Game 80: Drakkhen (1989)

      

Drakkhen

France

Infogrames Europe (developer and European publisher); Data East USA (U.S. publisher)

Released 1989 for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS; 1990 for FM Towns; 1991 for PC-98, Sharp X68000, and SNES

Date Started: 12 December 2012

      

Oh, my, is this an odd game. I can already tell I'm going to have a love/hate relationship with it. Reader Nathan Pym gave me some advance notice that it was going to seem like a big leap forward, and it sure does. Let's start with the good: it has an interface of a style I've never seen before. For most of the game, you're in third-person view, but from the side, as if your PCs are characters in a sitcom, and you're sitting in the studio audience looking through the fourth wall.

But when outdoors, you can hit the ENTER key, the characters obediently walk off the screen, and the game turns into a continuously-scrolling, 3-D exploration of a huge world. Whenever an enemy shows up, or you just feel like it, the characters reappear and you can control them individually in combat and other interactions.

You'll have to take my word that it's continuously scrolling until I get some video up.

I'm trying to remember if we've had a continuously-scrolling, first-person game so far, and the only one I can come up with is Alternate Reality: The City (how did they do that back in 1985?). I think games with fixed-squares will continue to dominate for a few more years, so this one is fairly groundbreaking in that regard.

The VGA images are also lovely. Coming off a series of games like Bloodwych, The Dark Heart of Uukrul, and Don't Go Alone, with their featureless corridors, it's refreshing to play a game in which castles feel like real places, with little decorations and details.

The characters study a tapestry in a castle hall.

The back story, told in ornamented prose (but generally quite good), from several different perspectives, explains that the world has entered its death throes thanks to a callous knight who, seeking glory, slew the last great dragon. The dragon used its last energy to fly away from the battle and plunge its dying body into a volcano, and the clueless knight was executed by the Emperor for his misdeed. Since then, magic--the fundamental basis of the world--has failed. Wizards can't cast spells; some have been driven to suicide, others have been stoned by furious members of the populace who have grown dependent on their magic. Palaces built on magic have crumbled to dust, and barbarian invaders are harrying the borders of the empire.

During this crisis, a ship called the Shadrack was cast adrift in the open sea when its Wind Wizard lost his power. Carried on a current, it ran aground on a mysterious continent that did not appear on any charts. An expeditionary force sent inland found that the populace was made of humanoid Drakkhen (dragon kind) who live under a rigid caste system. They have cities, castles, towns, farms, taverns, temples, and all the other trappings of civilization. The wizards among the crew discovered that, on the island, some of their magic worked again. Most importantly, a priest with the expedition visited a Drakkhen temple and was told by the priest that the death of the last dragon heralded the coming of a new age in which Drakkhen kind would sweep humanity from the world.

A Drakkhen warrior, from the game manual.

The shipwrecked sailors got their vessel back in order, fled the island continent, returned to the empire, and reported to the Emperor. (The priest had stayed behind.) The Emperor convened a council and came up with a desperate plan to have four heroes, led by the Arch Priest of the One, Vhal Hart Hann Jurgen von Wessenmayer (very silly party), return to the Drakkhen continent, find the priest, solve the mystery, and stop the end of the world.

The party begins having apparently already reached the continent. None of the default characters are Vhal Hart etc., so I don't know exactly what was going on with that bit in the manual.

To win, I must conquer this island.

Naturally, I created my own party, and for whatever reason, I went with an all female band: Cressida the Amazon, Rosalind the Scout, Miranda the Priestess, and Titania the Sorceress. This is the third game I've played recently (following The Dark Heart of Uukrul and Don't Go Alone) in which you have a four-character party, and the four characters must include one of each of four classes (i.e., you cannot adventure with four fighters). During character creation, you get a pool of five randomly-rolled statistics that you have to assign to strength, dexterity, intelligence, constitution, and education (i.e., wisdom). The game also rolls a "luck" variable that you can't change. If you don't like the roll, you can roll again--but only up to three times, at which point, your stuck with whatever came up on the third roll unless you want to start the entire party creation process all over again.

Dragging the statistics where I want them.

Everyone starts in their smallclothes, and you have to immediately head to their inventories to equip their starting weapons and armor (I beat on my first few foes with fists before I realized this). The game helpfully notes that "the objects held by the character are in red, while the objects he's carrying in his pack are in green," which means for the entire time I play this game, I'm going to guess whether I have something equipped or not (fortunately, the portrait shows weapons and armor). I guess red and blue would have been too difficult to program.

Equipping the party.

Movement isn't the only thing to occur in real time. If you just stand around, outside or inside, monsters inevitably show up. Combat is bizarre, and I can tell I'm not going to like it. It will be slightly familiar to anyone who has played Ultima VII. When faced with a foe, you click the combat icon and everyone springs into action, attacking with whatever swords or spells you've readied in the lower left. It looks like a frantic melee on the screen, but there are really no tactics to it. Experience is rewarded to the character that makes the kill, which means my amazon has almost everything; fortunately, you can have individual characters attack enemies without the rest of the party. Slain enemies "chunk," with body parts flying off the screen in all directions, which is a little nonsensical and a bit disgusting.

Pieces of my foe go flying all over the screen.

Magic seems fairly basic: you have a pool of mana and a selection of spells based on character class. I've got strength, healing, and lightning bolt spells to start. The spells are rendered in runic on the screen, which means you essentially have to have the manual open at all times so you can translate the runes to the actual spells, or you have to develop some kind of mnemonic device to remember them. As if this wasn't copy protection enough, the game occasionally pops up with a question about a word found in some code table, of which of course I have a text copy.

A page from the spellbook

Anyway, something seems amiss with the magic because I can't get the healing spells to work. They seem to cast okay, but the recipient's health doesn't go back up.

The controls are mostly mouse-driven and not very good. You select a character, click with the mouse to move her to your preferred location, and then click one of the "action" icons (wave hello, question, impress, pick up, attack, use, look, and exit) to tell her what to do. I find that it's tough to click on the right place sometimes, and all-too-easy to accidentally click on a different character. Sometimes the characters keep bustling around the screen even when you've told them to stop. I wish the game had allowed the use of the arrow keys to move the character instead. According to the manual, the keypad should perform the actions in the lower-right control panel, but it doesn't work with my keyboard; the only keyboard controls that work are F1-F4 to select the characters. If the selected character leaves the room, the party splits up--unless the active character is designed the "leader," in which case all the other characters follow.

In addition to graphics, the game has some decent sound, although I found the music repetitive, overdone, and annoying, and I turned it off. Satisfying thumps and slashes accompany combat, and there are other sound effects for taking various actions; it's early in the game and I don't have a full sense of them yet.

The save difficulty is to my liking. You only have one save slot, and you can only save outdoors. Since I have no idea whether resurrection is even possible in this game (or how to do it if it is), I've been reloading after every single-character death, which happens quite frequently. Aside from combat, it appears that even touching water is deadly. If you're navigating in first-person view and you're not careful, suddenly one or more of your characters will sink and die.

Could you ladies at least try to swim?

Full-party death produces a screen that makes you feel just horrible about yourself, describing how the armies of Drakkhen spread unchecked and the human race is wiped out.

Okay, I got it already! I'm reloading, okay?!

As the game started, my characters were standing on a road outside a keep. I'm not really sure where on the continent we are.

The four ladies stroll into the adventure. I feel like something by Helen Reddy ought to be playing here.

At first, I tried wandering in random directions, but I kept encountering battles that left everyone dead. I suspect I'm meant to explore the keep first.

Okay! I'll just be heading back the way I came, then.

 Getting into the keep required a little trial and error. The moat is patrolled by a shark which leaps out of the water and swallows anyone who tries to cross the drawbridge. Eventually, I figured out how to cross by waiting until he'd passed under the bridge and dashing across before he had time to circle back around.

The shark snatches one of my characters.

Upon entry, the game informed me that I had "just broken into the palace of Prince Hordtkhen, the Prince of Earth." (To be fair, the gate was open.) Each of the four doorways out of the entry room was protected by a continuous bolt of energy, and I had to turn it off by pulling some kind of lever (you can barely see them) between the doorways. Pulling the wrong one produced a pair of hunchbacked-looking things (the game tells you no information about your foes, and neither does the manual), which were my first kills.

I moved through the other rooms, looting things like torches and bucklers from the walls (only my amazon had started with one), swords from weapon racks, and coins from a pile of hay. You basically have to walk up to everything and hit the "take" button in case something is there. I assume a sword is better than a dagger and a "rod," but there's nothing in the game that tells me one way or the other.

In one of the rooms, I had a vision from some human-looking guy with a cane who told me that if I visit Princess Hordtkha, "tell her that her brother has become too dangerous for the League of the Ninth Tear." This is a reference to part of the game story, in which the dragon priest had said something cryptic about the dragon god shedding nine tears instead of eight, and how the last was for the non-dragon races. I really didn't know what it was talking about, but I assume the game will reveal this as I explore.

This guy shows up a lot on the road, too, and always says something cryptic.

Upstairs, there was an armored Drakkhen and a couple of spellbooks on table, which the game tells me "can't be translated." Moving through some rooms, I finally encountered the Drakkhen prince in his bedchamber. He thought about killing me but instead gave me a quest to deliver a message to his sister in her palace to the east.

Note that the three characters I'm not directly controlling just went and walked right on up to him. They do that.

 
There were some other areas to explore in the castle, but I kept dying, so I figured I'd save them for when I returned (hopefully with more levels and gear).

As I left the castle, it was getting dark. I boldly strode forward on the road...

...and realized I don't have the faintest idea where "east" is. There's no compass, no auto map, nothing. Trying random directions, I kept dying at the hands of extremely fearsome creatures.

In not many games can your level 1 characters encounter an enormous dragon within three minutes of the starting area.

At one point, the old bearded man showed up in my path and told me that the prince's castle was "north of the western crossroads." That gave me something to go on: I need to find a crossroads near the prince's castle. If I know the castle is north of it, I can figure out which way is east.

Unfortunately, shortly afterwards I managed to save the game right before some giant flying caterpillar thing swooped down on me. I can't even hit him, let alone defeat him, and he's there again every time I reload. The game doesn't seem to offer an "escape" option for combat. I'm faced with the prospect of recreating my entire party.

Is it just me, or does this look a little like those things in The Avengers?

 
Aside from the difficulty, I don't know how much patience I'm going to have for this game's interface. The characters blunder into each other constantly, and it's difficult to move them out of the way so you can properly search a room. They block each other's paths through doorways, and otherwise stymy every attempt at efficient navigation. They wander up to monsters and attack even when I try to keep them away or tell them to use spells.

For those of you who have played Drakkhen, I would appreciate hints about any of the following:

• Why don't my healing spells work? I'm doing what the manual says: selecting them, then right-clicking on the intended recipient.
• What's the deal with hit point and spell point regeneration? It seems to happen very erratically.
• Is there any way to tell which direction you're going that I've overlooked?
• Any way to escape combat that I'm just not seeing?

 
The game seems so promising that it would be a shame to not finish because of these frustrations. Perhaps a little practice will iron things out.