Legend of Faerghail: Final Rating

Legend of Faerghail

Germany

Electronic Design Hannover (developer); Rainbow Arts and reLINE (publishers)

Released 1990 for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS

Date Started: 8 November 2013
Date Ended: 5 December 2013

Total Hours: 19 (unfinished)
Difficulty: Easy (2/5)
Final Rating: 32
Ranking at Time of Posting:  71/128 (55%)
Ranking at Game #456: 303/456 (66%)

It's time to accept that I won't be going back to Legend of Faerghail. I think I gave it a good chance: I tried both the DOS and Amiga versions and found them buggy in their own ways. I spent some time trying to solve the bugs in the Amiga version, then switched back to the DOS version to see if I could win it there, and finally just admitted that I didn't care enough about the game to keep trying.

The game is an interesting misfire. It starts with an interface and quest reminiscent of The Bard's Tale but adds some innovative features. The quest is original and intriguing, and the combat system blends some neat characteristics of games like Wizardry and Phantasie, along with some fun animations. It has excellent graphics and sound.

Unfortunately, almost everything it innovated, it screwed up. It introduced some new classes and made them irrelevant. It introduced a system by which the characters could learn to speak to every creature in the game, and then made it unnecessary to speak to any of them. It introduced food as a logistical challenge (and an associated morale system) and then loaded the characters up with so much that I eventually had to drop meals on the floor. It introduced NPCs who would join the party for specific reasons and then never say anything again. It set up an interesting combat system but made it so long that you almost always want to use "quick combat," and it made combat completely optional since every one (except the final, I assume) is escapable. It offered nice graphics for monster portraits and screenshots but screwed up the navigation graphics by not showing items in your periphery and by making every enemy sprite a ghost. It offered pocket-picking (and an associated jail system!) but didn't provide enough gold to make it worthwhile. It had a system by which weapons and armor become damaged but then made it a trivial process to fix them. In almost every way, it undermined its own positive contributions.

When I last blogged, I had uncovered some intriguing information about the history of Faerghail having to do with an ancient alliance between a demon and a dragon. They were defeated by a group of champions who banished the demon to another dimension and imprisoned the dragon in a cave. There was some suggestion that either or both had returned and had found a way to corrupt the minds of the good races--and was thus responsible for the elves turning hostile.

Let's fill in the gaps with a visit to Saintus's blog. He seems to have the most comprehensive discussion of the game on the Internet. Fueled by childhood nostalgia and a pile of maps that he created more than 20 years ago (speeding his re-play), he completed it over two months in the fall of 2012, though he had his own corruption problems.

Saintus played in a different order than me, but he discovered mostly the same things. From his blog, I learned that the gunpowder I'd been carrying could have been used to blast open walls or locked doors and find hidden places. But it's a one-time-use item, meaning I'd have to keep going back to the mines to get more if I wanted to use more. He smartly dumped his thief after a few hours (which I didn't), noting that the thief hardly ever successfully disarms traps, and anything else the thief can do is unnecessary. He mentions certain encounters in the elven pyramid that I didn't experience, but I managed to get through it anyway.

The castle turned out to offer a horror theme, complete with echoing steps, flashing thunder and lightning, and undead inhabitants.  The castle is ruled by a vampire lord, whom you have to trap with the mithril ball to escape. The one necessary item from the castle seems to be an emerald, which coupled with a ring from the dwarven mines and a staff from the Temple of the Dragon Servants merges into a key that opens the final area.
 

The final enemy, courtesy of Saintus's post.

I'll let you read Saintus's harrowing account of the final area if you want. Suffice to say that it has a lot of tough monsters and a crazy-difficult area where you have to navigate through trial and error and every wrong step kills you, much like the "mine" level in Wizardry IV. This would have had me tearing my laptop apart with my teeth. The mines emerge into a wilderness area that takes you to a volcano. A guardian poses a riddle whose answer is the non-word "iceflower" which also would have had me destroying walls and furniture. The sarcophagus from the monastery becomes necessary to sail across a river of lava. The level culminates in a battle against a dragon, upon whose death you throw the demon mask from the elven pyramid into his pools of blood to win the game. The closing screenshots talk about peace and accolades for the party but don't help you understand any better what the hell was going on in the game.

The closing shot, again from Saintus's post.

 

In a GIMLET, I give it:

1. Game World. The game sets up a reasonably unique world and scenario but doesn't follow through with enough detail. The core mystery--why have the elves suddenly turned hostile?--is compelling, but the game leaves you to piece together the answer with overly-cryptic hints, and I honestly can't say whether that's deliberate or just poor game design. There is some reasonably good lore in the form of books, and some very good prose during exploration of dungeons, but the two valleys seem small, constrained, and thematically inconsistent, and the game rarely distinguishes itself from other fantasy worlds. Score: 4.

2. Character Creation and Development. It deserves some credit for introducing classes not seen, or rarely seen, in other RPGs of the era (blacksmiths, healers, monks, illusionists, barbarians), then loses that credit for making the distinctions relatively meaningless. Character leveling is slow but satisfying with the increase in hit points, attributes, skills, and spells. I wish the game had done more with the language system. Score: 4.

3. NPC interaction. There are a few NPCs who will join the party, although they aren't necessary and their abilities are variable enough that it might be better just to use the slot for another player-created character. The disappointing thing is that they come along in specific places for specific reasons (e.g., the monk who wants revenge on the dwarves who sacked his monastery) but then never say or do anything when the quest is completed. I like that a few NPC monsters will join you if you ask. Other NPCs are one-conversation-only encounters in specific squares. Score: 3.

4. Encounters and Foes. Until you fight, every foe is technically just an NPC, and you have the option to trade, recruit, and negotiate a withdrawal. The problem is these options hardly ever work. When trade does work, you find the other party has nothing you want and won't buy your items--the one thing that would have made it worthwhile. You find yourself slaughtering friendly parties because it's faster than anything else.

The excellent monster portraits help distinguish the game's foes, but only a few of them have special attacks that require some kind of special tactic. For the most part, they just wallop you. Though you can clear dungeon levels, the enemies respawn when you return.

Beyond the regular encounters, there were a nice variety of special encounters in the maps, such as informants who offer intelligence for a price, a sword-in-a-stone, and copious riddles--though some of them are nonsensical in English, and some are nonsensical in any language. Score: 4.

I've got a $25 Amazon gift card for anyone who can tell me what he was looking for.

5. Magic and Combat. There are some good combat options with the different ranks and such, and the animations that accompany each attack are fun--a few times. Then combat becomes a rote matter of hitting (Q)uick combat over and over. It's also a bit odd that the party can simply (W)ithdraw from combat at any time with no penalty. The magic system offers too few spells too slowly to make much of a difference in the party, and spell points deplete too quickly. Score: 3.

The combat is rote, but at least it's quick.

6. Equipment. Underwhelming. Each character class can equip a different variety of weapons and armor, but upgrades don't come very quickly after your initial purchases, and there's no way to assess relative value except by the sale price. There are a handful of potions and scrolls and such, but I had trouble figuring out how to use some of the magic items. The weapon and armor condition score was a potentially-interesting twist rendered trivial with a smith in the party. Score: 3.

7. Economy. Utterly broken in a feast-or-famine sort of way. Most treasure chests in the dungeons offer only a handful of gold pieces, but a few offer thousands. Since they reset when you enter and leave, you can get all the gold you can carry very quickly, and it's never a problem again. Meanwhile, there's nothing in the equipment store worth buying, though you do need gold for training and skill development. Score: 2.

8. Quests. The main quest reveals itself in stages and isn't bad. There are no explicit "side quests" but there are a couple of "side-dungeons" that help build experience and equipment. Score: 4.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. (I'm rating the Amiga version here, as the DOS version has reduced graphics and absolutely no sound.) The character and monster portraits and cut-scene graphics are very well-composed, and the game did a good job with different lighting levels depending on time of day or the strength of the characters' light spells. I particularly liked the sound, which features some of the first ambient sound I've experienced in an RPG, including soft howling of wind and chirping of crickets at night, water dripping in the dungeons, and bird calls outside during the day.

The outdoor and corridor graphics have more detail than many games of the age, but the lack of the ability to see objects and passages in your periphery really screws up navigation. I liked that the interface offered a choice between easy-to-remember keyboard commands and the mouse, but not that simple acts like transferring gold required too much effort. Score: 6.

10. Gameplay. The game is quite difficult during the first level, where every combat round can leave you with dead characters and insufficient money to resurrect them. It gets a lot easier later, when you can withdraw from any battle that seems to be going poorly and take a 24-hour nap right in front of your enemy, and loading up on all the cash you want is a matter of returning to a treasure room multiple times. I'd like to credit it with nonlinearity--all of the dungeons are open at the beginning--but you have to assail them in a specific order to fully complete them and get all the necessary items. Since the game gives you only a few hints as to this order, and since the dungeons reset when you leave and return, you could spend a lot of time bumbling around for nothing.

Also on the negative side is the size of the dungeons. They might have hundreds of squares per level and only one or two interesting things to encounter. You spend a lot of time wandering and mapping for no reason. Finally, I invested 19 hours in the game. If it hadn't bugged out on me, it probably would have taken another 15 to win. This simply wasn't a good enough game to deserve 34 hours of attention. Score: 2.

I do have to subtract 2 points for the bugs. After some online research, I'm convinced that these were present in the original versions and didn't just pop up during emulation. It deserves a third lost point for poor translation in parts of the game that, among other things, make two riddles essentially unsolvable without spoilers. That gives a final score of 32.

Contemporary reviews of the game were all over the place. The most positive is probably found in Amiga magazine from December 1990, which said that, "this is by far the best attempt at a roleplaying game to date." Not only better than the entire Ultima series or Gold Box series, mind you, but by far better. I think we can dismiss the rest of this review out of hand.

Zzap! had a more measured review in December 1990, praising its excellent graphics and sound (they particularly noted the ambient sound) and noting its innovations without discussing their downsides. The weakest score given by the magazine was in the "puzzle factor" category (78%), and I wonder if this has to do with the language issues. Few of the reviews mention this, and I have no idea how the reviewers got through the PLOUGH riddle before the Internet.

The reviews start to get worse in Australian Commodore and Amiga Review, which echoes the others in its admiration for the graphics and sound but bemoans the large dungeons and copious combats. Peter Olafson's review in the February 1991 Computer Gaming World comes closest to my "pan" of the game. Despite an initially-positive first impression, he found it "rough-edged in places and ill-thought-out or incomplete in others." As I did, he notes several features that had promise, like the languages, but ultimately "doesn't appear to have been fully implemented." He also comments, though not at length, on the "sloppy" translation from German to English.

Olafson also comments on something that I had to reload the game to verify. I utterly missed it the first time, partly because I must have assumed it was a random syllable and partly because I rarely fought without "quick combat." When you engage in regular combat (not quick) and watch each animation, when a character misses an enemy, he very clearly says "sh*t." I think this might be the first time there was a spoken obscenity in an RPG.

The worst review I've seen is a quick summary by Scorpia in the October 1991 issue, as she "surveys" all of the RPGs currently on the market: "German import that never should have crossed the Atlantic. Poorly translated manual has several mistakes. Graphics are ugly to tolerable. Combat is absurd: characters in the rear rank can be hit by opponents nowhere near them. There is nothing new or of interest in the game; a mediocre effort at best." Wow. I get what she means about most of these items, but the graphics are "ugly to tolerable"? Perhaps she looked at the DOS version.

Legend of Faerghail is one of only two games that MobyGames lists for Electronic Design Hannover; the other is Mit Jeans und Hellebarde ("With Jeans and Halberd"), a text adventure from 1989 involving a modern man in medieval times. But many of the personnel also seem to have worked for reLINE software (one of Faerghail's publishers), which produced a few other games, including the RPG Fate: Gates of Dawn (1991), which I hope is as good as it sounds.

For now, I need to wrap up with Lords of Chaos and start making better progress through 1990.

****

Over a year after posting the final rating, I offered an additional entry on Legend of Faerghail based on some excellent comments received from one of the principal developers.