When it comes to role-playing games for the Game Boy, it's not just nostalgia-fans who immediately consider Pokemon, which came over from Japan on a wave of success after a three-year wait for the translation. But let's turn the clock back to the time when – long before Pokemon – a role-playing game called Cave Noire was released in Japan. The reactions were not exuberant and a far cry from the boom that Pokemon triggered. Due to a lack of translation, Cave Noire also never gained international attention.
The development was inspired by so-called roguelike role-playing games. Even back then, however, these were no longer particularly popular due to their unadorned ASCII graphics and control via complicated keyboard commands. Other typical features such as statistics-based battles and step-by-step character development are of course still familiar today. The essential element of these roguelikes are dungeons that are randomised for each game. This component is particularly characteristic of the gameplay of Cave Noire.
In contrast to the coherent game world of Pokemon, the player goes through a dungeon consisting of several levels with a special quest per attempt. The monsters and treasures are randomly distributed at the start. The aim is to achieve the medal, which is awarded at a certain level of difficulty. The search for the quest items in the random labyrinths leads past many and usually stronger opponents. Your own skills are predetermined by the difficulty level of the quest and – unlike in today's popular role-playing games – can only be improved minimally. Instead, a perfect evasion strategy is key. By knowing the enemy's movement patterns well and using items such as invisibility, healing potions and fire spells in a targeted manner, you can make careful progress in the dungeon. Although the generated design is usually fair, luck plays an increasingly important role as the level of difficulty increases. This is why the automatic save-feature after completing a level comes in very handy.
Cave Noire is therefore – reduced to its core – an entertaining pleasure that, due to the element of chance, requires good risk calculation rather than the typical role-playing game combat skills. Pokemon could probably benefit from such predecessors and find a different recipe for success. However, in view of the resulting immense jungle of similar Japanese role-playing games, Cave Noire has aged much better due to its unique game mechanics.
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