Anyone at all familiar with Technos Japan is probably intimately familiar with the Kunio-Kun
games, a series popularized in the US by the RPG-lite Beat-em-up River City Ransom, which
was itself popularized in the early 2000s by viral video.
And those rock-dwellers who may not instantly recognize Technos by name?
Well, crud, what thirty-something gamer hasn’t lost a roll of quarters to an unforgiving
Double Dragon cab at least once in their geeky existence?
But besides making games about street punks who like to beat the bloody pulp out of one
another, Technos is also responsible for Sugoro Quest, a quirky dice-based famicom RPG that
never stood a blizzarga’s chance in Hades of receiving an official Western release.
When reduced to the bare essentials Sugoro Quest plays much like other turn-based RPGs:
a lone adventurer traipses across the Kingdom of Siland battling diabolical evil and performing
menial tasks for the local layabouts.
The plotline never gets any more involved than “kill the bad people because they’re
really bad” but it doesn’t need to; the board game gimmick is compelling enough to
create a casual RPG that’s usually fun to play and always adorable to behold.
Each scenario along the hero’s journey is represented by a visually distinctive game
board – six in total - each being longer, more complicated, and incredibly more difficult
than the last.
The game board is represented by a linear track that is divided into spaces of various
special effects – the most common being the not-so-random encounter.
But in addition to these battle squares the hero might also find traps, treasure, healing,
equipment buffs, or story events.
There are a few points on the board when the track splits into an alternate route depending
on how an adventurer handles a particular encounter, but these eventually loop back
onto the main track and ultimately all adventures end on either the victory or failure square.
During combat the hero and the monster’s dicemen (he’s a little man that rolls the
die – how much detail do I really need to go into on this?
The player can use dicemen too – the man summoned is of course random and different
men affect your rolls differently.
Some are better at magic, others defense, and some just waste your god damn time) anyway,
they roll the dice – the highest result inflicts a hit and the value of the roll is
then roughly modified by the character’s strength stat to calculate damage dealt.
In the event that the two opponents roll doubles, additional dice are stacked until a winner
emerges.
These events are rare but their damage is devastating.
Sugoro’s combat system is the thematic blend of experience based stat gains and an overtly
visual random number generator.
In my experience the RGN gods were not always kind, but the likelihood of poor rolls could
be lessened by the tried and tested method of grinding for level gains or by simply upgrading
your equipment at the castle between stages.
Unfortunately neither tactic was effective at warding off random dicemen knock-outs.
Enter Sugoro’s greatest weakness: the game is unfairly difficult and fairly repetitive.
To stand a chance at completing a new stage your adventurer will have had to run through
the previous game board two, possibly even three times.
And even when your hero is fully prepped for an encounter a series of terrible rolls could
easily be her downfall.
Adding to this grueling test of stamina is the fact that heroes level individually; later
stages are impossible to play with a new character unless fully leveled and equipped.
The final stage requires that you use all four heroes, meaning that in order to beat
the game you have to play every stage, multiple times, with four different characters.
In a way this is almost like selecting various difficulty levels, as each character has a
different skill set.
Magic users such as the Elves who can manipulate dice rolls are at an obvious advantage and
make playing the stages significantly easier than with the melee oriented dwarf or fighter.
Consequently, while Sugoro Quest’s minimal story line, linear progression, and stage-based
exploration make it a decent gaming option for short sessions (particularly in between
longer RPGs), the amount of time required to fully complete the game is a considerable
investment.
Win or Lose, I find Sugoro Quest to be an enjoyable time waster; when you give up on
the expectation of actually beating the game you open yourself to the exhilaration of chaos.
Sugoro Quest may not be the next Final Fantasy, but it’s an excellent approximation of rainy-day
physical board gaming - I only wish it supported multiplayer.