Legend: Picking Up

Seventy percent of all evil-killing is done in the library.

           

I nearly called this one "Summary and Rating," except for one thing: I started having a lot more fun with the game. Not epic levels of fun, mind you, but more fun. I started to think of it as a game that takes a while to digest, but picks up momentum at the midpoint. Then I investigated how much of the game I had left, and I realized I was nowhere near the "midpoint."

It's taken me nearly 30 hours to clear 6 dungeon levels, and there are 22 dungeon levels in the game. At that rate, by the time I finish, it will be the third-longest played game on my list, at over 100 hours. That's okay for a game with a lot of plot, but Legend is largely the same thing, room after room. If I don't quit, you'll have to suffer through 15 more entries of a couple paragraphs each, amounting to "cleared another level, solved this puzzle, found a magic sword." But I have enough good material for this entry, at least, so I'll give it just a little longer. It would be a shame to stop at the point that I'm finally getting into it.

Let's talk about why I've started to have more fun. First, the accumulation of more runes, enough spell reagents that I don't have to scrimp, scrolls to give me ideas, and my commenters' advice has made the spell system "click" in a way that it didn't before. In my defense, the spell system starts out slow, but then again, I suppose it has to, since it's so complicated. Mixing runes and reagents can be confusing enough without adding "Heal-Missile-Teleport" to the equation.

I learned that casting "Antimagic-Surround-Antimagic" every once in a while (it lasts for a few rooms, at least) meant that I don't have to be afraid of my own spells. (In one of the game's annoyances, you can't just mix "Surround" and the spell, because that only applies to the three characters around the runemaster. You have to cast "Spell-Surround-Spell" to get it to apply to everyone.) In the way that "Fireball" never gets old in the Gold Box games, I swiftly found that "Surround-Damage-Missile-Damage-Surround-Damage," also known as "fill the room with fire," never failed to put a smile on my face--and started seriously compensating for the experience point imbalance that the mage had been experiencing.
             

This is also known as the "Overkill" spell.

             
Now I find myself looking forward to other combinations. I've barely used "Continuous" at all. What happens if I string a "Missile-Surround-Paralyze" to the spell above? That sort of thing.

I also started finding so many magic items--helms, scrolls, wands, rings, potions--that I was constantly trying to find ways to use them. This made combat more tactical than before. For instance, I gave my assassin a "Cloud Ring," which teleports to a square of the player's choosing, and started looking for opportunities to better position him for backstabbing. My troubadour gained a "Holy Helm," which causes the enemies around him to become enslaved and fight their comrades. Combined with a "Missile-Teleport" spell from my runemaster, I can put the troubadour on the other side of a room and then immediately convert several enemies to her side.

Finally, and perhaps most important, I found an option at the Guild that I had missed before, allowing you to "re-clothe" your characters by changing their colors. The default colors made three of the characters look the same to me, but with some tweaks here, I can now actually pick them out of the chaos of combat.
            

Finally: something I can see!

           
I don't mean for a second to suggest that these additional options excuse the aforementioned chaos. There are still plenty of problems. Pathfinding remains abysmal; characters and enemies frequently pass a few minutes running randomly around the room because they've decided they want to attack particular foes and those foes have set their sights on different characters. There's no way to tell a character to attack a particular enemy; you have to get him close and hope for the best. A lot of enemies are capable of self-teleporting, which simply prolongs combat as they poof around the room. And as I've said before, enemies are unnamed and don't necessarily behave reliably based on color or icon. There's no way (that I can tell) to distinguish a dangerous priority from a low-level mook. When enemies cast spells, you have to figure out what they're doing from visual effects rather than any text (some players wouldn't mind this, but it's tough with my colorblindness and general difficulty with purely-visual signals).

One issue I haven't talked about is the difficulty targeting. When you target an enemy or character (or, for that matter, target an object to open or loot), you have to make sure to click on the base square--where his feet are planted. Because of the oblique angle, his head is probably over a different square, and some other enemy's (or character's) head is over his base square. It's very easy to get this wrong.
            

The "Make Weapon" rune is an odd one that simply makes a magic weapon. Since it can be dispelled by spell-casting enemies, I'm not sure it's a good investment. But I wonder if you can sell them.

          
Still, you could see how, with a few tweaks, the combat system could be better. Allow selection of characters and issuance of orders while in "pause." Give the enemies names, and show their actions, as well as the characters', in the message window. Increase the field of combat and improve pathfinding. Highlight the target when you hover the mouse over it. When you were done, you'd have something that looks a lot like the Infinity Engine system.

In this session, I explored a couple levels of Kilijan's Dark Tower. I was pleased with my solutions to a couple of challenging puzzles. In the room below, for instance, there's a rune in the northeast corner that I needed to hit with a "Heal" spell to stop the spikes on the bridge. The problem is, the table blocks the spell from reaching the rune. It turns out that the square to its left is targetable, but only from the square in the southwest corner (you have to have a clear diagonal shot like a bishop on a chessboard). So the solution was to mix up "Missile-Surround-Heal" and cast it on that blank square, assuring that the effect hit the healing square.
               

Owing to targeting issues, I accidentally hit the wrong square on this casting.

         
This one took a while. The rune in the southwest corner wanted a "Teleport" spell. This caused the teleporter on the east side of the south end of the room to activate, sending the character across the water--and then immediately back again. Now, I knew from previous experience that teleporters don't work if someone is standing on the destination pad, so the trick was to get another character to immediately move on to the eastern transport pad after it was activated, preventing the first character's return. That, in turn, meant that I had to cast "Missile-Teleport" from as far away as possible so I had time to select the second character and click frantically on the pad so she'd move to it as soon as the first character teleported. Later, I had to fill up all the pads with characters to prevent the one in front of the lever from teleporting anyone.
            

Teleport pads in real life would be so cool.

          

The second level of the tower brought what I think are the first non-humanoid enemies in the game--not that it matters since they still have no names. A message in an early room noted that "Anything that vanishes in a puff of blue smoke deserves to die!," which seems to be a joke about how slain enemies disappear in this game.
               

This seems tautological.

             

The level ended with perhaps the most challenging puzzle to date. I had to experiment a lot to solve it, and I was just on the cusp of looking for a hint when I figured it out. You can see there are four doors. To open them, you have to hit each of four "Damage" runes on the strip on the north side of the room. But you can't just use "Missile-Damage" because spells don't cross chasms.
            

A difficult puzzle room.

           
It turns out that the rune on the east side of the room, behind the pillar, teleports any spell cast upon it and causes it to come jetting out of the pillar to the west of the northern rune strip. So I had to get a "Damage" spell to hit that rune. But there was no way to target it directly because it was behind a pillar. What I had to do was cast a spell starting with "Missile-Surround-Missile." This causes a missile to land at a targeted location and then spawn four more missiles in the cardinal directions around it. Three of these were wasted, but the fourth coasted up the eastern wall to hit the rune. After that, it was a matter of appending the right number of "Damage" spells. "Missile-Surround-Missile-Damage" hit the first rune in the strip. "Missile-Surround-Missile-Damage-Damage" hit the second, and so forth.

Part of the reason that the solution took me so long is that it doesn't look like I should have been able to cast the spell on the southeast "chasm" square. You generally can't target blank chasms. But you can target regular depressions with water or ground at the bottom, and since we can't see what's at the bottom of those squares, it's probable there's solid ground there.

A few hours ago, I never would have solved that because I wouldn't have understood the spell system well enough. There's a lot that you have to intuit when it comes to these puzzles, such as the directions that "Missiles" take when you pair them with a "Surround."

There's still a lot that confuses me. For instance, take a look at the screen below--the last screen on Level 2 before going upstairs. It isn't a puzzle room; it's just a regular room that had a few monsters and treasures. Why are there four squares that look like teleport squares? They don't actually teleport. They're just inert. A lot of other rooms have squares with rune symbols that similarly don't do anything.
             

Why are there inert teleport squares here?

            

And what's the point of the compass rose in this room that has rune symbols in the corners?

               
I'm trying to decide now whether to hike out of the dungeon and divest myself of excess goods, plus level up and replenish "Luck," or press on. The thought of fighting all those random encounters on the way out is a bit exhausting, but I'm going to run out of inventory space if there are too many more levels (plus, I'm dangerously low on brimstone). Either way, I suspect by next time--which may be the final entry--I'll have conquered the Dark Tower.

Time so far: 29 hours