Legend: In Its Own Mind

One of the two levels that took me 9 hours to finish.

         

I've had a lot of enthusiastic commenters heaping praise on Legend, so I've done my best to give it a fair shot. But I'm simply not feeling it. Gameplay sessions are mildly torturous, and I have to have something else going on--a television show, a "Great Courses" series, another game--while I play it.

The game is far too combat-heavy for a title that gives you so few tactics in combat. Most rooms and most corridors in between rooms feature at least one battle. If you linger too long afterwards, you might even get a second battle. Even after you "clear" a room, there's around a 50% chance of an encounter on a subsequent visit. I started counting the number of battles I fought in the two levels of Fagranc. I lost track at some point, but it was well over 100.

There are a few factors that make the combats annoying, and I mostly covered them in my last entry. I suppose in the broadest sense, they're annoying because most of the time, there's nothing for you to do but watch. But just enough of them are dangerous enough that you have to jump to the rescue with a spell, potion or magic item. So you can't just let them start and then go get a snack, but when you do watch them intently, it's like waiting for a pot to boil.

             

A reminder of what combat looks like.

         

As I've reported before, a lack of enemy names or really any differentiation means that you really don't know which combats are going to be dangerous until they start. There's virtually no correlation between the location and the difficulty--random combats in hallways are often more deadly than fixed combats in important rooms. So you end up reloading a lot after you've learned, the hard way, that this combat is one that needs your full attention.

Not that "full attention" always saves you. With respect to those that love the spell system, I still don't have a lot of luck except with a healing spell that heals the caster and damage and paralysis spells that target the enemy directly in front of the caster. The utility of something like "Forward-Missile-Surround-Damage" or "Forward-Forward-Forward-Paralysis" is lost in a game where you cannot reliably position or face the characters. By the time I get the caster nudged into the right place, the enemy I wanted to target has moved somewhere else.

If there's one positive to the game, it's to be found in the puzzles. I covered a pretty hard one a few entries ago, and I still maintain that it was a little too hard for being so early in the game. Now, I see better how I might have figured out the solution on my own. The puzzles in Fagranc weren't nearly as hard, but they were still challenging enough to be fun. For instance, the screenshot below shows a puzzle where casting "Damage" on the western rune causes the person standing on the square above the face to teleport to the closest pad across the water. If someone is already standing there, he teleports to the other pad on the eastern side. Both pads have levers nearby that raise squares from the water, and the ultimate goal is to get someone over to the chest.

            

Casting a spell at a rune shoots a teleportation spell out of the northwest pillar.

       

I was able to figure this out through testing, and it was a lot of fun, but there were only a couple of puzzles like this in Fagranc. The issue is confused by the fact that a lot of the rooms have floor tiles that look like they're parts of puzzles but really aren't.

           

Trying to get to that chest when there's a teleportation pad in front of it. I think I just cast a "Teleport" spell from a scroll.  I don't know if that was the solution or if I just circumvented the puzzle.

         

Some of the rooms are beautifully rendered, and it makes you wish there was more to do than simply search the various pieces of furniture for treasures. As for those treasures, equipment rewards have been frequent enough to count as effective character development. I also find a lot of magic rings (which duplicate spells, but anyone can use them) and potions. I don't really understand potions. Their effects are based on their names--"Serpent" potions always heal; "Moon" potions always make you invisible--so I don't know why they're different colors. I guess maybe the color denotes the strength of the potion?

           

A pretty room, but there's still nothing to do but search.

        

I always like finding Golden Helms, which blast enemies in front of you hard enough to kill most of them. Finding one is the only time I can micro-manage my troubadour. I burn through them pretty fast.

I've been experimenting with different troubadour songs, but it's hard to see the effects of most of them. The default, "March of the Bold Ones," which regenerates hit points, is still the most tangibly effective of the group. 

The two levels of Fagranc, representing about 120 separate room and corridor screens, took me well over 8 hours to fully explore. At the end of Level 2 was a stairway down to a single room on Level 3, full of doors I couldn't open. I found a "Dark Key" in the room along with a note that said "Come and see me at The Dark Tower. --K." The Dark Tower is in a different dungeon in the northwest of the map. I guess it will be a while before I can report to the king that I've destroyed all the evil in Fagranc. He didn't even want to see me when I returned to his castle later.

               

Sorry, but your evil is in another castle.

         

Back outside, I stopped in several towns to sell my excess equipment and purchase more spell reagents. A bartender told me that The Ancient wanted to see me, which is fine--I needed to visit him to buy more runes anyway. Stopping at various cities, I slowly made my way back to the game's starting area.

          

Beginning the long trek home.

        

In Treihadwyl, I was disappointed that each character could only level-up once or twice. I thought I'd been in Fagranc so long that I was due for a major upgrade. On the other hand, leveling is becoming expensive enough that it's probably a good thing I didn't have many to gain. I wouldn't have been able to afford another round. My berserker and troubadours are now Level 5 and my assassin and runemaster are both Level 4. The experience point variance is significant, from almost 18,000 for my runemaster to about 50,000 for my berserker.

            

            

The Ancient, meanwhile, wanted me to recover his "mystic staff" from his evil cousin, Kilijan, who lives in the Dark Tower. Good thing I was headed there anyway. I was also able to purchase the "Teleport" rune from him for 4,000 gold, which I hope will get my runemaster out of more life-threatening situations. Of the runes, at this point, I'm only missing "Regeneration," "Vivify," and "Disrupt."

           

"Kilijan" joins the game's long list of names that just don't quite work.

           

I have a few new spells to experiment with, so I suppose I'll give the game another few hours and see what the Dark Tower has to offer. But I suspect you may see me end this one prematurely in favor of making more substantial progress in 1992.

       

Time so far: 19 hours