Tunnels & the Ultimate Trolls

Good. Let them have it. The Dragon Continent sucks.

God, I've never been so mad at a game. I've played plenty of RPGs that sucked, but rarely have I played a game with so much potential that so completely squandered it. It has a solid character development system, a very open game world, and a decent combat system, but none of them can overcome the game's flaws.

A quick rundown of the game's major problems:

1. Its adaptation from a series of gamebooks means that the game as a whole lacks thematic unity. There are dozens upon dozens of independent encounters that feel disconnected and random, with no connection to the main quest except (occasionally), a throw-away line about Khazan, Khara Kang, or  Lerotra'hh.

Some interpolation about the main quest from an otherwise unrelated encounter, probably drawn from a gamebook.

         
2. The game is too in-love with verbose text-based encounters that eschew the main game interface for a more literal gamebook experience.

3. While these encounters have options, they lack role-playing options, or even any sense to their puzzles. They whisk you this way and that, with no consideration of tactics, roleplaying, or even fairness.

An example: Near a volcano, you're given the chance to explore a tunnel. This is another "text map," where instead of actually entering a tunnel, you get a narration of events on-screen. In a large cavern, you find a number of slaves being whipped by fire demons. One is killed and tossed into a furnace. Suddenly, a bunch of demons rear up behind you and block the way back. Your options are:

a) Fight your way back

b) Plunge deeper into the cavern

c) Surrender

If you fight your way back, you get into a combat with a shadow demon and 16 minor demons. I don't know what you need for "Speed" to act first, but the lead demon used "Blasting Power" on me for 263 points of damage (far more than my 60 hp) and killed my lead character. In subsequent rounds, I lost another character before everyone was able to kill the demons. There's no way to avoid losing at least one person with this option.

Okay, so try again. "Plunge deeper." You get into a combat with 6 minor demons. They're not tough. I defeat them handily. No one dies. But after my victory screen, the text says I'm overwhelmed by demons and taken prisoner. The demons "decide to make an example of me" and throw Stahr into the furnace, killing him. Then I'm enslaved.

Reload. Only by surrendering--the most counterintuitive solution--do I get a postive outcome. I try to escape during an earthquake and only have to fight a handful of demons to get out.

Many of the encounters are "Morton's forks," leading to the same outcome no matter what you do. On the top of a hill, you see a circle of ancient stones. You're given the option to climb or leave. If you try to leave, you get pursued by a hellhound, at which point you have the option to fight or run. If you fight, you face battle with two hellhounds. If you run, you face battle with a hellhound. If you climb the hill, you find an altar to a demon. You're given the option to cast it down, investigate a wooden cask, or run. If you run, you get pursued and attacked by a hellhound. If you cast down the altar, you get attacked by a hellhound. If you investigate the cask, you get attacked by a hellhound. Basically, from the moment you step into the square--which offers no warning about what's to come--you get attacked by a hellhound no matter what you do.

The moment you step on this square, you're screwed.

          
Compare this to how a real RPG handles such things, allowing the player to employ his skills and the game mechanics to sneak, assess things from a distance, cast buffing spells before combat, and flee if necessary. Here, every player faces the same options no matter how strong, skilled, or prepared he tries to make his characters.

Really? That's as much information as you're going to give me to make this decision?

           
4. There are a handful of miscellaneous problems with items and spells. The "Froststaff" is supposed to teach rogues the "Freeze Me" spell (yes, I looked up a spoiler), but it doesn't do anything. You can't "use" or "equip" it. Most of the potions don't work as advertised, and neither do a lot of the spells. The "Remove Curse" spell absolutely never works. There are a lot of miscellaneous drains in attributes that the game doesn't bother to explain and can't seem to ever be healed.

5. To win the game, you have to collect a series of specific items and passwords, which means solving various encounters in precise ways. If you don't "encounter scum" to make sure you get the optimal outcome, you can easily put yourself in a "walking dead" scenario very early in the game. For instance, I don't think there's a way to defeat Khara Kang without a "Death Wand" that you get from an encounter with some mer-people. But the mer-people claim the wand as their own, and you either have to successfully bargain with them (involving an attribute roll) or kill all of them (violating role-playing) to keep it, and nothing at that point in the game alerts you that it's a necessary artifact.

These gremlins pester you every time you leave Khazan. But you have to (counterintuitively) be friendly with them and offer them money to get a password necessary to win the game.

             
In another place, a demon gives you a quest to recover his jeweled eye from a dragon. If you solve the quest, you can't win the game, because you also need the eye to awaken Khazan. You'd better not use the Bag of Winds to escape from storms on the ocean, because you need it in the final area. There are a dozen things like this.

6. But none of the above problems compare to the most egregious: merciless adjusting of enemy difficulty based on the player's level and attributes. We've seen this happen subtly in other games in my chronology, and quite often in modern games, but never in the kind of game-breaking way that Tunnels & Trolls does it, where the escalation in monster difficulty ensures that the game gets significantly harder for every level or attribute you increase. It's so absurd, in fact, that the simple act of quaffing "Warrior Juice" before combat, which increases your character's strength, simply serves to exponentially increase the difficulty of the enemies in the following combat.

I didn't realize this last point until more than halfway through the game. I noted that the encounters were getting more difficult, but I thought it was because of map progression, not my own character progression. Sick of always getting my butt handed to me in combat, I settled in for a long grinding session in a map that offered near-infinite battles with dire wolves who seemed incapable of hitting me. I spent several hours in the area--mostly letting the game fight on "automatic" while I did other things--and rose about 6 levels. Little did I know how much I was dooming myself.

My meteoric rise in power meant that practically every fixed combat was a hellish ordeal, with most monsters capable of killing characters in one hit. If I got ambushed in the first round, forget it--my whole party died.

This turned out to be a really bad idea.

        
Since I last blogged, I've explored most of the rest of the maps, reloading about a million times. I found Khara Kang in his fortress and, after about 12 tries, killed him with the Death Wand.

My characters are invisible here. It's a handy spell.

Well, I killed him in combat, anyway. The script said that as he died, he called out to Lerotra'hh, who opened some kind of portal to allow him to escape.

Later, I found Lerotra'hh in a dungeon called "The Digs." Well, technically, I went there first, but when I saw that an encounter with the Empress was pending, I left, because I had been warned by a commenter that killing her before killing Khara Kang breaks the game.

To be fair, there's a subtle in-game hint about this, too.

Her chambers had a series of puzzles that would be too boring to relate, including a battle with someone name "Fisk" who you needed a pair of Winged Sandals to defeat. Otherwise, you have to sit there and "block" for 30 consecutive rounds before he just collapses. A walkthrough helped me with that latter part, but not where I was supposed to have gotten the Winged Sandals.

When I reached Lerotra'hh, I was able to kill her quite quickly with the same Death Wand I used on Khara Kang.

But again, she wasn't really "dead." She cried out to Khara Kang, who scooped her up in that same kind of portal. They threatened revenge if I didn't wake up Khazan.

Not much of a "defeat," if you ask me.

           

The endgame is supposed to take place on the Uncertain Isle, where the old emperor, Khazan, slumbers. I made it to the isle.

I made it through a maze of teleporters.

The game starts to try my patience.

         
Using some special boots I'd found previously, I made it across a sea of lava (because walking on lava is only dangerous to the soles of your feet). I made it past an encounter where I had to give up an artifact called a "Heart of Fire."

           
I made it past a herd of buffalo, where I had to know the name of one of them from solving a previous encounter a precise way, and through a garden encounter where I had to have a Bag of Winds and have previously gotten a password from another encounter (I didn't have it; I was using a walkthrough to help by this point).

Even the walkthrough didn't tell me where to get this; it just told me to say it.

           
At last, I reached a final set of corridors, the end of which leads to Khazan's tomb.

And there my game ends. I can't get through the corridors. They're full of encounters with groups of monsters who always surprise me (no matter what I do) and always get the first attack. Their sheer number and power results in an instant slaughter. If I could survive the first round, there are some spells that could help (unfortunately, you can't cast them before combat), but there's no way to even come close surviving the first round, as the GIF below demonstrates.

              
I've reloaded numerous times. Sometimes the specific enemies change, but there are always too many of them, and they always wipe me out in the first round. I've seen videos online of people surviving the same area. They have half my characters' levels, strength, and stamina, and they therefore face much weaker enemies. Basically, I screwed myself by leveling up.

Replacing my characters with weaker NPCs was a decent idea, but ultimately futile.

           
I reloaded a save from before I entered Khazan's tomb and tried to swap out a couple of my characters for lower-level NPCs. Unfortunately, NPCs cooling their heels in the various guilds manage to level up along with the active characters. Their stats weren't nearly as good, and this helped a little with some of the encounters, but I still can't do anything about that last hallway.

Dragons bathe my party in fire before I can even react.

           
There's no way to create new characters in the middle of the game, so if I want to get a winning screen for this one, I'm going to have to start completely over, minimize leveling, and hit only the necessary encounters. Since I didn't take extensive notes, this will basically involve just following a walkthrough.

Even if I do that, it's going to take a little time. So let's move on to Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire.

*****

A couple of modifications to our master game list: I checked out Ellak's Tomb for the C64. It was a little tape magazine game with a first-person interface. Although you can make four characters--warrior, thief, wizard, or priest--there's no inventory for the characters and no sense of character development. I'd call it a "half-RPG." It's not worth anyone's time and I dumped it.

Meanwhile, Operation: Overkill II looked really interesting, but it was a BBS game, and I'm not sure if it's playable offline. I downloaded it, but it kept telling me that it couldn't find certain files, even though those files were in the directories. I applied for an account in a bulletin board service that offers the game, but in general, online-only or multiplayer games don't appear on my list for a reason, and I'm inclined not to pursue it if it keeps throwing obstacles at me.

This means that the first 1991 has appeared in the playlist! For most of the year, like I did with 1990, I'll be selecting games at random. But I want to start the year strong, with a title I know I'll like. so I decided to put Eye of the Beholder there. (Death Knights of Krynn or Might & Magic III seemed too obvious.) We'll have an intermediate end-of-1990 post before then, of course.