Enchantasy: The Quest for the Eternal Grimoire: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

  

This is perhaps the most backhanded reward I've ever received.

       

Enchantasy: The Quest for the Eternal Grimoire

United States

EGA Computing (developer); Orion Innovations (original publisher); Point of View Software (later publisher); also published as shareware.
Versions released between 1993 (maybe 1992) and 1996 for DOS

Date Started: 8 July 2024

Date Ended: 3 October 2024

Total Hours: 47

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)   

         

An enjoyable independent game inspired by Ultima V, Enchantasy takes you on a tiled, iconographic quest to recover the Eternal Grimoire to confront a nebulous evil. The plot and quest are interesting, and the game adopts some of the best elements of Ultima when it comes to NPC dialogue and combat. Most RPG mechanics stall around the half-way mark, however, leaving the balance of the game as a series of adventure-style item puzzles and fetch quests.

    

*****

        

What a stupid place for me to have ended my last entry. I could have wrapped it up in another four paragraphs. All I had left was the final battle.

   

When I last wrote, the party had the Eternal Grimoire in hand and was heading to Xanoc's castle to defeat him, rescue the prince, and end the threat once and for all. The endgame began when we arrived on the Isle of the Dead and marched to Xanoc's castle, ringed by mountains.

     

Ideally, you'd want the castle on top of a mountain, I'd think.

     

The front door was magically locked, but a spell took care of that. As we entered the foyer, Xanoc's voice taunted us: "Soon you will be dead and the Grimoire will be mine!" It did feel a bit irresponsible to bring it right to him. Flames erupted as we explored the various rooms, requiring the Scroll of Flames to calm them, although we learned to avoid them in the first place by walking the perimeters of the rooms.

   

We fought battles with various groups of guards and twisted creatures as we explored. The dungeon was generous with "MP Manna" (full MP recharge) potions, so I was generous with "Thunderclap," which did 27 damage with the Grimoire in hand. 

      

Finds like this meant that we didn't have to hold back.

     

The corners of the castle had locked doors with ladders on the other side, suggesting additional floors, but none of these rooms were accessible, and I suspect they were just there for show.

       

We'll never learn where those ladders go.

     

We explored the east and west wings first and found the prison in one of them. The Prince--I never did find out his name--was behind one of the doors. He offered that Xanoc planned to kill us, take the Grimoire, and rule Savallia. He encouraged us to use the tome to defeat the evil wizard. "He lies through the door north of the castle entrance," he finished, before running off to return to the Royal Castle. I was surprised by this. Something someone had said--I can't find the comment right now--made me assume that when I found the Prince, he would join the party.

    

What is your name?!

      

The north door led to a series of small rooms with barrels. Again, these were generous with potions. Duke Hawthorne met us in one of the rooms, wasted a party of "death guards" on us, then attacked us himself. A few spells and arrows later, he was dead.

       

It's the "hahahaha" that really sells it.

        

Xanoc continued to taunt us as we moved forward, and he kept casting fire fields in our path. He finally attacked us with a bunch of "X guards" and elite archers. It was a tough battle because in addition to mass-damage spells, Xanoc was capable of healing himself. He also had a couple of actions per round and was immune to most spells. It took us a couple of reloads before we got lucky with fewer mass-damage spells from his fingertips, allowing us to kill him before he killed us. I should mention that the Mystic Bow was extremely valuable in these final battles, but I never employed the Mystic Sword because it would have taken too many rounds to even get in melee range.

       

Xanoc and his army.

Xanoc is immune to poison.

      

The game had an additional surprise after we defeated him: We hadn't actually defeated him. He popped up in the next room, taunted us, and attacked again with the same group of companions as before. The battle was as difficult as before for the same reasons. Again, we prevailed, but just barely.

     

Fixing ourselves after the second battle.

     

Rudimon gated in as we neared the final door to Xanoc's throne room. He healed our party (which duplicated what I had already done) and had a little speech:

        

I am very proud of you, my young apprentice! I am proud of you all!! You have vanquished the evil from Savallia and gained control once again of the Eternal Grimoire. Your task is now completed. I always knew you would succeed! We'll meet later at the Royal Castle. 

             

How come I don't have the "Teleport In and Out of Places" spell?

       

But when we continued forward into the throne room, there was Xanoc, alive again through unknown means. He delivered a Trandle Oratory:

        

Well . . . it seems my plans have failed . . . temporarily, that is. He who is the possessor of the power of the Eternal Grimoire shall rule the world! And, rest assured, one day the Grimoire will be mine! This is not over yet . . . It has only just begun. HAHAHAHAHA!

      

Xanoc and Hawthorne have the same sense of humor, it seems.

   

The game fortunately did not make us retrace our steps back to the Royal Castle; it took us there automatically. There was a fun ending sequence--I'm always a sucker for these--that featured every NPC icon in the game. Even RICH9000 showed up. The four characters stood before Rudimon, the Prince, and his girlfriend, Jennifer, with every NPC icon in the game watching the proceedings. Rudimon gave my Level 65 character "the full title of Mage" and appointed me to the Mage Council. I don't know what my friends got. Hopefully, they were at least able to keep their magic weapons.

    

"The Prince and Jennifer were wed and became the King and Queen of Savallia," the game informed me. "All of the hideous creatures suddenly disappeared from the land." The Eternal Grimoire was given over to the Mage Council. 

      

Geologists are particularly happy with the endgame.

     

The final screen is author Erick Abel's dedication to his daughter, Jennifer, who died in 1988 at age 14. As we discussed in a previous entry, Erick ("Ricky") Abel himself died in 2022 at age 70 (making him about 39 when he wrote Enchantasy). His obituary mentions a son, Kyle, who died in infancy. He had two other children. Despite a clear intent to make a sequel to Enchantasy, it sounds like this was his only game. 

    

Sadness tinges the game's final celebration.

      

Enchantasy was a well-structured, well-programmed, competent game. I appreciate its intricate plot, its lack of goofiness, its side quests, and many of its mechanics. There were problems with other mechanics, and with pacing and length, but overall I admire what Abel accomplished and would have encouraged him to make the sequel. Abel is one of the few developers who was capable of adapting the best elements of the tiled, iconographic approach. Ultima V remains the highest-rated game on my blog, and I don't think enough has been done with its interface--not by Origin, which never liked to use the same engine twice, nor by the industry's many cloners, who for simplicity's sake seemed to prefer the earlier Ultimas.

    

Here's the GIMLET:

    

• 5 points for the game world. It's a little derivative, but it makes up for that with a greater amount of depth and breadth than we typically get. NPCs and books impart a sense of history and lore, and there are some minor ways in which the game world evolves with the player's actions.

• 2 points for character creation and development. That's almost all for development, since there's no creation. Leveling, training, and acquiring new spells are rewarding up to a point, but about mid-game, the game stops giving you any rewards for both higher experience levels and higher skill levels.

      

My statistics at the end of the game.

     

• 4 points for NPC interaction. I always like keyword-based dialogues and visible, persistent NPCs who speak in paragraphs and have personalities. I wouldn't have minded more role-playing opportunities or some karma system to give more weight to the interactions.

• 3 points for encounters and foes. Enemies are just icons, really, except that some have bows and magic. Most of the credit here goes to puzzles and non-combat encounters, which were occasionally fun.

• 4 points for magic and combat. A gridded, tactical interface is usually what I want from this kind of game. Enchantasy replicates Ultima V fairly well in that regard. I could have used more spells (although I did enjoy the various exploration spells), and the whole thing got more pointless as the game went on.

      

From the battle with Duke Hawthorne.

      

• 3 points for equipment. There are a few weapon and armor slots, and one thing I like is that the game offers clear "weapon strength" and "armor strength" statistics. On the other hand, the acquisition of gear was a little too linear and predictable.

• 3 points for the economy, which was tight and rewarding for the first third of the game and meant nothing after that.

• 4 points for quests, including a main quest and several side quests (e.g., the Mystic Bow and Mystic Sword) that earned experience or gear. There were no role-playing opportunities or choices during these quests, alas.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and inputs. Aside from the beautiful title screen, I found the graphics functional enough but nothing special. I felt the same way about sound. I found the keyboard interface easy to master, particularly with the comments offered on-screen.

• 4 points for gameplay. It earns credit for its nonlinear approach and its medium challenge. I would not call it "replayable" since there are no alternate choices to make, and I would have preferred it to come in at closer to 25 hours.

    

On the last point, I was never exactly bored with the game, but it doesn't keep a good balance of plot and mechanics through the end. It starts out with an enjoyable quest, combat, economy, character development, and so forth, but the last 15 hours are all just about the quest. Still, it's hard to do well, and I'm not going to come down too hard on an independent developer for not getting it right when many AAA games of the modern age make the same mistake.

     

Although I didn't engineer it that way, I like that the final total comes to 35, the rough threshold at which I consider a game "recommended." It has its flaws, but it deserves to be better remembered than it is. Except for my own victory and RandomGamer's, I can't find much evidence that anyone else has seen it through to the end.

 

The Internet Archive's hopefully-temporary outage has put the kibosh on a lot of the other stuff I'd normally do at this point, such as search one more time for any magazine mentions or take a final look at Erick Abel's old AOL page about the game. Perhaps I'll post an addendum later. For now, pleasant journeys, Mr. Abel. Your magnum opus lives on.