Quest for Glory II: Trial by Everything Else

The poet "Omar" recounts my victories against the elementals.

Quest for Glory II proceeds at such a leisurely pace, it's a bit like being on that vacation that the Katta promised me when they brought me to Shapeir in the first place. I defeated the Fire Elemental on Day 5 and hit the road for Raseir on Day 17, and in between, there were only a handful of scripted events, and a whole lot of me running around doing random things while I waited for them.

Occasionally, messages like this would alert me to things I needed to accomplish.

This structure has both positive and negative aspects. On the positive side, there's so much padding around the plot events that you'd have to screw up pretty badly to miss key elements and not achieve a perfect score. You can also spend a lot of time building your character and improving various skills (though this is of dubious importance for this game). On the negative side, it gets a bit boring at times, and you feel like you burn a lot of game time just running around making sure that you haven't missed anything.

Every day, I would get up and visit each of the key locations and NPCs, and make sure nothing new appeared and no one had anything new to say. If an elemental was attacking the town or some other plot event came up, I usually dealt with it quickly. Either way, I typically had the bulk of those 12 days to spend however I wanted. This might include:

• Going to the Adventurer's Guild and practicing with Uhura.

Woman, please. I was "too good for you" by Day 3.

• Heading out into the desert and fighting random creatures, taking care not to kill them all outright, but using the combats to practice spells, dodging, and parrying before finally dispatching them.

• Finding a nice quiet place to cast spells over and over to improve my spell skills and overall magic score.

• Re-talking with most NPCs, using the occasion to make sure I hadn't missed any major dialogue options, and also saying THANK YOU a lot (plus giving gold to the beggar) to improve my Honor rating.

It turns out that Rakeesh used to be the king of Tarna, but he gave the throne to his brother when he was lamed in battle against a demon.

The game does offer some options for speeding up these "in between" times. First, you can always go back to the inn and sleep the day away, but this is only a good option for players who have already won the game or who are using a walkthrough, lest you sleep through an elemental attack or some important message. Second, you can increase the "Game Time Scale" so that morning, afternoon, and evening come much faster. Finally, you can increase "Animation Speed" so you move through the game much faster (irrespective of the clock). They're all welcome options, but for me they didn't fully remove the sense that the game was dithering a bit.

I'll cover what I accomplished during these 12 days in several sections.

Grinding

I continue to like the development system in the Quest for Glory series, by which skills, attributes, and spell powers increase through use and exercise. Several games do this, but Quest for Glory manages to make it so damned satisfying, especially where you can call up your character sheet and see the improved skills annotated in a different color.

The results of a lot of grinding.

Last post, I indicated that I thought the combat system had improved since the first game, with three attack, parry, and dodge options (each) depending on the type of enemy and direction of attack. An anonymous commenter disagreed, saying that "the fastest and most effective way is just to smash [the] attack button as fast as you can." Corey Cole, the guy who actually wrote the program, disagreed, noting that dodging and parrying does not deplete stamina and increases the chance that your next attack will hit. He suggested that mashing "attack" is not, in fact, the best way.

They're both right. In the early game, when your weapon skill and attributes aren't particularly high, defending is a good strategy, primarily because it makes the occasional attack far more powerful. Once you have more than 125 strength and weapon skill, however, I've found that simply mashing the attack button is a near flawless key to victory, keeping the enemy on the ropes and slaying them before they can seriously counter. Most of the defending I've done since the Fire Elemental has been to practice those skills, not because I needed them.

I quickly dispatch a scorpion with the 7, 8, and 9 keys on the keyboard.

  

The mage, it turns out, is also a pretty lousy combatant if he relies on magic. Even at high levels, "Flame Dart" and "Force Bolt" under-perform dagger attacks, and I never found that "Dazzle" or "Calm" were doing anything useful. "Zap" had a non-zero but also somewhat limited effect on the power of dagger attacks.
  

Then again, I suppose you could argue that if I was really role-playing a mage, I'd stay out of combat. It's barely necessary in this game at all--useful only for gold (which you hardly need) and getting past the occasional (very rare) enemy who appears while you're going between desert locations. In the first game, even mages needed to sell troll's beard and cheetaur claws to the healer to achieve a perfect score; in this one, selling ghoul claws and scorpions' tails yields nothing but (mostly unneeded) cash.

Very quickly, I got to the point where my dagger-wielding mage could defeat large packs of jackalmen without breaking a sweat. Screw you, Blogger spellcheck. "Jackalmen" is a word.

Opportunities for grinding vary among skills. You can improve most spells (and overall magic) just by casting them anywhere, whether you have a legitimate purpose or not. "Open" and "Fetch" increase even when cast on blank walls and "Calm" and "Dazzle" go up even when you're the only one on the screen. On the other hand, to cast "Levitate" at all, you have to be at a place where it makes sense to levitate, such as next to the griffon's cliff or an open window in the city.

In grinding, I neglected "Throwing" mostly because I forgot about it, and I never found any place to grind "Climbing." Again, they're not mage skills, so I don't feel crippled for this deficiency.

Messing Around

I thought you could only reach Raseir (Shapeir's sister city) through plot developments, but an anonymous commenter insisted that you could ride your saurus there, and commenter Joe Pranevich supplied the directions. Even so, it took so long that I was prepared to accuse Joe of trolling me. But with plenty of waterskins and the "Animation Speed" cranked up to maximum, I eventually blew through the 200+ screens necessary to reach the other city, fighting lots of combats along the way.

Wow. It actually exists!

When I finally got there, the guards refused to let me in because I didn't have a visa, and they didn't take kindly to my attempt to bribe.

Fortunately, my faithful saurus remained with me and instantly returned to Shapeir with GO HOME. Handy, that.

A few other discoveries:

• Centimes (worth only 1/100 of a gold dinar) were so overloading me that I had to spend some time getting rid of them. The game lets you DROP or GIVE them to the beggar only one at a time, so clearly that wasn't going to do when I had like 1200 of them. Finally, I found that if I BARGAINed with the food merchants, they'd sell me 5 rations for 90 centimes. I did this like 10 times, then dropped all the excess rations.

Note how overloaded I am. All those centimes make up 12 of those excess pounds.

• In general, the economy is broken in this game. The first Quest for Glory ended before you could get so rich that healing and mana potions were no longer a good investment. In this game, I never had to save up for anything, and I ended with over 500 dinars even though I stopped bothering to collect them from slain enemies by the halfway mark. Health, mana, and vigor pills are nice, but you don't need that many of them. The one thing that I thought I was "saving" for--the pin "fit for a Sultan"--turned out to be a red herring. The game ultimately wouldn't let me buy it but instead awarded it to me as a gift.

What am I supposed to do with these dinars now? TAKE MY MONEY!

• I never found a use for the poison cure pills. Scorpions did damage to me and sometimes killed me with special attacks, but they never poisoned me.

• Every morning and every evening, you can sit down in the inn and get a home-cooked meal from Shema. Not only does this save on rations, the meals sound absolutely delicious. I don't think I've ever seen food so well-described in a game.

I think I might head to the local Lebanese place tonight.

• You cannot re-visit WIT after passing the initiation.

Dammit, I want to ASK ABOUT AD AVIS.

The Actual Plot

Here's what happened in the game's main quest. To recap previous events, Dark Magic is threatening Shapeir. The Emir of its sister city, Raseir, vanished after he was deposed in a coup, and the new authoritarian government has expelled the Katta and instituted martial law. In Shapeir, elementals have started to appear and attack the city. I defeated the first one, the Fire Elemental, on Day 5, as recounted in the last entry.

On Day 7, Omar the poet appeared in the Plaza of the Fountain and recited a moving verse about paladins:

I'm not sure the first half really goes with the typical paladin's "lawful" alignment.

When he left, he accidentally left his leather coin purse behind. I picked it up and returned it to him when he performed in the Katta's Tail Inn on Day 11. Given that I had about 600 dinars at that point, there was absolutely zero temptation to steal it.

The Air Elemental appeared on Day 8, and when it did, it occurred to me that unlike every other elemental, I didn't know what to do to weaken or capture it.

Do you remember when we were really humming?

Swallowing my disgust, I visited Keapon Laffin again and through a bunch of idiotic verse and puns, discerned that I needed something related to dirt or mud to weaken it. He sold me a pot of "Fooler's Earth" that would do the trick. At the same time, he indicated that the Dervish in the desert was in need of a hero--more on that below.

That left the need for something to capture it in. I figured my waterskin would do for the Water Elemental and an empty pot for the Earth Elemental (though I was wrong about that), but I had no idea on the Air Elemental. I wandered around the city for a while, talking to people, before I finally saw the solution above the door of the blacksmith's shop:

I had to wait until nightfall, but a "Fetch" spell soon had it in my hands.

I went back to the Palace Plaza, where the Air Elemental was hanging around, and set about defeating it. It took a lot of tries. Throwing the pot of dirt at the creature just sent the pot spinning harmlessly away.

This is what I get for not grinding my "Throwing" skill.

I tried using "Levitate" to hover over it and drop the dirt in, but it never moved under me while I was levitating (and while levitating, you can only move up and down). Finally, I just walked into the middle of the damned twister, took the damage, and dropped the dirt. This weakened it enough that I could USE BELLOWS and suck it up, though I'm not sure that's how bellows work.

This on Day 9:

Any reason I'm not at this meeting, given that I'm the one doing all the work?

Day 12 brought the Earth Elemental. He was perhaps the easiest of the elementals to defeat. NPCs had alerted me that he was vulnerable to fire, which of course I had in the form of "Flame Dart." A conversation with Rakeesh revealed what must be the fighter's option: Rakeesh has a magic flaming sword which normally only works for paladins, but which he could "will" to work for an average fighter. As I was a mage, though, he wasn't interested in helping me.

Thanks for nothing, then.

As a mage, of course, I had far more resources than the pitiful fighter, and I was able to reduce the Earth Elemental to a heap of dirt with a few castings of "Flame Dart." 

When I went to GATHER him, the game put him in a cloth bag I'd forgotten I even had. I had expected it to go into an empty pot.

After I defeated the Earth Elemental, I figured I had a key element to solve the "woman-tree" quest I'd stumbled upon several days prior. Asking Aziza the Enchantress about the mysterious woman-shaped tree in the desert produced a heartbreaking story about a beautiful healer who had to suffer the unwanted attentions of numerous men while pursuing her professional trade. Eventually, she was kidnapped by a man who lured her into the desert with a ruse about a dying man, and she was raped by a group of brigands.

Okay, technically Aziza "wouldn't say" what happened to her, but my guess is they didn't force her to play the shoe in Monopoly.

The woman escaped the brigands but was pursued and nearly captured. In desperation, she called out for help, and a djinn heard her cry and turned her into a tree. I guess that worked, though if I were a djinn, I might have, I don't know, buried the bandits in sand or teleported the woman to Columbia Medical School in 2014 or something.

Aziza outlined what I needed to do to free her spirit: give her a gift of kindness, a gift of magic, and a gift of love. The gift of kindness would be "what you would give to someone who has been in the desert for far too long" followed by telling her about myself to remind her of what it means to be human. The gift of magic would be something I'd gained through hardship, and "something from which a plant can gain strengh," followed by telling her how I acquired it.

Every visit to Aziza prior to capturing the Earth Elemental led to her saying that I didn't yet have a suitable gift of magic, but after I had the beast safely sewn up in my cloth bag, she said I was ready, and told me to say the woman's name, "Julanar," as the final step of the ritual.

Wow. Whatever language this is, it makes efficient use of its root syllables.

With the necessary resources in hand, I returned to the desert and visited the poor tree. A combination of GIVE WATER, TELL ABOUT SELF, GIVE EARTH, and TELL ABOUT EARTH ELEMENTAL brought me most of the way there. At each stage, the tree gained color, turned to face me, and finally blossomed.

Wait a minute. Hold on. I was never remotely afraid of the Earth Elemental.

The "gift of love" was the hardest part. I tried giving her flowers, but that didn't work. Neither did KISS. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out HUG.

When I did that and said her name, she rustled and dropped the "Fruit of Compassion." She didn't change back into a woman; Aziza had warned me that this wouldn't happen until another person "frees her with the power of True Love." (Why couldn't this be me? I love wood!) This calls up a faint memory, and I suspect we'll be hearing about Julanar again. In all, it was a touching story and a great side-quest, although it could have been a little more challenging with less explicit hints from Aziza.

Back on Day 8, Keapon Laffin had told me that the Dervish was in need of a hero. I visited him then, only to find that he wanted me to "dispel" a "caged beast" and that the alchemist, Harik, would know how to do it. Well, I had already talked to Harik about the "Dispel Potion," only to find that in addition to the griffon feathers (which I had), I also needed the "Fruit of Compassion." Since I didn't get that until I freed the spirit of the tree, I couldn't act on the Dervish's quest until Day 12. With the feather and the fruit, though, I had the alchemist whip up a couple of "Dispel" potions.

It turned out I only needed one. I'm not sure why the game bothered with three.

Harik warned me that I needed to mix a bit of the beast's hair to the potion before administering it (what if it's a bald beast?). Following the Dervish's directions, I found, caged in the middle of the desert, a beast that looked more like a griffon than the game's actual griffon. Distracting it with GIVE FOOD and GIVE WATER, I managed to pluck a bit of its hair and add it to the potion, although not without some misadventures first:

Casting "Open" on the cage door was apparently a bad idea.

Upon drinking the "Dispel" potion, the former beast turned into a man and revealed himself as "Al Scurva," the former apprentice of the wizard Ad Avis. I think this is the first place in which the wizard is named, although he's one of the unnamed portraits in the WIT. (Aside: doesn't his name mean "to a bird"?) Al Scurva warned me not to go near Ad Avis "unless you have some spell of protection or are very quick."

Note the left-hand side of the screen. This is a hint.

Al Scurva indicated that Ad Avis was planning some big ritual that would probably destroy everything, and as a consequence, he blinked out of Shapeir as soon as he finished his monologue.

I spent a while wandering around Shapeir, typing ASK ABOUT AD AVIS to everyone who would listen, but no one had anything particularly valuable to say.

You're what we call "slow on the uptake," aren't you, Aziza?

  
On Day 14, the last of the elementals--Water--finally appeared in the Plaza of the Fountain. I knew that his weakness was air, but I didn't think I had any item that exemplified air except . . . wait . . . the Air Elemental encased in the bellows! Defeating the Water Elemental was a simple matter of USE BELLOWS to release the Air Elemental and force the Water Elemental out of the fountain, then DROP WATERSKIN to suck it up. I'm not sure why this didn't result in me having to capture the Air Elemental again, but I'm not complaining.

Elementals. So predictable.

It was fun wandering around the city after capturing each elemental. The various NPCs all reacted suitably, praising my heroism and thanking me for my service to Shapeir.

Is that sarcasm? That sounds like sarcasm.

I thought your people specialized in flying carpets.

Well, if I don't continue to solve all your problems on my own, that will be about three days.

I was also financially rewarded for my slaying of the various elementals. The first time, Rakeesh gave me 50 dinars (given to him by the Sultan) for slaying the Fire Elemental; the other times, Omar the Poet gave the rewards to me. I guess he and the Sultan must be friends or something.

Thanks, "Omar."

On Day 16, Aziza summoned me to her house again to talk about disturbing signs from Raseir. As we talked, my faithful saurus came barging through the door with a "Gronk." Instead of freaking out and throwing us out, Aziza divined there was something special about the saurus and used her magic to reveal his true nature: Emir Arus al-Din, the deposed and absent former ruler of Raseir.

Aziza said that she'd take care of the Emir while I went to Raseir (presumably on the back of a different saurus) as part of a caravan leaving the next day. The game didn't give me a chance to use one of my other "Dispel" potions on the beast.

That night, we had one more poetry recital from Omar.

And the next morning, I was among a caravan of sauruses on their way--officially, this time--to the city several hundred leagues to the west. This marks a major break in the game; the rest of it takes place in Raseir and its environs. In case it wasn't clear, I've already won, but I think perhaps I'm going to delay the rest of the story, both to give Trickster a chance to catch up in the narrative, but also to explore a few things I didn't get to experience in Shapeir. Wow, this post was long, wasn't it?