenksren8206 I know. The absolute chads behind Dodonpachi 2: Bee Storm.
@Nathan-rb3qp It seems to me that game came out on ps2, at least here in EU, iirc. Maybe the one i'm referring to wasn't the game you think of, but a sequel.
Forgot a *this, sorry
@@alessandrobaggi6129 Nah that's the game. Spectral VS Generations got a PS2 port.
After completing the video the only two people I can imagine willingly creating this game is either a TURBO-NERD, the king of geeks, someone who is so deep in the woods of dungeon crawl rpg's he decided to make a game that just had ALL OF THE SYSTEMS, just stuffing the game with every idea he had with zero thought given to how all the systems were gonna interact...
OR the very opposite, a ULTRA-JOCK who so hated nerds that they decided to learn everything nerds like so they could create a honey-trap that would draw number-crunching nerds in and _demolish_ them. Not sure which of these persons are required to invent a game where you have to stuff your limited inventory full of junk to protect your necessary level-up and healing items from enemy attacks... but it has to be one of them, no other person could conjure such evil.
Have you played Azure Dreams before? The GBC version, specifically. That game didn't have *that* much content either, but I felt that the gameplay loop was satisfying enough (go in tower, find treasure/weapons/eggs, leave, sell treasure, hatch eggs etc.) that it was still a very fun game. More importantly though, you could tell the devs clearly thought about how to work the mechanics of a roguelike into a more typical rpg-like narrative format/context. One great example imo is how the typical "item hoarding" issue is rather naturally solved, because you only have a limited inventory, and the higher you go in the tower the higher-valued treasure you're likely to find. Even if your monster is only 10hp lower than max, you're going to use that healing herb because you need the inventory slot for the valuable piece of treasure you just found. Additionally, even if your monster is at max hp, feeding it a healing item increases its max hp by 1, so it's clear to me the devs thought the systems through and tried to have some synergy between the more "permanent" rpg elements and the more "transient" roguelike elements. There's nothing worse than when you have a regular RPG with roguelike elements bolted on e.g. Final Fantasy, except all the dungeons are randomly-generated. Never was a fan of that, it feels lazy and imo the two styles - JRPG and roguelike - aren't actually as complementary as one might think, and it takes some work to combine them in a satisfying way.
I *LOVE* this video. It's the perfect balance of spite and receipts, explained in a calm voice with just enough venom. I would absolutely watch more videos like this
I played Blackstone back in the day. It was one of only a tiny number of Xbox games released in the US with a bright anime aesthetic on the box, like so many of those cool ps1/ps2 rpgs!
It was thoroughly mediocre.
I remember getting stuck in that game as the next level never unlocked around level 20, even tried with multiple characters
Roguelike with 10K floors was bad enough but having each battle be a Face-to-face with enemies and not in-dungeon battles like Rogue just saps the soul out of me. Now you know why japan ranks so high in depression.
The graphics and sound of this game really reminds me of those budget multiple puzzle game packs of the late 90s and early 2000s for PC. Basically one step up from flash. I feel the same way about hoshi wo miru hito, so bad it's fascinating.
How is it that I lived my entire life without ever hearing about the Legendary Kusoge, but now I've run into references to it twice in a week? Now I'm actually tempted to try the damn thing just for the experience.
It is quite the experience.
@@jasonblalock4429 If youre interested in it and don't want to experience it yourself, Bad Game Hall of Fame recently did a longplay on it. It was very fun to watch imo.
Simple 1500 vol. 1: Spectral Tower
One of my aunts had one of those packs, but there was also a top-down beat 'em up similar to classic Gauntlet full of extremely shiny pre-rendered graphics. The main character was a bald man in a T-shirt named Buapha, who threw mallets (the rate of fire upgrade powerup had him shout HAMMER UP). I remember the health refills being Chinese takeout and while I don't remember what their effect was, another powerup was a pair of jeans called the PANTS OF POWER.
How does a game company last long where they are well known for making bad games while also still being able to stay afloat?
Bile fascination, possibly?
Otmate
By making a series of games based on mostly underage anime girls who innocently flash their panties on a regular basis. They've found a niche and that's the audience they've been catering to for the last decade or so.
@@sjake8308thanks. That makes sense. If there’s one thing Japan knows how to do is appeal to a niche audience that pays a lot of money.
Making their games cheaper than oxygen.
No, seriously, that's as good a recipe for success as anything else.
This game actually seems kinda fun but only as a desert bus style test of attrition between friends lmao
Imagine getting Isekaid into this game.
i think we call that Hell
You've earned my subscription... But only if you do an entire series on Idea Factory's entire catalog.
Calm down there Satan
most of it is just eather ok or vns for girls
Please don't, there's enough hit pieces on them from high-horsed JRPG reviewers already.
But there's actually good JP only stuff on PS1 nobody has heard of (like Flight Plan's output).
@shadowmaksim such youtubers as?
I still find amazing the obsesion of japan with "towers", "roguelikes" and "hard AF".
It's like they have this competition to make the hardest roguelike, set in a tower ofc; so when adding sensible difficult mechanics to their games reaches a point of diminishing returns for gameplay experience, they start throwing in the bullshit mechanics; although idea factory here took it to another level from the start. That gotta be an acheivement... I guess.
Thanks for the cool video Mr. Stranger.
Shadow Tower on PS1 is the quicker I got a game over in a Fromsoftware game. It's a first person Dungeon crawler and you start the game on stairs with no rails .
Also remember kids Fromsoftware was also known for making some of the worst JRPGs of all time.
Nobody liked Kings Feild back in the day. It's possible Neptunia could be called a classic in 20 years.
You know that Bloodbore PS1 demake? If Bloodborde came out in the 90s it would be called one of the worst games on the PS1.
Look up reviews of their RPGs pre Demons Souls.
It's because Japanese society is the endboss of anxiety and depression disorders
@@Chelaxim Shadow Tower is messy, I'll grant you. Having recently played and beaten King's Field I-III, I can definitely see their appeal. They are highly unique experiences with a lot of high points to go with them. They're not masterpieces, but they're solid (also we need to take into account when those were made, 94,95,96, respectively).
"Hard towers", very Freudian indeed
Tower of Druaga was one of the first big RPGs (ok it's not really an RPG, it's more like Zelda) in Japan. Super long and cryptic, but thrived on the community aspect of figuring it all out. Probably where that influence comes from.
This game have some ideas that i could had when i was a kid imaging game mechanics for a game like "yeah this random save spot could be something cool as in real life where you have only a few safe spots in a dangerous place".
It's beautiful
god, those menu character portraits. i don't like shitting on another artist's work, but all i can say is that seeing some of these drawings in a console game, presumably sold on real shelves in real stores in real life, makes me feel more confident about my own
this looks like something I would play while being sick and dont understanding if Im winning or not, it happen once with air management 96, played that thing for 14 straight hours with a strong fever, so yeah this game feels similar
I used to play this every so often, only because I didn't have anything else, and every time I would hate myself for it. I think Idea Factory just made games using interns; that's why there games just never got good no matter how many games they made, since they would just drop the older interns for more free slave labor. And yet, I still play their games, haha.
Every once in a while, Idea Factory puts out Game Jam level games like Dimension Trigger: Top Nep and Neptunia Shooter. The most basic games to ever exist that dont even have basic options like Fullscreen or resolution settings. So yeah, that proves that some of the games sometimes are made by interns.
nah that not it@@collinsgichuhi8255
@@collinsgichuhi8255
Uh, those were by Idea Factory International, their English publishing branch. And even then, they didn't make those games either, they were outsourced since they are sorely publishers. If I'm remembering correctly, they were just meant to be bonuses for some OVAs, or at least one of them was.
But even past that, "Neptunia" is Compile Heart.
How do people get away with spreading just blatant misinformation?
@@shadowmaksim I have a source.
I made it the fuck up
so they spun off of Data East? I'm sure that explains plenty. also started to lose count of the times I exclaimed 'WHY WOULD YOU DO IT THAT WAY?!' when describing something... I can totally see where the nickname Idea F***tory comes from, hahahaha.
Plus some ex j force
Well, Data East did make some pretty good games (Atomic Runner on the Mega Drive is outstanding), though they were pretty hit and miss. Idea Factory are miss and miss: Loads of JRPGS with really stodgy gameplay that's simply designed to waste your time, and in the case of the Neptunia series, the payoff is basically getting repeated panty shots of underage anime girls. That's really all Idea Factory have to offer.
@@sjake8308 oh yeah that's fair I do like bad dudes!
I mean Data East gave us one of the most famous twists (for western audiences) a decade before another game did it and became popular. I’m not going to spoiler either, but it blew my mind when I learned it.
Data East was a good developer. They also had their own RPG series for a time (Glory of Heracles) that was pretty good
Heard a bit of Neptunia in the past, didn't know a terrible company was behind it all the time.
I only know of Idea Factory from Neptunia (and I think Monster Monpiece, which was alright-ish). Neptunia is actually a fairly fun series, and the characters can be funny on occasion. They're not bad at all per-se, but my biggest gripe is how assets are reused in the remakes. I think it's unfair to call those games bad if the whole complaint is based on how repetitive they are, because they reworked the battle system later on as opposed to the original PS3 games and then re-released 1-3 with a rehaul of the graphics, music and battle system as well as the cutscene styles (3D models vs moving 2D ones). That boosted the accessibility of the games as they were easily ported to other systems compared to how expensive the originals were used at the time.
It is way past the time we got a documentary about Idea Factory 😂
As a Neptunia fan, the concept of Idea Factory making a bad game... is the least surprising thing I've ever heard.
Thank god we got gems like Fairy Fencer, Mugen Souls, and ofc Neptunia that balanced out Idea Factory's issues.
By looking at the speedruns of this game, reading the Spectral Tower Strategy Wiki, and playing the game a bit myself, I noticed a few anomalities regarding this video:
* werevolves actually do exist in the game, both as a player class and as an enemy type
* there are four different set pieces, each with one recolored variation (moldy attic, wooden mine, stalagmite cave and brick cave), and the game appears to change from one set piece to another, after every cleared third or fourth floors, and only Spectral Tower and Last Tower do have all eight of them
* some enemies do indeed home in you, if you are within their perimeters, like Thief, Assassin and Item Hunter
* being turned a pig disables you from interacting with almost everything (including the goddess statues), but you can still fight enemies normally (somehow, and as seen in the footage), get the key and unlock the door to the exit stairs, and eat any edible item without regard to their food levels, and not suffer any tummy ache penalties
* Fairy Rod guides you to keys, floor exits, and boss monsters, too
* Warp Rod can take you up to the maximum of sixty floors (as seen in the two speedruns of this game), and can also be used multiple times, unless Warp Rod breaks after one use, in which it does have a high chance to, but is still ain't guaranteed
Just to make sure that we all are on the same page.
God these graphics are on par with Ronde, and strangely I don't know which game is worse.
Ronde at least has more than 2 frames of animation for its battle sprites
@zenksren8206 yeah you know what, Ronde at least has gameplay. Also forgot it was on Saturn and not PS1, so Ronde gets to win this round for whatever that's worth.
Gotta love the dedication here. They started making bad games, and by god, they're not gonna stop making bad games. Weaker creators would falter and maybe at least consider making something actually *good* for once, or maybe just calling it quits, but Idea Factory started by considering carefully how to make the worst fucking design decisions possible, and adopted this as their sole driving philosophy of game creation. That is true dedication.
dedication to the art of slop
@@xord6286 Talk about the Japanese reincarnation of LJN... :D
Worst part is... Some of their games actually have some interesting ideas, that just isn't there most of the time. Being bogged down by questionable design choices or simply rushed development.
Honestly idea factory is a perfect name for them, since they just they endlessly produce games with some of the most baffeling design choices humanly possible
Jesus Christ this game sounds like Purgatory. Just a neverending spiral of pain and suffering.
The cut away at the end was hilarious :D
I thought the worst (JRPGs) would go to monster seed. A pokemon/ Digimon knockoff with the grosses monster design.
How utterly wild. Thank you for sharing this masterpiece with us.
oh shit bad idea factory strikes again
I’m trying to make an Excel spreadsheet of all JRPGs, and explaining what the general reception/what is worth playing, and knowing Idea Factory is a bad company will be a big help for sorting good and bad games
Also having games exclusively for Xbox 360? Did they have Ninja Gaiden’s Itagaki working with them or something?
I would expect that Microsoft paid them for exclusivity for whatever reason, as it would be insane for Idea Factory to do this otherwise.
For awhile during the 360 era, Microsoft was actively bankrolling niche Japanese devs to try and improve their console’s relevance in the East. Besides a few exclusive JRPGs, this also resulted in the console getting a ton of shoot-em-up/bullet hell releases.
@@sjake8308The 360 predated the PS3 and Wii so that's why some of those games are 360 exclucive and while Record of Agarest War and Zero were on both PS3 and 360 Record of Agarest War 2 was only PS3. Neptunia Sisters Vs Sisters is the first Idea Factory game to come to Xbox in 15 years.
Idea Factory has more games on the Playstation Vita alone than every Xbox combined.
@@ChelaximAah agarest another game that is just bad. Lets make the combat really bland, getting true ending stingy af, also make the game really grindy and dont give xp sharing so it means most of the character roster will never be used. good game design.
the issue is they WERE INSAIN they made games on VCD for GODS SAKE@@sjake8308
Eeeyikes. Thanks to an old Hardcore Gaming 101 article, I had known about Idea Factory's dire reputation in their home country, but I had never truly plunged into their output (didn't see anything that jumped out to me). I had vaguely heard of Hyperdimension Neptunia beforehand. It's a cute concept that reminds me of "Sega Hard Girls" (in fact, the two even had a crossover)...shame the game itself apparently isn't that great.
I loved the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games, so I was wondering "how could they snafu a roguelike?" Turns out, they can snafu it pretty badly. Some of the design choices you mention are utterly baffling. I mean, randomizing save points?! Somewhere in Japan, there has to be a person who couldn't attend to important business due to playing for hours and not finding a single save point. Does Spectral Tower have the largest dungeon in any roguelike? 10,000 floors...man.
How commercially successful are Idea Factory's games, anyway? Spectral Tower having sequels implies that the game was successful enough to warrant sequels, or that Idea Factory simply got enough money to produce them. Part of me suspects it's the decent artwork their titles boast, even though the style isn't my cup of tea.
One last note: I seem to remember Takahashi Meijin making a cameo in one of their games...somehow.
It's worth mentioning that their output in Japan was massive... they were cranking out at least 4-5 games on average each year. Even if those games sold only 10-20k each time, it would have been likely enough for them to keep going. Probably that's what they were banking on.
When you're making this stuff on the cheap, it doesn't have to sell like Dragon Quest to do well.
Neptune one is bad but the remake is okay
@@sparkly9294 Bingo.
@@mariusamber3237 The core Neptune games are pure grind. That's their big problem. They're twice as long as they need to be, with literally cut-and-pasted dungeons and mechanics that absolutely require grinding for both XP and crafting items. Which is a shame because they'd be decently fun junk food RPGs if they weren't so utterly tedious.
The only way I can get anywhere in an IF game is by watching movies or TH-cam on a second screen.
That ending lol
Holy crap, seeing this on my feed and you opening up talking about Idea Factory right after I closed out of a Neptunia game gave me the funniest whiplash. Neptunia games certainly aren't good (barring the latest mainline entry which actually holds its own as a game) but like you said, there's a strange charm to its concept and meta humor that can sometimes carry the game, even if the actual gameplay leaves much to be desired.
I actually just remembered that Neptunia also parodies the name of Spectral Tower in some of its entries, featuring an area called the Neptral Tower, usually used as a spot for an item collection minigame of sorts.
I'm not totally unconvinced this was purposefully made as an instrument of torture
Enjoyed the video but there's a strange editing error at the end where it cuts off mid-word.
🤣🤣🤣
This video got you like a thousand subs? Bout time people realize the greatness of a random stranger!
Spectral Tower is a perfect storm of terrible videogame design. How on Earth did the developers get approval to make a sequel? Also, it is really cool to see a RndStranger video get picked up by the algorithm. Great work, as always.
Oh thank goodness I'm not the only one who has no love for this company. Neptunia was one of the most unfun RPGs I ever tried to play.
I've played much worse than Neptunia, but visuals and subject matter aside, it was an incredibly bland game. The OST was quite nice, though.
@@sjake8308 Neptunia 1 sucked but it's the one series where they actually LISTENED and LEARNED! Neptunia mk2 has a really good battle system and is mostly mangled by an awful protagonist, Neptunia V (the third game) is actually pretty good and I had a ton of fun with it! Then V-II got rid of the movement circles for no reason.
I'm excited for the next one though because, no joke, the plot is about travelling back in time to try to save the Atari Jaguar (and 3DO and Pippin). Idea Factory is making a game about saving the Atari Jaguar. It's almost beautiful.
@@GELTONZ I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I've had my fill of Neptunia. The nature of the fan service really doesn't sit well with me.
If you think neptunia is bad, you ain't played this companies worst. Still shudder thinking about trying to play Generation of Chaos...
Mary Skelter is probably their best franchise.
@@RaifSeverence I've only played the first Mary Skelter, but I didn't think that game was particularly good either.
!F may have had some issues in the past, but they brought us The Record of Agarest War series, which was actually pretty good when they were released. Sure the battle system was a little off, but it was fun none-the less, especially all the CE's they had. I have full playthroughs of all the Agarest War games.
I don't think I could handle something this basic for any longer than 4 hours. I can't believe the audacity for them to draf it out to 450+ hours.
And I though the 3651 floors tower in Labyrinth of Galleria was a bit much 😅
That ending made me howl. Well-played.
This game sounds like a nightmare
Man, these pre-rendered graphics, and the text just kind of floating around, this looks like it should be on the 3D0. Kind of reminds me of a slightly saner Death Crimson. I'm getting kind of obsessed with this kind of 90s outsider art video game aesthetic.
Lots of games with this style on the Saturn.
Hey, great video! I'm new to the channel, been looking trough your videos and I'm very impressed. I think it would be great if you had a playlist with all the videos not related to Famidaily or your other daily series, like this one, otherwise they get kinda lost in the middle of your video library.
I have to admit, the idea of an RPG with hundreds of classes chosen at random sounds kind of fun, even if some of them really bad. There's no excuse for it to be hundress of hours of level grinding though.
Thank you for this video, because I otherwise wouldn't have known anything about this company otherwise! I have a feeling that this will be one of the better performing videos. It's crowd pleasing: It describes a terrible, unheard of JRPG, is under just 20 minutes, and it's amusing. I bet when I share this one, more of my friends will be clicking on it than usual.
Genuine question... Where do you share Rnd's videos that they may be clicked on? I share them with people when I want to explain some Famicom game I'm neurospicily obsessing over, in fact I found Famidaily when I was trying to challenge a speedruner to try to speedrun Super Monkey Daibouken. 😁
@@EriChanTheRetroGamerNerd basically anywhere. Discord, twitter, bluesky...
Well you’re right because after only one day it already has higher views than every Famidaily but one.
They seem kinda like Kemco - cranking out loads of RPGs of questionable quality every year, whether published or developed... I tried some of their games and thought none of them were particularly good/memorable. This looks like special kind of horrible though. (speaking of bad PSX RPGs - Ancient Roman retrospective when?)
Nah ideal factory is uniquely bad
Kemco actually made a few good games (mostly the Top Gear games on the SNES), Idea Factory don't even have that going for them.
Kemco's games are more low budget, low effort, generic games that sometimes hit upon a good idea.
Idea Factory lives up to their name. Note that the ideas they manufacture are rarely good ideas.
@@EriChanTheRetroGamerNerd I'd say they're good ideas on paper that get fantastically bungled somewhere in the middle. Like I'm kinda interested in a dungeon crawler with 160 character classes.
@@GELTONZ Not a dungeon crawler, but Dragon Quest VII has a total of nearly 60 character classes in total, and I absolutely adore it for that.
The escalation in the tower sizes got me cracking up, sounds like something a modern F2P garbage mobile game would pull off
And yet Idea Factory is still in business and turning 30 this year. What a weird industry.
It’s even more strange that they made bad games while also making specifically JRPGs for Xbox 360 in Japan. How do you survive doing that?
@@thomasffrench3639 You can't lose too much money on a game if you commit as few resources as possible when pooping them onto the market.
@@sjake8308that must be so low, because even low budget is probably the cost of all sales of an Xbox 360 in Japan
@@thomasffrench3639Low budgets, I'm pretty sure Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey was a net negative for Mistwalker.
Low dev costs with high return
This was a trip to watch. I love that ending, too. :)
After games like Wild Arms and PoPoLoCrois Monogatari this one seems to be a huge disgrace for PSX. It's worse than Hoshi wo Miru Hito and Maka Maka combined. I'd rather challenge myself with solo thief in Final Fantasy 😊
popolocrois mentioned!? 😮🥳🥳
@@kawanbruhpeople actually remember that game? I got it used at gamestop, which enabled me to return it.
I'd love to see more deep dives on obscure and terrible PS1 RPGs, getting to see the most ridiculously awful specimens of the genre on a console that's largely defined by the standout quality of its RPG library would be a treat.
Thanks to this video I finally understand what the hell Iffy was talking about when she was talking about a tower that has a lot of floors in some of the Neptunia games.
Sounds rough, but I really like the visual presentation and aesthetic.
The nice cover art would have fooled me into buying this, if it ever got released outside of Japan LOL
I never would’ve guessed Idea Factory was made up of ex arcade game developers. Since they made mostly RPGs and visual novels.
Despite how notorious the studio is, I just want to say that Black Stone: Magic & Steel was a banger.
Their attempt at a full-on co-op dungeon crawler ARPG actually worked out really well.
Spectral Souls and Generations of Chaos, two other IdeaFactory games, were two of my absolute favorite PSP games.
Hey, idea factory slander, count me in!
It isn't slander if it's true! 😆
5:15 TL;DR- you fight 5 towers, and the actual spectral tower- tower #4- has 1,000 floors. In a rogue like. Tower #5 has 10,000.
The rest of this is just a post mortem on every other failure this game has which makes even the diehard rogue like enjoyers not want to do all that.
There was a time many years ago that I would check out just about any RPG that came out west from Japan. Idea Factory stopped that habbit, real fast.
Ah, good old IdeaFuck!
Mary Skelter is a great series though
idea factory gotta learn we don’t want a single IDEA coming out of their FACTORY 🔥🔥
Honestly, knowing Idea Factory from Neptunia, I'd say this is actually among their more well-put-together titles.
By any chance did you show a couple seconds of gameplay in your first year of Super Famicom video? I had a whiff of deja vu somewhere in the middle while I was watching this.
I don't recall but it's very possible. Spectral Tower has been my go to for amazingly bad games for a long time. Now maybe other people will know what it is!
@@RndStranger I might jusy give it a spin for myself one day just to see how bad it is for myself, if anyone ever goes to the trouble of creating an English translation patch for it! 😆
@@sjake8308although I’m of the belief that most games should be translated, I prefer the more important and praised games having priority for translation as time is so limited on this earth
@@thomasffrench3639 Some folk have translated games simply because they're incredibly bad, though currently this isn't one of them. Basically, a person or group will take on a game translation if doing so just happens to interest them.
@@sjake8308 yeah instead of translating influential classics like Tengai Makyou we have stuff like Hoshi wo Miru Hito and Dual Orb 2.
16:32
"If the food level is higher than your characters level, then it makes them sick"
LMAO this game has a picky eater stat and tummy ache mechanics that rules
Stardew Valley has this now. Some monsters make you nauseated and ginger clears up your tummy ache.
*Coughs nervously having only known Idea Factory only for their Otomate division*
I didn't even know they had such a bad reputation since I never touched any of their RPGs. Like....the concept of the game sounds cool, but they ruined it with stupid mechanics. I've played Mystery Dungeon games, so I've suffered through 100 floor dungeons before...but 10,000 with these mechanics? Hell no.
The algorithm blessed me today.
I thought I was prepared for a bad game. I thought I knew bad ps1 games as I have dug and found many bad ones (popular bad ones such as Bubsy 3d, hooters road trip, Spawn, Criticom, Vip). Then watched a guy named Sean Seanson (which introduced me to more horrifically bad games like Dreams, Ubik and Iznogood) But this? Oh God this? I didnt even KNOW what Idea Factory was!
It as if I scraped the bottom of a barrel and hit some magical switch; which in turn, lead to another enclosed basement full of barrels...
If you somehow talk about more of these games (I dont see too many reviews of these types of games tbh), I'd watch them all.
Loved this one. Appreciate the work!