It's hard to be a provider of heroic deeds and still turn a profit.  Everyone expects you to just give of yourself and your strength for free, thanks to endless legends of nobility and self-sacrifice.  Doug McGrave, on the other hand, is in this to bank as much gold as possible, and if you can't pay then he's got better things to do.  Maybe he should have taken a page from a lawyer's playbook and done a little pro-bono work for the town of the colorfully-named Hellside, though, because telling them (lightly paraphrasing here) "get bent" didn't work out so well.  Now Doug is cursed to lose everything he loves until Hellside is rescued, and seeing as all he loves is being strong, rich, and geared up with the best weaponry available, that presents a bit of a problem.  Not the least of which, of course, is how on earth does The Weaponographist complete the task he's been forced into when his tools keep breaking?

As it turns out, this is done in two ways.  First, by making use of anything you find as a weapon.  Swords, spears, and hammers are nice, and you can never go wrong with a machine gun, but a weaponized tuba can be amazingly effective as well.  Every monster and enemy in the game comes armed with a weapon unique to its type, and the odds of dropping it when defeated are pretty high.  Tree spirits drop slingshots, weird young boys drop razor-loaded yo-yos, unicorns leave behind rainbow splash-damage rocket launching horns, and much, much more.  Each room in the dungeon gets a randomized selection of enemies, and you'll need to make due with whatever they've got in order to clear the single-screen arena and open the exit.  If that means switching from a yo-yo that extends a decent length, hanging in mid-air as it does a constant stream of damage until you pull it back, to a hammer that does a slow but very powerful shockwave attack, then so be it.  A professional weaponographist can switch tools and tactics on the fly without a moment's hesitation.

Speed is important, because the curse is always nipping at McGrave's heels.  When he's doing good by killing demons his combo bar fills up a bit, but degrades quickly if he stops.  Each enemy earns experience in the normal style of things, but when the combo bar is empty the experience bar is the next thing to deplete.  Keep killing and get powerful, slow down and get weaker.  Taking out the boss at the end of each of the dungeon's floor is a lot easier at level 10 after combo-ing the whole level than it is at level 5 if you took it slow along the way.  Of course, it doesn't help that even during boss fights the curse is in effect, so you'll still need to pay as much attention to switching weapons and taking out the minions as pinging away at the boss's health.

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The second method of staying powerful involves collecting monster goop.  McGrave isn't getting any money out of this, thanks to his callous greed, but the curse the town's witch put on him is maybe a bit too counter-productive for him to be effective.  Fortunately, the townsfolk are willing to take goop instead of cash to weaken specific aspects of McGrave's curse, such as the speed at which the combo meter drops or his skill with individual weapons and magic items.  There are five shops in town, each dealing in a specific curse-negating skill, and it's going to take a whole lot of monster goop to give McGrave a fighting chance.  Each of the twenty different weapons and eight magic items levels up individually, magic runes can be purchased so that the treasure chests scampering through the dungeons are stocked with new temporary power-ups, and weakening specific curse elements is incredibly pricey.  It also doesn't help that returning to one of the checkpoints found throughout the dungeon levels drains a significant percentage of your goop, so it's better to spend it all on cheaper stuff than save for the super-pricey upgrade if an inconvenient death lands you back in town.

While some aspects of the dungeon are random, one certain thing is that Doug McGrave is going to get killed, and fairly often at first.  The curse is viciously strong and McGrave is almost completely ineffective because of it, and each of the dungeon's five floors imposes a level cap on how far he can upgrade his abilities.  Each room of the dungeon is fought twin-stick style, with enemies popping in at random and taking several hits to dispatch, and seeing as each attack weakens whatever weapon you've got in use, it doesn't take long to need a new one.  It's easy to have a favorite weapon and nice when that one is plentiful, but when all you can scavenge is a bo staff (which I found pretty useless until it was fully leveled up) you'll just have to make due.  By the time you get to the fifth and final level, though, things get much easier thanks both to experience in dealing with all the strangeness the game has to throw at you as well as being relatively simple to max out the last few skills and weapon levels.

The journey to the final encounter is a decently entertaining trek, but The Weaponographist is short a few things that would have made it truly memorable.  The weird monsters and mix of both normal and totally bizarre weapons are fun to see, fight, and use, and everything is animated using high-resolution sprites, but almost everything except bosses are one-trick ponies.  The lion tamer (a tamer who's an anthropomorphic lion, of course) wields a whip, and only ever a whip, and it only attacks in a single way.  When the defeated tamer drops the whip and you get to use it, there's no alternate attack or combo system to take advantage of.  Hammer the attack and it will do the same lightining-fast series of constant strikes, every time.  Swords have a three-hit combo, spears do a nice stabbing thrust, the magic tuba sends out a blast directly across the screen, and the wyvern head shoots flame.  Figure out the way to exploit that single ability while making sure you don't take a hit and you'll be fine.  It doesn't help that the arenas are all basically the same full-screen area, with only the occasional pit or rock to change up your area of mobility.

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Closing Comments:

While not exactly a top-tier shooter/RPG hybrid, The Weaponographist is still enjoyable.  The humor running throughout its dungeons made it fun to see what the next monster would be, and while it would have been nice to see more than the twenty regular enemy types and eight magical ones, that's because of the inventiveness in their abilities.  Chimney sweepers wielding bellows that blow out a soot-clout attack?  More of this, please!  Each enemy and its weapon requires a slightly different tactic to handle, but in the end it boils down to "look at the direction they're facing and be elsewhere" to avoid taking the hit.  Even the story starts out strong, but in the end needs more writing and plot than the intro and end scene to provide a rough framework to hang the action from.  The Weaponographist is wonderfully insane and had the potential for greatness, but the pieces that it's lacking mean it's simply a fun, straightforward speed-running twin-stick action/RPG-lite.  Honestly, though?  That's not a bad thing to be.