Enchantasy: Quest Technically Completed

I just hope it's the right one.

       

This final session began in Keldar, where I took a ship to Hazlett and from there to Portsmith, stole a skiff, and rowed around the continent to Sonora. I used my pass to enter the Oasis Club, which turned out to be basically a regular tavern. As I entered, a patron named Sally warned me to show respect to an old man named Erasmus who's "always babbling about some legend."

      

Accessing an exclusive club.

    

As I suspected, the "legend" in question was that of Rotas, the Great Archer, who died in a sandstorm. His ghost is supposedly still around, guarding the Mystic Bow in a dungeon deep beneath the sand, near a mirage. "Go to it and invoke his name," he finished.

   

Pretty much every other NPC in the bar just commented on Erasmus, so we exited the town to find the mirage. We discovered it in a ring of rocks: a square that looked like water from a distance but disappeared as we got close. We stood in the square, invoked ROTAS, and found ourselves in a dungeon.

   

I'm not sure a real mirage would be surrounded by mountains like this.

    

Exploring, we found the ghost of Rotas, who asked us to bring him a golden bow from the southeast room. The room had a maze of corridors in which the wrong turn would dump us down to a level full of fire squares. It was impossible to get out of the level without taking some damage from the fire, and we had to find telegems to use in a teleporter. Since there was a limited supply of telegems, I just started saving and reloading if I fell down a pit. Through trial and error, we found a key that opened a door that led us to the golden bow. It turns out that there was a map through the area in a chest elsewhere in the dungeon, past two very hard battles with elite archers who always surprised us, but I didn't find that until later.

       

I found this after it was helpful.

       

We returned the golden bow to Rotas, who turned it into the Mystic Bow. Like the Mystic Sword, it has the maximum weapon rating of 25.  

       

Yes, I walked around a dungeon.

       

We returned to Keldar, rested, and then walked to the Royal Castle and made our way to the basement and its fields of fire. It turns out that the Flame Scroll is an infinite-use item that destroys one fire square at a time, so we could have saved ourselves a lot of hit points by using it in Rotas's dungeon. Slowly, we minced our way through the flame squares. 

         

Destroying the fire fields one by one.

       

The combats in the dungeon were the hardest I faced so far. Large groups of mages kept attacking, surprising us, and wiping us out in the first round with mass-damage spells. I had to reload frequently and had to retreat to Keldar four times, twice just to rest and heal, once to buy a telegem because the dungeon had one of those damned portals, and once for some dynamite to blast open a wall.

       

A typical dungeon battle.

       

In the middle of our explorations, RICH9000, our robot friend from the alien dungeon, suddenly appeared and alerted us to a destructible wall. I think we could have found it on our own, but it was still nice of him. Behind the weak wall was the king's tiara. I never found the magic sling that was supposed to be hidden in the dungeon despite casting "See Secret" on just about every wall.

       

This game's version of the Adoring Fan.

       

When I returned the tiara to Uriah, the king's advisor, he gave me a mage staff. I never got to see how it performed against other staves because the game crashed as I exited the dialogue. By this time in the game, it was constantly crashing, often when going into combat, often when changing between areas, sometimes in mid-stride. When I reloaded from the dungeon and tried to bring the tiara to Uriah again, the game seemed to think I had already given it to him, as it just had him say "thank you again for your help!" But the tiara was still in my inventory. I continued on, desperately hoping this hadn't caused an unwinnable condition.

       

If I need that staff, I'm screwed.

       

Moving on, I turned my attention next to Ransley Manor and the Magian Gem. Last session, I had spent a lot of time tracking down a piece of paper that gave a code: "YELLOW, BLUE, WHITE." I had written down: "Use the code to enter the locked room at Ransley Manor." I don't really know what I meant by that, since there's no place in Ransley Manor that offers the ability to use a letter code. The door I need to enter is simply locked. Yelling "YELLOW" outside the door didn't accomplish anything.

      

I imagine I looked like an idiot.

     

I went back to Trevor's house in Kadaar and realized in talking to him that I'd misunderstood some of the earlier dialogue. His father, Trevelyan, isn't in the house: he plays piano in the tavern downstairs. I visited the father and asked about his CHEST. He said he put it in storage at Griswold's, but he lost the claim ticket. At this point, I should have gone to Griswold's and just searched every chest (although I'm not sure that would have worked). Instead, I followed a very long quest chain--one of the many ways the game has of sending you on a long diversion--that started with Trevelyan's friend Somerton, who told me that his best friend, Kirk, has been missing since he went on an expedition for the Archaeological Society in Dalia.

      

Again the use of quotes instead of bold to annotate keywords creates some amusing dialogue.

       

In Dalia, the society told me that Kirk had gone on an expedition to a cave on Hesperios, but only Archaeological Society members have the password needed to enter. They forced me to join the Archaeological Society (this time, the membership director, Herbert, would speak with me), which involved going to a different cave, on an island in a lake in Meridion, and finding a dinosaur fossil. Kudos to this pseudo-medieval society for knowing what dinosaurs are; it took us until the cusp of the Industrial Age. 

   

The fossil dungeon wasn't terribly long, but I'm getting sick of combat at this point, so I groan every time I have to explore a dungeon, as combats are not avoidable there. Still, it only took me about 20 minutes to find the fossil.

      

I wonder if this medieval society has the same kinds of dinosaurs as we do.

     

I joined the Society and learned the password (KRATA) to the cave on Hesperios. I sailed to Aramon, on the same island, and walked north until I found the cave. It was a bit longer than the fossil cave, with about double the battles, and I had to retreat to Aramon once for healing, mana restoration, arrows, and potions. In the end, I found Kirk's mangled body in a corner. A piece of paper in his pocket directed me to the right area (Section J, Area 13) at Griswold's Storage. 

    

There's no particular indication how he died.

       

That chest contained a "Ransley Map," which depicted nine chairs, facing different directions, with different colored dots next to them. At this point, I was stuck on this quest. I couldn't figure out any place in Ransley Manor or otherwise in which I could do anything with different configurations of chairs. Fortunately, commenter RandomGamer reminded me of the "Magic Unlock" spell, which hasn't been used anywhere else in the game. It was the key to getting in the room, which had the same configuration of chairs.

      

The Ransley Map . . .

. . . and the room behind the door. I wonder if the game would have let me figure this one out through trial and error.

      

Sitting on the chairs in the right order opened a secret door, which led to a dungeon. I groaned, but fortunately there were no battles--just a corridor, another magically-locked door, a study, a book talking about the Magian Gem, and a chest with the gem itself. It seems to cast a kind of version of "See Secret" when used. This requires the user to be near the buried Grimoire.

      

Ransley's diary.

     

So all that was left at this point was to find the map to the Grimoire itself. For that, the game had a long scavenger hunt in store. It started with my visit to Pirate's Cove (the game has it that way, with the apostrophe in what I think is the wrong place), where two guards demanded the pass from the pirate boss, Seurat, which I had achieved several entries ago.

   

The underboss of the pirate clan, Bryce, said he knew of the treasure map, but he wanted me to kill Seurat for the knowledge. I knew there was no way I could do this, as the game has no mechanism for attacking NPCs, so I kept looking. As I wandered the village, a pirate approached with a warning message for me to bring to Seurat. 

    

Technically, I had to go retrieve it from under his bed.

      

I returned the skiff to Haslett and hopped a ship for Aramon, where I found Seurat still in the tavern. He appreciated my loyalty, gave me 100 gold, and told me to talk to Jonah next to him. Jonah said he'd see what he could find out about the map. As I wondered how to operationalize that, he said, "Maybe I'll see you in Pirate's Cove!" This was a clue to take the ship back to Hazlett, steal the skiff again, and row to Pirate's Cove.

   

As I approached Bryce's headquarters, I heard "a scream coming from inside." Inside, Jonah was standing over Bryce's corpse. Jonah had asked around about the treasure map. "Charlie remembered seeing it," he said. It was sold in Kadaar to someone named Sisley. Jonah called the map "worthless," as "the area shown on the map doesn't even exist!"

      

This, alas, turns out to be accurate.

      

I returned the skiff to Hazlett, took a ship to Keldar, stole another skiff, and rowed it around the continent to Kadaar. Sisley was behind a locked door that I had to knock on. Of course, he didn't have the map. He had given it to his girlfriend, Acacia, who was visiting relatives in Sonora. I rowed back to Keldar, took a ship to Portsmith, stole a skiff, and rowed it to Sonora. Acacia was in her sister's place. I remember talking to her before. She had the map and didn't like it. She offered to trade it for an ancient scroll--if I could get one from Halstead in Dalia.

     

Or maybe you just give it to me and help me save the world?

        

I rowed back to Portsmith, took a ship to Hazlett, stole the same skiff I've stolen 50 times previously, and rowed it to Dalia. Wouldn't you know, Halstead had just sold his last ancient scroll to Thorley, who lives northeast of Keldar. I rowed the skiff to Keldar, disembarked, and walked to Thorley's hut. Thorley had the scroll but wasn't interested in selling it. "I just put it away," he said. We looted it from the dresser in his room. If the game was going to make me resort to crime, I don't know why I couldn't have just strongarmed Acacia into giving us the map.

       

Using "See Secret" to find the map in Thorley's house.

     

Back we went to Sonora, where Acacia finally traded us the ancient map. As we were warned by Jonah, it didn't seem to depict any place in Savallia. There are only two places in the game world that have an east-west bridge crossing a river, and neither have a peninsula that comes to that sharp a point, particularly with mountains northwest of a city or building. I spent a long time trying to find the most likely place, investigating in particular the areas around the Forest of No Return and southern Hesperios. I considered the possibility that the map was rotated, mirrored, or depicted a land with more water than in the present. I couldn't find anything.

            

Here's the map . . .

And here's the area of the world map that it's supposed to be depicting.

                   

I went through my screenshots and discovered that Mage Zedikiah, living near Shaaran, had wanted to speak to me when I obtained the map. I took it to him. He snatched it from me and interpreted it to be depicting an island to the west of Enchantasy and south of Hesperios. That turned out to be true. The bit jutting from the east is the western end of Enchantasy. The map is a pretty rough sketch, then, because the actual shape of the land formation isn't anything like the southern coast of Hesperios.

        

Could I have that back? What if I hadn't taken a screenshot?

     

Zedikiah gave me a note to take to Mage Lucien in Shaaran: "Provide this trusted apprentice of Master Rudimon with the ancient scroll you've guarded these many years." Lucien gave me a scroll. It told me to seek out the Mystical Pond, stand on the eastern dock, and invoke the word HOYAM. I would then learn two new words. "Proceed to the location shown on the map," it continued, and invoke the first word "between the rocks" and the second to "reveal a hidden chamber in [the] cave."

   

The Mystical Pond was easy to find, and invoking the word caused bolts to come from the sky and write two more words in the middle of the pond. That was cool.

        

On the other hand, this is a good way to get the attention of the FBI.

        

The hard part was following the instructions to "proceed to the location shown on the map," since it was an island, and I had no way to reach the island. It turns out by "the location," he meant the western end of Enchantasy, where two rocks flanked the westernmost square of land. Invoking QADIA there caused a bridge to the island to appear.

      

Is it a magic bridge, or just an invisible bridge?

          

I walked to the ring of mountains depicted on the map and entered the cave. The cave had a few combats, but it wasn't too bad. A few minutes into my exploration, my old friend RICH9000 appeared and said the cave wall three paces to my south was emitting a strange energy. I walked back there and invoked TEILA, which opened a secret corridor. This led to a chamber where the Magian Gem depicted something in the corner.

      

You again!?

       

I dug, and at last had the Eternal Grimoire!

   

But you know what else showed something in the corner? The "See Secret" spell. I also probably could have figured it out by trial and error. So I'm not sure what the whole Magian Gem part of the quest is actually for. I wonder if you could win without it. 

        

I think I could have figured that out.

        

The Grimoire is pretty cool. It equips as a spellbook except that all spells are cast at three times their regular power. "Thunderbolt" wipes out most entire parties with the Grimoire equipped. "Major Heal" can get everyone to full health in just a couple of castings.

    

Grimoire in hand, I went to the secret Underground hideout on Sonora. Seeing that I had the tome, the lookout gave me the password to enter the mountain cavern. A short cavern led to a valley with several buildings, one of which held the Underground leader, Jamall, and his lieutenant, Raymond. They told me stuff I already knew: Xanoc was originally Conax, expelled from the Mage Council for evil magic. He is behind the death of the 9 council members who expelled him. Xanoc plans to use Duke Hawthorne as his puppet, and he has kidnapped the Prince to ensure that Hawthorne gets the throne. The only thing new that they told me is that Xanoc's castle is on the Isle of the Dead in northeastern Savallia. 

       

At last, the elusive Jamall.

       

Jamall had made a deal with the pirate king, Seurat, to give me passage to the island. Seurat was lurking in a nearby house and told me to find a ship waiting on the eastern coast of Sonora.

       

And I did!

      

I hate to break here, I won't be able to finish the narrative, plus offer the GIMLET, without making this the longest entry I've ever written. So we'll pick up next time with the assault on Conax's castle and the endgame.

   

Time so far: 46 hours