Vengeance of Excalibur: Won!* (with Final Rating)

Vengeance of Excalibur
United States
Synergistic Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1991 for DOS, 1992 for Amiga and Atari ST

Date Started: 14 February 2016
Date Ended: 22 February 2016

Total Hours: 18

Reload Count: 11

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 34

Ranking at Time of Posting: 140/208 (67%)

    

Scenario 3 opened with the intelligence that several of Camelot's treasures had been taken to the mysterious City of Brass, occupied by thousands of "skeleton soldiers." Al-Mansur, Breuse's supposed ally, was besieging the city, and might agree to sell out Breuse in his desperation.

The party meets the most powerful figure in Muslim Iberia.

  

I went to the city and spoke to Al-Mansur. He agreed to help me if I could get into the city and open the gates from within. "If only men could fly," he added, hinting at what the manual makes explicit: I need a flying carpet. Fortunately, the djinni in my service had a "Flying Carpet" spell. I went to the exterior of the city, summoned the Djinni, and cast the spell.

  

I have to provide the carpet?! What kind of a djinni are you?!

  

Time to scour all of Iberia for a carpet! Figuring it wasn't in any of the places that I had explored in Scenario #2, I concentrated on the other cities. I first hit all the ones without garrisons, but found nothing except some traders selling healing balm and herbs. These turned out to be handy later but they weren't the object of my quest.

In my explorations, I ran into a Christian army led by someone named Enrico. He was hoping to get my help reclaiming Barcelona. Figuring at the very least this was a side-mission, I accepted and we conquered the city.

  

I like my odds.

  

Barcelona turned out to have several merchants, one of whom was happy to sell a carpet.

  

Something about the way he said this made me a little suspicious.

   

I bought the carpet, returned to the City of Brass, dropped it on the ground, summoned the djinni again, and cast the spell.

   

   

Right. What does "house of a flying creature" mean!? I went back to Barcelona, poked around some more, and found a merchant who would sell me a silk carpet. 

Okay, I suppose the cocoon of a silkworm is a "house of a flying creature" in some twisted way. When I went back to the City of Brass with this carpet, the spell worked and I was able to fly over the walls into the city.

  

I'm not sure I wouldn't want to sit for this.

  

As predicted, the city was full of skeletons. They were tough enemies, and I had to use a lot of healing balms and "Healing" spells from Nineve to keep my knights alive. Even then, the skeletons occasionally killed someone before I could react, and I had to reload. There were several combats with multiple skeletons at once, in which case three of your party members engage at once.

Throughout the game, I was never able to figure out how to re-order the knights in combat or send the warriors I actually wanted into the fight. For instance, in the battle above, if Palomides withdraws, Amadis will take his place. So far, so good. But if Bedivere then withdraws, Nineve won't take his place--Palomides will head back into action again. In other words, you can only have one substitution at a time, and it always substitutes the next highest-ranked character. Later in the game, I got the ability to summon a bunch of my own skeletons, and it would have been nice to have them do all the fighting, but they only ever took the place of whatever knight was third on the list (in a battle against three foes).

Anyway, eventually I reached the gate of the city from the inside, and Al-Mansur's forces were able to conquer it. But that still didn't end the scenario. I had to wander around the city until I found the source of its evil: an evil djinni constantly summoning skeletons. Every time I defeated one, he just summoned another one.

  

  

I couldn't break the cycle no matter what I did or what spell I used. Thus, I reluctantly consulted a walkthrough. I discovered that to defeat the djinni, I needed an empty bottle and a cork. This would have required me to buy a bottle of wine back in Barcelona, drink it before meeting up with the djinni, and then "use" the cork to trap him. I guess the evil djinni couldn't possibly see me coming with a bottle and cork held out menacingly in front of me.

This was exactly the kind of thing that drove me crazy about Spirit of Excalibur: fail to visit some random place or acquire some random object, and you're screwed hours later. Even classic adventure games don't typically put you in this kind of situation. They allow you to backtrack to previous screens and work out puzzles logically. When you have the entire Iberian peninsula to explore and events progress in a linear manner, it fundamentally isn't fair unless the goal is to expect the player to tread the same ground multiple times, fighting the same battles. RPG's typically aren't like this, and when they are--when I have to hunt around for an "earlier save"--I get annoyed.

Anyway, I restarted from the beginning of the scenario, bought the wine bottle this time, did everything again, and trapped the djinni. This got me Helye's Book, a treasure that I don't recall being mentioned in the backstory and that does not appear in Arthurian legend. It's apparently a spellbook, and reading it conferred to Nineve some extra spells.

   

From this point, I lost my interest in playing honestly, and I consulted the walkthrough frequently to get to the end of the game. I was able to finish Scenarios 4 and 5 without help, but I sleepwalked through Scenario 6 and consulted it a couple of times in Scenario 7.

  

Scenario 4 opened with the news that Al-Mansur had betrayed me by taking Arthur's helm, Arthur's shield, Excalibur, and the Holy Grail and rode off for Kurtuba (Cordoba). The world map showed his army on the move towards the city.

Winning the scenario depended largely on getting to Kurtuba before Al-Mansur--difficult enough on its own given that accidentally running into him on the road leads to immediate death. Even worse, I had to reach Kurtuba with a knight named Ruy Diaz, who had a quest to rescue the daughter of the King of Castile. That meant first joining him far to the north in Salamanca. The manual tells you all of this; I didn't have to get it from the walkthrough. What the walkthrough recommended, however, was leaving one knight close to Salamanca during Scenario #3 so he could hustle to join Diaz at the beginning of Scenario #4 and meet the rest of the party in Kurtuba before Al-Mansur could get there. Having not done that, I had to take my entire party to Salamanca and back down to Kurtuba, which took me three tries and left me with just seconds to spare on the last try.

  

The party gets to Kurtuba too late. These instant-kills are really annoying.

      

The manual also warned that I would need Sir Breuse's help. I had to explore a large dungeon to find him. The multi-screen dungeons in this game are a good idea, making it more like an RPG than Spirit of Excalibur, but they're hard to map because there's little rhyme or reason to the direction you enter and exit a room. You might go from Room 1 to Room 2 by clicking on a door, but when you arrive in Room 2, you walk in from the left side of the screen. Then, clicking on the left side doesn't necessarily take you back to Room 1.

   

This is the kind of thing Breuse would do.

   
With Breuse's help, I found the maiden, Landoine (the name belongs to a couple of characters in the Vulgate Estoire del Saint Grail), and got from her a golden key to the castle's treasury.
    

      
In the treasury, I found Arthur's helm and shield, completing this scenario.
  

Scenario 5 opened with the news that Breuse had stolen Arthur's shield moments after I found it, and that Al-Mansur was headed for Tuliatala. The manual suggested that three cities would ask for aid, and that I would need to help at least two of them to raise an army large enough to take Tuliatala, but if I tried to help all three, it would "enable Al-Mansur to raise an army that is so formidable, even a prayer won't protect your party from certain death." I think the game could have tried harder with that hyperbole.

Anyway, as the scenario opened, I already had one army: King Alfonso's, given to Ruy Diaz in exchange for rescuing his daughter. A messenger came along soon enough with a request from two other cities.

   

   

Long story short, I helped defend the cities, acquired their armies, marched on Tuliatala, defeated Al-Mansur's army, and then killed Al-Mansur himself in a very easy one-on-one combat with Lancelot. Excalibur was mine. (Historical note: Almanzor is believed to have actually died in 1002 in the Battle of Calatañazor, a major victory in the Spanish Reconquista.)

    

Al-Mansur moments before I eviscerated him with my "feeble weapons."

    

Scenario #6 inexplicably wanted me to "reforge" Excalibur to kill the Shadowmaster despite nothing ever having been said that it was broken. The manual gave enough hints about what I needed to do that I probably could have figured it out on my own, but the process involved a couple of spells for which Nineve needed specific herbs, and I didn't feel like running around to every city trying to find them.

As part of the scenario, I had to sail to Majorca and kill a dragon in it's cave, recovering a number of treasures, including a "runic blade" that served as a good weapon for Bedivere (Lancelot had Excalibur), a "small chest" that I never found a way to open, and the dragon's teeth which, when used, summoned skeleton warriors to fight for me.

   

The dragon had some fancy treasure.

  

Somewhere, I ran into Diego Garcia again, who offered to trade me some meteor iron for the djinni's lamp, which I owed him anyway in exchange for his previous favor. I agreed. That plus some spells were the final ingredient I needed to reforge Excalibur, which I did at a smith's shop, ending the scenario.

   

And we've finished our destruction of the Arthurian tradition.

   

As Scenario #7 started, that mysterious canis lupus reappeared and told me that  the Shadowmaster was in the "Ciudad Encantada" northeast of Cadiz. I brought my party to the city. The difficult part of this scenario was finding my way through a couple of mazes, first outside the city and then inside, and killing a couple dozen Saracens, Moors, and guards along the way.

The map culminated first in a fight against Breuse. Killing him got me Arthur's shield.

Breuse, just before a quick death.

   

After that was the Shadowmaster. When I faced him, Lancelot was equipped with the Gauntlets of Power, Arthur's helm, Arthur's shield, and Excalibur/The Sword of Vengeance, but I still couldn't defeat the Shadowmaster. He kept killing me with fireballs before I could even get up to him.

   

This guy wasn't trash-talking.

The game had screwed me one more time. It turns out that to defeat the Shadowmaster, I first had to use something called a "Citadel Scroll" on Arthur's shield. But only a knight with a piety of 25 or greater was capable of using the Citadel Scroll. And the only way to build piety is to spent hours praying at a church. Thus, I had to reload a save from the beginning of the scenario, have my knights sit at a church until their piety was at the sufficient level, and replay everything again.

    

Trust me, I wasn't feeling particularly "pious" right now.

    

With the shield thus enchanted, the Shadowmaster could hardly do any damage at all, and Lancelot killed him in a few hits.

   

   

The endgame text describes how the party returns to Camelot and heals Constantine with the Grail and the land is saved, at least until William of Normandy shows up.

How the paralyzed Constantine "sips" from the Grail isn't well explained.

    

Mind if I add a quick GIMLET to this already-long post?

• 4 points for the game world. It uses an unusual historical setting--maybe the first and only time that we see Islamic Iberia in an RPG--but merging this history with Arthurian legends doesn't really make any sense, and I can't say that the backdrop contributed significantly to the story except for a couple NPCs and of course the landscape. The Shadowmaster was just a generic "big bad," and his nature and threat is never well explained in the game or backstory. I did, however, like the concept of a living world in which events happen independent of the party and yet you can still influence them.

• 2 points for character creation and development. You "choose" characters rather than create them, and the game doesn't give you a lot of help with that. There's little reason not to just pick the strongest knight (Lancelot) and have him wield all the best equipment and get all of the combat points. "Development" consists of an occasional combat or magic point--definitely the bare minimum to be considered an RPG at all.

       

Some character stats that increase with use and equipment.

   

• 5 points for NPC interaction. A key part of the game is finding messengers and allies and agreeing to help (or not) with their quests. Some of them are historically based, which adds some more depth.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. The enemies in the game are a bland selection of skeletons, Saracens, dwarves, and such--nothing to celebrate. As I often do, I give a couple points here for the adventure-style puzzles, but not a lot because I don't think they're very good.

• 2 points for magic and combat. Both individual and army combat are boring, automatic, and overly random. There is little in the way of tactics except for the occasional spell.

• 3 points for equipment. There are a handful of items to buy, find, wield, and use, but they make permanent changes to the character's attributes and are not the types of tradable, swappable, droppable inventory that you really seek in an RPG.

• 5 points for the economy. Because hiring armies costs so much, I was too paranoid to spend gold through much of the game, but it does have a lot of value, both in hiring allies and buying various potions and spell reagents, and you earn it both from quest completion and searching slain foes.

• 3 points for a main quest and a number of optional areas.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are fantastic--probably the best part of the game--but there's no sound beyond music and I found the mouse-driven interface clunky. It was too easy to click on the wrong thing.

        

Beautifully-composed scenes like this gypsy camp are the highlight of the game.

     

• 3 points for gameplay. It's deceptively linear, meaning the ability to traverse the Iberian peninsula makes it seem non-linear, but really each scenario confines you to a couple of cities. I suppose it's slightly "replayable" for different experiences with different knights, and different ways to accomplish some of the missions. I find it just a tad exasperating, but at least it's over quickly with a little help.

The final score of 34 puts it right below my "recommended" threshold and 1 point higher than I gave Spirit of Excalibur. Spirit had a much better story and game setting, but Vengeance has a better economy. The rest of the categories rate about the same. Reading over my Spirit rating, I see that I made a lot of the same comments, particularly on the nonlinearity issue: "I hold a special contempt for games that seem nonlinear but actually expect you to follow a precise path. What starts as, 'Wow! I can go anywhere in Britain!' soon becomes 'Wow! If I don't hit these towns in this precise order, there's no way to defeat the Saxon armies!'"
    

This title should have been rejected for the same reason that Revenge of the Jedi was.

 
Contemporary reviews tended to praise the original setting but gave poor overall ratings. Most noted that the problems inherent in Spirit of Excalibur hadn't been fixed. Amiga Power, wrote, "Back in May last year we less-than-eccstatically [sic] reviewed this game's predecessor, Spirit of Excalibur. This one's no better." Amiga Action in June 1992: "Following on the heels of Spirit of Excalibur, Vengeance revives the previous disappointment with a sequel of equally low stature."

The January 1992 Computer Gaming World offers a nuanced review, making most of the criticisms that I do: lack of information about the knights and spells, the horrible blow to role-playing in the dwarf caverns, and the tactically-bereft combat system among them.
      

Both Spirit and Vengeance exemplify Synergistic's refusal--going all the way back to Robert Clardy's Campaign series--to define itself by a single genre. But while originality is admirable, it has to be tempered with strong game elements. The games blend some strategy, adventure, and RPG characters, but they don't go deep enough into any of these genres and thus leave fans of all of them feeling a bit unsatisfied. The company is only going to have one more chance--1996's Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance--to get it right.

I needed a quick one after Disciples of Steel, and that served okay. The next 1991 game is one I know nothing about--Dusk of the Gods--followed by the familiar comfort of a Gold Box title.

****

Further Reading: Check out the other games made with Synergistic's "World Builder" engine: War in Middle Earth (1988),  Spirit of Excalibur (1990), and Conan: The Cimmerian (1991).