Deathlord: Resurrection

The party, quite appropriately, wanders a graveyard.

          

Deathlord is just a really hard game to get into, as evidenced by the fact that I'm four entries and 20 hours into this game and can only barely say that I've "gotten into" it. After putting it on the back burner in July, I've spent the last half-year trying and failing to come up with reasons to abandon it. A couple of pesky commenters have made it clear that it's not just going to slip out of everyone's mind.

To recap, Deathlord is the product of a group of first-time game developers who fused elements from several sources. From Ultima, they took the top-down, tiled interface, NPC dialogue, many keyboard commands, and the shape of the main continent. From Wizardry, they took the combat system and permadeath. From Dungeons and Dragons, they took the races, classes, and spells; from RuneQuest, the attributes. After Electronic Arts agreed to publish it, they made the developers put a Japanese skin on everything, "translating" races, classes, spells, and other proper names into Japanese equivalents. 

The story concerns an "outcast wizard" who has raised monstrous forces and attacked the kingdom of Kodan. The emperor offers a reward to a party who can defeat this "Deathlord." The party's quest is going to somehow involve collecting seven words and six items.

The game is famously difficult. You have only one save file, which gets over-written every time you transition areas and, most importantly, every time someone dies. It doesn't even wait until the combat is finished; in fact, it saves so quickly after death in combat that the blank screen that accompanies disk access is generally how you find out that someone died in the first place. It also auto-saves when you do something in a town to turn the citizens hostile. It does not auto-save when good things happen.

         

Resurrection is expensive. But you definitely want "Resurrection" unless you feel like losing a point of constitution every time.

       

Wizardry had permadeath, too, but it was a much smaller game in which the action was self-contained in one dungeon with a menu town on top. If a character died, it sucked, but you could replace him without a lot of difficulty, and eventually, given enough funds, you could resurrect him. Deathlord, on the other hand, takes place on a huge continent with only one healer that resurrects. Moreover, there's no way to boot a dead character and create a new one once the game has started. You have to accept the death until you can afford and find resurrection, unless you want to start over with a new party. Since new characters have hit points in the single-digits, it's near-impossible for a player playing "straight" to get through the first few hours.

Still, the difficulty doesn't bother me nearly as much as all the ways that they made the game . . . inconvenient. To enumerate some of them:

        

• The towns are indecently large, making it very difficult to determine if you've visited every location. You have to make maps to be sure, and it's always tough to map top-down games.

• There's no simple command to "open" a door. All doors must be picked or smashed, both of which have a greater than 50% chance of failing. Smashing causes hit point loss when it fails.

• Towns are full of deadly creatures behind locked doors, so you can't fully explore them at early levels.

• Towns don't have obvious names. NPCs sometimes refer to town names, but there's no clear "Welcome to Whatever" when you enter a town. You have to figure it out like a logic puzzle.

• Most NPCs don't have names. And instead of one command to just talk with them, there are separate sub-commands for chatting, talking, and inquiring.

• It's often not clear which NPCs run shops. You have to use the (B)uy sub-command to make sure.

• You can pool gold but there's no command to divide it.

• When you find new weapons and armor, you have to immediately decide whether to replace your old ones without testing effects on armor class first.

      

I don't know if anybody will.

      

• Since the spell names are all in Japanese, you have to constantly refer to the manual.

• Both towns and dungeons are full of secret areas. There are two types of secret doors: illusory ones, where you just walk through the wall, and hidden ones that you have to search with the "F" key. Thus, you pretty much have to walk into and F-search every wall. Oh, and the F-search might "fail" even if there is a secret door, so you have to try it on every wall multiple times.

• Outdoors, swamp squares, containing deadly poison, look barely different from forest squares.

• One I just discovered this session: there are neither spells nor healers that can restore levels lost to vampires and other level-draining creatures. A bad combat could send a super-character back to Level 1, permanently.

       

Note that there's no "restoration" option here.

    

To all of this, you have to add the size and scope. It was tough enough when I thought the main continent and its handful of dungeons was going to be the entire game. It turns out that there are over a dozen separate continents and islands. The manual isn't kidding when it promises to fill a "few hundred" hours. 

The answer to the difficulty is obvious enough 30 years later: I can use save states. I have been. But that just means I have to spend a few hundred hours feeling like I'm playing like a jackass. There's no question that, back in the day, I would have played this game with the disk drive open so it couldn't automatically overwrite my save game. I probably would have also backed up that single save game after every session, something that the manual mentions but says is "not the most honorable." You know what? Screw you, Deathlord manual. You haven't earned the right to lecture me on "honor." I'm the goddamned Avatar.

Since it's been 6 months, I spent most of this session re-visiting the cities and towns, checking them exhaustively for secret doors, talking with all the NPCs, and taking a new set of notes. I also peeked into a dungeon in the eastern part of the first continent. I had explored it before but missed a secret door.

I started in Tokushima in the northwest corner, thinking it was the town I had originally explored first but it turns out that was Kawa. Tokushima has the largest selection of stores on the continent, with shops for food, weapons, armor, and missile weapons, a shipwright, and a trainer. I don't really understand the purpose of missile weapons since you can't use them from the rear rank.

Behind a door I hadn't previously opened was a lava area shaped like a skull, and beyond that were fights with two stacks of zombies. I had just acquired "Turn Undead" (tsuiho, which Google translates as "addendum"), so that was a good excuse to use it, and it worked well. But in a room beyond that, with some treasure chests, a couple of ghouls came out and paralyzed two of my lead characters in the first round. I won't get a "Cure Paralysis" spell for another two character levels. I declined to hike all the way to the healer and reloaded instead, marking the area for later exploration.

        

Getting ready to turn some zombies.

     

From NPCs in Tokushima, I learn that ruins are rich, kobito hide gold, there is a group of mages staying at the palace, don't get caught outside at night, look to the north, seek the seven, find the words, map dungeons, the yakuza of Kawa are famous, and Kawahara awaits below the palace. No idea who that is. A plaque in a tower reads "Due south of the second stone."

I realized I had enough cash to buy some weapon and armor upgrades. You have to carefully watch the game when it comes to armor. Each character can only have one set at a time. If it's a type of armor they're allowed to wear, they automatically wear it; if not, they just carry it. You have to look at the armor class statistics to see what's happening for a particular character.

I'm a few thousand shy for a boat. That will have to come later. It looks like there's a section of the city only explorable once you have a boat. I smash my way into a cemetery in the south of the map and find a large mausoleum, but I can't figure out anything to do with it or the tombstones.

         

Soon.

       

I move on to Kawa, a large horseshoe-shaped city ringed by forest. I explore the forest exhaustively but find no one. I decide to smash my way into the chambers of the "Daimyo" or "Diamyo" depending on which text you read, and it's here that I have the unpleasant revelation about vampires and their ability to permanently drain levels. Fortunately, I get lucky with a couple motu ("paralyze") spells in a row and only my lead character is drained while the rest kill the vampire. A secret room full of treasure chests next door seems to make it worth it.

       

Level drains with no "restoration" ability is the apex of evil.

      

The vampire isn't the "Diamyo," though. The moment I smash open his door, he kills my second character in one hit, then kills two more the next round. I again reload and mark his chamber for a later visit.

In another chamber to the northeast, I smash a door and find myself in battle against 10 kobito. Thankfully, they're as bad at hitting us as we are at hitting them (my fighters miss at least 75% of attacks), and we're able to defeat them with the help of a mass-damage spell and a sleep spell. A chamber beyond holds a bunch of chests with almost 500 gold pieces; we might be able to afford that boat soon. (This area is probably the source of the NPC line about kobito hiding gold.) I'm feeling good, but the next door I smash has 6 shisai behind it, and within two rounds everyone is paralyzed.

Annoyed at getting my butt kicked every three minutes, I abandon my explorations and head to some caves to the east of here that I've already explored, figuring I'll grind a couple of levels. It turns out that I missed an entire level the last time I was here--one of those illusory doors--and it has an area full of pillars and a bunch of treasure chests. Awesome! I start opening them, and I release a vampire, and he kills us.

      

Just before the vampire. Note that the grinding worked, and everyone can level up.

      

I think my grinding idea was a good one. I'll just stay on the earlier levels of the caves. My only concern about that is that if a vampire is going to drain me either way, maybe I'd rather have him do it when I'm Level 3 rather than Level 6. But that's probably going to be an issue throughout the game, so I can't let it stop me from leveling here.

My apologies for the paucity of screenshots in this one. I started playing it right after a session of Eye of the Beholder II and forgot that CTRL-F5 doesn't do anything in VICE. I had to go around and recreate some of them from earlier saves.

The game is frustrating as hell, but I don't want to give up on it until I've at least finished exploring the main continent and purchased a boat. We'll see how long that takes. In some ways, it's convenient that this game will probably outlast Eye of the Beholder II, as it keeps a 1992 game from creeping into the second game slot before I make the 1991/1992 transition post. I'll be impatient for it to be over soon after that, though.

Time so far: 20 hours