This conversion of a crumbly old coin-op succeeds in being boring and crap. It’s just trudging around samey mazes, occasionally bopping a ‘slime’ on the head with your sword. It makes you really wonder why they bothered.

GRAPHICS: After a lengthy and promising introduction sequence, the in game visuals are utterly repetitive and boring.

SOUND: Rubbish.

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H-SEIKEN wrote: Your review for ToD seems to be quite pointless. It's a rather popular game in Japan (at least on some level since they're STILL using characters from it like Lizardman in Soul Calibur and even using the story for new games such as Nightmare of Druaga)...have spotted this a while back and wondering what all the fuss was about, I decided to force myself to play the arcade version on Namco Museum. After having my nuts handed to me in a plastic bag multiple times, I decided to look some info up on the game. Turns out that half the game is 'hidden'...in other words, it's less about fighting and about solving the mystery of each floor. While you get no clues, you get the 'idea' of what they are looking for after you learn how to solve 2 or 3 floors. By solving the 'mystery', a chest with an item to help you along the way is revealed. In fact, you MUST find a lot of these chests or you'll be alpo in the dog's den. Case in point, floor 2's chest are the hyper boots which drastically speed you up. If you somehow move up a floor without this item, you might as well call it quits. But even just finding the item may not be enough. Some have uses which are quite cryptic, but become insanely obvious when activated, usually by accident the first time.

There's something addictive about the game where you just HAVE to know why a chest showed up one time and not another. The PC Engine version added a nice bit of flavor from it's sequel (which is REALLY weird, but in a cool way) in the way the graphics are presented and the fact that Gil's hit points are actually seen. As well, the stats are a welcome addition, though they only help you so much, since later you must earn better weapons to even hurt certain enemies.

It's a VERY difficult game, but is one of the first action RPGs in the arcade (many people site Venture as the first, but you didn't really use the items you found). You either love it or hate, which I've noticed that (in my experience) MANY people do not give old games they never played but get a chance to nowdays for whatever reason any chance at all and just stick to 'what they know'. I personally love it, even though it's learning curve is steep and it's RPG elements don't really make much for an 'RPG' nowdays with many games doing what it pioneered many times better. However, if you look at it from an arcade game perspective, and compare it to other games that were at during it's release, you can't deny that it deserves some credit for being quite original.