Game 288: Legend (1992)

       

Legend

United Kingdom

Mindscape (developer and publisher)

Released 1992 for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS

Published in the United States as The Four Crystals of Trazere

Date Started: 7 April 2018

 
If there's one major thing that you can credit British RPGs of the late 1980s and early 1990s, it's their experimentation with different perspectives. While most U.S. games remained stubbornly divided between iconographic, top-down, and first-person perspectives, British games (at least, those not based on Dungeon Master)  played with side-view and what we might call "studio" perspectives: those where the screen seems to be framing a scene from a play (Moonstone, Galdregon's Domain, Heavy on the Magick). More important, the U.K. was ahead of the curve on axonometric perspectives, which would eventually comprise a solid chunk of all RPGs. In the U.S., only a small percentage of games so far have used this perspective, perhaps most famously in Faery Tale Adventure (1986) and Ultima VI (1990) and its two spin-offs, and in these cases the perspectives are barely offset from top-down. Axonometric examples from the U.K. include Lords of Chaos (1990), Heimdall (1991), and HeroQuest (1991).
       

A group of four characters explores a dungeon from an axonometric angle.

          
(What I'm calling "axonometric" is usually given as "isometric," but every time I use it we have to have a long discussion about whether it's technically isometric, which means the X, Y, and Z axes have been equally shortened to achieve a 3-D effect, or just axonometric, which can involve any number of perspective angles. In the case of Legend, if it's not actually isometric, it's damned close.)

HeroQuest and Legend both seem ultimately inspired by the action-adventure Cadaver (1990), which featured the same perspective, the same-shaped game area, the same sorts of controls and indicators in the periphery. When I reviewed HeroQuest, I remember remarking that the graphics were quite good, but the limited gameplay didn't give you anything to do with the interesting items you see, and the combat was just laughable. In Legend, both elements are improved, though they still have a long way to go. 
           

Cadaver (1990) seems to be the source of the interface for both HeroQuest (1991) and Legend.

          
Legend was written by Anthony Taglione and is set in the same universe as Taglione's previous Bloodwych (1989). It was marketed in the U.S. as The Four Crystals of Trazere, which is how my list had it until I started playing and found more available copies and documentation under its original name. Graphics are by Peter Owen-James, who also did Bloodwych and Anthony Crowther's Captive (1990). He seems to specialize in gaunt, hollow-cheeked protagonists who look more desperate than heroic.

The brief setup is that some ancient evil is reaching into the world of Trazere and turning its residents into vicious monsters. Four characters--a berserker, a runemaster, a troubadour, and an assassin--assemble to investigate and put a stop to it.
          

The brief backstory is covered in about half a dozen screens.

         
In character creation, you have to go with these four classes. You can choose a name and sex and broadly adjust ability scores by assigning various elemental icons to the character. For instance, "Earth" boosts strength, constitution, and armor class and reduces intelligence, speed, and dexterity while "Air" does the opposite. I went with an all-female party. Each character comes with a starting selection of weapons and armor and a little gold.
         

Creating a new berserker.

        
Gameplay begins on an overland map from which you can direct the party to various towns and castles and such. Other parties and armies roam the map at the same time, their sigils indicating their power levels, and the manual suggests you can fight them in something called "banner encounters," but I didn't try that in the first session. The manual hinted that the dungeon of Treihadwyl (similar to the "Treidwyl" of Bloodwych) was intended as a starting dungeon, and that was the closest city, so I went there.
          

This reminds me of the overland maps in Moonstone (1991) or Dragon Lord (1990).

        
The city has a "menu town" on top of the dungeon, with options to visit the blacksmith, tavern, artificer, and adventurer's guild. There's not much to do at these locations when you first begin, so I immediately headed for the dungeon.
        

Not much to do here until I earn more money.

         
I am mortified at how long it took me to get out of the first room. To start, I had trouble interpreting the elements in the periphery of the actual gameplay area, in the center of the screen. The central area, surrounded by a black void, is the area where the gameplay actually takes place. The items in the corners are controls and indicators. In the northwest, we have buttons that bring up the automap (the dragon) and character inventory. In the northeast are the directional indicator and a chicken that unkindly flaps its wings when the party is fleeing. The southeast shows available actions (based on equipped items) for the active character.
        

The characters arrive in the first room.

        
Finally, the southwest is where you can select your active character from among the four. The stacks of skulls next to them depict their health levels.

I realized from the manual that you select the characters in the southwest, but I didn't realize they were the same characters milling about the center of the screen. I thought they were starting outside the room and would have to open the first door to enter it. In other words, I didn't realize they were controls instead of the actual people. I spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out how to open that door before I realized that by selecting them, I was simply choosing which figure in the center of the screen was active.

The core of gameplay in Legend is exploring these dungeon rooms and finding the keys, or solving the puzzles, necessary to open doors and access further rooms. The placement of keys imposes a certain linearity on room exploration, but the two dungeon levels in Treihadwyl weren't all that big anyway. The game tells you explicitly what type of key is needed to unlock each door, and you simply have to search items until you find them. Just about any piece of furniture--chests, clocks, desks, tables, weapon racks--can hold treasures, including items. There's no difficulty in opening and looting them--no hidden items, no locks, no traps.
        

My assassin finds a key in a clock.

       
The harder part is the occasional puzzles. They have something of a Dungeon Master quality, with which of course Taglione was intimately familiar. Most of the usable objects are levers or buttons, but they often have non-obvious effects, sometimes in other rooms. Some examples below.
     

This was a tough one. The lever in the middle changed what the lever on the left did--either cause the pillar in the northwest to rotate or belch fire. I had to hit both of the runes with fire to lower the spikes in the northeast, which allowed me to push buttons on those pillars, which did something in a different room, I think.

I had to find a key to open this door to pull the lever behind it to do something in another room that would then allow me to enter this room from the west side.

The troubadour prepares to push a lever that will teleport the runemaster to the inaccessible western area. There, she'll be able to loot the large chest, then pull the lever to return. The plaque in front of the assassin said "send a friend" as a hint.

          
Aside from my confusion on the interface, one of the reasons that I couldn't get out of the first room was that it took me a while to understand the puzzle. Each of the two northern corners had a rune, and I finally had to break down and read the manual thoroughly to realize that the runes correspond to the game's magic system. (Between the puzzles and use of runes, there is some similarity here to 1990's DarkSpyre.) The sigel rune (looks like an "s") is associated with damage and the nȳd rune (looks like an "x") is associated with healing. The game wanted me to cast the appropriate spells on these rune tiles to open the east and west doors.

Thus, I had to explore the spell system right away. It's interesting. You create spells as pairs of runes, the first specifying the "direction" and the second specifying the "effect." Directions include forward (the tile in front of the character), surround (the 8 tiles surrounding the character), missile (wherever the caster aims), and "continuous" which applies to a subset of spells. Effects are damage, healing, paralysis, antimagic, dispelling, charming, speed, teleport, regeneration, resurrection, death, and "make weapon," the last a kind of odd-one out.
         

Mixing spells in the spell interface. This reminds me a bit of Dragon Lord (1990).

      
Both directions and effects require reagents, of which the runemaster begins with a large stock. The game is explicit about what reagents are required for what spells. You select the direction and appropriate reagent, then the path and the appropriate reagent, then mix them together. Once you've done this once, the spell appears on a recipe list and you can mix new ones with just the click of a button.
           

Now that I've mixed a couple of spells, I can just go to this screen to mix them again.

          
My understanding is that it's possible to mix extremely complex spells by combining multiple effect runes--for instance, a targeted spell that dispels the enemy's magic protection and then paralyzes him. But the runemaster only starts with the runes necessary for healing and damage, so that will have to wait until later.

Once I figured out how to mix targeted spells for healing and damage, I was able to cast them at the runes in the corners and open the doors.
       

The door opens after I blast the rune with a healing spell.

       
The next major issue is combat, of course. Any room you enter for the first time might contain a swarm of foes, but they can also respawn randomly in rooms you've already visited. I have no idea what the enemies are; the game identifies them nowhere in the interface. By appearance so far, they've included things like goblins, kobolds, orcs, wizards, and beholders. But there's no way to get their names or a sense of how powerful they are.

Combat is a chaotic free-for-all that does a decent job anticipating the Infinity Engine. You have to click on each character and activate their weapons to prompt them to engage the enemies. Enemies puff away as they die, but a lot of them seem to have some kind of teleport ability which looks the same. You can't select a specific enemy or otherwise do much to guide the character in combat. Sometimes they seem to go for the closest enemy; other times, they take the most roundabout route to the farthest enemy and insist on attacking from his least-accessible side. Of course, they get hung up on obstacles easily, and certain rooms are designed to make it almost impossible for more than one character to engage the enemy at a time.
         

A few seconds of combat. This is only a little faster than in the actual game.

         
A good solution in the latter case is to flee to a previous room where there's more space to spread out--enemies always follow--but you run a couple of risks. Characters are supposed to stop fleeing when you hit the "rally" button (or ENTER) but sometimes they don't, and you may end up in a worse room than where you started. Moreover, every time you transition screens, there's a chance that enemies will respawn, which means you might find yourself fighting both the original foes plus respawning ones from one or two rooms.

Often, enemies fixate on the first character they see, and if it happens to be one of the weaker ones (i.e., the runemaster or assassin), they can pound away his hit points mercilessly in a few seconds. But it's extremely hard--impossible, really--to coerce your characters into any kind of formation. Success at combat boils down to luck and, unfortunately, a lot of reloads.
       

The party battles some beholders and other monsters in a fairly limited-movement area.

       
You have just a few tactics. Each character has a special ability. The berserker can go into "berserker rage" and do some extra damage. The assassin can "hide in shadows" and theoretically backstab enemies, but good luck actually navigating him around in the chaos of combat. The troubadour can play a song. He only starts with "March of the Bold Ones," a weak regeneration spell that doesn't help much in combat but ensures that you can fully heal after combat before moving on.

Chief among the tactics, theoretically, is the runemaster's ability to cast spells. In the chaos of combat, with everyone moving every which way in real-time, it's almost impossible to successfully target either a healing or damage spell, but you can pause combat at any time and take your time studying the landscape. Without the pause option, I would have given up the game in its early hours, because it takes me at least a few seconds to identify who my party members are. If they're differentiated by color, I can't tell it except for the assassin. I have to study the figures carefully to look at their clothes or weapons, which is hard when they're in the middle of combat and running around the map.
         

This happened too often.

      
You can't activate new actions, switch characters, or do anything else while paused, but you can click on the screen to target a previously-initiated action. Again, it feels a lot like an early version of Infinity Engine combat, except that the Infinity Engine has more tactics and allows you to do a lot more while paused. Those extra options make quite a bit of difference. On the other hand, I'm new to this game, and it's possible that combats will feel more tactical as I acquire more items and powers. I've found area-effect items and scrolls, but I don't see how you keep your own party out of the area of effect. The game would be so much easier if you could just direct one character from room to room, but everyone has to go at once.

There's a huge imbalance in combat power, and thus earned experience. The berserker is killing machine who is rarely in danger of death, does about 10 times the damage of the weaker characters, and earns more experience than the rest of the party combined. This, of course, may change as I get more proficient with spells. I could also deliberately keep her out of combat by not clicking on his weapon, but for the first dungeon, at least, I really need her.

Thus, I blundered and reloaded through the two dungeon levels beneath the city. There were fairly regular equipment upgrades in the chests; this post is getting long so I'll talk more about equipment next time. I returned to the city once to see if I could level up, but only the berserker could.
          

Intelligence doesn't really do much for the berserker.

        
The first level had 15 rooms, and I've found 13 so far on Level 2. But there are corridor screens in between "rooms," and while not as complex, they often have their own items and combats. The total number of screens per level is around 30-35.
           

An automap helps.

         
Unfortunately, I'm stuck on Level 2. There's a room where I have to shut off a series of obstacles along a narrow path. Another room has a series of buttons behind locked doors, and I need four ornate keys to open the doors and push the buttons. I've found two. The fourth is, I'm sure, is beyond the door in the screenshot below.
            

The characters wait for inspiration to strike.

             
The floor runes are clearly the key to this puzzle. But you can't cast spells across the void, so I can't hit the five on the detached platform. I can only hit the one in the far southwest corner, but all that does is to cause a fireball to come belching out of one of the northern pillars. Nothing in the other rooms seems to affect anything here. I am thus stuck and will try to find a hint online if no one has any for me here.

The game certainly isn't the same old thing. I'll give it that. And I kind of look forward to seeing what happens outside with the "banner encounters." But I don't know if I'll be able to come to an accord with this combat system, and I thus hope there aren't too many of these dungeons to explore.

Time so far: 4 hours