 Ssssssssssssssssssssssssss. Dungeon Explor is one of the better titles for the TurboGrafx 16, it's a gauntlet style multiplayer RPG where you run around and hack and slash at everything that moves. It received a sequel for the same platform, Dungeon Explor 2, and the series kinda continued from there, on the Super Famicom with a game weirdly titled Crystal Beans from Dungeon Explor. This is one of those games where it's half-port half-remake. does take a lot of the graphics and dungeon design from Dungeon Explorer 2, but other than that, this game is its own thing in many aspects. Real quick, I should mention right away, Crystal Beans from Dungeon Explorer was not released outside of Japan, so you'll need an English patch to play through this one, and I've got a link in the description that you can use. The story takes place in the land of Grand Dahl. It's peaceful and happy and all that before a black cloud appears and creates a seemingly endless number of demon portals that spawn monsters which take over the power of the Crystal Bean. The King of Rubens is tasked by a mysterious voice to call forth the Heroes of Light to win back the Crystal Bean, and they function as the eight different class types you can choose from. And hey, check it out, right away you're asked how many players are playing, and you can choose up to three players with the multi-tap, and that is probably the number one appeal of this game. Multiplayer action RPGs aren't very common, so if that's what you're looking for, then here you go. The only issue here is that this is purely console style multiplayer, so you have to choose multiplayer from the very beginning of the game. A second player just can't press start and join at any time, unfortunately. The eight different classes here are listed as Warrior, Bow, Wizard, Priest, Monk, Kage, Witch, and Fighter, and what's cool is that you can see the stats of each right there in the bottom right corner. And the distinctions are pretty obvious here. If you want slightly more agility to dodge more, pick Bow or Kage, or if you want more efficient magic use, you can pick the Witch or the Wizard. You don't have to be 100% committed to just one character from the beginning. You can switch to someone else after you complete a dungeon. There's also four secret characters you can eventually unlock as you play along. The gameplay itself is just as simple as the story. It's very straightforward and almost like a top-down run-and-gun style game like Pocky and Rocky, only with the structure of Gauntlet. You can fire in eight different directions. B fires a projectile and Y slashes a melee weapon. The best part of the controls here are the L and R buttons, which are automatically assigned to the healing and magic potions you collect. No menus here, just replenish health by pressing L and unleash a clear screen attack by pressing R, provided you've collected enough potions. There's also various power-ups you can pick up to help you out, like a temporary speed boost, temporary invincibility, and a mirror that makes your projectile bounce off of walls. Just be careful when items drop, because if you keep hitting them with your attack, you can actually wipe them out entirely. You can also control how your character levels up. When you defeat a boss, you'll see a crystal that will change colors. You can pick it up when the color matches what stat you want to boost, with the colors corresponding to the stats you see at the character selection screen. Yellow is for agility that makes your character a bit quicker, blue is for attack strength, gray is for stamina or hit points, and green is for intelligence, and the higher your intelligence, the fewer magic skull things you need for clear screen attacks. And that brings me to one of the game's flaws I have to point out. Sure, it's cool that there's eight different characters, in addition to the four that you can find, but there's not enough of a contrast between them. They all control and feel the same way. I get what they were going for, with having the magic-wielding characters having higher intelligence, so they don't need to use as many magic potions, but you find so many of them because you fight a gazillion enemies, so it really doesn't matter how many you use for each magic spell. Plus, the spells in this game aren't the greatest to begin with. The dungeon design is also a little bit lacking. You find yourself going in circles occasionally just trying to get to the next area. I feel like sometimes we take games like Soul Blazer for granted. That game had some well-designed dungeons that were player-friendly, allowing you to unlock paths so you could easily go back and save or get to the next area. The dungeons in this game unfortunately just aren't on that level. They're okay, but some of them can definitely be cumbersome. It certainly helps that this game is such a breeze to play through. You can finish this game without much trouble in an afternoon. Going back to dungeon explorer 2 real quick, for those of you out there that are familiar with that game, I want to point out that yes, many of the dungeon layouts are the same as that game, but they're in a different order here. Also, as you can obviously see, the character sprites are completely redone to have a more cartoonish look, and there's a lot of new bosses here as well, so if you're familiar with dungeon explorer 2, there's enough here to make this game its own thing entirely. So yeah, Crystal Beans from Dungeon Explorer is a pretty simple game. Simple story, simple gameplay, simple mechanics, but in some ways it feels a little too simple. I would have liked to have seen more contrast between the character's strengths, maybe something a little closer to a game like King of Dragons, but let's face it, the main thing this game has going for it is that it's an action RPG that can support up to three players. There's not too many of those out there for the Super Nintendo or Super Famicom. So this might be a little bit of a tedious playthrough for some people, but you might find that it's way more fun with another player or two. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.