Lady Sword is an unlicensed PC Engine dungeon crawler released by Hacker International under their Games Express brand (fan-translation here). The company was somewhat famous for trying to combine gameplay and pornographic pictures and drew the ire of Nintendo when releasing their unlicensed games for the NES, but NEC was more tolerant of them (although it has to be said that by modern standards the game is extremely tame, just some naked ladies).
The game is a one-character turn-based first-person dungeon crawler with very few stats, no itemization (neither weapons nor armor), no spells and automatic stat increases. The game has really nice looking enemy sprites, but you’ll see the same boring wall graphics throughout the whole ten-level dungeon. You play as a knight entering the Tower of Faunus to free some girls (each floor has one and you see each of them naked once you beat the boss on each level), find a magic sword, the Lady Sword, and kill monsters along the way.
Combat is simplified to such an extent that its just a coin throw every time, you can either hit, replenish some HP (if you manage to not get hit) or try a rare multi-hit (with enemies getting a chance to hit you two times in a round). Enemies come in three types, you have glass cannons that can often kill you in on or two strikes, somewhat more durable one-hit killers and the monsters that were clearly designed so that you could replenish HPs during the fights, since they only hurt a little bit each round. Usually, if you find yourself meeting one of the deadlier enemies, it means reloading as death comes easy. Save scumming is accounted for and expected since few games of that era bothered to implement save everywhere.
If the game has one redeeming quality, it’s the dungeon design. If someone would rip out the terrible one-character system and the combat system and replace it with a Wizardry-style one, it would be a massive improvement. As it is, the most compelling aspect of the game is the tricky dungeon layouts with their variety of traps and tricks, and also finding new monster sprites on each floor.
Each level is a bit more difficult than the previous, until you reach level 6 and 7 which are somewhat of a breather, and then you get to the 8th level that has probably the hardest maze in the game. 81 squares only connected by secret walls, secret one-way-walls, lots of harm fields, one spinner and an increased random monster attack rate with most of them killing you in one or two hits. Once you clear that it’s smooth sailing almost to the end (level 9 pictured below).
Whoever designed this put a lot of thought and work into it. And it’s not just the pacing, of how each new floor of the tower introduces new elements and then uses them more extensively on the next floor or later in combination with other elements. Its also how the overall levels are designed. While the levels are highly linear with almost no branching parts – you finish each level by going through sub-sections of each level in sequence – the way how these sub-sections combine and are layered around each other is different each time and just fun to explore.
Again, moment to moment the game is pretty terrible to play and really tests your patience. But if you’re in it for the mapping challenge, then boy is it fun at the same time. That’s the one aspect that kept me going till the end.
The Entropy Pump 