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Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground for the PSP is headed to the USA this month, and is slated to ship on June 19th. I was worried that this game would stay in Japan, and I’m happy to report that it is coming stateside. A Gamespot preview and lengthly gameplay video show we’ve got some good dungeon crawling and building fun to look forward to.

The premise is now a little more detailed than last time I heard about the game. You’re invited to build a dungeon outside a town because the merchants in town feel it’ll be good for business. You visit your dungeon site once a day, and while inside you can adventure through it, slaying any monsters that liked your rooms enough to move in, and then build out the dungeon. Different monster types like different room sizes, styles, and layouts, and the townsfolk will give you advice on what you need to do to attract what kinds of monster as you play. You take any loot back to town to spend on new room designs and features to use the next day, then you go to your house to eat, drink, and heal up health and magic points, and repeat the process, visiting the shopkeepers the next day to pick up room types to build things out further. Over time you afford bigger and better rooms, then bigger and better magic and equipment, with a goal of attracting a boss creature of some kind.

Update: PSPFanboy has a slew of screen shots available.

My initial worries about the title centered around the tools for dungeon creation, and the preview talks about dungeon creation — and modification — being easy. The video shows it to be very easy. You build it out of blocks of room types, and once you set foot in the room you can open up a menu that lets you change the room type and wall textures.

The early previews talked about trading dungeons, and no mention of that feature is made in the preview. I doubt we’ll see infrastructure support for this feature, so I’m hoping that the dungeons are saved on the memory stick in a recognizable and discrete enough format that’s portable between systems. That way I could take a dungeon, copy it off the PSP, zip it up, and fling it by email to someone else to adventure through. If this feature has been cut, I think it might be a big loss for the title.

I’m excited to see how well it does in reviews when it ships on June 19th.

Links:
Action RPG and dungeon building video
Screen shots at PSPFanboy.
Preview at Gamespot, PSPFanboy

See also:
Dungeon Maker Takes Me Back