Deathlord: Continental Drifting

It's a little late for this.

      

I hate trying to get back into a game that I've only abandoned for a few weeks--not long enough to make it seem fresh, but long enough that I forgot most of what I learned about it. I equally hate trying to make a posting out of notes that I mostly took several weeks before writing the entry. Today, I get to engage in both activities. If I don't, the blog will never get restarted, but I apologize that this one isn't going to be my highest quality.

      

Our new party member.

     

Thanks to Genpei's comments on my first entry, I dissolved my party and re-formed it without a thief. The logic here is that my ranger was going to be mostly wasted in the fourth position, since only the first three positions can attack (even with missile weapons). I gather that thieves are mostly useful for actual thieving, and not just disarming traps and finding secret doors and whatnot, so I can do without him. I moved my ranger into position #3 and added a genkai (illusionist) to the party. He comes with a decent low-level mass-damage spell.

     

A blast spell does minor damage to an entire group.

     

With the new party formed, I began a counter-clockwise circuit around the continent, hoping to get its rough shape. I figured I'd do inland exploration after sketching out the perimeter. It seems to be roughly 125 x 125 tiles, shaped enough like Britannia (an upside-down "L") that it must have just added salt to the wound.

The first new place I visited was the castle, which I only figured out because it had a castle-like icon and there was a guy on a throne who offered nothing useful except to reiterate the gist of the main quest. Unless I'm missing some mechanic, there's no way to see the names of the cities and towns, nor the names of the NPCs who populate them. I guess the opening town is "Kawa" because I got a hint that "the Daimyo of Kawa hides a secret," and I saw something called a Daimyo in the city, but I suppose it's possible that all cities have a Daimyo.

The castle had a "treasure chamber" that would have required me to kill a bunch of guards, so I declined to explore it (even if I would have survived). I also couldn't defeat the "captive demon" in the "Emperor's Private Gardens."

     

Maybe I'll come back another time.

   

An NPC told me that there was a spy locked in the northwest tower, so I went to see him. Lacking a thief, I've been opening every door by bashing, which does damage to the character if unsuccessful. This has in turn occasioned a lot of waiting around for those hit points to regenerate so I don't actually kill myself trying to bash a door.

Anyway, in the process of bashing the doors, I guess I freed the spy--along with a lot of other characters in something that looked like a jail (some of them fought me). He told me to "step 'east' on the second drop," which I imagine will come in handy later. The castle had a dungeon, which I explored a little but didn't finish because the monsters seemed a bit hard.

    

Why is "east" in quotes? Is it not really east?

            

Another city sat in the northwest corner of the continent, where a dock held 14 ships selling for 10,000 gold pieces each. I think the city is probably "Tokugawa," since a line of dialogue in another city said I could buy ships there. A weapons shop sold missile weapons, but I'm not sure they have any real purpose, since only the first three characters (who can attack with melee weapons) can attack at all. (Maybe they let me target anyone in the enemy stack?) A door blocked an area with a sign that read "keep out or face the consequences." I smashed my way through and found myself in battle with multiple stacks of zombies.

     

Are we commoners? The manual didn't really give us a backstory.

     

A dungeon on the southwest coast was once a town, complete with abandoned weapon and armor shops, now overrun with snakes and skeletons. There were a lot of chests, but oddly most of them were already opened and looted. As with the castle dungeon, I explore just long enough to get a taste for it and then moved on.

A sign somewhere in the mid-west advised me to search the "Wakiza ruins" for pirates' gold. Maybe that's where I just was? It sure looked like ruins.

      

If only the dungeons had names.

     

A dungeon in the northeast section of the continent, surrounded by swamps, served up battles with stacks of skeletons. I didn't stay long, as I was running low on spell points and hit points.

     

Trading blows with skeletons in a dungeon.

     

The last thing I found before returning to my origin point was a village on the eastern coast consisting of a few small buildings with a lot of forest in between. There was a weapon and shield shop, a food store, and several buildings I had to smash my way into for no clear reason; most had NPCs who just said "welcome," although one had a battle with a stack of yakuza.

I think the town is called "Tokushima." That's the name of the bakery, at least. This game reminds me of times when I'm driving through an unfamiliar area, trying to figure out the name of the city I'm in by scanning the names of businesses along the road.

      

I need a second sign to determine if this is the city name or just the owner's name.

     

Only during the end of my trip did I start to see little plus symbols next to my characters, indicating they could level up. Only the front three characters have the symbol, which makes me wonder if I misinterpreted some of my readers' advice. I thought if the spellcasters cast at least once per fight, they'd get equal experience for that fight. Maybe that just gives them some experience for the fight, but they need to cast every round for it to be equal? Whatever the case, they're lagging behind the fighters, and because the game doesn't let you see your experience total, I don't know by how much.

I've written down about 20 lines of NPC dialogue, none of which give me any strong hints about what do do next. "Evil is coming from the north," one says, echoed by another that tells me to "look to the north." Whether this means north of the continent or northern portions on the continent, I don't know. "Time is short," says another, and I should "find the words" and "find Senju" and "seek the Seven." Many of the dialogue lines are simply tips on playing the game: "Watch out for the storms at sea"; "Ships get stolen"; "Ruins are rich"; "Don't get caught outside at night." I spent the entire last session forgetting that there's a "keyword" option in dialogue, allowing for the possibility that NPCs will expand on these tips, so I pretty much have to go around talking to everyone again.

Miscellaneous notes:

          

• I'm sure you're sick of hearing how my colorblindness affects my gameplay experience, but it would have been nice to see more contrast, in symbol or shade, between "harmless forest" and "deadly poison." Avoiding swamps is the most annoying part of navigating outdoors. There were some areas I couldn't reach because I didn't want to trudge over poison squares.

                

I stand south and east of harmless forest squares and north of poisonous swamp squares.

                 

• There aren't very many enemies in the outdoor areas. A player who wants to grind has to wander far and wide for the occasional paltry wolf or skeleton.

• I like that the game holds enemy parties to the same rules as the players. Only their first three warriors can attack in any given round, and they can only attack your first three.

• If you don't (A)ttack the monsters first as they approach your square, they act first in combat.

• Hit points and spell points regenerate at a rate of about 1 per half-hour of game time, corresponding to around 25 moves.

• There are long loading times between areas, and when the game decides to save progress to disk. I find myself frequently switching between regular and "warp" mode in the emulator.

• Guards don't seem to mind when you slash doors or loot chests, unless you have to kill them to get past them.

                

I loot a bunch of chests, to the indifference of the NPCs in the room.

                

• I know from the manual that secret doors are possible; I just don't know what they look like. I assume there's some way to tell and I don't have to search every wall tile.

• I haven't even tried to adhere to the game's permadeath. I capture a save state every few minutes and reload if someone dies. I suppose I could start playing more honestly now that I've found a healer who resurrects.

                   

Although it might be a while before I can afford it.

      

Thus far, I've discovered three towns, two dungeons, and a castle. Now that I have a sense of the outlines of the continent, I can start mapping the interior systematically and see what else there is to find. Although I don't know exactly what to do to proceed on the main quest, I imagine I'll have to solve the "Diamyo" thing eventually.

I'm going to have to figure out a mapping process somehow. Mapping top-down games is always a pain, but the dungeons and cities are too large here not to map them. Through my usual methods (explore the perimeter, then try to clean up as much in the middle as I can), I'm sure I'm missing huge sections. In this regard, I wish Deathlord had kept Ultima's dedication to small, first-person dungeons.

      

Ultima would have offered individual epitaphs for each of these graves.

   

Deathlord does about as good as a game could do with an early Ultima base and a Wizardry combat system. The problem is both Ultima and Wizardry were six years old at this point, and both had surpassed the incarnations that inspired this game's developers. It thus offers a game as limited in mechanics as 1981 but with a much larger game world--something that I may have welcomed in 1987, but which exhausts me 30 years later as I try to get through all the other games published this year.

    

Time so far: 8 hours