I’d never heard of Rammy’s Great Adventure until its remake landed on the Switch eShop. So I went and researched it, and here’s a brief history lesson.
Okay, so Rammy’s Great Adventure was originally a Japan-only release, and it was released on GAMEPACK, back in 1995. Now, GAMEPACK was a multi-title cartridge that was bundled with Fujitsu FMV personal computers, which were a major budget line in Japan from the first iteration in 1993. The starting price for a desktop was around 180,000 yen (which would be like paying AUD$1,800, which back in those days was reasonable indeed).
Of those GAMEPACK titles, Rammy’s Great Adventure is the second to get a revival, after Air Hockey, which was released as a web browser game a couple of years ago. There is clearly a fan base for Rammy’s Great Adventure, because the reason these remasters exist is thanks to a crowdfunding campaign that raised four million yen (around $40,000) at 167% the developer’s goal… but I have absolutely no idea why they got an English release, given that this is the first time the rest of the world has ever seen these titles.
Anyhow, what you need to know is that Rammy’s Great Adventure and its sequel are very no-frills roguelike dungeon crawlers. The first one doesn’t even have a narrative, just dropping you directly into the first level of the dungeon. The sequel does have a cut scene that’s a few seconds long to give you some context… but that’s about it.
Just like with Shiren the Wanderer, Chocobo’s Dungeon, and all the other roguelikes, in Rammy’s Great Adventure, you move around randomly-generated levels, fighting increasingly difficult enemies while looking for more powerful equipment and levelling up as you go. Like most roguelikes, Rammy’s Great Adventure errs on the side of being challenging, and it will likely take you a few “runs” to get to the point where you can clear a dungeon. At that point, your goal is to try to do so as quickly as possible to lift your place on the leaderboards (which are online and seem to be incredibly popular, given how many people are registering scores on it).
As you might expect for such old games, the gameplay is very efficient. You need to manage your “torch” level, which counts down with every step that you take in the dungeon, and you will need to find additional torches to replenish this level as you go (like the food/hunger systems in many other roguelikes). There are only a handful of abilities that you can learn as you play (which are powerful but have very limited uses), and for equipment, there’s one weapon slot and one armour slot.
Beyond that, both Rammy’s Great Adventure titles are very basic. Dungeons all follow the same structure, with a 3 x 3 grid of rooms lined by corridors, and the only “randomisation” being slight differences in room size. One new enemy type is introduced with each dungeon floor (a more powerful enemy than the previous one), and the weakest enemy from previous dungeon levels will stop appearing. All-in-all there are perhaps three enemy types per dungeon floor that you’ll need to contend with.
These enemies are cute in design, but very cheaply animated (many of them don’t even have a sprite for turning left or right, so just move around always facing forward). There’s also absolutely no visual feedback from attacking them. You swing your sword, some text on the bottom of the screen tells you whether the hit landed or not, and eventually the monster just disappears when you’ve dealt enough damage to it.
That’s basically all there is to both Rammy’s Great Adventure titles. You do this for dungeon level after dungeon level until you either clear the final floor or your character dies. There is an extra challenging mode, and you can unlock new costumes for Rammy. I assume that these are additions made to the “remaster” to distinguish it from the original, but otherwise these do very much feel like the kind of games you might have expected to get in a pack-in collection that came with a new PC in 1995.
Just to be clear, this isn’t a criticism. Most of us elder millennials and gen X types do have a nostalgia for the kind of no-frills shareware and pack-in style stuff that used to do the rounds in those early wild west days of game development. More than a few of those “pack-in” titles have gone on to be legendary games in their own right (SkiFree, for example), but overall this particular corner of retro gaming probably doesn’t get enough attention and so a lot of intriguing, interesting, or different little games have been largely lost to history.
But these titles do deserve to be remembered as part of the overall patchwork that the games industry grew out of, and I’m genuinely happy that I had the chance to discover Rammy’s Great Adventure. It’s not an easy thing to recommend to anyone because… Well, the Switch already has so many great roguelikes. But if you’re in the mood for something eclectic and eccentric, or just a piece of gaming history that you absolutely haven’t played before, Rammy’s Great Adventure and its sequel and the existence of this remake is genuinely fascinating.
