Mazes Of Fate - Blast From The Past

29/04/24

Since I’m constantly hunting down next and ever weirder games to play for this website, I look at a lot of GBA games, usually through the Wikipedia entry. Thus, I get more and more impressed when I stumble upon a new name, and discover something that was just totally made for me. Old-school fantasy vibe? Check. Hardcore, first person dungeon crawling? Oh, it’s here. A pure send-up of the classic RPGs of 80s and 90s yore? Hell yeah. If any of this strikes a fancy with you, Mazes of Fate, a true blue dungeon crawler that is a true spiritual successor to an entire genre, featuring everything that made it great… whilst pushing the GBA perhaps a bit *too* far, turning the game occasionally in a slideshow experience.

As I said, I’m amazed I didn’t stumble upon this game earlier, though I wouldn’t be surprised if my eyes glazed over it’s generic - yet, in retrospect, thoughtfully tongue-in-cheek - title, and of course, my perpetual trauma of low-quality platformers making me search elsewhere. Honestly, it’s a bad habit formed habit, because with a title as generic as Mazes of Fate being a game as good as this? Crazy. There have been few games, at least from ones I’d never played prior to The Game Boy Abyss, that have delighted me and pulled me in as quickly and wonderfully as Mazes of Fate.

Mazes of Fate throws out a pretty typical RPG storyline - you’re initially an everyman, doing odd jobs that eventually culminate in world-shaking, god-soaked events. You’re not really a chosen one, or anything like that, thankfully - you’re just someone with the skillset who happens upon the pieces of creation. Y’know, by accident. It happens, sometimes! The narrative is honestly pretty middling, with stilted, awkward dialogue and just a general lack of interaction between your party members. What the game makes up for is having a pretty fantastic set of lore, detailing a world with cruel gods, complex motivations, and a general sense of place, if that makes sense. The lands you roam feel formed, even with such little storytelling, with bits and pieces of culture present in pretty much every city you visit. Sadly, whilst it seems the game is setting up a larger scale story, but I’m assuming the fact that this game probably didn’t sell *that* well is the culprit behind no real followups to Mazes of Fate.

Of course, the towns aren’t where you’ll be spending the majority of your time in Mazes of Fate as this game is a true-blue dungeon crawler, through and through. Taking place from a first-person perspective, you’ll be exploring grid-based dungeons, hunting down keys for locked doors, artifacts for quest givers, and bashing your skull randomly on walls to find hidden entrances. The dungeons vary heavily in size - some are small, one floor affairs that are just filled with enemies to kill for a quest, whilst a few are multi-floor epics that’ll take over an hour to clear, filled with puzzles and challenging foes alike. This variety is nothing short of fantastic, as any time you find yourself a little fed up with the longer, main story dungeons, you can take a quest and clear out a short dungeon as a palate cleanser. Thankfully, the game isn’t too harsh on you when it comes to healing up or reviving for death. At any point, you can Camp, which will put all your characters to sleep and heal them over time, though they will be interrupted if an enemy approaches and attacks you. Furthermore, if a character does die, using any healing item on them will revive them with (only, no exceptions), 1 HP, with a game over dropping in only when all party members are down. Especially towards the endgame, if you’ve got squishy mages in your party and they’re getting one-shotted by demons, throwing a weak potion on them so they still get EXP is super convenient. Once you have a lot of healing items, it does kind of kill the difficulty of the game to an extent, but it didn’t really bother me too much. You’ll journey as a party of three, two of which are NPCs that’ll join you at certain parts in the story, each with their own skill sets. You’ll earn EXP from defeating enemies and finishing quests, allowing you to dole out skills to each member of your party, which basically covers four categories - raising stats like HP or MP, making your attacks more accurate, magical abilities, or rogue skills that’ll make dungeon navigating more convenient. I played as a Rogue who focussed on physical damage, and as the game wore on, partied with magic users who began to dole out the majority of my damage. Gear and whatnot plays a role, though mostly in a numerical sense - better weapons leads to better damage, armor less damage from foes, and so on. The gear isn’t that interesting, but honestly, as I’ll soon get into, the less time I spend gearing up, the better.

Of course, wandering the dungeons isn't without danger, and you'll frequently find yourself accosted by the forces of evil and depravity - which is to say, a lot of bandits, and a lot of beastman. Kinda has something about goats that happen to take the form of men. Funny that. From the pretty decent amount of time I’ve put into Mazes of Fate, combat is pretty basic and straightforward. To start with, each of your three characters have a round green gauge that serves as your stamina, which is expended upon attacking *and* moving, so if you run headlong into an enemy, you might wait a few moments to actually get an opportunity to engage. Attacks pretty much fall into two categories - a basic physical strike, and magic, the latter of which can cover various forms and afflictions, like savage fire damage, or weakening their stats. Honestly, most of the time, especially in the early game, you’ll just be spamming the A button to bring down enemies with basic attacks, but as the game goes on and you have more skills to work with, magic hits incredibly hard and generally becomes a better form of offense, especially since it’s a lot more accurate universally than normal melee attacks.

Something I find it incredibly important to point out is to identify, or choose, which kind of weapon each of your characters will be using, and pump as many skill points into as the game will let you. If you don’t, you’ll be spending a *lot* of time swinging your weapons at foes and getting nothing but misses as a result. Took me a good hour or two to realize I should be focussing those stats, and my enjoyment of the still otherwise basic combat increased by leaps and bounds once I was, y’know, actually taking foes out.

Puzzles are also a big part of the game, sometimes taking precedence over the battles - for an example, a dungeon called the Darkfort features a whole slew of unique puzzles unseen in the rest of the game, but sadly, as the game goes on, more and more Mazes of Fate moves away from this concept. Interesting puzzles like navigating a maze in a certain amount of steps, or following opposite instructions on signs, and instead opts for the player investigating half the walls in the dungeon for fake walls or hidden buttons to progress, which is ridiculously annoying when you just can’t find it, or haven’t thrown a metric ton of skill points into your Search skill. The game also slowly just becomes a bit… samey, as a result, with the last few dungeons not really having much of the draw the first half of the game did. It never ventures into truly bad territory, but I was ready to wrap up this 11 hour game around the eight hour mark or so.

Beyond just dungeon crawling, Mazes of Fate structure is decently straightforward; you’ll investigate each town, and the residents who inhabit them in search of quests, the starting and finishing of which will unlock new dungeons for you to investigate. One thing I was instantly grateful for was that upon completing a dungeon you need to traverse to a different area, you can skip the dungeon on further expeditions if you wish, saving you from traversing the same dusty, lifeless canyons again and again. The world map kind of creates an illusion of being much bigger than it actually is, giving it a world-traversing feel that doesn’t really exist, but every time I opened up a new zone I was excited to see what new towns and dungeons I had to explore, so it worked for me.

Frustratingly, but expected, Mazes of Fate does also suffer from one of the cornerstones of old-school RPGs, and that’s leveling up your skills. The game really doesn’t give you enough information on what stats should really be prioritized - for example, if you don’t level up your chosen weapon skill, your early game experience will suffer, and going without Search or Stamina skills can put you in for a rude awakening. The game isn’t hard enough that it’ll make or break it for you after a couple of hours, but it might cause you to bounce off the game if you’re not careful. Furthermore, as a late-era title that pushes the GBA a little bit harder, everything in Mazes of Fate has a bit of laggy jank to it, which rears its ugly head the most when you’re scrolling your inventory, equipping and searching through your gear, and generally everything that involves a decent amount of menuing is overall a total momentum killer. Plus ,generally gearing up your crew is always a frustrating ordeal, since there’s nothing to directly compare gear, so you’ll be scrolling back and forth trying to identify what goes well with who. Couple that with the lag? It’s torture, every time. This even reaches the dungeons themselves, with some dungeons feeling like they move with FPS in the single digits, rapidly accelerating my desire for the game to wrap itself up sooner than later.

I’ve seen people call out the game for looking rather goofy, especially in its character and general non-monster designs, and whilst I find it hard to really disagree with that consensus, I honestly find the weird art of Mazes of Fate really endearing and, for lack of a better term, cute. Everyone looks just that little bit messed up and I love it. Seriously, you’ve got ‘humans’ who are a variety of different, non-natural shades, a lot of blue and greens, and it looks great. What is something I’m certain is more widely respected is the game’s soundtrack. My god, the soundtrack! The overworld theme is just so incredibly relaxing, and whilst the various dungeons don’t have the biggest variety in tracks, they loop and flow in nice enough ways that you never really get sick of them, even in the longer dungeons like The Tower or the Darkfort. Seriously, this soundtrack is straight up fire, one of my favorites on the GBA thus far. Kind of stuff that I could put on whilst working, or something like that.

Mazes of Fate is, without a doubt, one of the biggest surprises I’ve had with the Game Boy Advance thus far. Engaging, satisfying and challenging in equal measures, its greatest issues simply lie in its reach escaping its grasp. It’s a title that pushes the GBA to its limits, resulting in a frequently laggy experience that makes the most simplistic taks the most frustrating. The pros outstrip the cons, and if you’re looking for a solid dungeon crawling experience that plays homage to the western RPGs of yesteryear, look no further than Mazes of Fate - hell, I’d recommend it just based off the soundtrack! I'd throw a link up to it, but this game is known so little, it's not even on Youtube!

Thanks so much for reading my review of Mazes of Fate on the Game Boy Abyss! Great game, had a really fantastic time, even if it got a little samey towards the end. Next week, we’ll be celebrating one of the nerdiest dates of the year, though probably not in any way that’ll bring me joy. Yaaaay. As always, you can find me over on twitter @Lemmy7003, email me at mgeorge7003@hotmail.com, or watch me on Twitch under Game Boy Abyss. Thank you again for reading, and I’ll see you next week!