Centauri Alliance: Medieval Times

Ignoring the first line, that's a decent bit of iambic octameter.

    

I realized during some recent session that the opening cinematic has more text than I noticed before. When it got to the credits, I assumed it was over, but it had more to say. Here's the full thing:

 

In the year AD 2214, in the system Alpha Centauri, six races formed a historic alliance. Their dream: Peace throughout the galaxy. Today, less than three decades later, that dream has become a living reality.

Mysterious events are occurring on the far fringes of Alliance space. Rumors filter back of a mutinous Donsai officer gathering a force of renegades . . . an Alliance armory is looted . . . a border patrol vanishes. Most disturbing, arms dealers report uneasily that components of the legendary Fracytr Fist have surfaced in the black market. In the hands of Alliance enemies, the Fist would post an incalculable danger.

I thought I already had all the components.

      

Whatever the cost, you must quell the rebellion and prevent any part of the Fist from falling into hostile hands.

      

In-game, I've heard nothing of this renegade officer. The faction trying to find the first has been given as the Daynab Confederation. We wound the four fingers and the thumb of the Fractyr Fist in the dungeons of Omicron VII, and we learned that the palm was somewhere on Andrini.

   

As this session began, I arrived on Andrini. Like Omicron, the planet consisted of a starport and two dungeon levels. The starport had an Alliance HQ and an armory, but no medical bay, so when I was wounded, I had to have my body-focused psion cast INSHL ("Instant Heal") and wait for his spell points to regenerate.

  

"Rumors of the Fractyr Palm are widespread," I was told at Alliance HQ. "Exercise extreme caution." That wasn't much help. I ran through the area with the automap, then descended to the dungeon level, which was dark. I had to cast my mind-focused psion's NITST ("Night Sight") to see, which the game depicts as the word "Light" surrounded by flames, one of many ways that the interface signals that it was intended for a fantasy game.

      

Undead and beholders are another one.

      

Combats came along regularly. They are so boring, but I don't try to flee from them because fleeing fails at least half the time, giving enemies a free round to riddle you with bullets. For the same reason, I rarely try to move the party in combat, because that's all you can do that round. My lead character is fierce with a melee weapon, but advancing under enemy fire isn't worth it; it's best to have her use a pistol unless enemies start in melee range or they move themselves there.

     

For most combats, I just unload with my 9mm weapons. My two psions will get some good mass-damage spells later, but for the time being, their pistols outperform their psionic attacks.

      

Fairly early on the first level, I wandered into a "crowded room filled with guards." Someone yelled that I was there to "steal the Palm," and they attacked. It was the toughest battle in the game so far, with seven men armed with machine guns. Three of my characters started the battle with empty magazines. The enemies killed two characters in the first round. I reloaded the game, reloaded my guns, and tried again, this time also lobbing a grenade at them. I found a Yellow Badge on one of them when they died. 

       

Who are these guys? Humans?

       

Some time later, in an alcove, I found a pile of papers on a desk. One of them included a note: "The complete suit was lost on KW. Raiding parties are on their way to Chronum. The real Palm is hidden behind the impostor." There was a pen with which I could write a note, but I didn't know of anything to write, so I declined. "KW" must be Kevner's World. Now it's not just a fist but a whole suit?

   

The only way down to Level 2 was by falling through the rotting timbers in an abandoned mineshaft, which I did accidentally. The Fractyr Palms--one real, one fake--were hidden in the southeast corner, protected by two energy fields. One of them halved our hit points when we walked through it. The other simply blocked us.

      

I'm not quite sure what this image is attempting to depict.

                

I had to find a generator in the southwest corner and shut it down. I believe there was a technical skill check involved. We then made our way to the Palms, each guarded by a robot. The message above had said the real one is "behind" the fake one, and indeed both of them were in adjacent squares, but I still don't know which one is real and which is fake.

     

Who needs electricity when you have a "Light" spell?

        

Some scratchings on a wall said: "When you get the chance, write 'ORACLE.'" We found stairs up to Level 1 (a hidden area with a one-way door leading back to the main part of the level). We went back to the desk we had seen previously and wrote ORACLE in the notebook. This somehow caused a door to appear on a nearby wall. Behind it was an old man. He said he'd identify equipment, but he didn't have anything interesting to say about any of our things.

      

I'd love to know the mechanism by which writing in a paper notebook causes a door to open.

      

We also had the option to feed him a keyword. I chose a random word. "You'd better bring me the word from Tonka's," he said. I don't know what that means.

    

I brought the party back to the surface and to the spaceport so we could return to Lunabase and level up. On the way to the academy, we stopped at the Alliance HQ. "Go IMMEDIATELY to Chronum," the Alliance officer said. I disobeyed orders to level up first, then returned to the starport.

    

Maybe that's just his way of telling us to get out of his office.

     

We flew to Chronum without knowing why. Nothing got any clearer when we arrived; the officer in the Alliance HQ there just said, "Welcome to Alliance Headquarters."  The starport had an armory, a medical bay, and not much else. I wasted a bunch of time mapping the rest, but I guess that's been true of every map so far. There was only one square of interest, in the center of the map, that said: "The reactor is sealed off. No one can enter from here." Maybe I didn't go "immediately" enough.

  

Having found nothing on Chronum, I wasn't sure what to do next. I returned to the starport and decided to go to Kevner's World to see if I could find that "complete suit." The manual notes that Kevner's World is the home of a "humanoid civilization caught in an era resembling Earth's medieval period." Their psionic abilities "have been mistaken for magic and spellcasting." Enemies on the planet seemed like characters and monsters from The Bard's Tale: hunters, paladins, orcs, mages, bards, and dragons. One of the weapons I looted was a Dragonsword. You have to wonder why Michael Cranford didn't just produce another fantasy RPG.

     

Living the dream.

       

On Kevner's World, the Alliance Headquarters, starport, armory, and medical bay were all in the same 2 x 2 building. In the rest of the 16 x 16 map, there were only two things to find. The first was Tonka's Tower, the home of the "Great Wizard Tonka Og." A magic mouth wanted my name for admittance, but when I gave it, it said, "Sorry, I don't know you," and kicked me out. I also tried ORACLE and TONKA to no avail.

  

The second area was the entrance to Zentek's Fortress in the southwest. There was no magic mouth here, so I entered. 

   

Level 1 was relatively linear, with three branches that each led to switchback mazes. At the end of a corridor was a skeleton whose former host had written something about assembling "the penultimate words from the magic clues."

      

You guys are taking this medieval theme too far.

     

Another branch ended in a computer terminal which let me input words. I tried various keywords to no avail, although it did seem to recognize ZENTEK. 

Level 2 led me to three magic mouths, each with a phrase:

   

• "I smell a rat behind the spot where Zentek sat."
• "A foe so far that never could we ever spar."
• "The game's the thing wherein you feel the deadly sting."

        

A fourth magic mouth asked for a password, which I didn't have. I did note that ZENTEK is the penultimate word of the first phrase, so I figured the computer on the first floor wanted the words ZENTEK, EVER, and DEADLY. The problem was, I couldn't find any way to get back up to the prior floor. There were no stairs going back up at the location where I had arrived--and without the password, there was no way forward. I don't know whether that's a bug or whether I missed something. Either way, I looked up what would have happened had I fed the three words into the computer. I would have gotten the password: NAVATH. I used it to open the way to the next level.

      

I should mention that by this point, I'd acquired a couple of allies. First, I found a genie bottle at the end of a battle with some half-orcs. Using it summoned a genie to fill a party slot. Then a vampire asked to join the party. Both of them have powerful magic attacks if they can get close enough.

     

How does this look different from a vampire desiring to eat my party?

       

Level 3 was linear, but confusing enough that I mapped it manually. There were a lot of teleporters that sent us on one-way trips between individual sections of the map. It culminated in a long eastern corridor full of squares that drain health and psionics. The damage done by both can be undone by simply waiting for spell points to recharge and casting healing spells, but psionic ones come with a twist: If a character gets to 0 psionic points, he becomes stunned, a condition that (I think) is only fixable by visiting the medical bay back in the starport. 

      

My map of Zentek's fortress.

      

The end of the level had two special encounters. The first was a message that said Tonak's middle name was BUNT.

     

The second was an encounter with Zentek himself, wearing the Fractyr Suit. It took me about 6 reloads to defeat him. He was capable of some devastating magic spells, plus he could summon "stone men" which themselves had powerful magic and could kill characters with one hit in melee range. Vir was out of commission from the psi-draining squares; there was no way to avoid them or save him. Ultimately, genie and vampire were crucial in the successful battle. I ended up losing the vampire anyway.

     

That's quite a pose, Big Z.

        

Killing Zentek got me the Fractyr Suit. I had to go back through the psi-draining squares and health-draining squares to find the exit; fortunately, it teleported me back to the first level, two steps away from the stairs to the starport. I visited the medical bay and got everyone healed, then took a ship to Lunabase so I could level up. 

Back to Kevner's World, where TONKA BUNT OG got us past the magic mouth and into Tonka's fortress. 

     

I spent too long trying to find an anagram in here.

       

Tonka's place was two levels. On the first, we found a message that said: "Directions: Inverted logic . . . visit the three sequentially." This seemed to refer to three squares on the east side of the map, each of which contained a message. I didn't write down two of them exactly, but they were something like this:

• "The hand reaches for the sword."
• "The sword clears the sheath."
• "The blow is struck."

 

Thus, I had to visit the squares in that order to tell the story and open the teleporter to the next level.

  

Arriving on Level 2, I was greeted with a message from Tonka. The long and annoying level only had two things. One was a message that: "The secret is contained in KNLAKRA." The other was an encounter with Tonka, wearing a Fractyr Helm. This encounter came at the end of a very long passage in which every other square had a psion-draining effect. If there's some way to protect against these, I haven't found it. Even resting for long periods along the way, I couldn't make it to Tonka's door without Morella getting stunned.

     

What kind of a name is "Tonka," anyway?

     

Tonka was about as hard as Zentek, which means it took a lot of reloads and my genie did much of the heavy lifting. Half of my success in difficult battles comes down to enemies making stupid decisions for multiple turns in a row, such as trying to use psi attacks with limited range when we're too far away. We finally got lucky with a sequence of those, killed Tonka, and took the helm.

   

Back at the Alliance headquarters on Kevner's World, the representative told us information might be waiting for us on Tau Eridani. But we went to Lunabase first to level up. It really is quite annoying that we have to do that. Then we returned to Andrini to feed that weird keyword to the Oracle. All he said was, "Why didn't you say so in the first place?" I have no idea what that accomplished.

        

Because it's a nonsense word that means nothing?

     

Combat is getting a little harder, so I probably need to take some time to grind a few levels, perhaps exploring some skills that I haven't been prioritizing. I also keep finding items with charges, but rather than taking the time to figure out what they do, I've mostly been selling them. 

At this point, I've explored about one-third of the worlds, so I guess I'm about one-third done. I haven't been able to find the right words to describe what it's like to play this game. It's not bad--it's about as much fun as The Bard's Tale--and some of the puzzles and navigational challenges are okay. There's just a general sense of cluelessness about the thing. If this were a shareware game, I'd call it "spunky," but it came from Michael Cranford and Brøderbund. It doesn't seem to be winking at its own obsolescence; indeed, it seems to be convinced that it's actually a good game. It so earnestly repeats things that worked well in a previous era, and it shows no awareness of anything else that happened during the intervening period, like Might and Magic or Dungeon Master or Pool of Radiance. It feels a little sad, frankly.

                    

But I'll stick with it and see how it goes. Maybe there are surprises on the other worlds.

   

Time so far: 11 hours

Playing out of: Still duty, like the kind of duty that forces you to read your 11-year-old son's "novel" even though it's full of cringe.

Game 515: Loremaster (1991)

It's like they left room for a subtitle that they ended up not using.

      

Loremaster

United States

Creative Software (developer and publisher)
Released 1991 for DOS
Date Started: 14 May 2024

     

Loremaster--if that's even its name--is an interesting find. Usually, 1991 is well out of the Dark Ages, and there's plenty of documentation about every title, its author, and its publisher. This one is a complete mystery. Its publisher (and perhaps developer), Creative Software of San Francisco, was only around long enough for this game. The documentation has been lost, and the specific author is unknown. The publisher had enough faith in it to sponsor a well-designed half-page ad in Computer Gaming World and a full-pager in PC Games.

   

It's an adventure/RPG hybrid in a similar mold as the Quest for Glory series; in fact, I'd be surprised if the author hadn't played at least Hero's Quest. As with the Sierra adventures, you navigate a series of indoor and outdoor screens in a "studio" (side-view) perspective and type verbs and nouns to interact with people and objects. The RPG elements come from non-deterministic combat, a small inventory, and a set of attributes, as well as experience and leveling. Beyond that are a lot of mysteries. I'm not prepared to say that it's a bad game, but the lack of documentation severely hurts the experience.

 

 

 

Given that it's a hybrid, my coverage will be paralleled by Morpheus Kitami's over at the Adventurers' Guild. I hope he has more luck with it.

    

The first point of confusion is the game's name. The ads suggest that it might have been intended as Send for the Loremaster, or that may have just been a tagline. The installation program calls it Loremaster I: Send for the Loremaster but the title-screen just calls it Loremaster, as does the "thank you for playing" screen that you get when you close the game.

   

This one even tells you that there's no main quest. Guess I'm done!

    

In any event, the titular Loremaster is not the PC. The backstory is that the Seven Kingdoms, ruled by King Yelraf (read it backwards) and Queen Tei, are under threat from a northern sorcerer named Gaiasbane. They've sent for the legendary Loremaster to deal with the sorcerer. The PC appears to be the son of a king that Gaiasbane conquered and killed.

   

Getting the backstory from the king and queen.

        

The default character is a mage named Myth. He's supposed to be only 28 years old when the game begins, but he looks 70. You can create your own character from fighter, mage, cleric, thief, sage, or merchant classes, although owing to incorrect in-game instructions, I didn't figure out how to do that until late in the session. The only option you get during creation is the character's name and a password to use when you LOGON to that character.

   

The game starts you with default values in IQ, wisdom, age, level, stamina, strength, armor, agility, karma, piety, experience, and life (represented as a percentage). Unlike most games, you don't start at Level 1. Myth is Level 58 as the game begins. The fighter I created started at Level 27. Just as the characters gain experience from successful actions, they can lose it (and levels) from unsuccessful ones, including death.

   

I need to do some more experimentation, but I think multiple characters can occupy the world at the same time. When I had one character kill a spider, then logged in as a different character, the same spider was dead. On the other hand, characters never encounter each other on the same screen, and they get the same dialogue from NPCs. Maybe the slain king had multiple sons. The game saves the world and character state every time you transition screens, I think. There's no option to save manually or reload if something goes poorly. You can delete and add characters whenever you want, but if you want to start completely over, you have to reload the entire game. This focus on a persistent world state with multiple characters makes me think the author had exposure to a MUD.

     

Loremaster starts with Myth standing on a bluff overlooking the town. The view shows the relative positions of the castle, general store, and church. This is the only screen that I've found so far that's non-interactive. The character cannot walk across the screen or interact with its objects. All he can do is move  north or south to much smaller areas.

     

The opening screen.

     

On all other screens, you can move the character about the screen with the numberpad or mouse. You can walk up to specific objects and creatures. The interface is reasonably well-programmed. Right-clicking the mouse cycles the cursor through movement, drop, attack, look, cast, pick up, detect trap, check status, rest, and meditate options; again, this is much like Quest for Glory. The player can also activate these commands by typing them, but for some actions (look, principally), you definitely want the cursor. 

   

Commands include most of what you'd expect, including ASK, ATTACK, CAST, GIVE, PUSH, and READ, and TAKE. Most commands use simple verb-object or verb-subject-object constructions like TAKE LAMP or ASK YELRAF SWORD. Most words can be abbreviated to three letters; CAS GRI will cast the prepared spell at a griffon. The author wrote HELP text for every command, and as a bonus, all of the text in the game gets dumped into a text file in the game's directory, so you can review everything an NPC or the game itself has said at any time. More games could use that feature.

   

All of this sounds fairly straightforward, but then we get into a number of oddities:

   

• There doesn't appear to be any distinction between enemies and NPCs. They're all just beings. Sometimes, they'll talk to you and offer advice; sometimes, they attack you for what seems like no reason. The latter is particularly true if you get up into their space. The merchant attacked me when I first entered his store because I got too close.

• You can fight NPC/enemies with weapons and spells. Myth is powerful enough at the beginning to kill almost anything with ICE and FIRE spells. When an enemy dies, sometimes its ghost appears and harasses you. Often, a lighting bolt comes down and somehow resurrects it.

 

Moments before the spider gets hit by lightning and comes back to life.

     

• If the character gets killed, his body slinks to the ground. After a few seconds, you can type JUDGE, and the game will resurrect you at the cost of a few levels. But if you're right next to an enemy, he might just kill you again. If this happens several times in a row, the game will kick you back to DOS and force you to take a break. When you reload, you're back at the starting screen, albeit weaker.

• I have to explore more with magic, but it seems insanely powerful. You prepare a spell with INCANT and the name of the spell, then CAST it at a specific monster or character; for instance, INCANT SLEEP and CAST BASALISK [sic]. Spells include straight-out DEATH as well as FIRE, ICE, LIGHTING, FEAR, SLEEP, WEAK, and HEAL, and you have all of them from the beginning of the game. TELEPORT will take you to any known NPC, and SUMMON will bring any NPC to you. I used it to bring Gaiasbane to me, two steps from the beginning, although he just proceeded to kill me repeatedly while I was powerless to touch him.

      

I try to force the final battle too soon.

      

• Judicious use of ASK will get you a lot of information from NPCs, but I can't find any way to interact with them other than asking and occasionally answering if they ask you a question.There's no generic TALK or SAY command.
  

• The game makes it hard to map by putting stone walls in the middle of some screens. There are also passages to caves and other underworld locations at what seem like random spots. Also traps.

       

That's an effective trap.

       

• You find buildings. When you enter, the game doesn't move you to an entirely new screen, but takes you half-off the outdoor screen that had the doorway, using only the upper third of the screen to depict the indoors. This means that all indoor areas are long and thin and kind of squashed.

     

I started mapping the game to get a sense of its overall territory. At first, I just did it with large single blocks in Excel, but I kept getting hung up on walls and I settled on a more complex method in which every screen was represented by 9 smaller blocks, allowing me to draw walls that cut through a particular screen. This approach worked somewhat, but I soon realized I'll be mapping forever if I continue with this. The best I can figure, the game has at least 500 screens, not counting all of the underground and indoor areas that I haven't even begun to explore. A lot of the screens use similar elements--boulders, flowers, trees--but I haven't seen any exact duplicates.

     

Note that I'm stuck on the east side of the wall.

     

So I gave up comprehensively mapping and just tried to get a sense of the best way to approach the start of the game. I started over with a thief character. The game has two character images: a big brawny guy (thief and fighter) and the mage we've been seeing (everyone else). The thief started with no equipment and 211 coins at Level 22. He's 31 years old. As expected, his best statistic is agility (70), but he's so dumb he can barely move (intelligence and wisdom at 7).

       

Chester's almost-starting statistics. I forgot to take a shot right after creation.

     

In my previous hours with the game, I hadn't found any weapons lying around on the ground, so I headed for the general store to buy something. On the way, I met a faerie, but I couldn't get anything interesting out of him.

      

Sounds fair.

    

The shop is run by a guy named Butterman. He tells me he can sell weapons or armor. He suggests I see Francis, the cleric, about spiritual issues and Iseult, the Oracle, about the past and future. She can be found "through the old forest," a dangerous journey west. Francis is to the east. Gerald, the king's last loyal guard, is to the northeast. A farmer named Samwise is "way up north"; he tells stories about little green men. Butterman doesn't trust Iseult's lover, Tristan, who he's seen "lurking about" talking about "synchronasticity."

He fills in a bit of background about the main quest. He talks of trouble up north, the weather turning sour, and no more visitors coming from that direction. Rains have turned green and acid and kill plants. He's confident the Loremaster will turn up and straighten things out. He refers to Yelraf's kingdom as the Kingdom of Law and Justice. If it seems rather empty, he says, it's because most folks have fled the coming apocalypse.

Conversation turns to weapons. He says he has swords for fighters, maces for clerics, and staves for mages. I guess of the three, I'm closest to a fighter. I can't get him to say anything about the cost, so I just try BUY SWORD. It works, except the sword costs 930 coins, and I'm now 741 coins in debt. He won't let me repeat the process with armor, though.

     

If you owe the merchant 10 gold, that's your problem; if you owe him 741 gold, that's his problem.

     

I ready the sword and head out, noting that the conversation increased Chester's intelligence by 1 point. I'll have to keep an eye on what actions have what effects on what statistics. 

   

On a nearby screen, I decide to try out my sword by attacking a giant spider, but the game won't let me. It just says, "Hmmm, you do have a mean streak in you." Maybe you have to get attacked first.

       

Yes, please let me express it.

     

I head up to the castle, the facade of which takes up three screens. The front door is in the center, and banners reading "Law" and "Justice" are to the east and west. The door takes me to a single room in which both King Yelraf and Queen Tei sit. They mostly repeat what Butterman already told me, and what I related in the backstory. My karma increases by 10 from the conversation.

        

"Big boy"?!

     

While looking for Francis and the church, I run into a dragon. She isn't hostile, though she warns me that many of her kin will be. She offers a riddle:

I am of glowing soft moonlight,

    yet hidden from the mooman's sight.

From deep and dark and airs demand,

    in softness held, the end of sand . . .

Tell me what this treasure be,

    adored by her of land and sea

 

I get it right with PEARL and the dragon increases my magic ability by 1. I didn't even know that was a statistic. I don't see it anywhere. 

     

Gerald is clear about his place in the world.

       

I find Gerald before I find Francis. He's guarding a door next to a building in the northeast section of town. For a PLEASE, he trains me and increases my fighting ability by 1. The building behind Gerald has what looks like a mound and a cross. These dot the landscape. I took them as graves at first, but I guess they're piles of treasure. In this case, the game tells me that they're ancient coins. But when I try to take them, it won't let me, so I don't know what that's about. 

  

At the west end of this indoor area, I trigger a fire trap, then fall down to an underground area. It seems to be part of a multi-screen network, but I'm on the other side of a wall, and I can't get into the main area. I trigger a sleep trap, and while I'm asleep, a basilisk comes along and kills me. The game resurrects me, but one level lower and eight years older. I manage to kill the basilisk, though, which returns my level and increases my strength. And my karma is a whopping 510 (from around 40 before), so I don't even know what that attribute is measuring.

     

Just let me die!

      

I find the church, enter, and pray at the altar, which gives me 1 wisdom and 10 piety. 

      

The front door of the church.

   

Francis is in the west wing of the church. He's a little full of himself: "My faith combined with [Iseult's] foresight are the vengeance with which we hold back the flow of decay and ruin from the North." It's from him that I first learn the name "Gaiasbane" for the evil sorcerer who has caused the acid rain. Samwise has somehow managed to defy the sorcerer by keeping his own lands green and fertile.

Francis also confirms that my parents were the rulers of the northern kingdom most recently conquered by Gaiasbane. He says my mother's name was Astrid, and they were very devoted to each other. Iseult can tell me more about them. Their kingdom might have been called the Kingdom of Peace and Tranquility. Isn't that nice?

He further states that there's only one weapon powerful enough to defeat Gaiasbane, and it lies in the caverns below, called the Caverns of Carthos. The caverns are guarded by a banshee named Banesthrall, an apprentice to Gaiasbane. "Find and defeat Banesthrall and you will find the key to defeating the Sorcerer," he concludes. He also wants me to recover his grail, which he thinks was taken by a fire elemental.

       

"Gaiasbane" is a little too on-the-nose.

    

At some point during the conversation, I make a typo and it causes me to attack Francis. He kills me immediately, and when I come back to life, I've lost a level but also 14 years off my age. This game is just weird sometimes.

I think I'll leave it there for now and see if Morpheus Kitami had any more luck making sense of things. Keep watching both of our blogs for continued coverage.

    

Time so far: 4 hours

Playing out of: Curiosity. 

Princess Maker 2: Summary and Rating

From the final report.

      

Princess Maker 2

Japan
Gainax Co., Ltd. (developer and publisher), Adventions (English translation)
Released 1991 for PC-98, 1992 for MSX and DOS, 1995 for TurboGrafx CD; English DOS version from 1996
Date Started: 5 May 2024

Date Ended: 8 May 2024

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Easy (2.0/5), in the sense there's no way to "lose"; hard (4.0/5) to get the best ending

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

       

As my longtime readers know, I don't have any children of my own. This was mostly a conscious decision that Irene and I made in our 20s. She has never questioned the decision; I find myself questioning it more and more as I get older and reflect that it won't be many years before I have no family at all, and all the things that I treasure will end up in an estate auction or a landfill.

But when I think about such things, I am not missing the presence of a real child. I am missing the presence of a hypothetical happy, healthy child who survived to adulthood and is still speaking to me. I suppose that's the norm, but it's hardly a guarantee. The fact that it's not a guarantee is 50% of why I chose not to have children. It would be nice if raising them were like Princess Maker 2, where certain inputs lead inevitably to certain outcomes. In real life, you never know how a developing human being's psycho-biology is going to react to the most innocuous inputs--or fail to react to the most heartfelt ones. I read this harrowing account of a man's relationship with his son on Reddit four years ago and haven't gone a week without thinking about it since. That is simply not a risk I'm willing to take.

      

I would probably get the sort of daughter who spends $3,000 of my money on a leather dress.

   

Well, for a while, I got to have a virtual child whose accomplishments I could be proud of. What interests me is the qualitative difference between playing your character and playing an unseen, ephemeral character (the father) who in turn directs the action of a "child" character. Functionally, it ought to feel like the same thing. Except for the stupid butler constantly asking how I wanted to set Villainy's schedule for the month, it would be equally accurate to say that I played Villainy, particularly when she went on adventures and I controlled her avatar. But Princess Maker introduces that extra layer, and there's something oddly effective about it. After I finished with the main game, I briefly tried to engineer a "bad" outcome by assigning Villainy to work repeated shifts in a sleazy bar, increasing her "Sin" and decreasing her "Morality." That lasted only as long as she agreed to become the mistress for a middle-aged guy in exchange for a monthly stipend. I could role-play a character who did such a thing, but I didn't want to role-play the father of such a character, and particularly not a father whose own decisions had put his daughter in that kind of a situation. Weird.

        

And I'm done.

      

In my first entry on the game, I covered its basic premise and mechanics. I thought I'd give a year-by-year account of Villainy's life here:

   

Age 10

   

The game began on the girl's 10th birthday. For the first month, not knowing what I was doing, I assigned her to 10 days of combat training, 10 days of farm work, and 10 days of babysitting. The combat training improved her statistics, but it cost so much money that I spent most of the year impoverished. She wasn't strong enough to succeed at farm work. She did all right in babysitting. In subsequent months, I had her try other types of work, but she didn't bring back much money because her skills weren't very high yet.

         

That's nice, but my bank account is not.

       

I prematurely sent her into the wilderness because a video or image that I saw showed the character opening a treasure chest. I thought that might be an easy way to make some money. I had no idea how dangerous the forest was. I don't think she even had any weapons or armor; I couldn't have afforded them. She met one monster, was defeated, and had to be flown back home by Cube.

         

She should have paid attention to the sign.

     

Over the coming months, I tried to make up money by having her work, but I didn't realize how the whole stress/constitution system worked yet, so the experience just made her sick and disobedient. During the "Talk" phase, I gave her a lecture each month ("Scold"), which reduced some of the disobedience but presumably didn't do much for our relationship. She started having days of unpaid work not because she didn't have the skills for the job but because she simply refused.

   

Every October, there's a Harvest Festival in which you can enroll the girl into the combat tournament, the dance party, the art festival, or the cooking contest. I chose cooking, but I hadn't developed any of those skills, and she came in dead last.

      

Villainy goes for Star Baker.

    

As the year came to an end, my finances got worse. I scrimped to buy a club and suit of leather armor and sent Villainy out again to adventure, but she couldn't come close to defeating any enemies. When she turned 11, I didn't have enough money for a present for her. I was going into negative values every month just feeding her (this is the only debt the game lets you accrue).

     

Age 11

   

The year began without promise as a seer visited the house and predicted that Villainy would become "an ordinary housewife." But as the year passed, I got a handle on how work and training affected different skills. I was still primarily interested in getting her into fighting shape, so I had her take combat, dueling, and strategy lessons whenever I could afford it, and kept her working at jobs that built her constitution and strength otherwise.

     

Calm down. I'm still new to this fatherhood thing.

     

I had to buy her summer and winter dresses to replace the "plain dress" she had at the beginning, then remember to change her as the seasons changed, else she'd suffer a "Constitution" penalty. 

 

I upgraded her weapon to a longsword and sent her out on more adventures. She finally scored her first kill against a condor, but otherwise didn't last long in the east forest. When the Harvest Festival rolled around, I enrolled her in the combat tournament, which does this fun bracketing thing, but she lost her fist battle.

    

On the other hand, "Katana Terror" is someone you don't mind losing to.

      

Age 12

      

"Hunter" opened up as a job option, and I wasted a lot of time assigning her to it, since it improves both "Constitution" and "Combat Skill," although it increases sin. She could never make a wage at it, though, no matter how high she got in those skills. I discovered later that success at hunting depends partly on "Intelligence," which I hadn't been building.

   

I continued to send her to martial schools when I had the money. A couple of times during the year, some warlord showed up and decided to humiliate the school by stealing its standard. Villainy challenged the warlord each time, but lost the battles, and the school would get closed for a few months.

     

Wasn't this a plot point in Ultima VII?

    

But as her skills grew, she was visited by Valkyria, "the guardian of all true warriors," who gave her a further boost. 

Age 13

      

"Gravedigger" became a job, and I set her to it a couple of times, as it builds "Magical Defense" and some foes attack with magic. The seer visited again and now predicted that Villainy would become a soldier.

        

She finally started to get successful at adventuring, clearing the east forest and finding several treasure chests, which finally put my account books solidly in the black. She also cleared most of the northern glacier and southern islands. (Once the scale tips on combat, it tips fast.) She came in second in the combat tournament that year, after which random people started challenging her to duels a few times a year. Every successful duel increased her "Fighter Reputation."

     

A random fight in the street.

     

Her "Sin" went up from all the battles, so I had to keep donating to the church and having the girl work church jobs (which pays a pittance) in between her combat trainings.

   

One night while working graveyard duty, a skeleton knight came out of a grave and challenged her to combat. He ran away before she defeated him the first time, but the second time, she defeated him and got 2,539 gold pieces. This is one of several places in the game in which you get a special, large reward for completing a unique encounter. Thanks to this money and other winnings, I was able to buy her a katana and mithril armor, the best items that the store sells.

       

That was an awfully specific amount.

      

A traveling salesperson came to the house offering various artifacts. I bought Villainy the Venus Jewels. From that point, every birthday, one of Venus's minions showed up at the house and gave the girl +15 "Refinement," +15 "Charisma," and +15 "Sensitivity." She mostly squandered these boosts by working jobs that lowered the scores back to 0.

A couple years later.

     

Age 14

      

As the year began, she cleared out the western wastes. There were a couple of odd encounters there:

  

• A demon cave. When she entered, a demon confronted her and said that it "isn't a place for humans" and cast a spell that put her back outside. I'm not sure if there's any way around this.

       

It's nice that he warned me instead of killing me.

     

• A maze guarded by a dragon. He offered to let her pass for 200 gold pieces, but she chose to fight. She won easily, after which the dragon confessed he was only 13--a baby as dragons go. He slinked away. A commenter said that one of the endings has the girl marrying a young dragon; I imagine this is the one, though I don't know how it happens. She fought a couple of regular dragons in the maze and met an ancient one in the final chamber, but he was too old and tired to fight. A treasure chest held a Dragon's Fang, which increased "Fighter Reputation" by 20. 

       

I'm through doing what I'm told.

      

Back at home, a duelist named Anita Cassandra showed up at the house and proclaimed herself to be Villainy's archnemesis. "Don't come to the next Combat Tournament," she warned. "You'll only embarrass yourself." Villainy didn't take that well. 

       

A fateful meeting? She came to my house!

     

I explored the wilderness area some more and found a few things I  missed the first time. When the Harvest Festival rolled around, Villainy won the combat tournament, defeating Anita in the first round. The king gave her a Royal Sword and 3,000 gold pieces.

    

Age 15

      
Both I and Villainy were pretty pleased as to her martial accomplishments by now. I decided it was time to train her in some other areas and started enrolling her in dancing, poetry, theology, science, and particularly protocol classes, which increased her more courtly attributes like "Refinement," "Decorum," "Intelligence," and "Art." 

    

Villainy is getting a little arrogant.

    

I tried to help her out by buying a silk dress, but Cube said that--at 4'11" and 97 pounds--she was too heavy for it. I put her on a restricted diet, but it kept saying she was still too fat at 95 pounds, and the restricted diet took a toll on her constitution. I eventually gave up and put her back on normal rations.

     

Ah, yes. This happened at some point. I thought we'd encountered a "Paimon" in some previous game, but I couldn't find it.

       

As "Decorum" increased, she could visit higher and higher-ranked people at the castle, which in turn gave her boosts to reputation. I had neglected this for the first half of the game, so she struggled to catch up. I didn't want to sacrifice her strength, constitution, and martial skills, so every time they started to slip, I had her work a farm or sent her back for combat training. There wasn't much point to more adventuring, but I occasionally sent her out for money. She won the Combat Tournament again, easily.

   

Ages 16 and 17

       

I give her a book on her 16th birthday.

      

By now, she had job options to work at a sleazy bar or a cabaret. These jobs paid well and increased her "Charisma," but they lowered "Faith," "Morality," "Refinement," and "Temperament," and they increased "Sin." I only tried them once or twice. 

       

What good is sitting alone in your room?

        

Her "Decorum" got high enough that she could visit the king. 

 

All anyone wants to talk about is my father!

      

I threw myself at the War God in the northern glacier a few times, but I couldn't come close to defeating him even with my combat skill at maximum. My constitution and strength never got higher than 50% of maximum, so perhaps that was the solution.

         

I kept up the training and had her work a variety of jobs she hadn't done in the past to try to diversify her skill set. She won both combat tournaments in her final two years. I tried to enroll her in other things, but she begged to fight the tournament because of her rivalry with Anita Cassandra, and I capitulated.

   

The End

      

The endgame commenced when Villainy turned 18. The first thing I got was a letter from her tailored to the priorities that I set for her. Phrases included: "I've grown up so healthy"; "You must have been trying to make me strong in mind and body"; "I ended up becoming very good at farming."

     

I don't know why she felt compelled to write me a letter.

     

The king offered to make her a general in his army, but she declined: "I want to go out on my own into the wide world and test my strength." General Kruger (who runs the strategy school as well as the combat tournaments) made her promise to come home and tell of her adventures.

       

General Kruger might be hinting at some unresolved feelings.

     

The endgame text revealed that she had many adventures and eventually met a "kind knight" and married him and had her own daughter. Her travels took her to an eastern capital, where she destroyed a demon that was leading an army of bandits. She eventually came home, and we held a banquet in her honor.

     

She'd look relatively heroic here if her eyes weren't as large as tennis balls.

    

Finally, I was contacted by the angel who gave me the girl in the first place. She congratulated me and thanked me on fine parenting skills and ran through the final outcome:

• Villainy had become a hero.
• She performed well at her work.
• She found a good husband.
• Her maternal instincts leave something to be desired.
• The angel had planned to recall the girl to the heavens, but has decided to let her live a mortal life.

           

Maybe give her the choice? Or would that be too revolutionary for this game?

    

I then got a final score sheet that recapped her endgame attributes but also had a bunch of statistics I hadn't seen before showing that she had a very low maternal instinct, a very low "relationship with father," a high "relationship with butler," and absolutely no "relationship with Prince," who I didn't even know existed. To be fair, I didn't take her on many vacations, take her out to many meals, buy her many presents, or even talk to her very often. I mostly let "time off" handle stress-reduction instead of those other possibilities.

   

And I think I'm going to leave it there. I know some commenters wanted to see me run through it again, maybe more than once, but a full game takes at least 4 hours, even if you're quick about it. I don't want to spend that much more time on a game that's not really an RPG; it just weirdly has an RPG embedded in it as an option. I wonder if there are any other games like this, like if Fallout 4 wasn't an RPG, but I still felt I had to play and rate it because of the Grognak game you can play on the Pip-Boy.

       

Call us a bunch of Victorian prudes, but I'm glad this wouldn't fly in the U.S.

     

I can tell from online sources that there are 74 potential endings depending on your morality score, sin score, and various reputations. If you didn't get any reputation very high, I guess you end up working for the rest of your life at whatever job you worked most. If you got any of your attributes high enough but not any of the reputations, you can be anything from a maid to a ruling queen.

   

If you got a reputation high like I did with "Fighter Reputation," you end up with a job that reflects that reputation as well as some other attributes. "Hero" was the highest possible job I could have gotten on the warrior track, so that was pretty good for my first time out. But it's because I took lessons that brought my "Sensitivity" high. If I hadn't done that, I would have ended up as a general or a lower position like a knight or soldier. "Bounty Hunter" is the lowest you can go on the fighter track, and that's only if your morality is low.

        

He says, just before I defeat him.

       

There are separate ranks of jobs for characters who specialized in magic (from sorceress to magician hero), social skills (divorcee to queen by marriage), and art (dancer to jester). There is only one final job for a character who specialized in domestic skills: housewife.

   

There are a variety of "dark" endings if you have a high "Sin" score at the end, from "harlot" to "princess of darkness," with "bandit," "crime boss," and "bondage queen" along the way. 

  

I guess the girl's marriage prospects are quasi-independent of her job. To marry the prince and fulfill the title of the game, she has to meet the "young officer" at the castle every January, get a charisma over 200, and get a high "Refinement" score. She can also end up marrying Cube if she has a high enough charisma and relationship with him, and yes, if her relationship with her father is strong enough, she can (yuck) end up marrying him. The John Jarndyce jokes write themselves.

      

I don't know why the game often depicted her with one eye open and one eye closed.

     

I found the game cute. It's not the sort of game I'm addicted to, and I don't really want to play more of them, but it was an okay diversion for a few hours.

   

For the GIMLET, I decided to rate the totality of the game rather than just the "RPG part" of the game.

     

• 2 points for a generic game world that you don't learn very much about.

• 7 points for character creation and development. It's really the raison d'etre of the entire series. There are many statistics to manage, and together they determine success or failure at a variety of enterprises.

    

I wonder what kind of dance they're doing. I think I've seen that move before.

    

• 2 points for NPC interaction. The NPCs you meet in the wilderness don't really tell you anything interesting, and there isn't much to do with the folks at the castle. I'm regarding everyone else as "encounters."

• 5 points for encounters and foes. The enemies are nothing special, but the game deserves quite a bit of credit for the large variety of non-combat encounters that test the character's mettle.

      

That's a pretty cool dragon.

      

• 2 points for magic and combat. With essentially only one physical attack option, one magical attack option, and no other options, it's hard to give much credit here.

• 4 points for equipment. You have one weapon, one suit of armor, and a decent variety of artifact items that affect your statistics in various ways.

     

Villainy's stuff, around mid-game.

     

• 8 points for the economy. The game has almost everything I like here: Several ways to make money, several ways to spend money, and no point at which money stops being useful.

• 4 points for quests. The only quest is to end the game in as good a position as possible, but there are plenty of options for how to do that, and plenty of endings.

     

It's not a "quest," exactly, but Villainy completes a personal goal.

      

• 5 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are nice. I wish the girl looked like a real person instead of a cartoon character, but otherwise the monster portraits and other NPC portraits were well-composed, as was the opening and closing artwork. The interface had redundant mouse and keyboard commands and flowed nicely. I give no points for the sound, which I mostly didn't experience because of the incessant, pounding music that couldn't be turned off independently. When I forced myself to leave it on just to listen for effects, there weren't enough to bother talking about.

• 6 points for gameplay. It points for the right difficulty level, just about the right length, and replayability. However, I suspect that successful games of any type look very similar to each other, and thus setting the girl's schedule month after month must get awfully boring after just a couple of games. I couldn't even bring myself to do it twice.

        

I wonder if this number is the same in the original Japanese.

      

That gives us a relatively high 45. If you told me a month ago that something called Princess Maker 2 would end up in the top 10% of games for 1993, I'd have said you were crazy. Again, though, I'm being a little generous. If I had just ranked the adventuring and combat part of the game independently, the score would have come out closer to 25. I don't mean for this entry to set a precedent for how I handle any further games of a different genre that happen to have an embedded RPG. I do hope there are not a lot of them.

   

I say that knowing that there will be at least one more. Gainax followed Princess Maker 2 with Princess Maker: Legend of Another World (1995), Princess Maker: Fairy Tales Come True (1997), Princess Maker: Go!Go! Princess (1999), and Princess Maker 5 (2007). Of these, MobyGames tags only the 1995 and 1997 games as RPGs, and the 1995 one was released only for the SNES. I don't know whether this is a case of different contributors having different standards, or whether the later games really do drop the adventuring/combat/RPG elements. 

   

MobyGames lists a small number of other combinations between "human life simulator" and RPG, including Real Lives (2002), some ports of The Sims 2 (2005), Kudos 2 (2008), Long Live the Queen (2012), and Her. (2018; the period is part of the title, apparently). However, this is a mashing of genres for which I expect personal opinion will create wildly inconsistent results as to RPG status.