Game 268: Legends (1987)

      

Legends

United States

Asgard Software (developer and publisher)

Released in 1987 for TI-99

Date Started: 19 October 2017    
      
You have gone 20 levels down and 20 levels back up in your search for the Amulet of Yendor, rising in the process from a scared serf to an invincible warlord. The quest item is tucked securely in your belt and the exit is in sight. Suddenly, a little Level 1 goblin appears in your path and growls. You're torn between annoyance and amusement. You faced hordes of these when you were a Level 1 adventurer, but you outgrew them a long time ago. Do I step around him or smack him across the room without breaking stride?, you wonder, knowing that by even considering the question, you're spending more time on this foe than he's worth.

You try to side-step him. He dives in front of your legs and trips you. You don't fall, but it takes a couple of seconds to right your balance. Now you're pissed. You're going to crush the little bastard's skull. You swing your mace at him but he dodges at the last second, chortling at you. You swing again; he jumps aside. You swear aloud. Fifteen steps from your destination, and you have to deal with this? You turn again towards the door, vowing to just ignore him, but now he runs up and jumps on your back, digging his claws into your neck. "Get off me," you bellow, twisting your body to and fro as his grubby nails pierce your flesh.
      

I'm going to be telling this analogy for a while, so here's the game's take on a giant cat.

    
Reeling backwards, you head for the nearest wall, intending to mangle your "opponent"--though you can't yet bring yourself to call him that---between its stones and your armor. Anticipating the satisfaction of the resulting crunch, you smile. But moments before you strike, he leaps away and into the shadows. With no way to check your momentum, you slam against the granite wall. The impact jars your armor and helm and you see stars. Shaking your head to clear it, you look around. The goblin is nowhere to be seen.

Well, at least he's--. Your thought is cut off as you abruptly notice a lack of weight on your belt. In panic you grab at your waist with your gauntleted hand. It comes up empty, confirming the worst. The Amulet of Yendor is gone. In the distance, you hear a goblin laughing. You have to be f&#*#@$ kidding me. You cast one last plaintive look towards the exit before heading back into the dungeon's shadows, girding yourself for a quest that's clearly going to take a lot longer than it should.

Legends is the CRPG equivalent of that goblin. That it's a TI-99 game meant that it was never going to be great, but it could have at least been fast. It didn't have to completely halt my momentum. It could have let me swat it out of the way with one entry. I would have been complimentary. I probably would have called it the "most complete RPG for the TI-99." I might not have been able to resist saying something like, "which is a little like being the best blues player in Millinocket, Maine." Adamantyr would have offered a spirited defense of the platform, and we would have been polite to him but no one would have really felt sincere about it. Then this entire entry would have gone completely unread until 2026, when Millinocket finally gets Internet access, and someone would feel it necessary to comment that old George Eastman strums a six-string down at the Blue Ox on Saturdays and is "not half bad."

But no. Legends has to be hard--and not in a satisfying, tactical way, but in the way where the dice rolls never go your way and you have to grind forever. My first foray out of the starting city, I got eaten by 5 "giant cats" without even once hitting them. Combats are so frequent and merciless that it was more than an hour before I could exit the city, win a single battle, and return to the city despite the city being only one square away from the battle.
       

An all-too-common message in the early game.

      
If you had a TI-99 in the 1980s and were interested in adventure games or RPGs at all, you probably knew about Asgard Software. The company sprang up in the years after Texas Instruments discontinued and disavowed its own machine. TI had famously discouraged third-party development for the platform during its life (1979-1984); afterwards, they didn't seem to care, but no major developer was interested in writing for a discontinued platform. The Maryland-based Asgard stepped in and satisfied the niche demand for TI-99 titles. Chief among these was the Tunnels of Doom Editor, written by Chicago Police Officer John Behnke, who spent untold hours decoding the 1982 game. The Editor allowed the creation of new modules, and Asgard published some of the best of these as Doom Games I (1987), II (1988), and III (1989). They also ported most of Infocom's text adventures to the TI-99 and offered a small portfolio of their own adventure titles.
       

This is the quality of graphic on the manual cover.

      
Legends (1987) and its sequel, Legends II (1989; subtitled The Sequel in case you're confused) are the only RPGs in Asgard's portfolio, although there's a sort of proto-action RPG called Old Dark Caves (1986?), written by Legends' author, Donn Granros. Granros is famous among TI-99 aficionados the way you'd be famous if you were the only competent RPG author for a cult platform.

Oh, there I go again. I'm trying my best to be polite about this, mostly because one of my oldest commenters, Adamantyr, is an enthusiastic TI-99 fan and he's helped me immeasurably on every TI-99 game I've ever played. (He has his own valuable summary of Legends and a bunch of TI-99 titles.) But for all its importance to this particular platform, Asgard was a low-rent company that sold minor games with no production values via catalog for a discontinued computer. We're not going to find genius here. We don't even find originality: Legends is a limited knockoff of Phantasie. That it begins with an unavoidable grind-fest is particularly unforgivable.

The backstory pioneers no new ground: The kingdom of Edonland (a portmanteau of "Ed" and "Donn," the two authors) used to be peaceful, but some wizard named Ashtar Creel (read: Nikademus) has stolen a spellbook and the Azure Amulet and used them to open a portal to the Land of the Dead, letting monsters roam freely. He has also created a group of Dark Knights (read: Black Knights) who terrorize the land. It is up to a party of four adventurers to stop them all.
    

As in Phantasie, you can encounter the Dark Knights wandering the landscape.

     
You have no choice but to play a party of four adventurers with fixed classes--a fighter, a ranger, a cleric, and a wizard--so during character creation, the only options are the characters' names and random rolls (1 to 20) for strength, intelligence, dexterity, constitution, charisma, hit points, and magic points. You start with a set of equipment sensible for your class.
   

A wizard's character sheet after a couple of levels.

     
Something odd happened to my characters. I originally created my own party, which you see in some of these screenshots led by "1 Stab" the fighter. But at some point, I must have accidentally restored the default party and not noticed. By the time I realized the names I was playing with weren't the ones I chose, I'd gained a couple of levels and didn't feel like starting over.

The game begins in Wizard's Rock, where the Adventurers' Guild offers various character utilities, including training, and you can sleep in the inn, visit a tavern for rumors, or buy potions in an alchemist's shop. (There's no standard equipment shop.)
      

Finally returning to the opening city after a successful expedition.

     
Whenever you leave Wizard's Rock, the game asks you to set a difficulty level between 1 and 6. The first time, I naively set it to 3 and got slaughtered. I soon learned that at the beginning, you want to leave it set at 1, maybe 2 if you want a gamble. The difficulty level does not affect the types of monsters you encounter, but it does affect their hit points, attack skill, and damage--as well as the experience and gold that you get from them.
    

A successful early combat.

     
Combat is relentless. If you don't immediately start moving (with the unintuitive ESDX cluster), you'll get attacked within a few seconds of leaving town. Running essentially never works. After combat, you have to be quick on the draw with the keyboard, because dithering around will almost certainly result in another attack within a few seconds. And the keyboard isn't very responsive, either. I don't know if this is an original problem or an emulator problem, but the game indicates that it's ready for you to start moving a second or two before it will actually register your keystrokes. So you pound away at "D," trying to move east, and nothing happens. You sit back and wonder what's wrong and within another couple of seconds, you're in combat again.

The types of enemies you encounter differ based on terrain. Relatively easy thugs, rats, "kobalds," and giant flies occupy the grassland near the city, for instance, while forests are likely to serve up more difficult foes like "mystical bears," stone golems, and dragons. The game suckered me with this, because I spent about 3 hours grinding on the grassland until my party made it to Level 3 and stopped dying all the time. I assumed they were finally ready to start exploring the larger world, headed briskly away from Wizard's Rock, and got slaughtered by three "plains dragons" the moment I entered my first forest square.
     

Compared to the grassland, the forest is full of terrors.

      
Combat begins with options to fight, threaten, greet, surrender, run, or change the party formation. Again, most of these are drawn from Phantasie. As I mentioned above, running hardly ever works. I also haven't had any success (at low levels) with threaten and greet, both of which give the monsters a free round of attacks when they fail.
      

Wouldn't regular bears have been difficult enough?

      
In combat, you have options to make a regular attack (which gets you multiple hits depending on level), put everything into a powerful but less-accurate "lunge," parry, or cast a spell. Again, these options are adapted from Phantasie, as is the little jumping animation that accompanies your attack. That's about all that the developers copied. Gone are any consideration of ranks, positions, or priority: characters can only attack one enemy at a time, everyone is in melee range, and there are no mass-damage spells.
     

Whatever kind of weapon he's holding, it doesn't look very efficient.

     
Even the spell list is mostly plagiarized from Phantasie, but greatly reduced. Wizards, rangers, and clerics each have a separate spell progression table, with selections like "Strength," "Dispel Magic," and "Turn Undead." A few spells, like "Firestorm" and "Healing" occur in multiple levels: "Firestorm1," "Firestorm2," and "Firestorm3," for instance. There are only 8 wizard spells, 8 cleric spells, and 6 ranger spells (most of them duplicated within the three lists), and you get a new one at every level. To cast them, you specify the spell number, so you have to memorize the spell reference card or have it close at hand. As in Phantasie, spell points deplete fast, and each caster might only be able to cast 5 or 6 useful spells between rests.

As for equipment, I assume I get upgrades at some point in the game. Maybe I have to find them in dungeons. None of the enemies I've fought so far have dropped weapons or armor, just gold.
       

A spell is successful against a "thug."

     
The problem with combat isn't just its difficulty. It lasts a long time. A simple fight against an easy enemy, like three "huge flies," can easily stretch to 5 minutes as both sides mostly miss and you have to sit and watch all the attack messages. Without streaming television to watch at the same time, I'd find this title horrendously boring.

Adamantyr's site indicates that the game world comprises 15 screens. You start in the far northeast and have to walk to the various dungeons, fighting untold hordes of enemies in between. Although there are scattered inns (just as in Phantasie) where you can rest and recharge, only Wizard's Rock has a temple and a full complement of services, making its far-flung location particularly annoying. Even worse is the fact that while you can save anywhere, saving outside Wizard's Rock forces you to quit after saving, and when you reload the party is back in Wizard's Rock. That means that each expedition away from town has to be made with no saving until you're ready to return.
      

This inn is located in a part of the landscape that there's no reason to visit.

     
In about 5 hours of gameplay, I haven't even been able to get to the point where I can survive a trip to a dungeon, let alone explore its interior. I suspect I'll have to grind around Wizard's Rock until everyone's Level 8 and has all their spells before I can survive an extended expedition. Complicating things is the fact that, just like Phantasie, your characters are always under-funded for training. Everyone's ready to move to Level 4 at this point, but I don't have enough money for even one of them. This discourages me from purchasing potions, including a useful "Stealth" potion that temporarily eliminates enemy encounters.
       

The first level wasn't so bad, but costs more than double between levels.

      
Training is otherwise quite useful, increasing hit points, spell points, and combat skill. The results are palpable. They just take a long time to arrive. I might have to grind for another 5 hours before I can even leave the starting area.
      

A rumor at the tavern. I never would have suspected!

     
At this point the only thing I'm really holding out hope for is that the dungeons are interesting. Judging by what Adamantyr says on his site, the game seems to have adopted Phantasie's encounter system in dungeons, by which interesting things pop up as you peek into rooms. I'll give it long enough to explore at least one dungeon. But seriously, 1987 games need to start sitting down, shutting up, and stop fouling my momentum.

Time so far: 5 hours

****

Sorry for having three active games at the same time. I'm getting some help from German readers on Die Drachen von Laas, but they need time to play, and I need time to analyze, compile, and comment on their experiences.