Throne of Darkness

So, I’ve decided to start another game while I decide whether or not spending more time on my joystick problems is worth it. Picking one at random, I find Throne of Darkness, a Samurai-themed Diablo imitation from 2001.

Man. I haven’t thought about this game in ages.

I think I bought it mainly because it was cheap and the screenshots on the box looked appealing. I played it briefly when I first got it, but it turned out to be more complicated than I was in the mood for just then.

Installation Annoyance #1: It has two disks, and you have to swap them three times before you can start playing.

Installation Annoyance #2: Throws a silly error, even when patched. Finding a site that would let me download the patch without the hassle of “becoming a member” was frustrating enough (and I’ll save anyone else who reads this the frustration by offering my copy here), but discovering afterward that it didn’t help? Bleah. I eventually found help on a third-party forum. It turns out that the solution is to overwrite the game’s copy of msvcrt.dll with the one from WINDOWS/System32.

First session: The mechanics are pretty complicated, but I haven’t yet reached the point where I have to understand what I’m doing in order to make progress. Hopefully I’ll be able to learn and apply things as I go along. Like I said, it’s Diablo-like, but you have a team of seven characters with different abilities, of which four can be active at a time. It seems like it might be a valid strategy to play with just one or two characters at a time so they can level faster.

3 Comments so far

  1. Nightweb on 5 Sep 2011

    Thank you I found you page while looking to fix that error you were having, your fix worked perfect and your the only one I found it on,
    thank you again

  2. Niltrace on 24 Nov 2012

    Your solution for the msvcrt.dll error is spot on. Fixed my mom’s installation of the game with very little fuss. I agree with the other commenter; this is the only place I found the fix, too!

    Thanks!

  3. Remy on 25 Feb 2018

    I really hope this game will be re-released someday. Maybe as part of some kind of collection or on Steam. It’s not the most universally appealing game but I think it’s a hidden gem.

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