Quest for Glory II: Final Rating

 

Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire

Sierra On-Line (developer and publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS and Amiga, remade in 2008 for Windows

Date Started: 14 July 2014
Date Ended: 3 August 2014

Total Hours: 26 (four wins)

Difficulty: Easy (2/5)
Final Rating: 50
Ranking at Time of Posting: 134/152 (88%)

Like its predecessor, Quest for Glory II is a fun game, full of wit and humor as it covers a relatively serious and interesting main plot. Also like its predecessor, it isn't a great RPG specifically, but it does deftly blend RPG elements into an adventure-game template. I continue to enjoy its character development system, even if it seemed like (in this game) all that development was mostly unnecessary. That I liked it overall is evidenced by my having played through it four times--something I haven't come close to doing with any other game on my list.

The fourth win was one I did on a lark after the third. I wanted to see how fast I could do it and how low a score I could get. Using a mage character, without engaging in a second of grinding, without speaking to a single NPC except to buy things, without even visiting the Adventurer's Guild, without solving the Julanar-tree quest, without getting the griffin's feather, without even entering the desert or fighting a single monster, I managed to win in about an hour, achieving a score of 323. I think it might be possible to get a lower score with one of the other classes. The mage still has to join WIT to get the "Reversal" spell, but the other classes could eschew their class-specific side quests.

"Congratulations" is hardly the right term.

But my ability to win so quickly and with so little effort speaks a bit to the game's performance as an RPG. The first game also minimized the importance of combat, but at least you still had to kill a cheetaur and a troll for a perfect score. More important, you regularly encountered monsters in the wilderness as you moved from one area to another. Trial by Fire puts all of the combats in a side-desert and makes them completely avoidable. The apothecary buys scorpion and ghoul components but you don't get points for them. Even if you do the desert quests (Julanar, the griffin, the Dervish, and the caged beast), chances are reasonably good that you can hit all of the locations without encountering a wandering monster.

This is a non-sequitur, but trying to harm the tree in the desert breaks your monitor and immediately ends the game. YouTuber MrWhitman has compiled a video of all the creative ways to die in the game.

Thus, without looking at my final rating for Hero's Quest first, I'm going to guess that the sequel will come in slightly under on the GIMLET. I could be wrong, though. I liked the plot and setting better in this game, and while the overall game was still pretty easy, I found its puzzles a little more challenging than its predecessor. Let's see.

1. Game World. I loved the quasi-Arabian setting and the creative way the developers used common themes from the mythology of Arabia, Persia, and North Africa--everything from One Thousand and One Nights to twentieth-century film. Hardly any RPGs use this setting (so far, only Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves comes to mind). The geography and plot hold together reasonably well, though I think key elements of the game's lore (Iblis and Suleiman, specifically) could have been better-integrated into the game and dialogue; miss one paragraph in the manual, and you're a bit lost.

I also like how the game world responds to the actions of the player, with various NPCs acknowledging your deeds and various plot elements tied to player actions, up to the point where the end game dialogue differs depending on the choices the player made. Overall, a very strong part of the game. Score: 7.

It would have been easy to miss the significance of this.

2. Character Creation and Development. The Quest for Glory series continues to be one of the few in which the choice of character class really matters, offering fairly different experiences for mages, thieves, and fighters--far more so than the first game. The "Honor" statistic and the invisible paladin meter add a fun spin to the proceedings, and there are several places in which the player can make an honest role-playing choice, although I wish there had been more of them.

I remain unhappy with the fact that the only choice for the character is the same goofy, yellow-haired guy, but I understand why the creators were limited in this regard.

I continue to admire the character development system, although I was disappointed how little effect it had in this game. The process of building skills and attributes--with a variety of mechanisms for training--is fun and rewarding, but the problem is there's absolutely no need to do it. In my fourth playing, I made it all the way to the end with basically the character's starting attributes. I also missed training features like the climbing tree and the archery target from the first game. Score: 6.

It was always fun to watch my attributes increase, even if they had little effect on gameplay.

3. NPC Interaction. This game does some great stuff with NPCs, and I don't think I highlighted everything that I liked in the postings. Unlike most RPGs, the NPCs here are conceived with the care you might give to characters in a novel or film--everyone has his own back story, attitude, desires, and character traits, and from Aziza's insistence on politeness to Issur's refusal to bargain, the player has to navigate these personality quirks.

Everyone's got an attitude.

The NPCs also keep a schedule, and while it's not quite as complex as Ultima V, it's still reasonably so, with various NPCs appearing in different positions depending on both the time of day and day of week. Of course, like any good RPG, you learn about the game world and your quest from NPC dialogue, and I love that this game used the flexible dialogue system seen in Hero's Quest, offering both ASK ABOUT and TELL ABOUT options. I don't think I hit upon half the possibilities with these two commands, which is a good thing. I lament that Quest for Glory III will jettison these for point-and-click dialogue choices.

Another great thing is all the background NPCs that wander in and out of the frame, including guards and villagers. They give a strong sense of a living world, and while you don't get much interaction with them, they help avoid the empty, depopulated feeling that you get in many RPG cities. I can't remember any other game that has generic "background" NPCs so far in my chronology.

I was disappointed that we still don't get any romances and that so many of the late-game NPC interactions are scripted, with little chance to have flexible dialogue. Overall, I have to save a perfect score for games with more NPCs, especially those where you have more role-playing opportunities in talking with them, but Quest for Glory II is one of the best so far on my list. Score: 7.

4. Encounters and Foes. The puzzle encounters in Trial by Fire are probably better than the first game. There are more of them, first off, and they're a bit harder. They also offer occasional role-playing opportunities, by both class and (unlike the first game) alignment. The timed nature of many of the encounters lends an urgency that the first game didn't have.

I didn't find the foes quite as original or as much fun as the first game, but they did offer some special attacks (the scorpion's sting, the ghoul's strength-drain) and varied approaches to combat that were welcome. Score: 5.

The consequences of not taking a poison cure pill before fighting the scorpion.

5. Magic and Combat. On one hand, I appreciated that there were more combat options and that the engine offered more opportunity to anticipate and defend against attacks. On the other, it stopped being remotely challenging too early in the game. More important, combat is almost entirely optional: with the exception of the fighter, no quests depend on it, and the monsters are all segregated in an essentially optional area.

The magic system expanded here with a few new spells, but the system remains flawed. Even mage characters who grind offensive spells up to impressive levels cannot fully rely on spells. The game offers little opportunity to nail approaching enemies with multiple spells and thrown objects. And the puzzle-based spells are used so rarely (and work at such low levels) that there's hardly any reason to grind them. I found no difference between a score of 25 and a score of 200 on spells like "Calm," "Open," "Levitate," and "Fetch." Overall, an under-emphasized part of the game. Score: 3.

6. Equipment. Also not up to RPG standards--even less so than the first game. For the fighter, there was a chance to get one weapon upgrade. For the other classes, no one could do any better than the weapons and armor they brought from Hero's Quest. With the exception of the health, mana, and vigor pills (replacing potions), all of the inventory items are puzzle items. Score: 2.

My thief's inventory towards the end. Encumbrance issues dogged me until I ground my strength up to Herculean levels.

7. Economy. You know the economy is bad when your big problem, for almost the entirety of the game, is that your funds are weighing you down. As I discovered with my fourth playing, an imported character with a decent amount of Spielburgian gold never has to earn a cent in the sequel. Characters who start in this game might have to gather a few scorpion tails if they want to buy extra pills, but in general, the starting funds and the reward funds for slaying the elementals are more than enough to buy everything you need to buy. A disappointing part of the game. Score: 2.

8. Quests. We're back to a strong category here. The game has a fun, compelling main quest that proceeds in multiple steps and has different choices for the different classes. Although the primary outcome is the same, various elements of the endgame (who speaks for you, how many points you have, whether you become a paladin) differ in satisfying ways. I liked that each class had a primary side-quest and that there were a few side quests that all classes could perform. Score: 7.

The time limits lent a sense of urgency but weren't overly difficult.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. If this ends up ranking different from Hero's Quest, something is wrong with my GIMLET. It's fundamentally the same interface. It makes as good a use of the EGA graphics as possible (slightly better than the first game), and while the sound effects continue to be a little sparse, I love the leitmotifs that accompany various characters and settings--this is one of the few games so far in my chronology that I think does music well, using it for accent and mood rather than just constant background noise. I continue to like the text parser, although there were a few places in which it misbehaved, and in general I don't think the developers spent quite as much time on synonyms as they did in Hero's Quest. BASH DOOR produces no results where SMASH DOOR does, for instance. LOOK IN CABINET fails to reveal an object that SEARCH CABINET reveals.

I also didn't care for the targeting system. In Hero's Quest, casting a spell or throwing an object would always automatically target the obvious (or only) legitimate target on the screen. This, among other things, made it possible to huck a few daggers at an approaching enemy. In this game, the auto-targeting is replaced with a manual target. While I agree that this makes more sense, it didn't work well for me to have to type THROW KNIFE, hit ENTER, and then quickly move my right hand off the keyboard to the mouse so I could get the target in the right place and click. It's a minor part of gameplay, but it bugged me a little. Score: 5.

10. Gameplay. The overall gameplay was far more linear than in the first game, but in a way that still offered lots of padding. Players can do many things in whatever order they choose in between the scripted plot events. The different classes and side-quests make the game extremely replayable (as we saw by my doing it four times!).

On the negative side, I thought the pacing was poor, and the game too linear, during the Raseir portion. And just like its predecessor, Quest for Glory II also remains a bit too easy. Score: 6.

Add 'em up and we get a final score of 50, which turns out to be (as I suspected) just shy of the 53 I gave to Hero's Quest. It's still a reasonably high score--the fourth highest so far in 1990, as it happens. Do remember that I'm rating it as an RPG specifically. I wouldn't be surprised if Trickster over at The Adventurer Gamer ended up scoring it higher than the first game, because I do think it performs better as an adventure game than the first Quest for Glory.

(While I'm linking to other blogs, I just discovered that Andy Panthro recently completed a summary of the game, including his quest to get 200 points in every skill. It's a good summary if you find my nine posts on the game a little too much to digest.)

The back of the box shows a griffin attacking during a cut-scene and the PC fighting Uhura on a regular combat screen. I'm reasonably sure that neither occurs in the actual game.

  
Given modern admiration for the game, I was surprised to find how few contemporary reviews offered any praise for it. Scorpia's curiously breezy review/walkthrough in the February 1991 Computer Gaming World is probably the most positive, particularly regarding the ending, which she calls "one of the better game endings anywhere." I agree. She bemoans (but not seriously) the bad jokes and puns and notes the game is a trifle harder than its predecessor. Overall, though, the review seems more interested in delivering spoilers than telling readers whether they should buy the game, and I'm having trouble discerning her overall opinion.

The review in the July 1991 issue of Advanced Computer Entertainment, written by Chris Jenkins, may be the first review I've read that actively enrages me. It illustrates everything I can't stand about Amiga-philes, so in love with their graphics and sound that they frankly didn't deserve RPGs with complex mechanics, plots, and encounters. The poncy little crumpet-stuffer said he "lost interest" during the "obligatory boring maze" and quit. This can only refer to the streets of Shapeir, which aren't that hard in the first place and stop being difficult at all once you get the map, meaning he must've played about six minutes of it.
 
After characterizing the music as "grating," the graphics as "coloured with all the subtlety of a four-year-old's fingerpainting," and the sense of humor as one that "only Americans could find funny," the review concludes with the advice to "steer clear of adventure games written by husband-and-wife teams called Lori and Corey." I'm two gimlets away from tracking down this Chris Jenkins and challenging him to a fist fight.

Because only Americans find Monty Python references funny.

  
European Amiga journals tended to rate it average. The only wildly positive review I see is from the October 1991 Dragon, which gave it 5/5 stars. (The review is worth reading for comments by Lori and Corey.) This would be more meaningful if the average Dragon review wasn't also 5/5 stars.

Incidentally, the Dragon review promises that both Quest for Glory and its sequel would get VGA upgrades in the coming year, but as we know now, that only happened with the first game. The third game was developed natively in VGA, so for decades Trial by Fire was left hanging as the only EGA entry in the series. This changed in 2008, when AGD Interactive remade the game using an open-source development tool called Adventure Game Studio. AGD offers it for free on its web site, along with remakes of the first three King's Quest games.

The welcome screen of AGD Interactive's remake.

I downloaded and played a bit of the game in Shapeir. I think it does a very good job mimicking what Quest for Glory II would have looked like using the SCI1.1 interpreter while still allowing the option to use the old text parser for dialogue.

The Adventurer's Guild in the remake. They even got the moose.

I played it with the point-and-click interpreter just to see what dialogue options I'd missed. Most of them were minor--descriptions of the wares sold by various shops, usually--but among them, I realized I missed Uhura's entire back story in the regular version of the game. She is a Simbani warrior, but a "Simbani woman cannot be [a] wife and [a] warrior," so she came to Shapeir to find a husband and still retain her warrior status. One of the Sultan's guards is the father of Simba. I don't know what keyword should have delivered this information in the regular edition, but neither PEOPLE nor SIMBANI (the keyword given in the remake) works.

Combat is more complex, involving jumping, ducking, and moving backwards and forwards as well as just dodging and parrying; I'm not sure if this is taken from Quest for Glory III or is unique to this remake. Uhura gives you a nice tutorial in everything.

Uhura explains how to fight.

Speaking of Quest for Glory III, it looks like I'll have to burn through two years' worth of games before I can get to it. As we now know, the subtitle of the next game was not, as announced on the closing screen of II, Shadows of Darkness. Rather, in Wages of War, the Hero will follow Rakeesh and Uhura to the land of Fricana, where African and Indian influences blend to create perhaps the most unique game world we'll have seen by then. Having the game already installed on my computer creates near-irresistible temptation, and I can't promise I won't play a bit of the game on my "off-time" before I get to it officially.

I've had an enormous amount of fun with Quest for Glory II, and I lingered on it for a while because I remain completely unexcited about the next game coming up on the 1990 list: Captive. No escaping it now, though.