Hello everyone, Usber here! I’ve been playing a bunch of PC games off of Steam, Freem, and DLsite recently these days, and I’ve gotta say I’ve noticed a lot of differences between the indie and doujin games compared to the big budget titles I used to play in the past.
As an example, let’s talk about one of the games I’ve been playing recently: Dungeon Wars. It’s the newest game by the same circle that put out Mad Princess—The Grand Warriors—which incidentally is one of the games the setting of BB is based off of. I was really looking forward to its release, and now that it’s finally out, I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit. But because it’s a doujin game, there’s unfortunately no walk-throughs or wikis or really any information of any kind about the game online.
At any rate, Dungeon Wars is a game where you play as the Demon Lord and need to manage all of your dungeons. You have to explore the world to gather materials to craft and upgrade your dungeons, which is the sim part of the game, and then you have to actually battle against heroes inside those dungeons, which is the RPG part. You need a lot of different materials to build out your dungeons, and some of them are only available in certain areas. For example, if you want a larger room you need the Empty Pail material, but you can only ever buy that in the Verdant Plains, which is one of the early game areas. If, like me, you just skipped right past it, then you’ll end up screwed further down the road. To make matters worse, you don’t know what materials you might need to build higher-tier rooms until you actually unlock them, so you often run into the situation where you don’t buy something, only to discover later that you actually needed it and you’ll have to waste time making another trip to get it.
I really would like to have a wiki of some kind for games like these, but at the same time, I have to admit it’s pretty fun going through the game blind. Of course, optimal strats only arise when multiple people discuss their playstyles and compare them, so it’s entirely possible the way I’m doing things is inefficient. That being said, I’m the kind of player who’ll savescum to get the right randomly generated skill sets for the monsters I choose, and will also abuse any broken mechanics I can to make the game easier for myself. On my run on the hardest difficulty, which is called God, I only took out the fortresses that had story events I wanted to hit, then flew straight to the last boss with an airship. I used a bunch of items to avoid the battles with all of the high level mobs in the last boss’s dungeon, and then avoided fighting the last boss too by choosing to side with them.
Obviously, this is not the route you would normally want to choose! But even after doing all that, the game was difficult enough that I really felt accomplished when the credits started rolling. And knowing I’d done it all without the help of a wiki or walk-through made it feel all the more amazing, since I knew I’d gotten here with my own strength and was possibly the first person to beat the game on that high of a difficulty. When I checked online, I didn’t see any tweets or posts on other social media about people saying they’d beaten the final difficulty, so it is actually possible I was the first. You can only get that sense of accomplishment with doujin games, really.
Best of all, I found this awesome bug! On the version of the game I played, which was 1.0.8, the dev had already fixed all of the softlocks, but there were still really funny bugs you could only replicate under extremely unique conditions. As a bug fan myself, I loved that I could still find a few! For example, when you go from the menu to the field map, there’s a transition screen, and if you spam the forward direction while on that screen you can run right past enemies you’d normally have to fight. Also, I haven’t confirmed this one myself, but I heard there’s a bug where if you use a mouse and a controller at the same time, you can bug out your skills so that even the strongest skills only cost as much SP to use as the weakest ones.
I also discovered that when you’re harvesting ingredients on the map, the amount you can harvest from each node is once for however many real time hours that node has existed for. It turns out enemy corpses are also treated as ingredient nodes, so what I did was collect all of them, stick them in my airship, and then waited a day to farm a bunch of dope items from them. I call this the Corpse Tour exploit! It’s stuff like this that makes me keep coming back to video games, I tell you.
Oh, but while this is technically the most efficient way to grind, it makes the entire game a cakewalk, so I don’t recommend doing it if you want a challenge. Actually, I reported all these bugs to the dev so they’ve all been patched now anyway. That being said, I really love the rough feel of doujin games. Indeed, part of the appeal of BB is meant to be that it had so few players that a full walk-through doesn’t exist, and that even in its final version it still has a lot of bugs left in it. Some people really like that stuff, okay!
But that’s enough gushing—it’s time for the acknowledgments.
First off, I’d like to thank my editors, Fda-san and Yguchi-san. I’m sorry for working you hard this time around! I think this volume came out a lot better for it though, so thank you very much!
I’d also like to thank my illustrator, Amano-san. Your illustrations really capture the atmosphere of I’m Not The Hero!, and you drew Lily and Rose just how I imagined them to be. Thank you so much!
A big thank you to my designer Kiba-san as well, who made such a great obi for this volume. And also thank you to my proofreader, who patiently worked through my typo-riddled prose.
Last but not least, thank you dear readers for supporting me all this way! May we meet again in the next volume!