Might and Magic III: Mudcrabs and Mud-Slinging

Disgusting creatures. I hope to never see another.

       

Most CRPG fans know of Scorpia, Computer Gaming World's preeminent reviewer of RPGs for over 15 years (c. 1984-1999). I consult her reviews after every game that I complete. I generally find myself agreeing with her--anyone that names Ultima IV as her favorite RPG has unimpeachable taste--and even when I don't, I can usually see her point. That is, except when I can't. Every once in a while, she fires off a review that comes out of nowhere, often complaining that a game lacks features that literally no game of the era offered. (Her comment about "no true role-playing" in one of the Krynn games continues to baffle me.) Despite high praise for Ultima IV, for instance, she gave a negative review to Ultima V, which 99% of players would call superior except perhaps for the plot.

If a positive review for Ultima IV but a negative one for Ultima V seems odd, it wasn't the only time this happened. Her April 1987 review of the original Might and Magic is nothing but praise. Even when she acknowledges the early game's legendary difficulty, she's clearly (like me) more exhilarated than annoyed by it. She's enchanted by the encounter-packed maps, the detailed combat, and even the minimalist plot. You could pull quotes from the review that would shame the most hyperbolic movie poster: "One of THE most extensive computer RPGs around . . . world-touring on a grand scale! . . . its scope and complexity are amazing . . . highly recommended!"

The second game introduces NPCs and skills and has updated graphics, but keeps enough of the core gameplay that it's hard to imagine liking one but hating the other. Thus, Scorpia's largely negative review in the March 1989 issue seems to come out of nowhere. Sure, the whole NPC mechanic is a little unnecessary, but kiddo, where were you finding any games in 1989 in which NPCs had "personalities of their own"? She criticizes the game for offering extra quests and areas not essential to the plot and criticizes the plot as "simple," apparently forgetting that the first game, until the final screen, had no plot at all. She lambastes getting an extra 50 million experience points upon finishing the game. I mean, I guess I agree that they're kind of useless if you don't want to keep playing (and by the way, how many games offered the ability to keep playing after you win?), but they don't exactly hurt, do they? I think Scorpia's primary issue--I see this in a lot of her reviews--is that she gets hung up over a bad element or two--bugs or mechanics that don't work exactly like they're supposed to do--and it casts a pall over the rest of her enjoyment of the game. I remember how she went on for like a page analyzing combat rolls in the sewers section of Curse of the Azure Bonds, for instance. Here, apparently a couple of side quests were broken on the first release.

Van Caneghem was naturally surprised upon reading the review. "We had worked so hard on Might and Magic II, and it was a big step up from the first one . . . it had everything that Might and Magic I had, elevated," he said in an interview earlier this year with Matt Barton. (Incidentally, he remembers the review incorrectly, thinking that it all came down to the cryptogram puzzle at the end of the game. This is in fact only one thing Scorpia complains about, and not anywhere near the most serious.) Surprise festered into anger. The May 1989 issue published a long letter from Van Caneghem in which he attacks Scorpia's very qualifications as an RPG reviewer, suggesting that she would be more interested in adventure games. He correctly points out that the end of the game, though odd, was a deliberate attempt to avoid the very "foozle" that Scorpia coined the term to denigrate. He expresses (deserved) bafflement at her comments about too much combat, noting that "approximately half the time spent in any current fantasy role-playing game is combat time." His penultimate paragraph is quite a roast, and I suspect he was thinking of Ultima V when he wrote it:

      

Maybe a different reviewer should oversee the CRPG genre. Of the reviews Scorpia has done of CRPGs, even those with a favorable end have been thrashed within an inch of death before earning the "recommended" status . . . The majority of these have been sequels to classic games and have gone on to become classics themselves and favorites of game players everywhere, bereft of Scorpia's approval.

        

To her credit, Scorpia gives a measured reply to the letter, defending her obligations as a game journalist, and if I didn't think she was simply wrong about the qualities of Might and Magic II, and the way she reviewed it, I would think that she came out looking better from the whole episode.

Van Caneghem wasn't finished, which brings us to the present game. This is a monster encountered in the dungeons of Swamp Town:

     

You think the artists were influenced by The Little Mermaid's Ursula?

      

I had heard for years about Scorpia's inclusion in Might and Magic III, but I thought she was a one-off NPC. I thought I remembered her out on the ocean somewhere. Instead, she's a whole class of monsters capable of poisoning the party. You have to kill about 15 of them in the town's dungeon.

If Scorpia ever reacted to her depiction as a morbidly obese witch with bad makeup and horrendous fashion sense, I haven't been able to find it. In the same interview linked above, Barton asked Van Caneghem whether she'd had any reaction, and Van Caneghem said, "Said she was flattered to be included in the game, which I thought was wonderful." (That does admittedly sound like Scorpia. I read a interview with her once in which the interviewer tried repeatedly to get her to say that she'd suffered belittlement or discrimination because of her sex, but she refused to rise to the bait.) I was hoping that she'd reviewed Might and Magic III, but the magazine's editors, probably thinking politically, assigned it to someone else. She did have praise for the game in a October 1993 summary of dozens of RPGs on the market, but she stuck to her guns on its predecessor, saying that Terra's positives "turn the series away from the excesses of the past" and result in "a big improvement." Anyway, it's all a fun piece of CRPG trivia, particularly given that it doesn't sound like anyone is still bitter.

      

My reward for donating at all the temples was a few iron weapons and a coral shield.

        

As I played through this session, it became somewhat clear to me that the developers intended the player to visit each of the towns before doing any serious outdoor or dungeon exploration. This is the sensible approach in both previous games, and there are a lot of clues that they intended the tradition to carry forward, including the availability of a boat from the starting island to Swamp Town (unnecessary if the party has already acquired "Town Portal" or even "Water Walk"), the fact that the magic mirror password to Blistering Heights appears in the Swamp Town dungeon, and the fact that your reward for donating at all five temples is a set of equipment that even a Level 4 character would find useless. Also, the enemies in both remaining cities were laughably easy at my level.

Corak's notes on Swamp Town indicated that the city had been taken over by undead after VonEmosh, "master of the walking dead," had destroyed it. The ninja clan, which made a truce with the undead master, "remains undisturbed." This translated to the town's services being located behind secret doors, guarded by kicking ninjas.

     

True to the theme, even the trainers in Swamp Town are undead.

     

The rest of the town had encounters with ghouls and ghosts, the latter immune to most physical attacks. There were a lot of graves to search, some of which cursed my characters or produced enemies, others of which delivered treasure. One of the things I'm growing to dislike about Might and Magic III is the pre-determined nature of treasure and traps. There are some chests with basic traps that require a thief's skill to disarm, with random treasure inside, but the larger percentage of chests, graves, coffins, coffers, and so forth seem to offer a pre-determined, inevitable outcome, with no way to search, anticipate, or avoid. Since you have to test and open everything, just in case, you simply have to suck up and deal with every ill the game wants to throw at you. I know it's too early to expect a title like Fallout 4, where if you look carefully you can see the tripwire, but it would be nice if traps were something that you could role-play instead of just endure.

      

Alas, this was not just a saying.

     

In addition to Scorpias, the Swamp Town dungeon had phantoms that cause magic aging. I never suffered it because I was able to kill them in one or two blows. Two long spiraling hallways ended in altars that conferred 20-point boosts in strength and endurance for all party members.

A statue in Swamp Town had the first reference to the "main quest" in a long time. A statue of Prince Smallberry, "explorer of the swampy lands," said that, "When Princess Trueberry was abducted by Sheltem the Dark, Prince Smallberry was the first to come to her aid, and the first to fall dead at the dark one's feet." I've otherwise heard nothing of Sheltem all game. Two other statues, in response to riddles so easy I'm not even going to repeat them, gave me passwords to the "Main Engine Sector" and the "Beta Engine Sector"--of what, I don't know.

By this point, the trainers in Swamp Town were unable to advance my characters any further, so I went right for Blistering Heights, the last city, nestled in the midst of a volcanic island. Outside, which I only explored for a few steps, characters take fire damage with every move. Inside, fire lizards and demons roamed the halls. But statues cheerfully offered +50 boosts to elemental resistances, making what would have already been an easy area very easy.

       

These guys look a lot harder than they are.

      

Aside: I've never really understood resistances in the Might and Magic games. Here, a 50-point resistance is enough to block all damage from the fire-based attacks inside and outside of the town, so perhaps it's not so much a percentage as an hard threshold? Later, in Might and Magic VI-VIII, the opposite is true: no matter how high your resistance, you always seem to take some damage from elemental attacks. 

     

The Isles of Terra are noted for their six-legged spiders.

      

The caverns below Blistering Heights (presented in Corak's notes as the husk of a giant spider rather than a man-made formation) offered combats with "fire stalkers," who are immune to physical damage but who fell easily to my cold-based spells. 

          

I have no idea what's going on with my lead character in this screenshot. I don't remember anything driving me insane in the area.

      

There was another Scorpia or two, plus pools of fire on the floor. (As with some of the traps in other dungeons, I reflected that the pools of fire are there to separate the true role-players from those who really want a completed automap.) At the end of each of the spider's "legs" was an altar offering a permanent increase in resistances.

      

      

At this point, I was a bit lost. Other that really needing to find the "evil" castle to get rid of a bunch of Ancient Artifacts, I didn't have any compelling reason to choose any of the maps. Thanks to combinations of "Town Portal," "Lloyd's Beacon," and "Water Walk," I could pretty much go anywhere. Incidentally, right about this time, I figured out that "Lloyd's Beacon" is specific to each character, meaning that I could have two beacons active at once. I had my archer set his in the midst of the attribute-boosting wells in B1 so it wouldn't cost me so much time to visit.

Ultimately, I succumbed to lawnmowing tendencies and made my next visit to C1. The area was about 50% water, with two small islands in the middle, crawling with trivially-easy sprites and absurdly difficult cyclopes. There were no dungeons, just a couple of treasure chests and spawn points for the enemies.

       

The frozen tundra of the northern isles is about a day's walk from the palm trees and sand in the south.

      

The eastern island held an altar to the full moon. Corak's notes warned me that desecrating it would draw the wrath of werewolves, and sure enough, that's what happened. The creatures cause disease and have a ton of hit points, and my party probably deserved the grief they brought me. Why did I desecrate the altar? Who has a problem with the full moon, for gods' sake?

     

Flinging a fireball. Note the diseased characters in the middle.

    

Problems started in C2. The Isle of Fire in the middle of the game world encroaches on at least four maps--C2, D2, C3, and D3--and the spires of brimstone that ring the island form a hard wall. You can't just walk across them like mountains; you have to thread through them like a maze. ("Teleport" and "Etherealize" also don't work.) Unable to reach the interior without returning to Blistering Heights, all I could do was map the northwest contours of the island and the water squares around it.

     

The exterior of the volcanic island is impenetrable.

     

The water squares held a few whirlpools, but unlike the ones on a previous map, they didn't send the party to some distant shore. Instead, they held floating boxes of treasure. The problem was, every time I opened one, I summoned a handful of monsters. In this case, they were "dragon worms," perhaps the toughest creature I'd faced in the game so far. Despite that appellation, they weren't that tough, and though I relied more on damage spells that with previous enemies, I was able to kill them without much problem.

     

These guys are going to become a lot more annoying in VI.

     

Map C3 was a different story. It was almost a mirror of C2, outlining the southwest coast of the Isle of Fire, and offering more floating chests. These didn't summon "dragon worms," however; they summoned something called "kudo crabs" which I'll be happy never to face again. My party members couldn't even hit them (or couldn't penetrate their hides). Every physical attack failed. And as they had more than 2,500 hit points, even magic attacks weren't very useful. Moreover, almost every one of their devastating attacks shattered my armor. Even hopped up on well water, I was no match for them. It took me about 25 minutes and all my (artificially elevated) spell points to kill even one.

       

The bartender really understates things.

       

Nothing was forcing me to open the chests adrift on the water, and I could have dealt with the issue by simply saving them for later or bypassing them, but for some reason I was feeling stubborn this time. I claimed the experience due to me for the Ancient Artificacts of Good and Neutrality that I was carrying, leveled up (level average is around 25 at this point), and returned to Blistering Heights to visit the magic guild because I'd forgotten to do that before. There, I bought the rest of the game's most powerful spells--names like "Inferno," "Incinerate," "Dancing Sword," "Implosion," "Moonray," and "Star Burst."

     

#$@*, yeah. It's almost too bad the crabs only attack one at a time.

     

I visited the wells that increased levels, hit points, spell points, armor class, strength, luck, and dexterity. I donated at the temple in Baywatch enough times to get the various blessings cast on each of the characters. I un-equipped my armor. Then I returned to the map and confronted the crabs.

It was a useful exercise. First, it taught me how some of the spells work. "Mass Distortion" is a particularly useful one that halves an enemy's hit points no matter how many it has. The only thing is, it doesn't work (or, at least, not to its maximum effect) every time. You can't get discouraged; you have to keep casting it. I also determined that some spells increase the spell point cost with the character level, and since my levels were artificially inflated, it was costing a lot. My mage could cast "Dancing Sword" maybe three times and then he was out. I settled into powerful but less costly spells like "Incinerate" and "Fiery Flail," expending more gems on 9 crabs than all of the prior enemies in the game.

      

"Identify Monster" disabuses me of the notion that I've made any significant progress in this battle.

       

It took several trips back to the fountains and temples, but ultimately I was victorious, and got some pretty good loot for my trouble. Everyone has something of obsidian--the best material in the game--at this point. The experience rewards were decent, too, although not as much as the difficulty of the enemy warranted. Even while juicing on well water, though, my characters couldn't land a blow on the damned crabs. I hope I don't encounter more of them--or something worse--on the other side of the island. I'm sure I will.

I capped the session with a visit to C4 and one of the desert islands to the south. It had a fountain that increased my accuracy by 60 points, which would have been nice to know about before the crabs. (I know, I know--it's my fault.) There were a handful of treasures, combats against barbarians and dino beetles, and Greywind's Castle. I had been told to visit the castle on Day 50 to sit in his throne, and it turned out I got there on Day 53. Blast. I thus saved the castle for next year. If I head right to D4, though, I might get to Blackwind's castle before Day 60.

    

I felt bad telling him that I wouldn't be back for a year.

    

Miscellaneous notes:

• Even in Blistering Heights, the store offers equipment less useful than what my characters had at Level 5. I haven't bought anything from the shops except identification and repair since the game began.

       

I outgrew steel and silver about 30 hours ago.

      

• The inventories of my first four characters are now fully taken up by quest items, including 7 Ancient Artifacts of Evil, 4 "Precious Pearls of Youth and Beauty," and 3 "Hologram Sequencing Cards." I know that I have to deliver the artifacts to the evil castle, but I don't know what the other two batches are for. I realize that if things really get out of hand, I can stash excess items on NPCs hanging out at inns.

• It occurs to me that each map, outdoor or indoor, has featured (I think) exactly three enemy types. 

• I laughed at this "Guild Info" paragraph in the last town. I'm not even sure what the option is there for.

       

"Premium" meaning "extremely high."

      

• A lot of things curse you. I'm not entirely sure what effect cursing has. I thought it caused 50% of your actions to fail, but it never seems to stop me from casting spells.

      

About half the game world explored!

     

With only one dungeon in the entirety of Column C, the game does seem to be moving a bit quicker. I'd guess I've now explored about 50% of it. I really like the feeling of standing in the first square on a new map, wondering what treasures and special encounters you'll find this time. If the Might and Magic series knows how to deliver one thing, that's it.

Time so far: 34 hours

Reload count: 13