Relic Dungeon

Hiya, really enjoyed this, thanks for making it! Consider the following comment to be a review, bug report and general feedback.

The overall game progression was satisfying and I was able to beat it after two failed runs.  Enemy patterns growing more complex made for some fun room clears and at times taxed my Famicom to its limit with some glorious old school slowdown. The itemization was also fun and made checking chests for loot enjoyable. I would recommend this to any fan of Final Fantasy Adventure/Mana series, as well as people who enjoy the gameplay of old Zelda titles.

That said, I do feel the game's economy needs to be rebalanced because I effectively had unlimited quantities of consumables by the end of the game due to ending up with upwards of 6000 gold between finding shops, and Stat Potions can apparently spawn in shops which allowed me to buy my way to victory since they were only 100 each. At the very least I think the HP/MP potions should cost 500 and the Offensive/Defensive stat potions should cost 1000 to help avoid being able to trivially overpower the game via gold.

I also discovered a bug pertaining to stat potions: If you increase your MP to 99 via stat potions and then level up, it will exceed the 99 cap and display as garbage characters. It functions correctly at 100 MP and above but the UI may need to be changed for that.

In the realm of possibly not a bug but noticeable: At floors above 50 as the room generation began to produce floors with 5+ rooms I began to notice a tendency for many floors to have nothing in half of the rooms. Especially in cases where there were 7 or more rooms. I noticed this more and more as I descended past the 80s.

Additionally, I was playing on a CRT and noticed that the game screen might be better shifted downwards as the top of the screen was routinely cut off by my CRT's overscan while I had at least 8 vertical pixels worth of clearance the entire game on the bottom.

The last thing I feel I need to comment on is the collision detection where block tiles are concerned. There isn't quite enough leeway when aligning yourself and that can make fighting in the block mazes harder than it initially seems it should be. It's nothing you don't master after a few hours of play but it is noticeably tight positioning relative to what one might expect from other games. 

Game is fun! Been playing on my NES with N8 Pro, no issues at all.

I'm on floor 43 and only encountered a shop once at floor 3 or so?? haha

This is really fun, thanks for making this!

I found a small bug in my playthrough.  One of the blade traps got stuck in a small segment of the screen in one of the rooms with narrow pathways.  It was trying to move up and it looked like it had room to do so, but it would only move up a pixel and then wait before moving in a different direction.  It ended up only going back and forth over a two-tile area.  Hopefully that makes sense.

Any chance to have a demo ROM so we can review it for BrewOtaku #9?