Legend of the Red Dragon II: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

 

The "good" ending to the game.

    

Legend of the Red Dragon II: New World

United States

Robinson Technologies (developer and original publisher); Metropolis Gameport (later publisher)

Released in 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 1 February 2025

Date Ended: 11 February 2025

Total Hours: 15

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5), but offline, with no other players

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)  

     

Summary:

 

An old BBS door game that loses something without interaction with other players, Dragon still offers a solo campaign similar in complexity to an early Ultima. Your little character leaves his village of Stonebrook to explore a 300-screen ANSI world with towns, castles, and caves. He solves a handful of fixed and recurring text encounters and fights hundreds of battles to earn experience, gold, quest points, and alignment points. Eventually, he can take on one of two endings (good and bad) in the ongoing struggle between the angelic Koshi and the evil Dragon Tooth Cult.

    

Combat, inventory, and character development are all present, but as simple as an early 1980s game. Much of the allure comes from interacting with (including fighting) other players for status, wealth, and experience, none of which the offline player experiences. Quest and dialogue options sound like they were written by a teenager (in fairness, they were), and "role-playing" is only of the most simplistic sort.

     

****

        

Winning the game took about another 8 hours, in two consecutive sessions. I won on Day 50, so it would have taken me almost 2 months if I had been playing by the 3,000-turn-per-day rules instead of using the maintenance switch to advance the day whenever I wanted. Of course, in its intended mode of operation, I would have also been playing with other players, which would have introduced an x factor that may have lengthened or shortened the experience. Probably shortened, vastly shortened, because one thing I never had to worry about was finding a safe place to sleep when my turns ran low. I could collapse anywhere and not have to worry about death at the hands of another player.

The game world is indeed about 300 screens. It comprises two major east-west sections, one to the north, one to the south, connected by a thin strip of land on the east side. There's also a large island off the west coast, which I didn't map, and a smaller island where the final quest takes place.

      

The game world, minus a couple of islands. Click to enlarge.

     

Some of these screens are well-composed using ANSI graphics, but only a few of them have anything interesting to explore. The author spent a lot of time laying out trees, mountains, and sand dunes on dozens upon dozens of generic screens in which the only thing that ever happens are random encounters. Still, they do build a relatively coherent game world. You have the BigWood Forest on the northwest tombolo, connected to the rest of the world by the slim North Beach. The RockHolm Mountains bulge out in the northeast. Stone Beach Pass connects this area to the area immediately around Greentree and PortTown, which offers a mix of terrain. A large desert stretches west to the West Forest and the city of FlagCity. An alternate route, south of the desert, goes through Snowy Pass.

      

Unlike the first game, in which enemies scaled to the character level every time he explored the generic (and all-text) "forest," in this sequel, enemy difficulty is defined by the geographic area. Stone Beach Pass has a "pirate" theme, with beached pirates, thieves, and vagabond cutthroats along with sandworms, giant crabs, and beached men o' war. BigWood Forest has triceratops, hairy yaks, and Kung-Fu warriors who call you "grasshopper." The West Forest, on the other hand, offers enemies like lost monkeys, giant snakes, rabid tigers, and—because this game is what it is—"Sir Beavis." Overall, I found that by Level 10, I could defeat the enemies around Greentree without losing a hit point, but enemies in the rest of the world remained challenging through the entire game.

     

One of the deadlier parts of the game.

      

Most of the world is wasted. To win the game, you really only need to reach the cities, including the starting city of Greentree, PortTown to its north, Sosen Village to the far northwest, FlagCity and BoneTown to the far southwest, and ArrisVille on the island. You eventually have enough money to take ships between these cities. Walking between them is perilous and best done only once.

     

I mapped the world while grinding my character, eventually reaching Level 25. Curiously, I think you could win the game without ever leveling once, as a) you can run away from most battles; and b) there are no fixed battles in the game. You do need some money, but I think you could accomplish that by fishing and delivering messages between the cities. It would be an interesting challenge.

       

My last level-up.

     

Anyway, some discoveries along the way:

     

• Greentree is the only city that offers training services, so you have to return to it frequently throughout the game to level up.

• FlagCity has a bounty office, where you can place a bounty, view the current bounty list, and pay off your own bounty. This is all multiplayer stuff that did nothing for me, but it's a cute idea. There were some players' characters in the first Legend of the Red Dragon who I would have happily paid other players to kill.

      

I wonder if the author had any connection to Finlay, Ohio.

       

• All cities have a person who both gives and receives message-delivery missions. 

• There are three recurring encounters in the wilderness: an injured man who needs help getting back to the nearest village; a lost girl; a woman being raped. All of these encounters give you a good and evil option that affects your alignment. In the case of choosing the good option, they raise your alignment 1 point. I didn't try the evil options.

• BoneTown, near FlagCity, is the "Buccaneer's Den" of the world. It offers gambling, prostitution, and other lawlessness. There are a couple of repeating encounters unique to BoneTown, including a drunk man being mugged (you can either defend him or help the thief) and a brewing gang fight (you can help either side, take them both on, or try to talk them down).

   

This recurring encounter in BoneTown is key to getting your alignment up.

    

• You can play slots or craps in BoneTown at several casinos. The odds seemed fair, but I did poorly and didn't spend much time with it. 

      

Viva BoneTown!

      

• Sosen Village has the only major weapon and armor upgrades between PortTown and the endgame. I bought twin swords and a spiked shirt there. 

• Many cities sell blue, green, or white potions which heal you 10, 50, and 200 hit points, in that order.

• There's a wandering encounter with a priest who sells a black potion that teleports you to a random part of the world.

• There's also a wandering encounter with a dark figure who offers you a different piece of the Skystaff each time. More on that in a bit. Suffice to say for now that buying multiple pieces of the same type is a waste of money. 

• Wandering into a particular tree in BigWood Forest takes you into a "Weird World" with all kinds of graffiti. If you bump a table in this area, you find a Moonstone, which raises the number of turns you get per day to 3,500.

   

It's definitely weird.

      

• There are four places for sale: Runion Keep (3,000 gold), the inn in Sosen (20,000 gold), Castle Coldrake (20,000 gold), and a Wizard's Keep (40,000 gold). I bought Runion Keep and Castle Coldrake. All fortresses allow you a safe place to rest (not an issue in my game). Castle Coldrake also has free healing and free coach passage to PortTown and Sosen Village, which would have been handier if it wasn't so far out of the way. My understanding from a walkthrough is that Wizard's Keep offers teleportation portals to the major cities and a powerful magic wand.

     

My new castle!

    

• A man high in the RockHolm mountains offers a different hint every time you bump into him. 

• Snowy Pass warps you from the east to west sides of the game world in far fewer screens than it takes if you go by the northern desert. And there's a way to shorten it by entering a cave and showing an amulet (found in Stone Pass Lodge) to a giant there. But it's also some of the deadliest territory in the game, so I only did it once. There's an abyss halfway through the pass that you can fall down for an instant death. 

      

I did, despite the warning, fall in there.

      

• A ferry near Sosen Village offers transport across the sea to Arris Island and ArrisVille. ArrisVille is run by a Prince Corin, who is opposing the Dragon Tooth Clan; more in a minute.

    

Approaching the island city.

    

• The inn in ArrisVille has a ghost who says he quested for the Red Dragon (in the first game) but was betrayed by a companion and killed in its cave. It asks me to return his ring to his body. I found the cave in the RockHolm Mountains and returned the ring, getting +5 strength and 5 quest points. I honestly don't know what quest points do for you.

      

Exploring the location of the climactic battle in the first game.

     

• West of ArrisVille is a music shop where you can take lessons so you can play the flute found in a cavern early in the game. You learn two songs: "Remembering the Past" and "Remembering the Present." These allow you to set a teleportation point and return there whenever you want, much like "Mark" and "Recall" spells of other games. I set it outside the trainer in Greentree, which is a short walk to PortTown and its ferries to any other city.

        

Approaching the music shop.

     

That was about it. There are more side quests in the first few hours of the game than in the second dozen. I never found any quests that gave me any serious boosts to my alignment (except for the one where I freed the parrot, completed early on), just incremental +1 improvements from random encounters. 

   

Eventually, after wandering a bit, I thought to try to use the pieces of the Skystaff to assemble them. I had bought the fourth piece by hour 8 or 9, but it didn't occur to me to use them from the inventory. I figured I'd run into someone who would help me assemble them. When I fit them together, I was teleported to a "strange and wondrous place" called Cloudy City.

    

Less of a city, more of just a cloud.

     

The city had only two things. First, I found a Cloud Sword on a table. It wasn't a very good weapon, but it was key to a later encounter. Second, there was a single NPC: a nude angelic woman with wings protruding from her back. She introduced herself as one of the Koshi. The character had some appropriately juvenile things to say to her. There had been a couple of references to the Koshi people in other parts of the game.

    

I wish I hadn't named him after myself.

    

She told me to use the Cloud Sword somewhere west of ArrisVille. I had found the place while exploring the island, so I knew how to get back there. It was a cave with a passage guarded by another Koshi who asked for the "key." I showed him the Cloud Sword, but he said I needed an alignment of 100 to pass.

  

The Koshi, one of the few full-screen character portraits in the game.

     

My alignment at this point was only 41, and 20 of those points were from the parrot quest. It would have taken me dozens of hours to encounter enough injured men and rapists to get to 100 in the outdoor map, but I figured I could rack it up a lot more quickly in BoneTown. Sure enough, after about an hour there, I had saved enough mugging victims to get me to about 65. After that, I gave myself the freedom to hex edit the character to 100. There really wasn't anything to be gained by doing the same thing for another three hours.

   

I returned to the cave and the guardian let me pass into a hidden Koshi village. It had only three locations. In the first, I found a second Moonstone, raising the number of turns per day to 4,000. The second had a store that sold two sets of weapon and armor upgrades. The first, blessed armor and a fireball weapon, I could afford. The second, Koshi armor and a Koshi sword, I not only couldn't afford but probably never would have been able to afford. They were spectacularly unnecessary anyway. The blessed armor and fireball were enough to make me essentially immune to every enemy in the game, which was a bit of a joke because I think I only fought half a dozen more random battles after this point.

    

The best weapons and armor are well out of my reach.

     

The third location in the Koshi village was a cavern with a gathering of Koshi NPCs. Their leader, Dahma, told me that the Dragon Tooth Clan (referenced throughout the game) has been spreading rumors of the Red Dragon's return to make people afraid enough to pay them tributes for "protection." Before he'd tell me more, he said I needed to go home and speak to my mother.

   

It feels like I'm about to join the Manson family.

     

I played the flute to get back to Greentree, then walked the few screens home. My mother confessed that my father was a Koshi named Ransom. He hid his wings and visited my mother only at night. He was killed by a mob when he went to a marketplace during the day, and someone saw his wings (it's stated several times that normal people hate and fear Koshi). The character has some obnoxious comments during this dialogue but ends up comforting his mother. There is no player input here.

  

The character really runs hot and cold here.

     

I returned to Dahma, who asked me to stop the Dragon Tooth Clan from exterminating the Koshi by retrieving a stolen artifact called the Gryphon Moon from their fortress. I asked where their fortress was. "It is on a small island. Getting there is your problem. Bye."

    

The "butterbean" thing was kind of funny.

    

Fortunately, Prince Corin could help. He feted me for a night, gave me a disguise to get past the Dragon Tooth guards, and had a ship drop me off on their island. I expected that I would have to fight multiple battles on the way to the artifact, so I had prepared with multiple full-healing potions.

  

My understanding is that if I were playing evil, I could buy weapons equal to the Koshi weapons in that little hut.

     

Instead, I simply waltzed into the fortress, walked past the guards, and grabbed the Gryphon Moon, which was just sitting on a table. I used the flute to warp out of there. I can only imagine that in live play, other players who decided to side with the Dragon Tooth Clan would have tried to stop me somehow? 

     

The sign nearly stopped me. They asked so nicely.

      

I returned to the Koshi with the stone, which got me 500 quest points and 10,000 experience points. We had a celebration. Dahma asked me to keep the stone and protect it. And that was the end of the quest, although I could keep playing. The Gryphon Moon allows the player to play indefinitely, as every time you rub it, it adds 500 to your available turns. Completing the quest got me a "K" next to my name in the player list.

   

What is that question mark all about?

     

Now, I am aware from a walkthrough that I could at this point explore the evil quest. By getting my karma to -100, I could join the Dragon Tooth Clan, kill a Koshi slave to pass the initiation ritual, and get a quest to steal the "Smackrod" from the Koshi. The device lets you warp to any coordinates on a screen, including places you could usually not access without passing some kind of encounter check. Completing this quest gets you a "D" next to your name. I decided that completing the one quest was enough to call it a win.

  

I have the highest rank!

     

In a GIMLET, the game earns:

    

• 3 points for the game world. It's a fairly standard high fantasy setting, but the limited graphics do a decent job making it feel like a somewhat real place, and there are some original bits of lore, even if I wish they had been more fleshed out.

• 2 points for character creation and development. The game alas lacks the creation options of its predecessor, so every character is essentially the same (except for sex) and gets the same small rewards for leveling.

     

My endgame character.

   

• 5 points for NPC interaction. As with the first game, I'm allowing some extra points here for the interactions (which I didn't get to experience) with other players. Some non-player NPCs give clues, lore, and dialogue.

• 3 points for encounters and foes. Foes are really just names. The meat of the game comes from the textual encounters with role-playing options, many of which are random. It would score higher here except the text and options are so juvenile that it detracts from the quality of the game. And whether to defend a woman from rapists or help the rapists isn't my idea of a solid role-playing choice.

• 1 point for magic and combat. You just get one option in combat. With the first game, you had mystical skills and special attacks.

     

Combat towards the end of the game, with peak weapons and armor.

     

• 3 points for equipment. You still just have one weapon slot and one armor slot, and not many options for these, but a greater variety of usable items improves things here.

• 7 points for the economy. It's quite well done, as with the first game. There are many things to buy and several ways to make money to buy them. Even through the end of the game, there are items out of your reach. Potions serve as a useful money sink, and you can buy castles and speed up your travel by paying for transportation.

• 4 points for quests. I'll repeat what I said for the first game: "There's a main quest and a lot of side quests that build the character, though they're mostly too silly to be considered actual role-playing." I like side quests, and I like side quests with creativity, but I don't like being forced to participate in a back-alley abortion. 

     

There are a small number of sensible side quests with rewarding outcomes.

     

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are as good as ANSI graphics could be, I think, and the keyboard controls work fine.

• 5 points for gameplay. It gets points for nonlinearity and modest difficulty. I can't complain about the overall number of hours, but portions of the game dragged and would have been worse if I hadn't hex-edited my alignment. I wouldn't call it replayable.

  

That gives us a final score of 36, one point higher than its predecessor. The game world is better here, but the first Red Dragon had better encounter and combat depth and more interesting character options. It was also a much brisker game, good for online play with a limited number of turns. I suspect it's because of that, as well as the fact that the sequel was released on the cusp of the Internet era, that makes the original still popular today while the sequel has been mostly forgotten. I can't believe I'm about to quote a YouTube comment, but I think that user "thefonzkiss" says it well in the comments section to this video:

   

This game was just too clever and complicated for its own good. The reason [the original] worked was because of its simplicity. People didn't want to spend hours navigating a graphical interface like this on modems of the time. They could just play Quest for Glory or King's Quest.

    

The MobyGames trivia section for the game claims that it started as a science-fiction title, the "new world" intended to be a literal new world to which the player has journeyed after the destruction of Earth. Author Seth Robinson got bored working on it and abandoned it, but he picked it up years later and turned it into a fantasy game.

     

There were some sci-fi elements anyway.

     

Robinson sold his games to Metropolis Gameport in 1997 and washed his hands of them. (I covered more of Robinson's fate in the "Summary and Rating" entry for the first Red Dragon.) Metropolis did nothing with the titles for a couple of years. Fan Mike Preslar wrote to the company and pleaded with them not to let the games die; they responded by giving him the responsibility for maintaining them (information from this GameBanshee article). He did so through the early 2010s, after which he reportedly lost the source code in a hard drive crash, and Metropolis (for unrelated reasons) started to falter. Its web site still exists, but I haven't been able to get it to load all month. A review of the site on the Internet Archive shows they were still offering Legend of the Red Dragon II to BBS services for $15 through the end of 2024. I found a couple of BBSes that were running it, but there was no player base, so I would have had the same experience that I had, only limited by how much I could play in a day.