Game 208: Tyrann (1984)

       

Tyrann
France
Norsoft (developer); No Man's Land (publisher)

Released 1984 for Tangerine Oric, Thomson MO5, and Amstrad CPC (some of these platforms may have seen a 1985 release instead)
Date Started: 4 January 2016
         
Japan would eventually rocket to the top in RPG quantity, but through the 1980s, the U.S. was the leader in the RPG market, with 233 games to Japan's 222 (this is based on my master list, including console games, but not games I've investigated and rejected). The UK comes in a distant third with 23.

In fourth place, you might be surprised to hear, is France, with 14 RPG titles between 1984 and 1989. The nation falls far down the list in the 1990s and 2000s, but for a brief period in the mid-1980s, there was a "golden age" of French RPGs. Tyrann is the first of these--the first of all French RPGs--and others we'll be investigating include Mandragore (1985), Faial (1986), Fer & Flamme (1986), Sapiens (1986), Les Templiers d'Orven (1986), and L'Anneau de Zengara (1987). We'll also be re-visiting Tera: La Cité des Crânes (1986) and Le Maître des Âmes (1987), neither of which I finished or even played long enough to rate on the GIMLET scale. (Fortunately, my French has improved since 2010.) Almost all of these games were released primarily or exclusively for the Amstrad CPC.

A party explores the dungeons of Tyrann.

   

Founded in 1968 in the UK, Amstrad initially produced televisions and stereos before entering the personal computer market in 1984, hoping to compete with Commodore and Sinclair (maker of the ZX Spectrum) in the UK and Europe. With a cheap price and an efficient operating system (AMSDOS), the CPC did well enough on the continent that Amstrad was able to purchase Sinclair in 1986. By 1990, the company had switched to MSDOS-based PCs, and the CPC slowly dwindled away. The last RPG released on the platform was HeroQuest, which I played just a few months ago. The last RPG released solely for the CPC was Saga, a bafflingly bad 1990 game that I played over a year ago. In any event, I had already learned the emulator (WinApe), so I didn't need to find ones for Tyrann's other platforms, the Tangerine Oric and the Thomson MO5.

As popular as it was, Wizardry never made it to these European PCs: as far as I can tell, it had no Spectrum, CPC, Oric, or Thomson release. Thus, the market was ripe for a Wizardry clone, just as it was for The Ring of Darkness (an Ultima clone) a couple years prior. Enter Tyrann, which plays less like a game that copies Wizardry's code and more like a game that someone wrote from scratch while looking at Wizardry screenshots. Like so many knock-offs, it manages to copy the letter of the original while lacking a certain spirit.
    
The basic outline we could recite now from memory: a party of 6 characters navigates a gridded wireframe dungeon, fights monsters, finds treasure, and slowly levels up. I guess there was an English version--at least, the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History has a manual in English--but I wasn't able to find it. The manual offers nothing for a backstory except that the game takes place in a labyrinth off the village of Golanur, and nothing about a main quest except that there is one and it somehow involves "the mystery of Tyrann."

The manual does show you how to map.

      

Classes are chosen from warrior, magician, thief, and druid. Creation is a quick process: after specifying a name and class, attributes of strength, intelligence, vitality, and agility are rolled randomly between 7 and 12. If the player wants to accept the first role, he can allocate 5 bonus points to any one attribute, but if he says "no," he never gets that option again on subsequent re-rolls.

The brief character creation process.

   

Once the party is created, you buy some basic gear at the store in Golanur and then head into the dungeon, where the difficulty curve is about the same as Wizardry: tough. You die a lot in the early levels while you navigate the dungeon and hope for the game to roll weak enemies. Tyrann doesn't have Wizardry's permadeath, but it requires you to save your progress on cassette tape, and you can only save in town. Reloading must have taken a few minutes when the game was new. Now, of course, save states make it instantaneous and remove a lot of the pain associated with death. I'd try harder to adhere to the intended difficulty but I can't get the tape to work. Individual character death is also a lot easier to deal with in Tyrann; resurrection is relatively cheap and there's no risk of the character turning to ash.
    

The party starts out in he Village of Golanur, standing in for Trebor's Castle.

    
We've seen the combat system a million times before. Enemies approach and you can evaluate their party and try to flee if you don't feel confident. Once combat is joined, each character selects an action--attack, parry, use an item, or cast a spell--and the actions execute all at once. Defeated enemies leave gold and experience points but not items (at least, not so far).

A fight against four enemies: two specters, a wolf, and a giant spider.

   
The spell system is different in a way that makes early-level spellcasters quite weak. Spellcasters have to purchase spellbooks for their respective classes from the shop before they can cast. They get one new spell per level, and as in Wizardry, each spell is given a nonsense name. My mage started with YPAFET ("Sleep") and got KADEO ("Find Location") on Level 2. My druid started with ASEKO ("Minor Healing") and progressed to OKOY ("Petrification") on Level 2 and ZINAK ("Turn Undead") at Level 3.

My druid's spellbook.

  
Curiously, spells don't have associated levels, so each spellcaster is allotted a certain number of castings for each spell rather than level-based slots or spell points. The number of castings is randomized each time the character sleeps; the roll seems to be 1D6. So my mage might have 3 YPAFET slots and 2 KADEO slots. He sleeps and suddenly he has 2 YPAFET slots and 4 KADEO slots. Very odd. In any event, resting restores at least some slots for each spell if you've run completely out.

Leveling is also a bit mysterious in the game. As soon as a character hits enough points to make the next level, the game automatically takes you to a "level up" screen where you can assign 2 or 3 points to any of the character's attributes. The problem is, the number of experience points needed to level seems at least partially randomized. My first character to hit Level 2 was Talbot, my druid, at 2600 experience points. My magician went next at around 3,500. My first warrior didn't reach Level 2 until he had around 4,000 points, and my third warrior still hasn't leveled despite having almost 7,500. (During this time, my druid has hit Level 3.) Once you level up, your experience rolls over to 0.

My druid levels up. I can put 3 points into any attribute.

    
Level 1 of the dungeon turned out to be 24 x 24 squares, although without shared walls. (I believe we're calling these "worm tunnels" now, as opposed to the "razor walls" of Wizardry.) I battled through a host of goblins, skeletons, specters, serpents, giant rats, jackals, sorcerers, orcs, and other assorted creatures and mapped the level in about 2 hours. There were a number of chests with gold and items at fixed points and two down staircases but no special encounters. I wish developers knocking off Wizardry games would realize the importance of the special encounters. There might only be one or two per level, but those occasional NPCs or messages on the walls impart a sense of progress and story that a plain gridded map simply can't convey.

The dungeon's first level.

   
Periodic returns to town are necessary since it's the only place you can rest (like Wizardry, you can "camp" in the dungeon to check on characters and cast spells, but you can't actually sleep). I've noticed that the selection of items available in the shop has been growing with each new visit, which is a nice change. An "alchemist" takes the place of Wizardry's temple and heals characters for a fee (at much more reasonable rates, I should add).

The alchemist restores you to maximum health for 4 gold pieces per character level.

  
As I said, the game has many of the mechanics of Wizardry but lacks most of the soul. You wouldn't think little touches like having to enter the tavern to inspect characters or choosing "Boltac's Trading Post" instead of just "Buy or sell" would make a difference, but in this early era of few NPCs and limited stories, it really does. Just some of the little ways that the game under-performs its parent:

• You don't actually equip weapons and armor. The game assumes you're wielding whatever weapon and wearing whatever armor is in your inventory. This means you can only have one weapon and one piece of armor at a time; if you try to buy more, the game shouts "impossible!" Thus, I guarantee I won't be finding any weapons or armor in the dungeon.

Buying weapons. I'm not sure why a double axe is worth so much more than a two-handed sword. A "fleau d'armes" is a flail, I think.

    

• There is no item identification system.

• There are no random encounters in the dungeon (at least, not on Level 1). The composition of the encounters is random, but they all occur at fixed encounter points, and once you clear them they remain clear. This means there's no way to grind.

• There do not appear to be any secret doors. I may encounter them later, but Level 1 had no navigation obstacles--no spinners, one-way doors, teleporters, and so forth.

• Sometimes chests are trapped but there's only one trap type. There's no examination/disarming system; the thief just opens the chest and either succeeds or fails.

My thief opens a coffer.

    

• There are no alignments or sexes.

• There are no images for the monsters.

• There is no consideration of "combat ranks"; all characters fight in melee range and can be hit by enemies.

            
The game isn't entirely lacking innovations. It arguably has a better economy than Wizardry since healing isn't so crazy expensive and the shop actually seems to offer things worth saving up for. Although I haven't really explored them yet, there seems to be a wider variety of usable items, including powder barrels and several animals like combat dogs and baby dragons. A couple of them are mysteries; what do I do with a souris blanche (white mouse)?
      

Some of the more interesting items in the store. It'll be a long time before I can afford that baby dragon.

        

Play is hampered by a number of interface issues. Too many commands, like casting a spell outside of combat, require tunneling through several menu trees. In combat, you have to specify what creature you want to attack by its number. The problems is the number doesn't change even when other enemies die. You might start with enemies numbered 1, 2, 3, and 4, and after you kill a couple, they're numbered 2 and 4. You have to make sure to specify those numbers--not 1 and 2--or your characters will attack air. You have to specify the number even when there's only one enemy remaining.

        

My magician tries to put two sorcerers, a wolf, and a goblin to sleep.

          

In general, Norsoft came up with an adequate early-era RPG that scratches a basic itch to explore, map, fight, and improve, but it's all mechanics and--at least, so far--no plot. As with The Standing Stones, I'm motivated to try to reach the end just to be the only documented person online to have done so, but it's hard to justify spending the time it would take. And in this case, I can't find any fan sites with maps to help me out.

How long will it take to reach the end naturally? At the end of the manual (which is simply awful; it hardly documents anything), it says that "when your team has attained an average of 11 levels of experience, you will be able to load Side B." Now, the manual is for a double-sided tape version of the game, and I have a disk version, so I don't know if the same level restriction applies to anything here. Assuming it does, it took me about 3 hours of play to get one of my characters to Level 3; say 4 hours until my average character is Level 3. That suggests that even with linear progression, I'm looking at about 15 hours to hit Level 11, at which point the game is half over? That really doesn't sound like it's in the cards.
       

I thought I'd also share this weird illustration from the manual.

     

What I've described is a competent but banal RPG that only existed because better ones hadn't made it to European PCs by the mid-1980s. Once personal computers started to standardize on DOS and Windows and more games became available for everyone, there would have been no reason in the world to play Tyrann. But thousands of 1980s teenagers were exposed to Tyrann when it was the only RPG available to them, and naturally it holds a place of fondness in their hearts. This is the only reason I can offer that someone would have bothered, just a few months ago, to publish an Android version of Tyrann.
       

The town and dungeon in the updated mobile version.

     

Based on the scattered facts I can find in online descriptions, at least one of the original authors--Rémy Gosselin--is behind the effort, and the company, Norsoft, has been resurrected for this title. I have not seen evidence that the other listed author, Matthias Wystrach, is involved. I also can't find the two tied to any other RPGs save Tyrann's obscure sequel, Le Fer d'Amnukor (1986), which appears to have been published only for the Oric.

I'll map another level or two to see if anything changes--any NPCs, navigation obstacles, story elements, and so forth--but after that, we'll probably see an early GIMLET unless someone has more luck than me finding maps*. Just two more games to 1984!

Time so far: 3 hours

Reload count: 11 

*To avoid anybody wasting their time, I did find a message board in which someone had extracted the maps and offered them in Oirc tape format. I tried to get the tape to run on an Oric emulator but was unsuccessful.

*****

Sorry for the sudden switch between this game and Sword of Kadash. I have a post ready to go for Kadash but I managed to make a belated contact with the author, and I'm waiting for him to respond to some questions before I finalize the post.