Mystery Dungeon

Video game series
the video game series

Mystery Dungeon, known in Japan as , is a series of roguelike role playing video games. Most were developed by Chunsoft, now Spike Chunsoft since the merging in 2012, and select games were developed by other companies with Chunsoft's permission. The series began when co–creator of Dragon Quest, Koichi Nakamura, was inspired by Seiichiro Nagahata's experience with Rogue, who is also a fellow developer from the company, and a desire to create an original series. It began on the Super Famicom, progressing to almost all of Nintendo's and Sony's home and handheld consoles, WonderSwan, Dreamcast, Windows, and mobile devices. The series has inspired other entries in Japan and has moderate popularity, mostly from crossover entries with the Dragon Quest, Chocobo, and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series. Despite the moderate popularity of the franchise, there have been numerous manga, anime, and novels published under it, whether they are coming from the company's original series, Shiren the Wanderer, or across many crossovers. The premise of most Mystery Dungeon games is to play a silent protagonist who travels across the world to discover mysterious dungeons that have randomly generated rooms and never have the same patterns upon entering into it more than once, with the protagonist sometimes accompanied by a group of party members or going alone. Though it is relatively inspired of older roguelike games, like NetHack, the franchise had a few unique gameplay elements that would appear in future titles; one such is rescuing other players online via a generated password.

Although all games in the series bear the Fushigi no Dungeon moniker somewhere in their Japanese titles, only the Shiren the Wanderer games contain original characters; all other license their characters from other role playing game franchises. The first game, Torneko's Great Adventure, stars a shopkeeper character from the same developer's Dragon Quest IV. Mystery Dungeon games are among the few console games in the roguelike genre. Chunsoft has also started several lines of branded Mystery Dungeon games, starting with one featuring the Chocobo from SquareSoft's Final Fantasy series in 1997, then Bandai's Gundam, Konami's TwinBee and Namco's Tower of Druaga series in 2004, Game Freak's Pokémon series in 2005, and Atlus's Etrian Odyssey series in 2015. Currently, One Way Heroics is the latest crossover with the series. Other games who are not developed or published by the company but uses the same moniker would also appear throughout the years, namely the Touhou Project series with its spin offs titled Fushigi no Gensokyo.

The franchise had its first spin off game in 2004, titled Shiren Monsters: Netsal. It is only one game based on the monsters from the Shiren the Wanderer series. Its gameplay was notably changed to the sport genre, specifically towards association football, compared to the main series' roguelike genre. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is part of the franchise since 2005 and serves as a crossover between Pokémon and Mystery Dungeon. It was turned into its own spin off series due to its worldwide popularity.

Most Mystery Dungeon games center around exploring a dungeon with randomly generated layouts and fights. These are in a turn based manner, where the player's every action such as attacking or walking, is met by the opponents' action. Features distinct to the Shiren the Wanderer series include the "Melding Jar" which allows players to synthesize items and weapons into more powerful ones. The Chocobo games further simplify the genre's difficulty to appeal to a wider and younger audience. Nakamura explained that the appeal of the Mystery Dungeon series is that every game is different and that players' skills are constantly being challenged, which helps the player feel deeply involved.

During the 1990's, the computer role playing game genre became famous in Japan due to the successful hit of the Dragon Quest series. However, most of the roguelike games that were published for PC used to not have a Japanese translation; the genre's recognition remained low in result. While following the basic game system of roguelike games, other companies tried to bring the genre into a home console. Two of the earliest known attempts were Sega's Fatal Labyrinth and Dragon Crystal, both games released in 1990, but which lacked the depth of a typical computer based roguelike. Neither proved to be successful games.

After the launch of the Super Famicom and finishing development for Dragon Quest V, the company ceased working on the Dragon Quest series and began working on the Mystery Dungeon series. Even if it sold less than the series' main titles, the game has sold over 800,000 copies. Koichi Nakamura conceived the series as Chunsoft's first original work. The game spawned two sequels starring Torneko, Torneko: The Last Hope in 1999 and Dragon Quest Characters: Torneko no Daibōken 3 in 2002, and a follow up, Dragon Quest: Shōnen Yangus to Fushigi no Dungeon in 2006, where Torneko would appear as a cameo instead of the protagonist. And indeed, the game became the first of the over thirty Mystery Dungeon rogue like series.

The company wanted to work on the new features and gameplay mechanics added in NetHack, a variant of Rogue, one of them was being able to steal items from a shopkeeper. However, it was not possible to translate the new content from NetHack with characters from the Dragon Quest series; one such with Torneko who is a merchant. Two years after the release of Torneko no Daibōken, Mystery Dungeon 2: Shiren the Wanderer was released as the company's second work for the Mystery Dungeon series, with a new world setting and unique characters. The success of the first game in Japan helped key employees that participated in the aforementioned game's development return to work on the series' future titles throughout the years, such as character artist Kaoru Hasegawa, supervisor Seiichiro Nagahata, A unique gameplay element that first appeared in Magic Castle of the Desert and would appear later in the Mystery Dungeon franchise and its crossovers is rescuing other players via passwords. They went with this idea instead of using the Game Boy's Game Link Cable because there were not many owners of the cable. This idea was expanded in Shiren the Wanderer Gaiden: Asuka the Swordswoman with the addition of online support. Within the online support, players would receive new dungeons, called either "Weekly Dungeon"; a dungeon that can be played online on a weekly basis, or "Challenge Dungeon"; the dungeon's difficulty would be increased and useful items would appear less frequently.

The Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon series is fully developed and published by Square Enix, then SquareSoft before the merging with Enix. However, Nakamura has supervised the first two games and was the producer for Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon, before Hironobu Sakaguchi took the place for Chocobo's Dungeon 2. Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon would become the first title to be released in the Chocobo sub series, while Chocobo's Dungeon 2 became the first Mystery Dungeon title to be released outside of Japan. Starting in Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon, some of the more difficult game elements were removed so that it would appeal to "small children and female" players.

Tsunekazu Ishihara has worked previously with Chunsoft with Tetris 2 + Bombliss as the producer, and met Nakamura, who was the game's director. Prior to the development of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red and Blue Rescue Team, Ishihara has played a few games from the Mystery Dungeon series, namely Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon, and was impressed with the genre's depth and quality. The game's development started after Nagahata and Tomie approached Ishihara and agreed with working on an easier version of the genre for the mainline Pokémon fans. During the development of Red and Blue Rescue Team, Kouji Maruta, one of the programmer for these two games, and contributed previously on EarthBound and Shiren the Wanderer 2, stated the company went through bad business performance, as employees from Chunsoft would leave the company progressively due to this issue. The game's success not only helped giving more popularity in the franchise, it also helped Chunsoft avoiding bankruptcy. The widespread success of the first game helped creating a spin off series, with it selling over 10 million copies four years after its first titles were released in Japan. Unlike the Dragon Quest branch, it does not have a linear timeline between the mainline Pokémon franchise and this series so newcomers would be introduced easily into the series and the genre.

The game was developed by Spike Chunsoft and Atlus, the latter being the developers of the Etrian Odyssey series, with most of the actual development done at Spike Chunsoft, while Atlus acted as supervisors. During development, both the companies would continuously share their most recent data on a shared server, and discuss details of the game direction using an instant messaging program; additionally, they would hold weekly meetings during which they made various arrangements for the game, and every month during development, Spike Chunsoft would send their latest playable build to Atlus, who would check the direction the game was going in.

Though the franchise is divided with numerous crossovers, the majority of its soundtracks were composed by late Koichi Sugiyama, and Hayato Matsuo for the Dragon Quest crossovers and Shiren the Wanderer series. Sugiyama made use of East Asian elements for the Shiren the Wanderer series, compared to his more European styled Dragon Quest compositions, using instruments such as a shakuhachi flute. This theme would remain for the series' next titles. Other composers such as Yuzo Koshiro for the Etrian Odyssey crossover or Keisuke Ito and Arata Iiyoshi for the Pokémon crossover have frequently contributed in the franchise. In addition to new compositions, tracks from previous mainline titles would also be featured in some of the crossover's titles, one example being the Dragon Quest crossover with tracks from the mainline games playing in these titles, in majority being from Dragon Quest IV or Dragon Quest VIII. Etrian Mystery Dungeon would includes arranged music from previous Etrian Odyssey games. Joe Down Studio developed the music for Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon and featured extensive remixing of music from various Final Fantasy games due to the positive reception of remixed Final Fantasy music in the game Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales, and requested that they be allowed to use music from the early Final Fantasy titles as it would be appropriate to the theme of forgotten time.