Chaos Seed: Feng Shui Chronicle (SNES)

 Is this the first game where you're charged with the task of building dungeons, and defending them from invading would-be heroes? I don't know of any that came earlier than it, but I can believe that something along these conceptual lines might exist on some eighties microcomputer somewhere. Either way, Chaos Seed: Fengshui Chronicle (also known as Chaos Seed : Fuusui Kairouki) is a very early entry into the genre, and  it is a little different from the more famous games that came out after it.

 

In most dungeon building games, a large part of your goal is to create an environment to which monsters will be drawn, and will want to stay, so that they can defend your base at the centre of it. Instead, Chaos seed has you placing certain kinds of rooms with the goal of generating various resources, most prominently energy and sentan. The actual aim of your dungeon is to generate energy that you can absorb and then redirect into the dragon vein (which I think is the Asian equivalent of Europe's ley lines), and revive the blighted lands above. Sentan, the other resource, is used for upgrading the abilities of the rooms you build, as well as other things like summoning monsters to whom you can assign patrol routes to help defend your dungeon.

 

The Fengshui element mentioned in the title comes in the from of a system whereby every room you build is assigned one of five elements, depending on where you build it, and invisible elemental energy flows down the corridors from room to room, and adjacent rooms can have beneficial or detrimental effects on their neighbours' efficiency, depending on how their respective elements match up. A few years ago, when I was less patient, I never would have been able to get into this game. It starts out with a (definitely necessary) tutorial dungeon, where you're constantly being bombarded with (annoying, but still necessary) dialogue boxes explaining every mechanic in detail. Then, at the end of that dungeon, an angry dragon defeats you in battle and casts a spell that scatters your soul simultaneously across multiple different universes, and each subsequent dungeon is a dragon vein in one of those universes.

 

What's less clear is why soldiers are constantly invading your dungeons. For some reason, everyone's very angry about you trying to revive their desolate lands, so they constantly flood your dungeon with goons in an attempt to destroy it and kill you. You fight them in a typical SNES action RPG style, where you have a few normal attacks, you can open a menu to cast spells and use items, and so on. Occasionally, a plot-important character will also invade, and you have to watch them go an a rampage in your dungeon, killing any monsters they encounter until they find and fight you. Though any damage your monsters inflict won't be healed before they character gets to you, so even if they're all killed, they'll still be helping you a little bit.

 

I've played through the first few dungeons, and so far, each takes between one and two hours to complete. Things will speed up a little once you get used to things like how to maximise the efficiency of your energy-generating rooms and so on, as well as a few random factors,like days where enemies don't invade. It's one of those games that's pretty fun, but due to the nature of it, I can't imagine being able to sit through more than one dungeon every couple of days. It's got a problem that I've seen in other real time building/management games, like Sim City: once you've collected and used all your resources in a period, you're left wasting time and doing nothing until the next period starts and causes another round of generation.

 

Still, it's a decent enough time, and it's a pretty unique game, both thematically and mechanically. Plus it looks great! Well, your dungeons are always going to be made up of differently-sized copies of the same few rooms, but the places you see in the cutscenes are beautifully realised! Villages, temples, natural scenes and more, all in an east Asian fantasy style, and all looking great. I'd say Chaos Seed is a game that's definitely worth a look, at least, though I will re-iterate again that you've really got to persevere through the very long tutorial, because it's a complicated game, and you do kind of need to be told how everything works.