Knights of Legen...Wait for It...d.

I'd rather just be friends, okay?

This entry--for which I'll apologize at the outset--is my awkward attempt to piece together what happened in about 8-10 hours of gameplay. It's awkward because:

1. It all took place in early April. I took screenshots and sketchy notes, intending to write it all up later. Little did I know that "later" would be nearly a month later.

2. I was watching episodes of How I Met Your Mother while I was playing. I think I got through about one season per battle. The show passed the time but didn't increase my recall of the game.

When I last blogged, I had just finished a quest in the lamely-named town of Htron. For the next quest, I headed to a fortress on the Tegal River to retrieve a lost gold crown from binderaks--some kind of, I don't know, monkey-like creature.

Try to count these bastards.

Despite that they went down in a few hits, they didn't have any missile weapons, and there was an obvious place to set an ambush, they still kicked my butt the first time through. Rather than deal with the loss of all my gold, I quit, reloaded from the last inn, and returned to the fortress.

The second battle was the stuff that legends are made of. I made extensive use of an ambush point, but the binderaks were capable of moving three times per round and unfortunately caught up to the first character I was using as a scout, knocking her out early on. In the ensuing melee combats, Aedd went unconscious and Coll lost so much blood that he couldn't move more than two or three steps at a time between rest periods, so I left him behind as I moved the remaining three characters (two melee fighters and an archer) into the keep to root out the remaining binderaks.

The ambush point worked well, but the foes were tough.

Long story short, all of them died while there were two binderaks--one wounded, one fresh--still on the field. That left Coll, who had just be chilling out and resting, to rouse himself and try to finish off the last two binderaks. As I limped towards them, I had to keep stopping to rest every few steps, but when I finally encountered the first one, I got lucky and was able to time things so that it walked right into a "berserk" attack, killing it instantly. After I rested for a few rounds, I approached the second. He and Coll traded blows, and Coll was somehow able to kill him just moments before he would have passed out from blood loss. It was exhilarating--just the sort of thing that Knights of Legend fans are always trumpeting. It's the kind of feeling that's only possible in a game where you can hardly ever save, and losing a battle means losing a couple hours' investment in time. I'm not saying that I wish every game was like this, but it sure does make for a unique experience.

Back in Htron, I returned the crown to Biblik the Sage and was rewarded with a "flying cloak." I didn't understand what it did at first, but it turns out that it allows any character wearing it to fly like a Kelder. This is a fantastic addition to a scout character.

There were hints of some other quest in Htron: I was told to ask some pirates about "Nobjor's Treasure," but I didn't know where to find any pirates, so I stuck a pin in that and moved on. I picked a random city on the map and ended up in Olanth.

Map and town exploration is, to me, one of the weakest parts of Knights of Legend. It seems like it would be fun, with all of the different shops and NPCs and such. But the towns are so interchangeable, the dialogue with the NPCs so frustrating, and the various services you need (especially training) so difficult to track down that I wish the game had just put one city in the center of the map. The expedition-and-return quest system of Knights is fairly satisfying, but it would be more satisfying if everything was out of a central hub. There are a lot of towns, keeps, and hamlets--some offering vital training--that aren't even marked on the map.

Map exploration is rendered less fun because of the frequency and length of random combats. In some ways, I value them because they're one of the few ways to collect vital gold and experience, but it's frustrating to have to stop for a half-hour combat when all you're doing is beating around some brush, trying to figure out a path from one keep to another.

An epic battle with a dozen rogues in the middle of nowhere.

I didn't take very good notes on Olanth. The best I can tell you is that the characters got a quest from a woman named Belinda Goldenhair to retrieve a necklace of spun gold--which had been stolen from an alchemist by some orcs. Every quest in the game involves the retrieval of an object, regardless of whether it really makes sense in the context of the quest.

This is an extremely polite way of asking me to slaughter a bunch of sentient creatures to retrieve an item that isn't even hers.

In this case, it was doubly weird, because when I killed the orcs and retrieved the treasure, it turned out to be a "ruby choker," not a gold necklace. But Belinda took it happily enough and gave me a magic ingot for my troubles. When I took the ingot to a smith, he turned it into a magic weapon.

Again, we see how a promising gameplay element was rendered silly by ham-handed developers. The game gave me no indication of what the final weapon would actually be before asking me to name it. I was in the midst of naming it the "Awesomeator" when the game decided that was enough letters, and I ended up with a weapon called the "Awesomea." I had to actually have someone pick it up before I could tell that it was a halberd, and even then, I lack confidence that Hela's halberd offensive and defensive skills are actually working with the new weapon.

Well into the game, my characters remain very poor. I still can't seem to get enough cash to buy everyone the best horses--not with healing, saving, and training sapping my gold after every expedition.

You've all been giving me various warnings about training in the comments, but I haven't done a good job synthesizing and understanding them. Basically, there are trainers for each type of weapon in the game, each of them capable of training both offense and defense with that weapon up to a certain maximum level. Sounds great on the surface, but:

1) Not all weapons have trainers in the game capable of training to anything more than a basic level. Apparently, such trainers were planned for expansions that never arrived.

2) Some trainers will only work with you if you already have a certain level with the weapon.

Would you two make up your minds?

3) Some trainers refuse to work with you if you're a certain race or class.

These caveats mean that some characters can never really advance anywhere with their chosen weapons. Right now, my big problem is Moro, my Kelder, whose favored weapon has been the greatsword. But I've yet to find a single greatsword trainer, meaning that he has almost 5000 adventure points waiting to spend. I could switch him to another weapon, but I'd need to find someone willing to a) train a Kelder; and b) train from 0 experience points with that weapon. I might switch him to an archer, since I can rarely engage an enemy with more than three melee fighters anyway.

Hela, too, has only found one halberd trainer, and she's not good enough for the trainer to work with her. I'm left hoping that there's a less picky halberd trainer somewhere else in the game.

It's for these reasons that some commenters have encouraged me to cheat--for instance, by using a hex editor to increase weapon skills when no trainers are available. I suppose you could consider this "honest" cheating if you decreased your gold and adventure points in the same hex editing session. But I'm still rejecting that avenue simply because if I do that, I won't be playing this game, as originally created and as experienced by the majority of players. I'm already divorcing myself from the original gameplay experience by using an emulator; if I add hex edits and keystroke macros to that mix, what game am I really "playing"? And for what reason?

A few final notes:

• Every character has a "nutrition" bar, and I confess I don't understand it. You can buy food and drink at taverns and shops, but the bar seems to reset itself every time I stay in an inn anyway. Even in long expeditions away from town, I've never seen it advance more than a third of the way to the "hunger" end of the bar. It appears to be an interesting feature with flawed implementation.

I've yet to find a reason to buy any of this stuff.

• Towns occasionally feature inns that don't cost anything to save. Unfortunately, in staying there, you run the risk of having equipment stolen. Even if it was worth it economically, it's not worth it to have to find an equipment store, purchase new stuff, and re-equip it.

"Welcome to my parlor, said the spider to the fly..."

• I've still done very little with magic. The healing spells I purchased have helped a little bit a few times. I haven't had enough gold to contemplate purchasing offensive spells.

At this point, confused as I am with where my characters are and what they're doing, not having really played for almost a month, I think I essentially need to start over--not in the sense of rolling new characters, but in the sense of exhaustively exploring the towns, re-talking with NPCs, cataloging trainers, and taking all the notes I need. I also might just suck it up and fight random battles until I have enough gold to buy the best horses, so I don't have to fight so many random battles.

I'm hoping that my next Knights of Legend posting is a long explanation of a tactical battle, as I promised the last time. I may dip into the next game before then.