Secrets of Bharas: Reboot

Success in this game means filtering through a lot of dialogue, most of which I've now lost.

       

The state of Secrets of Bharas is a mess. I played a lot of it in November and early December and then took a few weeks off without blogging. Somehow, in that time, I managed to lose (or overwrite) a notepad file in which I'd been keeping my game notes. Even worse was a decision I'll describe below that lost me most of my screenshots. So I'm approaching this brief entry without notes, images, or even recent memory.

 

You'll recall that in my first few entries, I explored the first of what turns out to be six continents. I met an oracle named Yajiv the Big-Nosed, who first told me to return when I had a ship. Once I had a ship, he told me to return when I had three items: the Gem of Vision, the Amulet of the Third Eye, and the Helmet of Goat Empathy.

    

I turned my attentions next to Dharthi, the continent of the dwarves. It had four cities--Normandy, Toulon, Parthenay, and Amiens--plus the royal palace. That was a lot of NPCs to record, and I was tired playing one night, so I decided that instead of taking notes on every NPC, I'd just screenshot all their dialogue and sift through it later. I'm using an emulator called ActiveGS to play the game, and I used its internal screenshot tool to capture the images. What I didn't realize was that it will only take 99 of them before it stops generating new ones and just keeps overwriting the 99th file. I thus lost a lot of dialogue and probably have to go through at least two of the villages again, not to mention the ones in Surya for which I've lost my notes. 

          

If anyone ever told me where to find Scrolls of Wisdom, I don't remember.

        

There are a lot of NPCs in this game who have interesting things to say but not particularly pertinent things to say. For instance, here is the total dialogue of Awad the Nomad in the Palace of Dharthi:

     

When I was young, I sought my fortune in many places. I could never stay in a single place for very long. I had an urge for travel, an urge for knowledge. I wanted all the knowledge that Dharthi had to offer. I soon realized that the only way I could have this was to visit each city and village in the continent.

When I was fifteen, I lived in Amiens. I worked in the village grocery. I saved up my money and bought a small boat. I hid this in the shop I worked in so my family wouldn't know what I was doing. One day, I took all my possessions and loaded them up on the boat. I then rowed myself away. After Toulon, I headed to Parthenay by the rivers. Parthenay is a bit bigger than Amiens. I liked staying in Parthenay. I made many friends there. One of them started calling me "the Nomad." I kept that nickname even after leaving Parthenay. I left Parthenay when I started getting bored of the same old routine.

From Parthenay, I rowed to Normandy. Normandy is quite a large port city. Normandy was much more interesting than I had expected it to be. Most of the trade of the Dharthi flows in and out of Normandy. In Normandy, I saw my first Suryans and Hawans. They sure look different from Dhartiens!

    

In Normandy, I first heard of the land of Wairan. The sailors told me that Wairan was full of nomads. I thought that Wairan would be perfect for me. I became friends with some sailors on a ship headed to Wairan. They let me sneak aboard their vessel. When I landed in Wairan, I expected a nomad's paradise. I instead found a harsh and forbidding desert. I tried to live in Wairan, but no matter what I did, I could not be a nomad in the hot and dry climate of Wairan. I headed back to the port and stowed away on the next ship to Dharthi.

      

Now, that's 339 words for a single NPC, and I think I may even have missed some of it. While it accomplishes some world-building, it doesn't really tell the player anything particularly new or important. Still, there are plenty of situations in which I would praise a game for extraneous world-building text, and for giving their NPCs some real character. I don't know why my first instinct with Bharas is to do the opposite. I have trouble getting immersed in its world despite the authors' world-building attempts. It feels sterile to me, and I don't know why. It's not the graphics; if I cared that much about graphics, I never would have become immersed in the worlds of Ultima IV or Might and Magic. I worry instead that it's prejudice: that this obscure 1991 game--which I wouldn't have even known about if the author hadn't told me while I was writing to him about a different game--by virtue of not being famous, somehow doesn't have the right to try to immerse me, to hold me back from "more important" games. It's because of this concern that I've stubbornly stuck to it, despite a relatively good reason to quit.

   

That reason is the dungeons. I had been largely avoiding them because I wasn't even sure they were mandatory. That changed in Dharthi, where several NPCs suggested that the artifacts I needed would be found in dungeons, although they didn't name specific ones. I started back in Surya and ultimately explored three dungeons there and two in Dharthi.

          

Exploring dungeons means frequently running into enemies.

          

Dungeons in this game are boring. All the levels are 16 x 16, with no interesting layouts, and nothing interesting happening as you explore them. There are no puzzles or navigational obstacles, just elevators connecting the floors, the occasional chest, and far, far, far too many combats. I put three "fars" in there because I didn't think it was good writing to add more, but if I'd put 15 of them, that would still be less than the game deserves.

   

I wouldn't have been able to stand it without the quick combat option. Battles in this game boil down to two types:

   

• Those for which I activate computer control and go do other things until they're over.

• Those for which I cast a couple of "Flame Wind" spells before activating computer control and going to do other things until they're over.

    

I've spent about 14 hours on this game since I last wrote, and about 10 of those hours have been waiting for the computer to finish fighting for me. Fortunately, I've been using that time to do other things, like grade my students' papers and tests, or play Legends of Valour in another window. 

    

The computer fights for me. I have it set to pause if any character's health drops below 250.

       

Dungeons have around 10-12 combats per level, and even with the computer fighting, those combats take an average of about 2.5 minutes. That's about half an hour to clear a level, or 4 hours to clear an 8-level dungeon. Of course, you can't clear the dungeon in one go. Eventually, your spell points run dry and you have to leave to recharge them or else you can't keep healing your characters. Fortunately, dungeons remember your progress and do not respawn, at least not right away. I'm not sure if they respawn after time, or if it's just the most recent dungeon you visited that doesn't respawn. Even without respawning, though, it still takes a long time to backtrack in and out of them, so you might be looking at closer to 7 hours to clear a full dungeon. Fortunately, not all of them have been eight levels. I only got one level into the Mines of Minere before I couldn't progress for lack of a "crystal key." One of the other dungeons in Surya was only six levels.

   

The only excitement you get in dungeons is finding the occasional chest. These are rare--fewer than one per level--but they almost always have some equipment upgrade or a quest item. Finally, in the Prisons of Dharthi, one of those chests held a Gem of Vision. It gives you a bird's-eye view of a reasonable area around the party.

      

This will help find more dungeons and towns.

       

Because of all the combats, dungeon explorations are pretty lucrative in general. They more than pay for the reagents I expend within them. With so much extra cash, I can flee from most surface battles. Fleeing causes you to drop a bit of gold. It never works in dungeons and always works on the surface.

           

Time is money.

        

Speaking of the surface, I figured out what the pyramids do. Each continent appears to have one pyramid associated with a god. If you say the name of the god, or more accurately what the god's name means, you'll be teleported to that continent. This is less useful than it seems because a lot of the continents are archipelagos and thus require a boat anyway, but perhaps there are some places only accessible via pyramids. Anyway, I lost the notes that had the gods' names.

        

On the positive side, my characters have gained a lot of levels.

        

So that's where I am with Secrets of Bharas. I basically have to start over in Surya and systematically hit all the towns, dialogue, and dungeons again, this time making a more careful list of what I'm looking for, and perhaps even making a kind-of encyclopedia. I thought I'd write this short entry to tie up what I'd accomplish several weeks ago rather than mingle it with new material next week.

     

Time so far: 26 hours