Game 166: Crystals of Arborea (1990)

Crystals of Arborea

France
Silmarils (Developer and Publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST

Date Started: 28 September 2014
Date Ended: 4 October 2014

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 23
Ranking at Time of Posting: 50/164 (30%)

Ranking at Game #457: 193/457 (42%)

Crystals of Arborea is a weird little strategy/RPG hybrid from the French developer Silmarils. The company would later become semi-famous for the Ishar trilogy. Arborea, which takes place in the same universe and has some links to Ishar's back story, is sometimes called Ishar 0. I found the entire series on GOG for $5.99, making this the third 1990 game I've legitimately purchased. I suspect this tendency will grow as the years pass.
  
I found Arborea extremely difficult to get into. I've remarked before about the slight tinge of the bizarre that often accompanies games from the continent, as if the creators were unaware of any RPG predecessors or unwilling to offer games that fit into a recognizable lineage. This has produced some innovative elements in games like Le Maitre des Ames, Dragonflight, and Drakkhen, but even when I admire the games for these innovations, on the whole they often seem a little "off." For the most part, this is less a criticism of the games and more a recognition of my own perspective as a U.S. player with a CRPG history made up almost entirely of U.S. games. In the case of Arborea, though, I think anyone would find it bizarre. The lack of actual use of most of the game features, the limited leveling, and the short game time make Arborea feel like a game engine in search of an actual game.

The game features a main character (Jarel) and six companions. You get to determine their classes and stats but not their names.

Arborea is an island on something called the "crystal world." Ages ago, when the gods created the world, they populated it with three races: orcs, Sham-nirs (elves), and black elves. Each race had a role: orcs were workers, Sham-nirs artisans, and black elves rulers. The world was held in balance by four crystals, each representing one of the four elements (earth, sky, water, and fire), each ensconced atop a tower.

Everything was cool until "Morgoth the fallen angel," in revenge for the gods' casting him out of heaven, "swept across the crystal world" and corrupted the orcs and black elves. (What a surprise.) When the gods awoke and saw what was happening, they "drowned the world in their fury," leaving only the island of Arborea, home of the crystals. Somehow during these events, the crystals became dislodged from their towers and scattered about the land. It is up to Jarel, last prince of the Sham-nirs, to find the crystals, return them to their towers, and restore balance to the world.

(To stave off comments relaying the obvious, Morgoth is the primary antagonist of Tolkien's The Silmarillion, from which of course the company Silmarils takes its name. For all I know, "Sham-nir" is somewhere in Tolkien, too. No, don't bother to comment. I don't care. Tolkien allusions are so trite, cliched, and tired by this point that it's just going to piss me off every time I see one. Seriously, developers: enough. Do something original for a change.)

As the game begins, you define Jarel's companions. In a weird inversion of the normal character creation process, the names of the characters are immutable, but the player determines their classes (warrior, ranger, or wizard) and allocates a pool of points to strength, constitution, life points, and agility. After creation, the characters plus Jarel start in a group in the lower-left corner of the island map. You can move characters individually or in groups across the map, looking for houses, towers, dungeons, and the titular crystals. At the same time, enemy forces also scatter across the map, looking to stop you.

The overland map. You can see a couple of discovered houses and towers. My party is represented by yellow squares; the purple square in the top middle-right is the main character, Jarel. The brown or red or whatever squares are enemy parties. Two towers have been discovered on the west side of the map and two crystal locations have been discovered on the east side. I have no idea what those circles are in the upper-left.

The game put me in a bad mood from the beginning by requiring a mouse for movement and almost all aspects of gameplay, but that would have been tolerable if the movement system itself wasn't so dumb. The game features two movement modes: map-based (top-down), where you click on the party, click "Move," and click the destination; and 3D view, where you click on compass pointers to advance one step, turn, and strafe. The obnoxious thing is that Jarel, the main character, who needs to be present to collect crystals and explore indoor structures, cannot move in map view. The other characters, meanwhile, cannot move in 3D view unless they're grouped with Jarel. Grouping them with Jarel, meanwhile, is a different process from grouping with each other--a very unintuitive one, I might add, that left me frustrated for the first few hours of gameplay.

Coming across a house in the woods.

Since Jarel needs to be present at every key interaction, the characters basically act as scouts. Once they find something, you have to move Jarel to the location to interact with the thing. But since Jarel is pretty vulnerable by himself--indeed, all small parties are vulnerable--the mechanic basically just encourages you to group everyone with Jarel at the outset and spend all your time exploring in 3D mode. This is what I did for my winning game.

The 3D view is rather pretty, and a cynic would think that the entire purpose of the game was just to show it off. As you explore, you see creatures moving about, navigate around obstacles, and find structures that you can enter. Day fades to evening and then nighttime, with the colors effectively changing to represent the time of day. I just wish the developers had mapped the movement commands to the number pad rather than requiring me to click on the stupid compass.

Jarel can actually see his companions in 3D view. To get them to join, you have to click on their faces.

The most important structures, at least for character development, are a series of houses occupied by various wizards and lords. Each has some bonus to offer you--the location of a crystal, a magic sword, the ability to see in the dark, and so forth--but each requires you to answer a riddle to get their boon. The funny thing is that the answers to the riddles are not discoverable in-game, but rather require knowledge of external literature. One wants to know what "Excalibur" is, for instance, and another asks you what the "silmarils" are. You choose from three answers, so there's a one-third chance of getting it right even if you haven't read the Arthurian legends or Tolkien.

Most games just annoy me with Tolkien references. This one actually wants me to have read the books.

The locations are at least partly randomized for each game. Every game has at least one dungeon--a series of tunnels that you explore in 3D view. I didn't like the graphics in the caves; it was very hard to determine when passages opened to the right and left. But the dungeons are small, and the one I fully mapped in my last game contained both a crystal and an armor upgrade for one of my warriors.
  

About to encounter a troll in the caves.

  
Combat comes along fairly frequently. You can flee from most of them, but you really need to build up experience for the endgame. The combat system is relatively original to this game. It takes place on a  6 x 7 grid on which you and your enemies can move in any direction, including diagonally. Warriors can only attack enemies in adjacent squares. Rangers can only attack enemies at least one square away, for whom they have a direct line-of-sight (horizontally, vertically, or diagonally) with no one in between. Wizards can cast spells and target enemies from anywhere on the grid.
  

Fighting a bunch of bats in the caverns. The two warriors (three squares north and one and two squares east) can attack the bat adjacent to them. The ranger at 2 squares east, 2 squares north can only attack the bat two squares to his northeast. The mage on the far right can cast a spell at any bat, but he has to hope that the one adjacent to him doesn't interrupt his casting.

  
Each turn, each character can move once or attack. Casting a spell requires one turn to start casting and one turn to finish. If the spellcaster takes damage after starting the spell, he loses it. Every action requires a certain amount of "energy" from the character's pool of 99 points. Characters must periodically sleep to recover energy.
  
I found combat reasonably difficult, especially when multiple enemies attack at once. Most attacks miss your foes, while most of their attacks seem to hit you. Enemies aren't stupid, and they constantly move around so that your characters can't attack from too many directions at once. I found that, because of this, rangers were essentially useless. It was too hard to maneuver rangers into line-of-sight positions with no other characters blocking, and every time I did, the enemy would just move. I won the game with two of each class, but if playing again, I'd go with 3 warriors and 3 wizards.

Each enemy delivers experience points to the character who makes the kill. Somewhere around 100 experience points, characters make Level 2. The game is so short, though, that none of my characters got higher than Level 3, and even that included some grinding.
  

In combat, Jarel acts as a warrior and can fight and level up with everyone else. If he dies, however, the game immediately ends with an image of the triumphant Morgoth.

Congratulations. You rule a small island.

There are 9 magic spells: "Acceleration" (basically "Haste," granting extra moves per turn), "Force Field" (protects a character but prevents him from moving), "Teleport," "Ball of Fire" (one foe), "Lightning" (all foes), "Paralysis," "Blindness," "Regression" (drains enemy levels), and "Treachery" (causes enemies to attack each other). Only "Acceleration," "Ball of Fire," and "Force Field" are available at Level 1, though, and I don't know when some of the others become available because I never got them at all. I relied on "Ball of Fire" most of the time.
  

A wizard prepares to cast "Ball of Fire" on a creature on the other side of the map.

  
There are notably no "Healing" spells. Jarel comes with a stock of healing potions that go pretty fast. There's at least one place in the game where you can refill the potions, but I didn't find it in every game. Minimizing damage in the first place, rather than healing later, is a key to winning the game.

Jarel heals himself and some of his compatriots with potions.

There's no economy in the game, nor really any equipment, meaning it technically doesn't meet my rules as an RPG. Yes, you can get magic swords and armor and such, but these just provide boosts to your stats; they're not actual items that you can equip, un-equip, trade, and drop.

Winning the game means recovering the four crystals from where they're scattered across the landscape. I've read some places that monsters will occasionally find them first and move them. I don't know if that's true, but if so, I never saw the consequences of this. In my winning game, I found one in the caverns, got a hint where to find the second, and just stumbled on the other two while exploring the wilderness (the outdoor ones sit on huge pedestals, so they're hard to miss).

Finding a crystal in the woods. As you walk up to them, they float down to Jarel.

After you have them, you go around the four towers and restore them. This is accompanied by a graphic.

Approaching the tower.

And restoring the crystal. How was I carrying four of these around in my backpack?

At the final tower--whichever one you visit last--Morgoth himself is waiting outside and attacks. The first time I faced him, I was completely unprepared for his difficulty, and he utterly took my party apart. He's extremely hard to hit, gets 3 moves per turn, can make himself invisible, and takes about 1/3 of the damage that other monsters do from successful attacks and spells.

Morgoth awaits at the final tower.

To defeat him, I had to grind for a bit to improve my various scores, then sleep for a while to make sure everyone was at full energy. Even then, it took me several reloads to achieve a victory. I accomplished it mostly by having my wizards cast "Force Field" on Jarel. Morgoth prioritizes attacks on Jarel, and he ineffectively beat at the force field while my other characters slowly whittled him down.

The warrior Akeer sacrifices himself for the rest of the party.

When Morgoth dies, everyone gets 1,000 experience points--far more than they would achieve in a normal game up to this point--and a 10-point bonus to all attributes. Neither really helps, as the game ends the moment you step past Morgoth's corpse and into the final tower. You're then treated to an animation of the island of Arborea slowly rising out of the sea, exposing more of the land around it. The sense is that the gods' floodwaters have receded, but there's no textual confirmation of this.

The crystals glow in the four towers, and the island rises from the sea again.

I won in 2 hours, about 1/3 of it spent reloading multiple times to defeat Morgoth.

I don't expect a very high GIMLET rating:

• 3 points for the game world. There's a sensible enough back story, I guess, reflected in the actual gameplay, which is more than most RPGs of the era accomplish.

• 3 points for character creation and development. There aren't enough choices during creation, the characters barely go anywhere during gameplay, and there's no role-playing. I included a point for the encounter-based upgrades that you get from NPC houses.

The main character barely went anywhere in two hours of gameplay.

• 2 points for NPC interaction, based on the limited interaction with the guys in their houses.

• 1 point for encounters and foes. There are only a handful of enemies in the game: black elves and orcs on the surface; trolls and bats in the underground; and Morgoth at the endgame. All enemies are melee-only and none except Morgoth have special attacks or defenses. There are no other "encounters" in the game.

• 4 points for magic and combat. The combat system feels half like an RPG, half like a board game, but it's reasonably tactical and engaging. The magic system is only so-so.

• 1 point for equipment. I'm charitably giving this to the couple of upgrades you can find.

Finding some armor in a cavern--one of only a couple "equipment" upgrades in the game.

• 0 points for no economy.

• 2 points for having a main quest, but with no side-quests or role-playing decisions.

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and inputs. The graphics are relatively nice, especially in 3D mode. The sound is okay, consisting of occasional growls, screams, and clangs during combat. I didn't like the interface at all; it was all mouse-driven and not very responsive. I'm going to give an extra point in this category for the in-game documentation, which (though it lacks certain key pieces of information) is reasonably thorough. It's perhaps the first example we have, outside roguelikes, of extensive instructions within the game itself rather than a separate manual.

The manual is accessible from the main screen and has several sections.

• 3 points for gameplay. It gets one for a certain amount of nonlinearity within a limited game world. It gets another for the randomness making it somewhat replayable, and a third for being at about the right difficulty level. But its short duration makes it feel more like a prologue for a longer game than a full game in its own right.

The final score of 23 is well below what I consider "recommended." The engine isn't horrible, the graphics are nice, and the combat system is promising. It just needed a better-balanced game, with more RPG trappings. I assume this is what we get in the Ishar series starting in 1992.

Arborea was covered in several Amiga magazines, which predictably focused on the graphics, sound, and music rather than the actual gameplay elements. (The May 1991 review from CU Amiga begins by giving thanks that "the days [are gone] when a role-playing game meant little more than a great leap of the imagination, a plot with trolls and gameplay along the lines of a special maths paper." You want to know when RPGs started getting "dumbed down"? This is it, right here.) It got 86% from The One, 91% from CU Amiga, and 86% from Amiga Action. Oddly, it's Amiga Power, the magazine I just excoriated for its half-assed review of Secret of the Silver Blades, that comes to the rescue with one of the only sensible reviews, giving the game only 48%.

Crystals of Arborea can be quite pretty (especially at night) if not outstandingly so, but while it has a lot of screens, it doesn't seem to be blessed with a great deal of variety. Add to that a distinctly slug-like pace and rules that seem to have been picked at random . . . and it all seems rather pointless. I found it one big snooze.

This was around the seventh game from Silmarils, but the first quasi-RPG; all of their previous offerings had been action, sports, and racing games. Two years later, they published Ishar: Legend of the Fortress (1992), followed by Ishar 2: Messengers of Doom (1993) and Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity (1994). Judging by screenshots, the games seem to use Arborea's 3D interface but eliminate the grid-based combat, which I think is too bad: I was hoping it would be improved, not dumped. The entire series gets mixed reviews.

The authors of Arborea and Ishar are listed as Pascal Einsweiler and Michel Pernot. They were active on Silmarils titles throughout the 1990s, with their last credits on Ashgan: The Dragon Slayer (1998) and Arabian Nights (2002). Both are action games. Silmarils went out of business in 2003. The owners of Silmarils (the Rocques brothers) and Einsweiler went on to found a new company called EverSim, which still appears to be around and has a small library of geopolitical simulation games.

Arborea seems little-remembered today except as the weird precursor to Ishar. I wasn't able to find any walkthroughs or FAQs online, nor even very many detailed descriptions. There are a couple of YouTube videos, but only of the first few minutes of gameplay. Once again, I'm glad to have filled the role of cataloging the obscure.

****

Next up is supposed to be Moria. I had first wanted to win it "honestly" before posting about it, but that's clearly not going to happen. Then, I decided I'd win it "dirty" so I could at least show the endgame, but even that is taking a long time. It may or may not be my next game. If it's not, the next game is going to be an even more obscure French game, this time actually in French, for the Amstrad CPC: Saga.