Spirit of Excalibur: Final Rating

This picture is dramatic, but I don't really know what's supposed to be going on.

Spirit of Excalibur

United States

Synergistic Software (developer); Virgin Mastertronic (publisher)

Released 1990 for Amiga, Macintosh, Atari ST, and DOS; 1991 for Apple IIgs and Commodore CDTV

Date Started: 29 January 2014
Date Ended: 1 February 2014

Total Hours: 14
Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 33
Ranking at Time of Posting: 83/137 (61%)

Ranking at Game #456: 312/456 (68%)

Most games, even mediocre ones, have at least a few strong game mechanics--some element that keeps you playing and that may even prove legitimately addictive. I just finished Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, and while I felt the game was far too long and horribly-plotted, I couldn't get enough of the mechanics of climbing buildings, jumping across rooftops, and collecting flags. Knights of Legend was a mediocre game with an epic, tension-filled combat system. In Hillsfar, I disliked almost everything except picking locks. It was fun to mine in Starflight long after I lost the need for money.

Spirit of Excalibur, on the other hand, underwhelms me in just about all of its areas. It manages to combine three genres--adventure, RPG, and strategy--without being good at any of them. The battles are too scripted, with not enough tactics or logistics, to be a good strategy game; there aren't enough puzzles to be a good adventure game; and there isn't enough character development to be a good RPG. The game really has only one narrative line, and the player has to figure out how to best adhere to it, rather than make his own role-playing choices and crafting his own path to the end.

Let's see how it does on a GIMLET:

1. Game World. This is perhaps the game's best element. It's not only one of the few RPGs to draw its story from Arthurian literature, but it creatively uses traditional themes to craft an original game world. I admire that the developers didn't do the obvious thing and set the game during Arthur's time, with Arthur himself as an NPC.

I had some fun in the posts noting the game's deviations from Arthurian tradition, and I still can't reconcile myself to its treatment of the Grail, but for the most part the deviations were within the spirit of the Arthurian legends. Even though the world develops and changes on a railroad track, it's fun to watch the slow and steady reunification of Britain. Score: 6.

2. Character Creation and Development. In this vital category for a traditional RPG, this game mostly falls flat. You don't get to create or define any of the characters; the most you can do is choose which heroes you'll field from a list. The only "development" is through the slow accumulation of combat points, nobility points, and faith points, and I don't even think these things really matter much in the game; most of the really tough battles are fought with objects and spells, not raw combat prowess. Score: 2.

3. NPC Interaction. The various lords, villagers, hags, maidens, and other figures that you find in the towns and keeps provide both bits of lore and clues as to the various quests. There's not much depth to the interactions, no dialogue options except the choice to accept or deny some quests. There is some intrigue in how you charm or bribe them. The dialogue is well-written, and a few of the villains are well-characterized, making it satisfying to defeat them. Score: 5.

The party gets some intel about Merlin's location from a townsman.

4. Encounters and Foes. The enemies in this game are mostly other knights plus various demonic hellspawn. Too many of the latter are defeated only through specific magic items rather than prowess in combat. There are a few light role-playing choices centered around the decision whether to rescue a maiden or continue your primary quest, or whether to accept a knight's challenge or risk a loss of nobility. None of them amount to much (usually, the choice is quite obvious), but they do have some effect on whether you end the game in charge of all Britain or just a part of it. Almost all encounters are scripted, with the exception of the randomly-roaming bandits and demons in the third and fifth scenarios, and you can't really do much with them anyway. Despite an adventure game feel to many of the screens, there aren't really any "puzzles" in the game. Score: 4.

This isn't much of a role-playing choice unless your idea of "role-playing" is simply "not being a complete jerk."

5. Magic and Combat. There's a fair amount of both, but they all feel more like semi-scripted events in an adventure game rather than the tactical battles of an RPG. Most of the combats, whether involving individuals or armies, are won or lost before they begin. In the case of individual battles, this means choosing strong knights (almost always Lancelot) with magic equipment; in the case of army battles, this means having the right forces in place when the battle commences. In either case, there are almost no tactics that can help you once the battle has begun. Despite options available on both screens ("attack," "defend," "flank," "engage"), the outcomes of the battles rarely vary no matter what you choose.

Lancelot takes care of a beast with a quest item.

In the case of magic, it's even worse. There are almost no spells that you can cast at will to influence the tide of battle; all of them are instead used to overcome specific obstacles or to effect permanent boosts to one knight's statistics. The "healing spell" and the "charm spell" (which make it more likely that NPCs will impart valuable information or give you stuff) are two exceptions. This is the second game in recent memory--the other was Elvira--in which spells are limited by the availability of reagents, and you have to be very careful not to expend them in the wrong place. Score: 3.

6. Equipment. Very little in a traditional RPG sense. Scattered about the kingdom are a couple of special swords, a handful of pieces of magical armor, spell reagents, and a few potions. These generally feel like quest items rather than a flexible inventory used to improve the character. There are no shops or random loot available from combats. The game's mechanism by which once you equip an item, it permanently grafts to the character and can't be traded, is a little inexcusable. Score: 2.

Nineve's late-game inventory of spell items.

7. Economy. You mostly need money to bribe herbsellers for reagents and a few townsfolk for information. There's more than enough money for this at the outset of the game (carried on individual knights or kept in the treasury at Camelot), so it becomes a simple matter of making sure that the right character has enough money at the right time. You can loot a few gold pieces from a small number of slain enemies, but for the most part, the economy is a minor part of the game. Score: 1.

8. Quests. The game has a main quest line, divided into five scenarios, and its full nature only becomes clear after you've played a few times. Like the back story and game world, the quests are reasonably interesting, though I found Morgan le Fay a little cartoonish as the villain. There are some limited side-quests having to do with whether you've rescued all the kidnapped maidens and princes and such, and disenchanted all the stoned rulers, with the results affecting how much territory you control at the end of each scenario and at the end of the game overall. Score: 5.

I did well. The walkthrough helped.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. I thought the graphics for both scenes and monsters were relatively well-composed. The DOS version had no sound except annoyingly repetitive music. I felt the interface was rather poor. Although it offers the option for a mouse/keyboard hybrid, I found it too easy to hit the wrong option or click on the wrong thing. The process of transferring items from one character to another was needlessly cumbersome, as was the process of combining and splitting parties. In the end, it gets points only for the graphics. Score: 2.

A pretty shot of Lancelot and Nineve coming upon Merlin's cave.

  
10. Gameplay. I hold a special contempt for games that seem nonlinear but actually expect you to follow a precise path. What starts as "Wow! I can go anywhere in Britain!" Soon becomes "Wow! If I don't hit these towns in this precise order, there's no way to defeat the Saxon armies!" For this reason, although I acknowledge that I might be missing some potential avenues, I can't really see the game as "replayable," either. Its difficulty is pitched about right--a little easy, even--once you know the path, and I suppose its one virtue is that it doesn't take that long. If it had gone on for two or three more scenarios, I probably would have abandoned it. Score: 3.

With its highest scores in the "game world," "NPC interaction," and "quests" categories, we have a game that's relatively strong in narrative but weak in mechanics. The final score of 33 puts it slightly below my "recommended" threshold. Despite what sounds like a lot of pessimism, I'm glad I played it--but mostly for the plot alone. I enjoyed reviving my long-dormant interest in Arthuriana.

Computer Gaming World reviewed the game in the May 1991 issue. Todd Threadgill praised the graphics, which were state-of-the-art at the time, but this paragraph encapsulates a lot of my frustration with the game:

Unfortunately, the second observation that new players will make is that the documentation seems appropriate in terms of recreating an era when most of the population was illiterate . . . There is a thorough description of how to do things (via the game's icon-driven interface), as well as interesting historical background and account of the myths of King Arthur. Once one has mastered the simplest mechanics of the game, all this material proves of little use in enlightening the player as to what to do.

Threadgill also criticized aspects of the interface and the need to do so much wandering around to figure out the objectives of each scenario.

I'm glad I had a chance to play Robert Clardy's early games before arriving at Spirit of Excalibur. Although the game is far-removed graphically from Wilderness Campaign, Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure, and Apventure to Atlantis, it bears several elements of Clardy's modus operandi, including frequent shifts from the campaign level to the individual level, a variety of game mechanics, and a reluctance to adhere to the conventions of a single genre. While I admire this eclectic nature, you eventually have to incorporate the more sophisticated aspects of at least one genre to have a solid gaming experience. When I wrote my reviews of the Campaign series, I was forgiving--even admiring--of the limited combat mechanics, the extremely light puzzle solving, and the half-implemented RPG elements. It was early in the history of computer games, and there weren't many templates. But by 1990, there were plenty of examples of excellent role-playing, adventure, and strategy games, and Excalibur doesn't draw from any of them. If a game merged Sword of Aragon's gameplay mechanics with Spirit of Excalibur's graphics and story, it would be a fantastic game.

I'd like to see some evolution in this game's sequel, Vengeance of Excalibur (1991), but I've looked at the screenshots online, and it appears to use the exact same engine. It also appears to take place on the Iberian Peninsula, so at least I can look forward to seeing how the game manages to weave Spain and Portugal into the Arthurian legends.
 

It's worth noting, as a final nod to both legend and history, where the game leaves Britain in its happy ending. Constantine may have unified the island under the peace of the Round Table, but it won't last. It's maybe 550 at the game's end; by 600, the Saxons will have returned and effectively conquered and divided the island. One wonders, in the grand scheme of things, what Arthur, even in legend, managed to accomplish.

During my period of Arthurian studies, I read some histories that doubted Arthur ever existed at all, and others that were happy to completely invent the circumstances of his existence. The best that the latter sources were ever able to say was that he held off the Saxon advance for a time and preserved Roman traditions in Britain long enough that when the Saxons returned, they couldn't completely obliterate them. In the most optimistic sources, there's always some suggestion that the Saxons of Arthur's age were savages who would have ravaged the island had they won, but by the time they returned at the end of the Arthurian period, they were no longer the same barbarians, and the "conquest" was more gradual and peaceful. The same Saxons who are the villains of Geoffrey of Monmouth are, after all, the heroes of Ivanhoe.

The other popular thought is that even if Arthur's Britain didn't last, the example he set did, through story and song. As Arthur himself says in Tennyson's account:

I was the first of all the kings who drew
The knighthood-errant of this realm and all
The realms together under me, their head,
In that fair order of my Table Round
A glorious company, the flower of men,
To serve as a model for the mighty world

It is this impulse that informs so much modern Arthurian literature, including T. H. White's inclusion of an episode in which Arthur sends a young page named Thomas--anachronistically presented as Thomas Malory himself--away from the final battle to spread the tale of Camelot. This was adapted into the Broadway play as the final song:

Ask every person if he's heard the story
And tell it strong and clear if he has not
That once there was a fleeting wisp of glory
Called Camelot

But where the "saved us from the Saxons" story doesn't hold up to history, the "stuff of future memory" hypothesis doesn't hold up to the original legends. In the modern era, the "Knights of the Round Table" might be synonymous with slaying beasts, rescuing maidens, righting wrongs, and meting justice, but this is all a fanciful distillation of the Arthurian legends. In most of them, these noble deeds are the purview of the hero of the story--Lancelot, Erec, Perceval, Yder--and his actions are contrasted with the majority of the Round Table knights, who happily maraud, rape, murder, and engage in petty familial feuds. Arthur doesn't establish the Round Table as a place where "all men are equal, even the king" (as the dreadful First Knight has it); he inherits the thing from his father, or father-in-law, and membership is earned by winning tournaments, not being pure of heart. In more than one story, Arthur himself begets a son by raping a maiden, and when he hears about Mordred's birth, he tries to defeat prophecy by killing every baby of Mordred's age. The early legends simply do not emphasize the great mercy and justice of Arthur's Britain in the way that we think of it through modern lenses, nor do they always establish Arthur as a ruler to be emulated.

When you study the Arthurian legends, you eventually learn that the memory of Arthur persists not because of his historical significance or the nobility of his cause, but for one simple reason: the stories are fantastic. The Arthurian saga rose in an era in which the standard work of fiction had all the narrative sophistication of a kindergarten play. Then suddenly, within a century, we have a saga of epic struggles for kingdoms, love triangles, a sword in a stone, incest, filial betrayal, and a Holy Grail. The weight of the legend was such that nothing could resist its pull. Tristan and Isolde, originally a completely separate legend, got wrapped up in the intrigues of the Round Table. So did Geraint and Enid. Arthur's story grew to subsume the great Celtic heroes and gods--Culhwch, Peredur, Bran the Blessed, Gwynn, Llyr of the Sea--as well as true historical figures. Urien and his son Owain, kings of Rheged near the turn of the seventh century, got sucked back a century to appear as Arthur's knights. Ambrosius Aurelianus became Arthur's uncle, the Byzantine Emperor Leo I became his vassal, and of course a minor sixth-century king of Dumnonia, Constantine, became his successor.

To say that once unleashed, the story "spread like wildfire" is, if anything, understating the case. The Arthurian saga reached, and received contributions back, from every corner of Europe. Geoffrey of Monmouth's history from around 1138 (and it's near-immediate French translation in Wace's Roman de Brut) was clearly chief among the sparks that lit this fire, but it was not the only one. The Welsh already had their lives of saints, triads, and (probably) the Mabinogion; a non-fantastical chronicle of Arthur's deeds appears in Brittany in 1019; and 700 miles away, in the ancient Italian city of Modena, a relief on the Porta della Pescheria, probably pre-dating Geoffrey's text, depicts the rescue of Guinevere from Caradoc by Arthur, Yder, Gawain, and Kay--a story that Geoffrey doesn't even recount. By 1230, less than a century after Geoffrey's text first met a scribe, we have hundreds of poems and prose romances from France, Germany, Italy, Iceland, Norway, Holland, and other regions. The number of texts that we have from this era is rendered all the more startling when you consider how much literature must have been lost.

The legends bled into authentic history. King Richard the Lionheart claimed to have Excalibur, and he presented it to his ally, Tancred of Sicily, as a gift in 1191. The same year, the monks at Glastonbury Abbey claimed to find Arthur and Guinevere's graves. In 1486, with the first printing of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur creating another spike of interest in the legends, King Henry VII bestowed the name of Arthur on his first son. If the prince hadn't died of an unknown illness when he was only 15, he would have reigned as Arthur II, and the world would have been spared a horrible Herman's Hermits song.

There is, in short, no other story like it--at least not in the western world. Robin Hood and Amadis of Gaul have not half the age; the Greek and Roman gods not half the texts. In a thousand years, no generation has been without its own crop of Arthurian texts, with the headliners of each age making their own contributions--names like Chaucer, Heywood, Spenser, Fielding, Scott, Wordsworth, Wagner, Tennyson, Twain, Steinbeck, and yes, even Tolkien. Movies were only a few years old when they took on an Arthurian subject (1904's Parsifal), and since then, neither television nor film have been able to leave the legends alone for long. It's only fitting that video games should contribute to the legend as well. The final word that I'll say about Spirit of Excalibur is that during my Arthurian studies in college, a period in which I read hundreds of Arthurian texts--some dealing with heroes, lands, and themes with only the most obscure and tangential relationships to Arthur--I never encountered a single one that cared to explore in detail what happened in Britain after the fall of Arthur's court. In most sources, Constantine's reign, the wars against Mordred's sons, and Lancelot's death are handled in a cursory, "wrap-up" manner. To that end, whatever I think of its gameplay, Spirit of Excalibur becomes part of a long and noble history of giving every Arthurian character his own geste. I'm happy I was able to write about it.

****

Further Reading: Check out the other games made with Synergistic's "World Builder" engine: War in Middle Earth (1988),  Vengeance of Excalibur (1991), and Conan: The Cimmerian (1991).