Enchantasy: Half and Half

These battles are getting harder and harder.

     

As I start this entry, it's been almost three weeks since I've played the game. That's never a good situation to be in. When I play games for pleasure, I routinely drop them entirely if too long passes between sessions, a fate that befell Baldur's Gate III a couple of months ago (although I did get far enough to have technically "won" the game, if you regard a certain bad ending as "winning"). With Enchantasy, there's the additional difficulty of not really being sure what to do next.

   

To recap, the main character--a magician's apprentice named Chester--and his friends have been tasked by the Mages' Guild with the recovery of the Eternal Grimoire, before the forces of darkness can find it. Ancillary quests include figuring out where the forces of darkness are coming from and finding the missing prince so that his uncle Hawthorne can't seize the throne.

   

I start in the city of Portsmith. Looking over my quest list, I decide it's ridiculous I haven't rescued the missing Joey from the dungeons of Keldar, and I resolve to grind until I'm strong enough to do that. 

     

Blasting a ghost with a lightning bolt.

       

We march back and forth for a couple of hours in front of the city, fighting all monster groups, usually killing them with arrows before they reach us in melee combat (although some of them have spells or missile weapons of their own). I was just talking about how I hate archers in most games, but I guess I make an exception for my own party. There are a lot of games in which missile weapons make combat a bit too easy--Baldur's Gate comes to mind--but Enchantasy does it well, first by limiting your arrow stock to 99 (and, honestly, even that is a lot for four people to carry) and second by making arrows so expensive. In all the time I spent grinding, I went nowhere financially. Every gold piece I earned went back to arrows.

    

We gain a few levels and spend the training points. I put everything Chester earns into "Magic," while Jared (fighter) and Rodell (ranger) alternate between "Weapon" and "Bow." I mostly favor fighting skills for Shyra (thief), too. Eventually, I'm going to have to prioritize "Lockpick," "Language," and maybe even "First Aid," but for now I'm just trying to get over this hump.

    

Feeling stronger, we return to the Keldar dungeon . . . and the cursed rats are gone. The first enemy group we face is a hodgepodge of foes, including invisible sprites, which I've come to hate. But what happened to the rats? You may recall that in a previous entry, I defeated them with three characters dead and decided to reload. It's possible that the game stores enemy status separately from party status, though, and it had already marked the rats as cleared. I'll have to test that later with another fixed encounter.

      

What we find instead of the cursed rats.

      

All the other enemies we face in the dungeon are far easier than the rats, so we make swift progress, although we have to return to town for arrows a couple of times.

   

We find a lot of barrels and chests with minor treasures (keys, food, a little gold), some behind secret doors or walls that we have to blast with dynamite. You can discern these special walls via subtle changes in the wall pattern, but another way is to cast "See Secrets," which shows you everything worth investigating in the immediate area.

     

This shows me that the chest has something in it and there's a secret area to my east.

    

One wall that we open with dynamite takes us to a chest with a copper shield. Excited, I throw away one of my wooden shields, only to find that no one is strong enough yet to equip the copper one.

   

There's another thief in this dungeon, willing to sell lockpicks and train the "Lockpick" skill. Incidentally, I figure out the little lockpicking "game," but it's hard. To succeed at lockpicking, you have to randomly stop three tumblers by hitting a key. The tumblers stop on numbers between 1 and 99, and they move too fast to time exactly where they stop. You need all three numbers to be below a certain value, depending on your "Lockpick" skill, I guess. I don't know what the specific value needed is for a skill of 4 or 5, which is what I have during this session, but the only time I'm successful at lockpicking, all three tumblers had values less than 25. The odds of getting three values in a row that low are less than 2%. Fortunately, keys always work when lockpicks fail.

      

The numbers are too high and I fail.

        

We do not find Joey. We do find a teleporter to another dungeon. At this point, my assumption is that the teleporters connect different dungeons all across the game world and they're primarily a means of transportation, so it doesn't occur to me that Joey might have gone through this one, particularly since you're supposed to need a "Telegem" to open it. Instead, I waste time returning to Keldar and re-talking to everyone about JOEY and casting "See Secrets" in every house in the city.

      

Using a Telegem on a teleporter.

      

Finally, I return to the dungeon and use a Telegem at the teleporter. We're taken to an isolated section of dungeon with no outlet, so that kills my theory about the teleporters existing for transportation. We fight more battles, running out of arrows and resorting to fully melee combat (except for Chester with his power sling and spells). Incidentally, when you attack an enemy with a melee weapon and miss, the game shows an animation of him dodging out of the way. This is another thing that the author took, I think, from The Magic Candle series.

    

Behind a locked door, we find a sort-of "academy" in which every battle is with a group of "dark cadets." A chest holds a return Telegem.

      

They do not attack one at a time.

      

Finally, we come to a door with someone crying and calling for help behind it. It's Joey!

       

How you doin'?

    

He thanks us for his rescue and runs off, saying he can find his way home. It's always a bit unrealistic when NPCs do this, but I'm so thankful that I don't have to escort them that I let it go.

    

Back in Keldar, Joey's mother gives us 25 gold pieces and some experience points. Finally, a quest solved!

     

Note Joey standing next to her.

      

Now that I know better how dungeons work, and particularly the uses of "See Secrets," I decide to search the dungeon at Macino again for the burglar Blaze. It's mostly a waste of time. There's still a door that no lock or pick will open (including my skeleton key), so maybe he's behind there. I do find a secret passage I had previously missed, but it just leads to a chest with a broadsword, which none of my characters can lift.

    

Back in Macino, I decide to take another round of the city, asking about Blaze and searching for, I don't know, a key to the locked door or something. Most people still insist that he's in the dungeon; but Worrell still thinks that he's dead and buried on a small island.

        

Worrell sticks to his story.

      

On the west side of town, behind a locked door that I never opened during previous visits (a sign outside says "Closed for Repairs"), I find a ladder down to an alternate section of the dungeon. It dumps me in a room with a single battle and no apparent exits, but I soon find a secret door on the north wall. That leads to a room with another locked door--that won't open to keys, picks, or even my skeleton key. Maybe I need a higher lockpicking skill to even try? I don't know. I have to give it up for now.

      

My excitement was short-lived.

     

My re-exploration of Macino does produce, in a healer's treasure chest, an ointment. I've found plenty of medicines, salves, and potions, but no ointment until now. I know someone who's been asking for one--a sick woman back in Keldar. She gives us a Telegem (yay) for it but also enough experience for a couple of characters to rise a level. I go to the training center next door and train Chester in another magic level, and guess what spell comes with it? "Unlock Magic." Alas, this does not turn out to be the solution to either of the locked doors in Macino, and I end up wasting another trip to that city.

       

I wonder where Rick Abel got the idea for all of these side quests. It certainly wasn't from Ultima V or The Magic Candle.

        

Looking over my quest list, I decide to head next to the Forest of No Return, south of Keldar, where I'm looking for a magic horn. This is the first time in the game that I've done any serious non-city, non-road exploration. Consulting the map, I follow the road from Keldar to where it ends after crossing a river. I follow the coast south, stopping at two wells. One poisons all of us and the other gives us +5 temporary armor class. 

   

The forest turns out to be a maze (as the name suggests) with a precise path. The accumulation of combats forces us to turn back to Keldar for arrows and healing several times. At first I try fleeing from most of the battles, but it turns out you lose 5 experience points every time you retreat.

      

I'm ready for combat.

    

At length, we come to a hut in the middle of the forest. Inside, we find the body of Mage Riddick, a Council member. Among his belongings, we find 15 gold, a hunter sling (better than my power sling, it seems), and 3 food. A well in his back yard fully heals us. 

      

Rudimon told me about this, but I can't believe they just left his body here.

       

We finish the forest maze but find nothing else that leads us to the magic horn. Perhaps Riddick had it and it was stolen when he was murdered, or perhaps I need to go through the entire thing again, searching every stump and pile of dirt.

    

Towards the end of this session, I realize I've been under-utilizing my mage. Part of the problem is that maximum spell points are so low that you can only cast a handful of offensive spells per battle. On the other hand, magic potions are so cheap that I should probably fill my inventory with them every time I'm in town. I recently got some mass-damage spells for the first time: "Lightning Storm" and "Flame Frenzy." Battles are definitely getting harder, scaling with my party's leveling, so I need to start increasing my firepower.

       

I can cast three of these before having to sleep and recharge.

      

I still like the game a lot, but man I wish I didn't keep running into walls. When an NPC in Ultima V said you'd find something at a particular place, you damn well found it there, and without a lot of fuss. At least Joey is finally free.

   

Time so far: 16 hours