With Dungeon Fighter Online set to open its doors for open beta in a week, "Pwyff" jumped in on the action and discovered what DFO does to set itself apart from all of its other competitors.

One of the most important lessons I've learned in life has come from the ancient adage to never judge a book by its cover. Interestingly, while I may disagree with the literal understanding of this cliché (book covers are a decent way of judging the style and quality of a book!), it's when you apply the metaphorical wisdom of this proverb that you really start to learn something. If, for example, one were to apply this saying to an MMORPG, I suppose the best iteration would be to say "never judge an MMORPG by its graphics or the theoretical game mechanics that you can derive from reading about it on Wikipedia."

Sounds fair enough.

Actually, I've never been very good at following sound advice so, unfortunately, prejudge was exactly what I did when I downloaded Neople's simple beat 'em up side scrolling MMO, Dungeon Fighter Online (DFO). I anticipated I would find something akin to Dragonica Online, but… worse. Imagine my delight, however, when I discovered that, while Dungeon Fighter was pretty much what I expected from an MMO of this type, the guys over at Neople are also well aware of what DFO is (and isn't!) and so I was pleasantly surprised at just how much fun I was having with this game.

To backtrack a bit, Dungeon Fighter subscribes to old school 'beat-'em-up' gaming genre that's basically a combination of Secret of Mana with Super Mario side-scrolling action. Console and arcade gamers of the late 90's may fondly reminisce about the more classic 'beat-'em-ups' like Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, Final Fight (Haggar smash!) or Capcom's Dungeons & Dragons arcade games. These days, while beat-'em-ups have fallen by the wayside in favour of the more complex 3D fighting systems of Assassin's Creed and God of War, there still remains a group of nostalgic gamers who loved the simpler times of smashing things and seeing random objects (cherries!) pop out.

Enter DFO, otherwise known as Dungeon & Fighter in Korea and Arad Senki in Japan. Developed by Neople and published by Nexon in North America, Dungeon Fighter Online, as it is now called in North America, was the first well known MMORPG to combine the smooth, addictive game play of beat-'em-ups with the always welcome persistency of RPGs. Some keen users may argue that Barunson's Dragonica Online could technically qualify as the first beat-'em-up MMO in North America and, to an extent, they would be correct. On the other hand, DFO has been out in Asia since 2005, and it's only been due to its overwhelming success (constantly ranking in Korea's top 10 MMORPGs) that we're finally seeing DFO coming to North America, four years after its initial release.

I noted earlier that I fired up DFO expecting something like Dragonica Online, but with sub-standard 2D graphics and an even simpler system underneath it - and I still stand by this assumption. There really is no escaping it; Dungeon Fighter reminds me a lot of a 1995 side-scroller, with its old school 2D sprite system and the fact that the entire premise of the game is, really, to fight through dozens of dungeons, get stronger, get more abilities and snag lots of loot. On the other hand, however, it turns out that it was precisely these game mechanics that lead to the addictive charm of DFO.

DFO was very much inspired by Capcom's Dungeons & Dragons arcade series (hence Dungeon & Fighter sounds very similar), and you can see that very quickly in the game itself. Players can choose between five basic classes to start Dungeon Fighter; the Priest, the Gunner, the Swordsman, the Mage and the Fighter. Eventually, these five classes can 'branch' out to one of four subclasses, with one more linear advancement waiting at a much higher level. Each class also has access to a small variety of different weapons, each weapon complimenting a certain style of fighting for all players. Basic progression through DFO consists of walking around the main town, grabbing quests and then moving out to the randomized dungeons to smash monsters, kill bosses, and finish off the quests (that usually involve killing X amount of Y monsters) for even more EXP.

That's it.

But where other MMOs try to cover up their endless monster grind by promoting unique pet systems or incredibly polished graphics, Neople decided that DFO wouldn't hide from what it was, and, instead, they focused on making its simple game play as much fun as possible. Director of Dungeon Fighter, Yunjong Kim, notes that Dungeon Fighter is really about efficiency, and you can see this in every aspect of the game. Not only has the team shied away from high-res 2D images, but the game itself runs on an incredibly tiny amount of resources. When a friend and I were under 'fatigue' debuff from leaving a dungeon without clearing it, we decided to fire up a game of League of Legends (which doesn't hog too many resources, but is still decent for my gaming laptop) while still running DFO in the background. In between deaths in LoL, I would alt tab and putter around town in DFO, while experiencing zero system lag when playing either game. Not only that, but Dungeon Fighter remains as one of the only MMOs I can play on my laptop off the plug without having it die on me in less than an hour.

In terms of game play itself, the team at DFO has worked very hard to ensure that, while the game plays like a beat-'em-up, it would suffer none of the lag that typifies older iterations of the genre. Not only does DFO have a huge array of abilities and spells available for players to pick and choose from to customize their character, but the game also features a very smooth combo system that just gets deeper and deeper as players advance. A friend and I teamed up to play the game together as a Priest and a Fighter, and we played hours on end just smashing through dungeons and enjoying ourselves.

All in all, if it seems as though there isn't much to talk about DFO outside of its combat and sprite graphics, that's really because there isn't. Where DFO succeeds, however, is in the fact that they stick with what they know (combat), and they ignore everything else. Yunjong Kim even admits that they planned to spend only five months of development time on Dungeon Fighter Online because they didn't believe that the game would have a very long life-cycle. Now the game is four years old and the team has never deviated from its intention to create a pure, simple, efficient and, most of all, fun gaming experience. Dungeon Fighter may not appeal to anyone looking for fishing mini-games and awkward storyline driven games; it is, unapologetically, an action game that truly delivers on its word, if not much else.

Christopher "Pwyff" Tom
Editor
ZAM.com