Amberstar: A Streak of Luck

This makes me wonder what the chipmunks in my yard are plotting.

         
My second session started bleak. I had several quests in Twinlake, both of which required me to descend in two dungeons, the Dancing Dragon Inn wine cellar and the city sewers. The wine cellar seemed like the easier of the two, but it had a number of locked doors for which I needed a crowbar. I couldn't find a shop that sold a crowbar.

Worse was the enemy difficulty. The first foes that Viola and Silk faced were giant rats. Combat--which I'll describe in more detail anon--did not go well for us. The classless, Level 0 characters, clad in simple clothes and armed with kitchen knives, hardly ever managed to hit the enemies, let alone kill them. Meanwhile, their 4 hit points didn't last long against rats capable of doing that much damage in one hit. I had to save and reload several times before each battle with the rodents, then rest or retreat to Sir Marillion's pool to restore my health afterwards.
              

The outcome of too many early-session battles.

         
Fortunately, you don't need that many experience points to join a guild, and it was only three or four combats before Silk had enough to get into the thieves' guild. Rising levels confers a lot of extra hit points (Viola went from 4 to 77 in 3 levels), plus a pool of points you can distribute to your various skills. More important at the beginning of the game, making your first level allows you to equip that class's weapons and armor. So Silk immediately became a decent Level 1 fighter, with 16 hit points, a short sword, and leather armor.
         

Distributing skills upon achieving a new level.

        
Unfortunately, even in his improved state, Silk was no match for the rat king that lay in wait in the sewers, nor the "wine slime" that served as the mini-boss for the wine cellar, so I went from feeling good about my prospects to feeling pretty poor. I could have made things easier by having Viola join the warriors' guild in Twinlake, but I didn't want that for her. I wanted her to be a paladin or ranger.
  
This got me thinking that clearly you're not supposed to last very long without joining a guild, but Twinlake only has two guilds. I realized that I'd been assuming that Amberstar would follow the pattern of a typical RPG, where you clean up the introductory city before moving on to the wide world. Maybe I was meant to go outside first. There might be easier encounters there, or I might be able to make it to other cities with the guilds I wanted for Silk. I might also find other NPCs to join the party.
      
It turns out that there are random encounters in the wilderness, with orcs and trolls and such, and they were a bit too tough for my party. But they're also very rare. The probability is that you'll make it from one town to another without triggering one (wow, was that a nice change after Final Fantasy).

I didn't do very well here, but I eventually got better.

          
The map of Lyramion shows Twinlake in roughly the center of the map.  The closest cities were Illien to the northwest and Crystal to the north, on a little peninsula. Although I had a specific purpose for this expedition--find a more desirable guild--I was already thinking about how I might go about exploring the map, and it struck me that I could probably do the northern panhandle first, then work my way around the map clockwise or counterclockwise. Thus, I headed for Crystal. Given what happened after this, I will forgive you for thinking that I probably looked at a walkthrough, but I swear it was just luck.
       

Reaching this was easier than I expected.

        
Crystal was about the same size as Twinlake. As usual, I went with a "rightmost" exploration pattern, which brought me to the inn shortly after entering. There, I started talking with NPC, and it wasn't long before I met Gryban, who was in town seeking . . . the Guild of Paladines. He joined the party but--apparently knowing that as an NPC he was putting all his choices in my hands--begged me to join him to the paladines rather than some other guild.
          

Believe it or not, that's exactly why I came to Crystal!

        
I explored the rest of the city and pushed past most of the special encounters and quests, trusting that I'd explore in more detail later. I soon realized that this was a mistake, as some important messages only come up the first time you enter an area. Once I realized this, I started taking more meticulous notes about things happening in Crystal, but I might have missed some early messages. 

At the Guild of Paladines, I learned that Viola had enough experience to join but not enough cash. I needed about 500 gold pieces. I started circling around the city looking for money-making opportunities or treasures. Among the encounters:
       

• Lord Chancellor Drebin's house introduced a mystery. The chancellor fancied himself a demon-summoner, and recently summoned a small demon into the body of a homunculus, which he then imprisoned in a glass globe. The creature refused to recognize him as its master, but that didn't stop the chancellor from resolving to summon a larger demon into a pentagram in the basement. He was convinced that the pentagram was strong enough to contain the King of Hell, Bralkur, himself. His wife and son report there was some kind of ruckus in the basement a few days ago, and the chancellor hasn't returned since then. The homunculus is speaking a language I don't understand, and his cellar door is locked with some kind of seal that I couldn't find in the house. 

I so hoped that one of the portraits would show his ancestor, Frank.

       

• In the tavern, I found another NPC willing to join the party: Trasric, a black wizard. Unlike the other companions I've found so far, Trasric actually had some levels under his belt, along with spells like "Hail Storm" and "Fireball." He related that black wizards haven't been very popular since the events at Castle Godsbane, which involved one of their number, Marmion. (This the second Thalion game in which the "black" in "black magic" doesn't technically mean evil, although every spellcaster who ends up threatening the world just happens to be of the black variety.) He said that the guild is in the southeast of Lyramion, in a valley that I'll need a ship to reach. I'll also need an artifact to unlock it, which Trasric hid in a flowerpot in the chambers of a fellow denizen of the inn.

            

Maybe you need a better term than "black magic."

           

• While I was searching flowerpots, I came to a courtyard. Searching one of the pots in the courtyard revealed a whopping 5,000 gold pieces, along with a note. The note was written to someone named "Kelvin" from the "Riddlemaster," and it gives Kelvin directions by ship to an island where he can "get his harp back." The gold is clearly meant to buy a ship, as that's exactly what the shipwright charges. I used it to solve my other financial woes for a while. Nearby, an NPC reports that Kelvin was a bard who used to play in the inn but hasn't been seen for months.

           

Visiting Crystal was the best decision I've ever made.

            

• A man named Thonion specializes in painting "mindgates"--a series of structures erected around the land that apparently allow travel across great distances, but only if you have a special necklace. Sansri, the Goddess of Snakes, is rumored to have one of them.

• A man named Firlas lost his Bone of Wisdom in Twinlake when he was attempting to help with the sewer problem.

        

Viola braces herself for the worst pickup line of all time.

         

• A secret door led behind the counter at the town's general store, where I could have looted 1,200 gold pieces from the shopkeeper's chest. If I hadn't found the 5,000, it would have been tempting, but for role-playing reasons it's probably not a good idea to join the Guild of Paladines with stolen gold. Then again, I suppose the gold is no less "stolen" just because I found it in a flower pot. 

         

Calm down. We were just investigating a secret door.

        
Having achieved our original goals and then some, we returned to Twinlake and attempted the wine cellar again. The wine slime was still pretty hard, capable of poison and sleep attacks as well as physical attacks. Trasric did the trick, though, with a "Tornado" spell.

Combat takes place in a separate combat interface. Graphically, the enemies are depicted in front of the party, but their specific positions, and yours, are annotated to the right of the main screen, on a 6 x 5 grid. The party members all start in the bottom two rows of the grid, in positions determined by the default party configuration that you set up outside of combat. Melee attacks can be made from any adjacent square, including diagonals.

Each round, you can click on each party member and then specify an action, including moving one square, fleeing, attacking, defending (which the manual gives as "parade"), and casting a spell. You then hit the "OK" button to see the results of your actions, threaded with the enemies' in order of a background initiative roll. It's basically the system that goes back to Wizardry but has the added consideration of specific position rather than just relative rank. Enemy attacks are accompanied by animations in the main window that show them thrusting forward or waving a weapon or whatever.
         

Trasric casts a spell in combat against the wine slime.

        
Rounds pass somewhat slowly, so there's a "fast forward" button to change that, but unfortunately the button doesn't change the speed of the enemy animations. I wish the button had made the animations go away but still delivered the messages at normal speed. I also don't quite understand movement. Characters seem to be unable to move forward from the second row, meaning that when enemies decide to flee, they can do so with impunity because the party can't chase them.
       

Fighting the rat king. There was a cute little crown on his head.

         
Combat will become more tactical as I obtain more spellcasting ability, so I'll revisit it later. For now, it's not a bad system, a bit slower than necessary, but made tolerable by the relative rarity of battles. Neither the wine cellar nor the sewers had any "random" battles, and as for fixed battles, there were only maybe eight between them.

The bottle of good wine was in a crate a few steps behind the wine slime. I returned it to Breth, one of the cooks, for 100 gold pieces.

The sewers were smaller than the wine cellar (oddly), but had more interesting textures, including animations of water flowing out of pipes. One of the drains had the ring that the other cook had lost.
         

I didn't make a GIF, but trust me that the water here is animated.

        
There were a couple more rat battles and then a final confrontation with the rat king, who spoke English and was about to sacrifice Felix the Cat when we burst into his room. "First the cats," he screamed, "and then the humans!" We killed him and his companions in melee combat and retrieved both his head and Felix. Two of my characters were poisoned during the battle, which causes them to lose a couple of hit points every round. I had no way of curing this, so we sped for the town healer as soon as we exited the sewers, and got there with no time to spare.
         

I have a feeling these pools are going to be useful throughout the game.

        
It was time to turn in several quest rewards, but first we stopped by the cemetery to use Sir Marillion's health and mana restoration pools, since healers don't heal regular hit points for some reason. When we entered, an NPC we hadn't seen before was hanging around the tomb. It turned out to be Gwendolyn, Marillion's former lover. She lamented that his spirit was caught between planes. She could release him with the Rose of Sadness, but it only blossoms every century in some unknown place called the "Sea of Peace."
         

In my defense, it's not like your icon ever appears anywhere else.

         
After speaking to her, we waited around for a long time until she left and Marillion's spirit returned. He didn't know anything about the Sea of Peace, but when we spoke to him of Gwendolyn, he gave us the key to his tomb, where we could recover his armor and sword. The key opened the door at the back of the tomb, and it contained not only armor and a sword but 589 gold pieces. The armor and sword are usable only by a paladin, so it was a bit of luck that I found that guild first. The items significantly improved Viola's fighting ability.
         

I feel like I didn't deserve this just yet.

         
Back in town, we returned Felix to his owner, Sunny. The "secret" she promised was a pretty big one: the ability to talk to animals. I used it immediately on the dog in my former home, whose name turns out to be Spike. Not only did he join the party (!), but he has a bone that I suspect is the Bone of Wisdom that Firlas needs (since I otherwise didn't find one in the sewers). Now I wonder if I can join Spike to a guild. He comes pretty buffed already, with 40 hit points and relatively high skills in "Attack," "Parry," "Swim," "Listen," "Find Traps," and "Search." For his high search ability (70%), I made him the leader of the party, but I have to remember to switch to someone else when I want to talk to an NPC or else no one can understand him. Is this the first game that allows a dog to join the party, or was it possible in Wasteland? That makes me realize that there's a game I've never seen: one in which the main character has an ability like the "Beastmaster" and slowly assembles a party of animals, each with unique abilities.
          

I love how even though I can understand the dog, somehow part of his speech is still "woof, woof, woof!"

        
Lord Karwain gave us 600 gold for the rat king head, and Olddaniel gave us a crystal ball for his ring. Silk got another level at the thieves' guild, after which we went back to Crystal, where Viola got a couple of levels in the Guild of Paladines and Gryban joined the same. For diversity's sake, it would have been better to have a warrior, but having just made my main character a paladin, I couldn't very well do something that cruel. The guild has a shop selling spells scrolls, and paladins are capable of white magic, so I purchased some first-level healing scrolls for both Viola and Gryban, although neither has any "Read Magic" or "Use Magic" abilities yet. I'll prioritize those the next time I level up.
  

It's always useful to have the favor of a town's lord.

The 77 hit points I have now is a big jump from the 4 I had a few hours ago.

Miscellaneous notes:

• There's an old estate north of Twinlake. Every time I approach it, no matter from what direction, I fall into a trap that dumps me into its cellars, causing enough damage to kill at least one party member. Maybe we'll be strong enough now that no one is Level 0.

• I don't remember where we got the clock, but Viola had it in her inventory for a while. I assumed I'd have to "use" it every time I wanted to know the time. Instead, the first time I used it, something delightful happened: the clock disappeared and the time appeared permanently in the main game window. That's awesome. I wish more games featured items that worked that way.

        

I now know that it's 9:35 exactly as we leave Twinlake.

          

• The interface otherwise continues to annoy me, particularly in the inventory screen and in shops. There's more clicking than is necessary; clicking on an object ought to "use" it automatically without requiring an extra button first. And when trading an item, you ought to be able to just hit the number of the character you're trading to, without clicking on his portrait. But worst of all is the way shops work. To buy anything, you first have to put gold on the table, and the easiest way to do this is just to pool all the characters' gold with the button that does that. After you buy something, you then have to make sure you give it to a character. Most important, you have to retrieve your gold before you leave the shop, or else you've just given it all to the shopkeeper. There is a warning that comes up if you're about to do this--which for me is every time--and it's just a matter of time before I accidentally click the wrong button and lose all my gold. I hope I at least notice it when it happens.

          

It's just a matter of time before I click the wrong thumb.

         

• You can swim pretty far out into the ocean before the characters' lack of "Swim" ability kicks in and kills them.

• So far, the automap has done a good enough job that I haven't felt the need to manually map, although I probably will map the towns since I have to visit and navigate them multiple times. 

             

The small sewer area, to which I'm probably never going to return, didn't need me to make a map.

          

• An NPC based on developer Karsten Köper appears in Crystal. 

            

          
I started this session in a bad place with the game, but my subsequent streak of luck--choosing Crystal in the first place, finding the gold, encountering Gwendolyn at the right time--turned things around, and now I'm feeling pretty positive. One of the things I'm enjoying is the way the developers bent the usual rules and tropes. The manual lays out the races and classes that can join the party but then allows a dog to join. For the hundredth time, you fight rats in a sewer, but this time they're led by a king with greater ambitions. The game blends both iconographic and 3D interfaces without making the transition seem awkward or clunky. The 3D sections of the game use textures like a thousand similar titles, but some of the textures are animated. It's little additions like these that make a game memorable. Thalion has a history of this, I should add. Their Dragonflight (1990) took a lot of ideas from previous games, but arranged them in memorably different ways. I look forward to seeing what's next.
       
Time so far: 8 hours