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SOJ Ehrgeiz · Vintage Fighting Games
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Why Does Ehrgeiz Have an RPG Mode?

Because at DreamFactory, a fighting game was only half the product. The other half was a dungeon.

The RPG mode in Ehrgeiz is not an eccentricity. It is an inheritance. Brand New Quest: The Forsaken Dungeon, the PlayStation version's dungeon crawling RPG, is the third generation of Quest Mode, the extra DreamFactory had been building into its fighters since Tobal No. 1 in 1996.

The reason the tradition exists is documented from the first game. Tobal was designed for the PlayStation rather than the arcade, and director Seiichi Ishii argued that a home fighter would be played mostly alone, so it needed greater depth than versus play provides. Quest Mode was his answer, and Ehrgeiz, his next home conversion, was always going to carry a bigger one.

THE TWO COVERS

Same game, two shelves
Ehrgeiz North American PlayStation box art
North America
Cloud Strife stands at the center of the North American cover, Buster Sword on his shoulder, above Godhand, Yoko and Lee Shuwen. The Final Fantasy VII guest is the face of the box.
Ehrgeiz Japanese PlayStation box art
Japan
Japan's cover shows no fighters at all: the Ehrgeiz sword and a gun arm in red over black, with the God Bless the Ring title. Squaresoft, 1998.

THE INHERITANCE

Quest Mode, third generation
INVENTED FOR TOBAL, 1996
Quest Mode began with Tobal No. 1, and its reason is on the record. Director Seiichi Ishii held that a fighter designed for a home console would be played mainly by one person, so it needed single player depth that arcade fighters did not. Tobal's Quest Mode, a dungeon crawl using the fighting system, was planned from the start to supply it.
EXPANDED IN TOBAL 2, 1997
Tobal 2 grew the idea further in Japan, but the game was never released in the West. Hardcore Gaming 101 describes Ehrgeiz's Quest Mode accurately as an expansion of the one in Tobal 2, which is why it landed on Western players with no visible ancestry: the middle chapter of the tradition was missing outside Japan.
HOME VERSION ONLY
The arcade Ehrgeiz has no RPG mode. Brand New Quest was built for the PlayStation port, alongside the port's other additions: extra Final Fantasy VII characters and four minigames, Battle Runner, Battle Beach, Battle Panel and Infinity Battle. The pattern is consistent across all three games: the dungeon is the home player's half of the product.
AN RPG HOUSE
It also fit the family. DreamFactory was part of Squaresoft, the defining RPG company of the era, and reviewers noticed: Hardcore Gaming 101 remarks that since DreamFactory is part of Squaresoft, they really know what they are doing in the dungeon.

INSIDE THE FORSAKEN DUNGEON

A Diablo in a fighting game's box
THE TWO ARCHAEOLOGISTS
Quest Mode stars Ehrgeiz's archaeologists, Koji Masuda, three time reigning tournament champion and professor, and Clair Andrews, his student, who entered university at sixteen. You play one at a time while the other waits at the inn, and you switch between them there.
DEATH IS A RESCUE MISSION
If your character dies in the dungeon, control passes to the partner, who can bring them back by finding the corpse and recovering their pack. It is a two character continue system disguised as loyalty, and it makes every deep run a story about both of them.
RANDOM FLOORS, REAL SYSTEMS
The dungeon's maps are randomly generated, floor after floor down from a small town with shops and an inn. There is a hunger meter fed by monster drops, and a nutrition system underneath it: protein, vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates and lipids steer whether your level ups favor attack, magic, dexterity, speed or defense. Recipe books hide in the dungeon, and the second one unlocks wine trading in town, buying and selling bottles as prices rise and fall.
THE CRITICS IN THE DUNGEON
Contemporary reviewers respected the ambition more than the combat. GameSpot found the mode's graphics stunning but its fighting reduced to a single attack button, and called it a game truly loyal to the cliché of hack and slash. Hardcore Gaming 101 adds the era's most resented detail: saving your game costs gil, and the price climbs with your level.

WHY IT MATTERS

The half of Ehrgeiz people kept

Strip the Forsaken Dungeon out and Ehrgeiz is a mid tier arcade fighter with famous guests. With it, the PlayStation disc contains two games in two genres, and the second one is a full dungeon RPG with its own heroes, economy and death mechanics. That is the DreamFactory formula working exactly as Ishii designed it in 1996: the versus mode is the spectacle, and the quest is what a single player at home actually lives in.

It is also why Ehrgeiz is still discussed when dozens of cleaner fighting games from 1998 are not. The RPG mode was never a bonus. It was the point, inherited from Tobal, expanded from Tobal 2, and delivered to the West for the first time inside this box.

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