Mandragore: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

  

Mandragore

France

Infogrames (developer and publisher)

Released 1985 for Apple II, 1986 for Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, MSX, and ZX Spectrum

Date Started: 26 April 2016
Date Ended: 16 May 2016

Total Hours: 15

Reload Count: 11

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 25

Ranking at Time of Posting: 90/220 (41%)
Ranking at Game #404: 176/404 (44%)

Mandragore is a rare case of an RPG that got better as it progressed. When I first started playing, seeing it as something of an Ultima clone and wanting in traditional Ultima-style mechanics, it took a lot of effort to get me to play. Later, as I tried to appreciate it for what it was trying to do...well, I still didn't like it. But I was almost able to role-play the kind of person who would like it. Someone more interested in originality than in getting a traditional RPG fix. Such a person would appreciate the sheer weirdness of its visuals, which are almost outré enough to call it the first psychedelic RPG (although you could make a strong case for Empire on that one).
   

The outdoor area looks similar to Ultima III, but the similarities end there.

  

The framing story that wraps the game is almost bland in comparison. As I discussed in the first posting, the accompanying 22-page novella describes how the default party gets together, embarks on a quest to defeat the evil usurper Yarod-Nor, and is ultimately defeated and dispersed over the course of their adventures. But if you start the game with the default party, everyone is hale and together, so that's a bit of an unsolved mystery. After I defeated the game, I re-read the story to see if there were any hints. Although the party encounters some of the same monsters as the player does in-game, the manual doesn't give any explicit hints.

The basic goal of the game is to explore 9 castles reachable by land, solve their individual puzzles, and get a "stanza" as a reward. In each case, solving the castle's puzzle involves finding the right item and then dropping it in the right room. Once you're done with the first nine castles, you buy a boat, journey to Yarad-Nor's castle on an island, and defeat him using a passcode picked up from the stanzas.
   

Yarad-Nor's subjects are suitably bleak.

   

The beginning and end of the game are standard high-fantasy stuff, but the first nine castles all have quirky, comical, or just plain screwy themes. They're not even really "castles," although that's what they look like from the outside: many feature outdoor areas and caves. In the order I found them, they are:

• A "zodiac" castle with NPCs representing each of the signs. Together, they provide a clue to look behind a bookcase, where you find an object called "Master." Dropping it on the top of the tower solves the quest.

• A "beehive" castle in which a bunch of giant bees and wasps had been driven mad because the queen's "fluid" was leaking. Solving the castle means dropping a bowl, found in one of the other castles, in front of her.

   

My "reward" for the beehive castle.

   

• The "number" castle, described in my last post, where I had to solve a magic square by dropping a "4" in the right place. Enemies included mathematical symbols.

• The "Lost World," where I met a bunch of dinosaurs, dragons, and devils. In one of its caves was a hermit, and the solution to the castle was to drop a flame (picked up, somehow, from a different screen) on his pedestal. Given the stanza that followed, the hermit seems to be Syrella's father, mentioned in the backstory, but nothing particular came of our meeting with him.

  

There was no acknowledgement of paternity here.

   

• A forested castle where I was attacked by different plant-based monsters. I had to find a plant called "Vital" and place it in the middle of a crown for some reason.

• "Heaven," where platforms circled through the clouds, and angels greeted me as NPCs. I wasn't able to solve this one--more on the consequences of that in a bit. Apparently, I was supposed to find a compass rose somewhere but I never did.

   

    

• An underwater castle of Nereids and sirens. I couldn't solve this one, either. I gather I was supposed to drop a "prow" in the siren king's chamber as an offering, but I visited the chamber too early and had to kill the king to escape.

   

Just before I killed him. I think his line refers to my party's curiosity in following the sirens to his chamber.

   

• A castle full of undead. I had to find a barrier deep in the castle and place it in front of the front doors.

   

   

• A "chess" castle full of NPCs named things like "red queen" and "green king." Solving it meant picking up the green king and dropping him somewhere else. I figured it out through trial and error.

   

   

Last time, I questioned whether it was possible to kill necessary NPCs without realizing it. Given the rest of my experience, I'm not sure there are any absolutely necessary NPCs, with the possible exception of King Triton, as above, but even that could have been something else I missed instead. In any event, it turns out that non-hostile creatures don't deliver experience points, so that's another way to tell.

Each of the castles held a set of monsters that, while bizarre in general, was specific to their themes. As I killed them, my characters increased in levels every 1,000 experience points, but I was never sure what the leveling did for me. I suppose it might have made combat easier, but with harder enemies coming along at the same time, it was tough to tell.
     

This is not the devil; only a devil.

    

Castles also held selections of treasure, weapons, and armor. As I mentioned last time, I never noticed that the weapons or armor were helping me in combat. To get to the endgame, you pretty much have to sell everything anyway, and I explored the final dungeon unarmed with no apparent drawbacks. Fortunately, I'd been stealing medicines throughout the game, because if I'd been purchasing them as often as I needed them, there's no way I would have had the 3,000 gold pieces necessary to buy the boat.

The last castle wasn't very hard until the end. There were some NPCs who alternately begged for assistance and commented on the futility of taking on Yarad-Nor. There were a couple monks I had to kill.  Eventually, I found a patch of the titular Mandragore (French for "mandrake"), which fittingly looked like a person. Each character took and ate a piece, which turned them invisible.
  

Okay, mandrake root looks kind-of like a person, but not in this way, right?

   

Soon we wandered into the chamber of the fearsome Yarad-Nor himself, labeled only "Monster." I couldn't figure out what to do here. Attacks did nothing. Talking with him did nothing. None of the commands usually applied to monsters did anything. I also couldn't leave the room.
  

To me, an evil overlord ought to have more contrasting colors.

  

Having played Ultima IV and plenty of other games in which the text found during the quest played a role in the endgame, I consulted the stanzas. I was missing two of them, as I hadn't finished those castles, but I was able to cheat and extract them from the game file just by opening it in Notepad. But each stanza basically just recapped the quest for that castle; none of them said anything about defeating Yarad-Nor. I tried to find some code among the words and letters and came up short.

I thus turned to a hint page in desperation. It took me a while to find one, and it was in French. Nonetheless, it told me what I needed to know by confirming my supposition that the code was in the stanzas. In the original French, the first letters of each stanza spell out IN DEMONEM, which is (fairly recent) Ecclesiastical Latin for "in the demon." The term actually makes sense, as we'll see in a second.
  
Anyway, stringing together the first letters of the English version spells out...TNSADWOAT. I'll save you a trip to Google: it doesn't mean anything in Latin or any other language, and in fact this page will be the only one that has it. As I typed it into the game parser, I thought, "there's no way this is going to work." But of course it did. That's some lazy translating there. It would have taken hardly any effort to translate the stanzas in such a way as to spell out the same phrase in English as it did in French; instead, the developers ensured that English players would never figure out the endgame password on their own.

 

Mandragore is the first game to feature a battle inside the enemy's body. It's not the only one because Pools of Darkness (1991) does the same thing.

   

Speaking the phrase took me inside Yarad-Nor's body. The images were freaky, but I think I was supposed to be inside his bloodstream, fighting fat globules or white blood cells or something. At last, I came to a chamber where I fought something called a "Filanta." Killing it--it wasn't very hard for the endgame boss--produced the winning message at the top of the screen.

The final battle of the game.

   

The endgame text thus had an interesting twist: Yarad-Nor, who the manual said had "appeared from nowhere" at the same time good King Jorian disappeared, was actual Jorian himself. The "Filanta" was some malevolent being that had ridden to the land in a meteor shower and possessed Jorian's body. By entering his body and killing it, I freed his mind and spirit. Groovy.

We thus start the GIMLET strong:

• 4 points for the game world. There's not much thematic consistency among the castles, but the framing story is well-told and Mandragore certain meets my first bullet point: "The game world has unique features that distinguish it from other CRPGs."

• 3 points for character creation and development. I like that the game awards experience for non-combat actions, and I like that only certain classes can access certain commands, making the choice of characters important. I don't like that the effects of leveling up aren't really palpable in the game.

   

A character sheet towards the end of the game.

   

• 2 points for a series of NPCs that deliver one-line phrases and hints.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. The monsters are uniquely named and drawn, but they don't really act any differently in combat, nor have any particular strengths or weaknesses.

   

I'm not quite sure how my party is breathing underwater here.

   

• 1 point for magic and combat. A terrible system. I didn't notice that the SPELL, PARALYZE, or HYPNOTIZE commands succeeded any more or less than simple ATTACKS, nor even much difference among the characters. There are essentially no tactics at all.

• 1 point for equipment. There's plenty of it; it just doesn't seem to do anything. My unarmed and unarmored characters at the end were just as effective as when they had weapons. There are items sold in the towns like torches and keys that never do anything in-game. The only purpose to inventory is to find things to sell and carry quest items long enough to use them.

• 4 points for the economy. Food, medicine, and the boat must be purchased within a tight, closed economic system.

• 3 points for a main quest, 2 for having one, and 1 for making it a little more interesting than most games of the era.

   

The stanza I received after defeating the haunted castle.

   

• 2 points for graphics, which are bad but interesting. None for sound, as the only sound in the game is an awful music track. None for the parser interface, which might be one of the worst I've encountered. Every errant keypress causes it to freeze up. There's an option to separate the party that is never needed.

   

And I never understood why the game insisted on listing objects you can't interact with.

   

• 4 points for gameplay. I like the nonlinearity of the first 9 castles, the moderate difficulty (I suppose I should regard it as hard since I couldn't finish 2 castles, but for some reason I don't), and the length. 15 hours is just about right for a game of this era.

Add 'em up and we get a subtotal of 26, but I'm going to subtract a point for the poor English adaptation to leave the final score at 25. It's not the best game of the era, but certainly far better than I thought when I fired it up. French developers have a way of making games that you remember even if you don't always like them, and I think Mandragore will be one of the most memorable games of 1985.

It would have been interesting to see what the author of Mandragore did as the genre evolved, but Marc Cecchi seems to have gotten out of video games shortly after it was published. The only other game I can find attributed to him is Infogrames's Oméga: Planète Invisible (1985), which seems to use the same engine. Both games would have been developed when he was in his early 20s. Since then, he appears to have gone into business consulting and is currently a senior vice president with Atos, a French IT services company.

Mandragore was the first RPG released by Infogrames--it might even have been their first game (there are three others in 1985, the company's first release year). We next saw them with Drakkhen, perhaps the best exemplar of my "memorably weird" thesis, but I don't think we'll run into the company again until 1999's Silver. They're almost entirely about action, adventure, and strategy games.

But we will have plenty of more French RPGs in the near future. As I mentioned in my 1984/1985 transition posting, this is the brief "golden age" of RPGs in France, and we have three of them in a row coming up in 1986: Faial, Fer & Flamme, and Le Fer d'Amnukor. I'm sure they'll all be suitably inscrutable.

*****

Tell me if  you agree with this line of thinking: While the Macintosh is definitely a personal computer, of all the platforms in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it is least like the others. Thus, RPGs designed specifically for the Mac make a kind-of subset of the genre and have to be studied as a unique evolutionary branch. For this reason, it would probably be a mistake to jump right to Shadow Keep (1991) without first investigating the Mac-only games that preceded it, like OrbQuest (1986) and Quarterstaff (1987), to see how this sub-genre evolved.

If this is true, I should probably move Shadow Keep off the active list and play it much later in the 1991 list, after I've played at least a couple of those earlier games.