Introduction

So, what's all this then?

This is Unterwegs in Düsterburg, an RPG Maker game by Ingmar Hahnemann. Being an RPG Maker game, there's not too many surprises here as far as gameplay goes - a standard tile-based SNES-era RPG with old-school Final Fantasy style combat - but nonetheless the game does a few interesting things with the engine, although that will come much later. I would describe it as "cliché, but in a good way".

"Unterwegs in Düsterburg"?

Oh, right. As you may have noticed, the title is German and translates out to "Out and About in Düsterburg" (Düsterburg being a location). And it's not just the title of the game, but the entire game is in German. Around the first half of the 2000s, there was a fairly large RPG Maker scene in Germany that produced its share of garbage (as with every scene revolving around something where it's easy to create content), but a good amount of gems as well. The German RPG Maker movement was spearheaded by the two Vampires Dawn games, which in my opinion could give the SNES Final Fantasy games a serious run for their money, and Unterwegs in Düsterburg was one of the second-tier games - the ones that aren't quite as popular as the big ones, but are good in their own right.

So why pick this game in particular?

I had a great deal of fun exploring this game back when this type of game was the hot new thing and they actually came on CDs with PC game magazines, and I believe it's a shame it's only been available to German speakers.

So, it's in German? How's that going to work?

Well, I'm both a German and English native speaker, so understanding the whole thing and transferring it between languages shouldn't be a major problem. Still, here's a few notes on what I'm going to do:

- My translation will be purely written in text in these posts. Editing my images would be an option, but I believe adding more steps to the translation process will only increase the chance of severe LP burnout.
- Because of that, whenever I post an image with text, the next thing I post will be the translation of that line, and then I'll simply proceed with the rest of the text until a change worth screenshotting happens. This should be obvious, but I'll say it just in case.
- Because of the way RPG Maker works, pretty much every line has a face attached to it. That means it shouldn't be a problem to distinguish my commentary from the dialogue.
- For the German speakers: I'm going for substance over style. What this means is that I won't break my neck trying to find a translation that preserves all the facets of the original text, because sometimes that's more trouble than it's worth, and at the end of the day, I'm not a professional. Not even close.
-

Whenever something I say has this guy in front of it, that means it's something related to the translation in particular. Explanations about idioms, puns and certain tics would be prefaced with this. Also, if there's some sort of IRL parallel to certain names/places, I'll point that out with this guy too.
- Additional note: As the LP went on, I started dropping some of the response options we have, mostly when it simply came out to yes or no, and instead just put in the answer we ended up choosing. Just thought you should know.

And how will the LP be set up?

The idea is that I'll be going with screenshots and nothing but screenshots. I originally planned to do videos as well, but after some feedback, I came to the conclusion that GIFs would be able to do the job just as well, so you'll be getting some of those too.

But enough waffling, let's get on to the game!

The Let's Play Archive

Unterwegs in Düsterburg

by TheMcD

Introduction

Table of Contents