Dark Alliance has always been my guilty pleasure. There is something to the simplicity of this game. And how sexualized every female character is.
Turns out I even finished the first episode some 15 years ago in coop, but barely remember anything of it.
The game is surprisingly brutal. Every ARPG can be viewed as economy game: you need to bring more money from the dungeon than you spend. In that sense, Dark Alliance is very close to break even. If you play as Archer, your weapons do very little damage. So you need flame arrows, which require mana, and the arrows themselves, which don’t drop in enough quantities. And you need healing potions, because despite having some regeneration, it’s not nearly enough. The drops aren’t very generous, I might have gotten a +1 gloves, but was better off with buying a leather armor from the vendor. There are “town portals” for shopping trips, but those aren’t cheap either. So you’re basically paying for the great privilege of cleaning the dungeons. At some point in the sewers the only way I managed to bean both the rat miniboss (of course there’s a rat miniboss) and the bugbear boss only by surrounding myself with some crates that they couldn’t navigate, and making a pincushion out of both.
I started the game on original Xbox, then remembered it was ported to Switch, so I switched to it.
Although I must say I probably prefer the low-res look of the original.
The main problem with the game: it’s quite boring in single-player. You don’t get experience quickly enough, so you’re stuck with just one skill for a long, long time, and not enough motivation to continue.
