Game 246: Wrath of Denethenor (1986)

    

The Wrath of Denethenor

United States

Independently developed; published by Sierra

Released in 1986 for Apple II and Commodore 64

Date Started: 6 March 2017
Date Ended: 13 March 2017

Total Hours: 26

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)

Final Rating: 31

Ranking at Time of Posting: 144/248 (58%)

The Wrath of Denethenor is the most competent Ultima clone that we've seen, perhaps excepting, if we're extending that term to it, Questron. Difficult and complicated, it at times exceeds Ultima I-II, although that might be faint praise for 1986, given what came out in between. It took me long enough to win that I could have squeezed at least 3 entries out of it, but it came up at an odd time where I'd already written and scheduled the next 5 entries, so I didn't need to stretch this one out. That's probably for the best: it's a long game to conquer, but not a lot of plot happens in between.
    

Some scrolling text at the beginning sets up the story.

    

The setup is of the typical "evil wizard" variety. Once, the land of Deledain was in balance, with four island kingdoms--Nisondel, Cestiona, Arveduin, and Mystenor--ruled independently. Then Lord Denethenor of Mystenor (a likely play on The Lord of The Rings' Denethor) started exploring the dark arts and decided he wanted to rule everything. He's sent monsters to flood the neighboring lands, and everyone is terrified. The PC is a young adventurer from Nisondel--so far, the least affected of the kingdoms--who sets out to stop the threat.
    

Approaching the King of Nisondel.

    

There's no character creation except the specification of a name. Every character starts with 5 strength and intelligence, 1000 hit points, 600 stamina, 300 gold, and no items. The game is unique, however, in that information about the character and the world state is written to all four of the game disks. More on the ramifications of this in a bit.
     

Character creation.

    

All commands are delivered by a single key, such as (C)onverse, (H)oist anchor, (O)pen door, and (R)est. Movement is with the IJKM cluster.

Each of the four kingdoms is an island, or series of islands, and the game starts on Nisondel. The monsters are easiest here, and the towns are completely safe. Each kingdom has its own map, and each map (nonsensically) wraps around on itself, as do the dungeon maps. There are multiple dungeons in the game, although some of them are completely optional.
    

Working my way through a dungeon.

    

In its opening stages, the game will seem very familiar to anyone who's played Ultima II. Monsters spawn all around the land and sometimes stack up behind mountains or on peninsulas where their pathfinding is poor. Combat is a little more complex than Ultima--instead of just hitting (A)ttack, you hit TAB (CTRL on the Commodore) and the direction you want to attack, then specify a high, level, or low attack. These options don't really add anything to the combat except force you to pay attention whether you're facing a regular creature, a small creature, or a flying creature.
     

Grinding for gold and items against a line of monsters while more wait behind the mountains.

   

When the creature dies, it sometimes delivers gold, sometimes one of the special items you need to cast spells. Anyone who remembers mowing down rogues and guards hoping to find blue tassels, keys, and powder will have a similar experience here, killing monsters to find torches, scrolls, pendants, charms, and silver powder. There is otherwise no experience or leveling in the game, and thus no reason to kill things except that they're trying to kill you.

Equipment is pretty basic. There are maybe 8 weapons, ranging in quality from whip to rapier, which adjust your strength up to a maximum of 30. There's no creative swapping of weapons here; when you hit (E)quip, you just get the best one. Armor comes only in four types, cloaks to plate, and simply absorbs a fixed number of damage points.
     

Equipping the "best items" later in the game.

     

Denethenor's somewhat odd approach doesn't become fully clear until you've played it for a while. Hit points, the most important resource of any other game, are worth virtually nothing here. The character needs only to find some safe corner and rest indefinitely to earn up to 9,999 of them. The far greater danger, just like the early Ultima games, is starving to death. A "stamina" score is boosted by food and depleted with every action and with every spell cast.

Since food costs money--as does equipment--the primary mechanism of gameplay is to get as rich as possible. You can try to do that by grinding against enemies, but they deliver paltry amounts of gold. To really bulk up your resources, you need to find treasure chests. Dungeons have them, and they regenerate slowly over time, but the best way--the way that the game seems tailor-made to support--is burglarizing them in towns and castles, just like in Ultima III.

     

Taking those chests is going to involve killing 3 guards and casting at least two instances of RESONIM--but there are enough of them to be worth it.

    

There are a couple of twists to this thievery. First, some chests are behind locked doors and energy fields, and when all is said and done, you might find that you've expended more in stamina and items than you made via the chests. Second, stealing turns the chest owners and guards hostile. Unlike Ultima II--where you could steal, kill some guards, flee town, and re-enter to find everyone alive again--NPC deaths in Denethenor are permanent and saved to the game state. Kill a shopkeeper and you'll never be able to buy what he's selling again. Kill a random NPC and you'd better hope that you got his clue first. Thus, to make the most out of theivery, you really have to study the map, figure out the best means of entry and escape, and calculate the risk/reward ratio.
    

A guard is prophetic.

    

Once you have the best equipment, the need for gold becomes less acute--food isn't that expensive--and you can give up the life of crime, but I rather found these opening stages the most interesting of the game.

The outdoor and indoor terrain will again be familiar to an Ultima player--including impassable mountains, water, store counters, locked and unlocked doors, shop names spelled out in large letters read from above, hidden areas in each town where you find key NPCs, and ships that you need to steal. NPC dialogue is also the same: NPCs have only one line, and most of them say generic things like "Having a nice day?" or (for guards), "Behave yourself!" A few key NPCs have major hints, and chief among these are the words of power that you need to speak to cast the game's 10 spells, which are more like puzzle-solving devices than traditional combat spells.
     

An NPC gives a clue as to the location of a spell.

     

Some major differences become clear after a few hours. First, the lands and cities of Denethenor are much larger than any Ultima or Questron game. I might even say that they're too large. They exhausted me a bit. Each land has islands and peninsulas cut off from the mainland, and you have to find your way around with "dimension doors," multiple dungeon entrances and exits, and (when you can find them) ships.

Second, dungeons are still top-down rather than first-person. To navigate them, you have to have been told the TULICANRE spell and have a supply of torches on which to cast the enchantment. They're full of traps (there's a "disarm" option, but I found it usually fails), treasures, and complex twisty passages. Like the lands and towns, some of them are simply enormous and require multiple hours to fully explore.

     

The mapping spell helps figure out a complex dungeon.

     

Third, the game is fairly linear. You basically progress from Nisondel to Cestiona to Arveduin to the Isles of Bregalad to Mystenor, in that order, and even within the individual maps, you often have to follow an exact path through mountains, dungeons, towns, water, and dimension doors to find your way to the next map. This makes it particularly hard towards the endgame because you lack opportunities to easily backtrack for food and supplies. The shops are very inconsistent. The best weapon (the rapier) can only be purchased on the first map, and the first town you encounter, Backwoods, has the only location where you can sell excess inventory. There isn't necessarily a food shop in every town.

Thematically, the progression of lands is fun to experience. The first three kingdoms have kings in their castles who give you 10 point boosts to intelligence. The ruler of Cestiona even gives you a side-quest to find some hemlock. Monsters get progressively harder, and by the fourth map, they're even showing up in towns. There's one town that's completely overrun by monsters, with all the shops smashed and empty, and you find the townsfolk living underground, voluntarily sacrificing themselves into a volcano to keep the orcs at bay. (This "town" is the only place where you can actually purchase spell reagents.)

    

An underground town is menaced by orcs.

    

One by one, from exhaustively talking to NPCs, you get the game's 10 spells. As I said, most of them are for navigation and puzzle-solving. SPECERE makes a map; TULICANRE lights a torch; NETRELON lets you pass locked doors; and RESONIM dispels energy fields temporarily.
    

SPECERE helps you figure your location in the large overworld.

    
A couple other useful ones are a "time stop" spell called MONSROL that lets you run past monsters, and an invisibility spell called INSLERETE. Late in the game you get spells that damage or destroy enemies, but by then stamina is so precious it seems irresponsible to waste 50 points casting, say, a LETHREN (fireball). The earliest spells all require an item to cast: a scroll for SPECERE, a torch for TULICANRE, a charm for NETRELON, and so forth. But about half of the spells--including the vital RESONIM--don't require anything.

The game does some interesting things with its disks to minimize swapping. All of the towns, lands, and dungeons in one area will be on one disk so you only really have to swap when you (rarely) move between lands. Moreover, as you do move between lands the game saves the changes you've made to them (e.g., chests plundered, NPCs killed). When you go to save the character, the game just saves him on whatever disk is active. When you quit and reload, the game has to do some scouting of the disks sometimes to find the character file.
     

The game occasionally shows a sense of humor.

     

One unwelcome element is the day/night cycle. Such a concept is hardly new to Denethenor, but what is unusual here is the length of the cycles. It takes 5 game actions for 1 minute to pass, so a whopping 3,600 actions make up a 12-hour cycle. At 19:00, the world starts growing darker and doesn't get fully light again for 3,600 more actions. This makes outdoor and town exploration difficult without wasting a lot of torches (which don't fully light up the area anyway). And you can't just sleep away the time: the (R)est command does nothing more than pass the turns in place as if you were holding down the SPACE bar. It also depletes precious stamina.
   

I'm just going to have to live with this for a while.

    

Other minor notes:

• Enemies can blunder into traps, get hit by each others' spells and ranged attacks, and get caught when dispelled energy fields turn back on. That's always fun.

• Hit points regenerate as you walk and rest outside or in dungeons. They do not regenerate in towns.

• After you cast a spell, a little meter takes a few rounds to recharge before you can cast again. This has major consequences towards the end of the game.

• Some of the dungeons are completely dark--torches don't work--and you have to navigate with the SPECERE spell or by feeling your way.

• Some of the towns have banks, but you can't actually do anything with them except, I suppose, rob them.

    

And how often do kings wander into town?

    

• Enemy wizards have a highly-original attack by which they send you flying away from them until you hit an impassable object. Outdoors, they can send you shooting across an entire continent until you slam into a mountain range.

• There's a unique creature here called a terrahydra which originates in the sea but can climb up and attack you on land; it has a different icon for each location. I think all of Ultima's creatures are land- or sea-only.

• Enemies can attack and move on the diagonal, but the character can only move and attack in the four cardinal directions.

• When you're in a ship, you attack with ships' cannons, but you don't get any gold or items from the kills.

    

Attacking a "terrahydra" from a ship.

    

To win the game, I had to find the right paths, ladders, and doors through the continents to the final land of Mystenor. I had to look up a hint at one point when I couldn't find a way forward; it turned out I needed to visit a particular city during the midnight hour to find the teleporter (I must have missed a hint).
   

Actually, it turns out that I screen-shot the hint. I just didn't remember it.

    

Very late in the game, I found the hemlock that the king of Cestiona wanted. But by the time I found it, I couldn't figure out how to easily get back to the king. I never turned in this quest. The developer later told me that if I had, I would have received a significant boost to my intelligence, which would have made the endgame much easier.

Eventually, my ship came upon an island with Castle Denethenor. It was surrounded by energy fields that I had to dispel with a RESONIM. As I entered, I expected combats, but instead I found friendly guards and NPCs who said things like, "Someday, the truth will be revealed and Mirrih dethroned" and "the other Lords of Deledain are just jealous." Denethenor, sitting on his throne, greeted me with a friendly, "Live long, friend." I thought the game was setting me up for a plot twist, but I didn't know how to act on it, so I decided to try to kill Denethenor to see what happened.

    

The nicest villain ever.

    

He died in about 2 hits. When I stepped where his throne had been, the entire castle and its NPCs were revealed as an illusion. The facade disappeared and I was standing in a crumbling ruin next to a message that said "UrenDuirEsex." 

    

"Ruined ur sex?"

    

A teleporter outside the castle took me to the real Castle Denethenor, where I had to solve an underground dungeon maze to emerge in the castle proper. There were about one billion demons in the castle, and by this point in the game I was mostly using MOSROL to stop time and run past them. There were also a few locations where something killed me in a single hit, and I could only pass with the INSLERETE invisibility spell. Lots of doors that required NETRELON and lots of magical force fields, too. A player could easily reach this point and find himself in a "walking dead" situation because he didn't have enough spell reagents.

    

The final castle offered some challenges.

    

Denethenor's throne room was in the northern part of the fortress, and every time I tried to approach from the obvious way, he spotted me (even with invisibility active) and sent a legion of demons to kill me. (Apparently, some NPC dialogue that I missed warned not to approach from the west.)

    

    

Through exploration, trial, and error, I found an alternate route. A secret passage from a southern room led to the outer walls. It ultimately became clear that I needed to traverse these outer walls and sneak up on Denethenor from behind. The problem was, the interior of the walls was filled with magic energy fields. I could dispel them with RESONIM, but the spell is temporary, and I didn't have enough time to reach safe spots within the walls before the fields came back on and started frying me, directly damaging both stamina and health. Because you can't cast another spell for maybe a dozen rounds, I had to sit there in the fields, taking constant damage, until the game let me cast again. (Again, if I'd solved the hemlock quest, the time between castings would have been reduced and the duration of the spell would have been lengthened.)

    

This is the worst plan ever.

   

It became clear that I simply didn't have enough hit points and health to proceed, so I had to reload an earlier save, buy plenty of food, rest a lot to get my hit points up, and re-do a bunch of the game to try again. This time, I had enough resources to survive, and I was able to enter Denethenor's chambers. He was surrounded by force fields, but another RESONIM got rid of them. However, when I approached him, he spotted me when I was one square away.

    

Okay, seriously. Stop calling me a fool.

     

Reloading yet again, I found that I could approach him if I had INSLERETE active. I couldn't attack him--the game insisted that no one was there--but the magic word learned in the fake castle somehow brought about his doom.

    

I defeat the big bad by sneaking up on him and whispering something about sex.

     

The ending was reasonably satisfying. Denethenor died and his castle shook and was fractured. This was accompanied by about 5 constant minutes of cacophonous sound.

Denethenor was apparently a "load-bearing boss."

    

The game said that I woke up in an unfamiliar place. Before I could take any action, it simply gave me a winning screen.

      

Yes, where am I, exactly? This is going to bother me.

     

As okay as the ending was, it fell short of expectations. One of the reasons I forced myself to finish the game--and it really was an effort during the last 10 hours or so--was that a contemporary review promised a mind-blowing ending. "The grand finale is a masterpiece of programming," it said. I was expecting a Questron-level epilogue and really looked forward to writing about it. Later, I realized that this glowing review came from Sierra's own magazine.

In a GIMLET, The Wrath of Denethenor earns:

• 4 points for the gameworld. The story is derivative, but it does a good job of matching game elements with the backstory, offering areas not seen in typical Ultima games (e.g., a lunatic asylum), and achieving a persistence with the game world.

     

Talking to a NPC in the insane asylum.

     

• 1 point for character creation and development. Unfortunately, there's hardly any of either. It barely qualifies as an RPG in this sense.

     

You get strength boosts from equipping better weapons; you get intelligence boosts by talking to regional kings.

    

• 3 points for NPC interaction. Just one-line monologues, but still more than some games of the time were offering.

An NPC gives the location of a key teleporter.

     

• 3 points for encounters and foes. The original slate of monsters, well-described in the manual, offers a few new and innovative things in their special attacks.

• 3 points for magic and combat. Most of that goes to the way magic is used to solve navigation puzzles. There are really no combat options at all.

• 2 points for a minimalist approach to equipment.

• 5 points for the economy. The strongest part of the game, and one of the few games that truly rewards a life of crime versus more banal monster-slaying.

    

Money never runs out of value.

    

• 4 points for a main quest with a few stages, one side quest, and a few optional areas and dungeons.

    

I do wonder what this side quest would have gotten me.

   

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. Graphics and sound are only okay, but any interface that just requires me to memorize a few intuitive letters always gets a high score from me.

• 2 points for gameplay. Alas, Denethenor is just a little too large, linear, hard, and long.

            

The final score of 31 is higher than I've rated any Ultima clone, including Ring of Darkness (25), Vampyr (28), and Legend of Lothian (23), although (again) not Questron (32). It's even higher than I rated Ultima II (21). There was some really good work here, marred primarily by size, length, and inability to shortcut certain areas.
   

Scorpia reviewed Denethenor in the May 1987 Computer Gaming World and mostly offered the same opinions that I did. She comments on its clear similarity to the first two Ultimas and says although it is "well-crafted," it "offers nothing fresh to the RPG genre." To be fair, she also notes that the game only sold for $20 in an era when the more common price was $40 or $50.

Denethenor was programmed by Christopher Crim with graphics by Kevin Christiansen. An acknowledgement in the manual suggests that the two friends went to high school together in Bishop, California and began working on the game before graduation. It was finished while Crim was halfway through his bachelor's degree in computer science at the University of California at Irvine. Crim would go on to spend his career at Filemaker, Inc. (formerly Claris). He is now at least semi-retired. We corresponded a bit last week. He acknowledges the game's debt to Ultima and says he wanted to improve on the size and complexity of the geography, which he clearly did. Having read a draft of my review, he notes that I missed a lot of clues and some beneficial side-areas and seemed surprised that I was able to win anyway.

This was the first RPG that Sierra published after losing the Ultima series in 1983. I like to think that while they enjoyed the game, the prospect of annoying Richard Garriott must have been at least a secondary consideration in their decision to publish it.

With this review completed, we've hit the end of 1986 for the second time. There's not much chance that any of the games I've played since August are going to unseat Starflight as "Game of the Year," although we do perhaps need to have a discussion about why I chose Starflight over Might & Magic. Either way, expect a transition posting coming up.