Quest for Glory II: Won!

One of three winning screens I've achieved while someone was still messing around with the Earth Elemental. "Without peer" indeed.

My last post ended with my character trapped in the tomb of Iblis, from which Ad Avis had just made his escape with a statue containing the djinn. He had announced his plan to perform a ritual on the statue, release the evil djinn, and use him to take over the world.

But all was not lost. Wandering around, I found a magic ring on one of the stalagmites. Picking it up released a genie--presumably one of those who had aided Suleiman in trapping Iblis in the first place.

The developers didn't even program a response for MORE WISHES. Come on, Corey. That was bush league.

The genie offered me three wishes, but clarified that they were limited to "health, prowess, or teleporting you to Iblis." After some experimentation, I found that I could wish for any skill or attribute (agility, vitality, stealth, throwing), and the genie would increase my score by 50. The exception is honor, which "you must earn yourself." I forgot to check whether this would apply to skills I didn't have in the first place; if so, it could be a way for characters who start as fighters or mages to get all classes' skills.

For all characters, I wished for increases in their lowest useful skills. You can burn all three wishes on these boosts, but it ends the game immediately.

For the third wish, I chose to TELEPORT back to Raseir, where Ad Avis was in the midst of his summoning ritual. The closest the genie could get me was to the exterior of the palace.

Here, for my thief and mage, Sharaf reappeared and told me of the Kattas' plans to attack the palace "to provide some distraction." I didn't notice that this really did anything for either of the characters.

At this point, the experiences of the classes diverged considerably, but there were two things common to all of them. First, if I dithered around too much in any area, Ad Avis finished his ritual and Iblis escaped to destroy the world.

I'm not entirely sure what Ad Avis gets out of all of this.

Second, the freaking genie wouldn't shut his trap for three seconds. Between constantly telling me how to solve the puzzles and just generally telling me that I was running out of time, he was the most annoying character in the game, constantly popping up and interrupting whatever I was in the middle of doing.

Thanks. It wouldn't have occurred to me to just walk over to the only available exit. Glad you're here.

The palace was guarded by two soldiers and a eunuch walking along the upper balcony. The first task was to get past them and get into the palace. I'm sure there were multiple ways for each class to accomplish this. For my mage character, I killed the eunuch with a "Flame Dart," then "Dazzled" my way past the guards and opened the door. My fighter took out the eunuch with a thrown dagger and then, predictably, just charged in swinging and defeated the guards in combat (one of only two combats post-Shapeir; the other characters got none). The thief had to wait for the eunuch to pass by, then shimmy up his magic rope on the far left, where a scarf was tied (as Zayishah's handmaiden had promised).

Targeting the eunuch at the front gates.

This meant that the thief entered a different part of the palace than the fighter and mage. For the fighter and mage, the genie led me to an antechamber outside Ad Avis's ritual chamber. Khaveen was on guard.

Someone's going to be sorry he said that.

The mage solution was to cast "Calm," which caused Khaveen to forget what he was doing and wander out of the room. The fighter jumped down from the balcony and engaged Khaveen in combat. At one point during the combat, Khaveen drops his sword, and you have the option whether to kill him or allow him to pick it back up; the latter is necessary for achieving paladin status at the end of the game. The result was the same either way.

I then had to burst through the magically-guarded door to Ad Avis's summoning chamber. The door had some kind of damage spell on it, but my mage set it off with a "Trigger" and the fighter just sucked up the damage.

On the other side, Ad Avis was engaged in some ritual involving lighting candles in a hexagram. Some stone guardian was protecting him and attacked as I came through. Through trial and error, I found that "Trigger" caused him to just collapse, but the fighter had to ESCAPE combat with him because he wouldn't die from my regular attacks.

Next, I had to disrupt the ritual by either stealing ("Fetch" did the trick for the mage) or throwing a dagger to knock over one of the candles.

Stop trying to make fetch happen.

Ad Avis noticed me at this point. For my mage character, he immediately fired off a spell to turn me into an animal. Fortunately, I had been warned by Al Scurva to have "Reversal" active when I entered the room, and the spell bounced off me and hit Khaveen, who was coming through the left door. Al Scurva had specifically said that if the spell hit me, I would be "transformed into a creature most resembling your soul," and sure enough, Khaveen turned into a snake.

Now, here's the offensive thing. After I won, I played the encounter again without casting "Reversal" first, and guess what I turned into?

A saurus?! What the hell?! I could see why the Emir became a saurus: he was described as somewhat simple, kind, and skittish. But why am I not a lion or a bear or something?

But I digress. Ad Avis also had a "Reversal" spell active, so hitting him with "Flame Dart" or "Force Bolt" just caused the spell to go careening around the chamber. The key to defeating him was the realization that "Reversal" only protects the caster when directly targeted. What I needed to do was bounce a spell off something else and hit him. This took a long time and multiple reloads as I screwed around trying to first find the optimal position from which to cast the spell and second find the optimal surface off which to bounce it--all while dodging his own ricocheting spells at the same time. Eventually, I found the right place to bounce "Force Bolt" so that it knocked over the brazier and sent Ad Avis tumbling out of the window in flames.

Now that's a Disney villain death.

The fighter had a much easier time. Ad Avis didn't bother with any transmogrification spells; he just started casting flame darts. I just had to charge the guy and knock him out the window.

The thief had a very different endgame experience. Since he entered the palace by climbing up on the balcony, he started in a different room--specifically, the harem. Zayishah had said that the women of the palace would help me, and they did, first by hiding me from the suspicious eunuch.

Wait, did the previous emir have a harem and eunuchs? Because I'm not sure why I'm helping him, then.

There followed a sequence in which I had to hide and crawl around to avoid detection, but it was all overly-scripted and didn't offer many options for making mistakes. If I tried to go the wrong way, the genie would pop up and stop me.

The sequence ended with me on a balcony behind Ad Avis's summoning area, with his back to me. First, I had to cross over to him with my magic rope.

Good thing I practiced all that tightrope walking.

But I couldn't get through the pillars; there was some kind of force field preventing me. Instead, I had to throw a dagger to knock over the candle, then slowly approach Ad Avis while frequently typing DUCK (clued by the genie) to avoid his spells. A thrown dagger finally sent him to his doom.

Will you, for god's sake, SHUT UP?!

I guess if the thief shows up for the endgame without some extra daggers or rocks, he's in trouble. Incidentally, there was no opportunity to use "Reversal" for the thief, even if he learned it (as mine did), since there was no place to safely cast it after the palace entrance, and its effects don't last long enough to see the character all the way through the palace encounters.

So Ad Avis was dead, and at that point, the game became roughly the same for every character. I have to say, I really enjoyed the endgame sequence. Not enough games offer a solid denouement for the hero; a lot of them simply give you one end-game screen and drop you to the prompt. Here, we have a rewarding five-minute epilogue. First, the genie recites the prophecy under which Ad Avis was operating, noting that the real prophecy did leave open the possibility that the Hero would forestall Iblis's return.

The genie then takes Iblis's statue back to the tomb for another 1,001 years. The Hero, meanwhile, finds Emir Ali hiding in his bedroom and "persuades" him to take charge of the city and proclaim "the evil rule of Ad Avis and Khaveen to be over."

The Hero then restores Raseir's magic fountain with the Water Elemental. I have to confess, I'm not really sure how that works, or why the Water Elemental doesn't just destroy the city the way he was going to do before I captured him in the waterskin in the first place.

Whatever. It sounds good and has nice symmetry.

Abdulla and Shameen show up on the magic carpet to bear the Hero back to Shapeir.

Somehow, the elemental even made the cracks in the pavement disappear.

There, in the Palace of the Sultan, Sultan Harun al-Rashid is revealed to be the same person as the poet Omar, which explains why Omar was always handing me reward money. In a little ceremony, the various NPCs recount the Hero's deeds, with different NPCs speaking depending on what the Hero did during the course of the game. Shameen and Shema go first and recount the Hero's deeds in the first game.

Ha! But the Katta were driven from Raseir only a year ago, and in Quest for Glory, Shameen says they've been in Spielburg for three years! Why am I so hung up on this?

If the Hero freed the spirit of Julanar from the tree, Aziza recounts that. All my characters did this side quest, but I think it's possible to win without having done it, since you don't absolutely need to free Al Scurva.

Zayishah, Emir Ali's daughter, follows up by explaining how the Hero helped her escape Raseir. Somewhere in there, the EOF member, Walid, explains that the Hero spared his life, if the character was a fighter and chose that option. Then the Emir-saurus (the transmogrified previous emir, Zayishah's uncle and Ali's brother) shows up with his own contribution.

The Hero chooses this moment to administer a "Dispel" potion, "specifically prepared by Harik for the occasion" on him. I'd be pretty annoyed if I were him. I'd have expected them to use "Dispel" on me pretty much as soon as the potion was brewed. Either way:

Dude, I rode around the desert on your back.

Finally, the Sultan speaks: "I am Harun al-Rashid, Sultan of the land of Shapeir / I am the Poet Omar, teller of tales for all to hear / By the words which have been spoken / By the deeds that have been done / I proclaim this man a Hero / I now call this man my son."

Cool! Is there an inheritance involved?

There's one final sequence if the character obtained enough hidden "paladin points" and achieved a high enough "honor" score throughout the game. Rakeesh shows up and speaks of the Hero's courage, honesty, mercy, and compassion, proclaims him a paladin, and bestows upon him his sword, "Soulforge."

This comes with another 50 points and advances the maximum to 550. Only my mage (my first character) achieved a 100% score, and he wasn't proclaimed a paladin because he lost points disturbing (and killing) the griffon. My fighter ended with 517/550 and my thief ended with 472/500. In both cases, I just carelessly overlooked certain things.

The game ends with a credit sequence in which witty in-jokes are made about the development team members and their roles:

Followed by a preview of the next Quest for Glory game.

I, for one, can't wait. On to the GIMLET!