The Power Stones of Ard II: The Five Towers of Trafa-Zar: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

 

We never get to see Niz's reaction.

     

The Power Stones of Ard II: The Five Towers of Trafa-Zar

United States

Three C's Projects (developer and publisher)

Released in 1990 for Tandy Color Computer 3

Date Started: 10 January 2025

Date Ended: 31 January 2025

Total Hours: 15

Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)  

     

Summary:

    

This sequel to The Power Stones of Ard: The Quest for the Spirit Stone significantly changes the original game's interface to a first-person dungeon crawler with numerous adventure game puzzles. Trafa-Zar takes place entirely within the titular five towers, all five levels, all 5 x 5 tiles, as the PC, an apprentice wizard, seeks to destroy the evil wizard and recover the Mind Stone.

   

The spell system, consisting of 10 battle spells and 10 exploration and defensive spells, works well, but both combat and puzzles alternate between too easy and too hard. For every puzzle that requires the clever use of an object or the environment, there's a blatantly absurd or unfair puzzle that forces the player to guess the arbitrary way the author used his own interface. In the end, it does not have enough character development and tactical combat to be a good RPG, and the puzzles are too nutty to make a good adventure game.

      

****

   

The last two towers offered the same experience as the first three: lots of combat, lots of puzzles, some fair, some not. I needed LanHawk's help a lot. We're all lucky he struggled through the game before I got to it.

   

An example of an unfair puzzle was the one that greeted me right away on Tower 4, Level 1. The completely open level had only two items of note: a pile of hay in one square and a glass case in another. The glass case was filled with smoke, but peering through it revealed a Fire Sword. The unintuitive solution was to T)ouch the GLASS. But you have to type GLASS, not CASE or SWORD or anything else. You also have to T)ouch it, and with an empty hand, not P)ut your hand on it the way you do when touching your nose in that previous puzzle. Nobody likes adventure game puzzles that have silly solutions, and nobody likes adventure game puzzles that force the player to fight with the commands. This one managed to include both of these elements in several of its puzzles.

   

The Fire Sword ends up being the best weapon in the game, but more importantly, it ignites the pile of hay in the other room (it must be magic hay, as a "Fireball" spell doesn't ignite it), which in turn somehow carries you up to the next level on the smoke. As smoke tends to do.

    

Getting from Level 2 to Level 3 was as simple as finding a pole and hook, attaching them with the P)ut command, using them to hook the edge of a hole in the ceiling, and C)limbing up.

   

Level 3 was back to the absurd. One room has a huge iron vault that won't open to anything. The door has a small hole in it (which you only see if you examine the IRON VAULT, not just the VAULT). Elsewhere on the level, you find a fuse (the kind that lights a stick of dynamite, not the kind that's in a box in your basement). You have to stick the fuse in the hole on the vault door and light it with the Fire Sword. The door blows off the vault and shoots through the ceiling, leaving a hole. You can then climb the vault to get to the next level. Why does this work? Were there explosives in the vault? Does the author think that a fuse by itself can cause an explosion? Who knows.

      

This is the only screenshot I got during this section of the game because I forgot the keyboard shortcut.

      

Towers 4 and 5 stopped introducing new enemies every level. In Tower 4, the entire bestiary consisted of dust devils, glass golems, red devils, rog demons, and blood beasts. Of the four, the blood beasts were the most difficult, with 5 attacks per round each. Fortunately, I had enough spell points by now to keep "Ironskin" going almost constantly, and this spell essentially makes you immune to physical attacks. I'm not sure I saw an enemy get through it even once. Magical attacks are another matter, but rarer; I don't think any of the Tower 4 enemies had spells. Thus, the battles in the tower were trivial as long as I was willing to grab hold of that pebble and rest frequently.

   

Level 4 offered the one exception. There were no regular enemies on the level, just a demon lord. He killed me three times before I discovered that he was vulnerable to the "Hold" spell. One casting took care of him.

    

Isn't this more of a "devil"?

      

Beyond the demon lord was a chamber with a demoness, who did not attack. I discovered I could kill her, but then I was stuck. The solution was to give her the diamond discovered on a much, much earlier level. (If you give her anything else, she gets angry.) She took it gratefully and stuffed me into her boudoir, which had no obvious exit. First, you can shatter the mirror on her vanity to get a glass shard. To get out, you have to pile pillows and climb them through a hole on the ceiling—a hole that the game never tells you is there. Plus, it only says there's one pillow. I can't remember how I piled them. I might have picked one up and dropped it or P)ut it somewhere. Whatever the correct command was, it took me a while.

 

She turned out to be too materialistic.

      

The final level of Tower 4 evoked a pentagram, as it had five single-square rooms arranged as if they were the points of a pentagram. Each had a wall that teleported me clockwise around the level, which was completely unnecessary. I have no idea what that was for. One of the rooms had a rag doll in it. It was missing its left eye.

   

The central square on the level had a pentagram with a little girl kneeling in the center. Giving her the rag doll, or anything else, caused her to turn into a star demon and tear me apart. The solution was to P)ut the glass shard on the doll; "it replaces the missing eye," the game said. How does a shard of glass replace a doll's eye? Whatever. If you give the doll to the girl after that, she looks at it, sees her own reflection, and disappears. Saying FIRE in the pentagram sends you to Tower 5.

        

If you were exploring a deserted tower in real life, it's hard to imagine encountering anything scarier than a little girl sitting in a pentagram. Maybe a clown.

     

The fifth tower was unlike the others in that there was really only one puzzle. Each level had a series of colored circles on the walls, and I had to associate the colors with letters based on clues found throughout the other towers. LanHawk had to help me with this one. A few were easy, such as a brown "E" in Tower 1 and a white "Y" in Tower 2. But the game kept giving me colors that it had not associated with any letters--unless you sound some of the other clues aloud. Tower 1 has a statue of a blue jay ("J"); Tower 2 has a picture of a woman pouring golden tea ("T"); Tower 3 has a painting of a farmer picking green peas ("P"). I'm not sure I would have figured that out, but it's a fair puzzle, and closer to the ones that I enjoyed in the first Power Stones game.

   

The circles on Level 1 of Tower 5 were blue, orange, and white, which spelled "JOY." Each level has a room where you're told to "speak the word of passage," so you just string the colors together and find the right words, which end up being JOY, FAITH, HOPE, and LOVE.

   

     

Beyond that, the only puzzle is an optional one on the first level. You find a room with a stone altar and a crystal chest. The chest opens with a crystal key found so long ago I didn't even note it. Inside is an ephod, which I had to look up (it's a ceremonial garment worn by ancient Jewish priests). A message on an earlier level had said: "Find his place, gird thyself in purity, and call upon the Father." I was pretty sure I had found the place, but I had no idea how to gird myself in the ephod as there's no W)ear command. I tried P)utting it on my BODY, CHEST, BACK, SHOULDERS, ARMS, TORSO, and so forth to no avail. I don't know how it came to me, but just as I was about to give up, I tried simply putting it ON, and it worked. This makes no sense because when you use P)ut, the game asks, "Where will you put the ephod?" ON is not a place.

   

I didn't know how to "call upon the Father," but I tried just K)neeling, and it worked. A column of light descended upon me, all my maximum attributes increased by about 5 points, and I was knocked out. The game then asked if I wanted to continue playing. This is what it asks when you die, so I thought the experience had somehow killed me. I was in the middle of cursing Bill Cleveland's name to hell and back when I hit "Y" and the game just continued. I don't know what that was about.

      

Consciousness ran from the room, screaming, "I am FREE!"

        

The enhanced attributes helped, but I think I could have won without them. As I continued to explore the tower and work my way up, I met black knights, iron golems, eyes of Argon, executioners, and apprentices. Apprentices have magic attacks, so I had to keep "Magic Shield" going in addition to "Ironskin." The enemies otherwise weren't very hard. I hit Level 7, the final character level, at some point, earning enough spell points for "Brimstone," which I never successfully cast. I never did earn enough for "Mind Melt." I suppose you need to roll very high intelligence and perhaps play as an elf.

    

The final level had only three battles: a group of vampire lords, a dragon, and Trafa-Zar himself. Each required a unique strategy. I found that the vampire lords were vulnerable only to "Stone," but I could only cast one of those between rests. So I had to encounter them, cast it, flee, get through a door, cast "Lock" to seal it from the other side, rest to restore spell points, cast "Knock" to unlock the door, engage the rest of the party, and repeat.

   

The dragon was invulnerable to anything except the basic "Arcane Arrows" spell. 

    

Finally, Trafa-Zar attacked me in his throne room. His battle is scripted to always start with "Mind Melt," then move to "Fireball," "Lightning," and "Arcane Arrows" before settling on some kind of "Bolt" spell for the remainder of the battle. In the meantime, I was trying all of my spells to no avail. He was immune.

      

His portrait adds another angle to the Santa Claus puzzle in Tower 3.

     

You're supposed to defeat Trafa-Zar using a special staff, disguised on a much earlier level as a black snake. The backstory warns you about this. When you meet the snake, you're supposed to say "ARD" to transform it. During the battle with Trafa-Zar, it blows up in his face. 

   

Lacking the staff, I just pumped myself with a few castings of "Augment," then whacked him half a dozen times with my Fire Sword.

    

Striking the final blow.

    

When Trafa-Zar dies, he drops a key. It unlocks a chamber that holds the Mind Stone. Picking it up has you immediately transported back to Niz's workshop, which ends the game. There isn't much of a denouement, either, just a single victory screen.

     

"Wow, that's a lot of magical energy," Chester said as clumps of his hair began to fall out.

    

In a GIMLET, I give the game:

   

• 4 points for the game world. It's not bad. I like how the "accident" in the backstory leads to the main quest, and how the game's connection to its predecessor is a bit of a mystery. But the tower doesn't feel anything like a real place. Why would Trafa-Zar want to devote 90% of his floor space to weird puzzles?

• 3 points for character creation and development. There isn't much to creation—name, sex, race—and development is relatively slow, with the difficulty of monsters matching your growth in lockstep. It is nice to unlock new spells, however.

• 0 points for no NPC interaction. The few people you meet in the tower are "encounters," not NPCs.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. There's nothing really special about the monsters. They're high fantasy tropes, mostly distinguished only by how hard they hit and whether they cast spells. If the game consisted only of its fairer puzzles, it would earn a 4 or a 5 here, but I have to take as many points away for the more ridiculous puzzles.

• 3 points for magic and combat. Combat is just about holding your best weapon and hitting A)ttack, but the spells add some fun variety. Being able to flee from foes, slam the door behind you, and "Lock" it is not an experience that most games of the era were offering.

    

Figuring out the best spells to use against certain enemies was a fun part of the game.

     

• 2 points for equipment. It's mostly of the puzzle variety.

• 0 points for no economy.

• 2 points for a main quest. It has one side puzzle that isn't worth an extra point on a 10-point scale.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are fine; the interface is mostly fine. It could have offered a second hand slot so you're not always having to re-equip your weapon after picking up something else. Unless I screwed something up in XRoar, there's no sound.

• 2 points for gameplay. It gets those for not being too long. It's otherwise very linear, not replayable, and extremely frustrating. The difficulty is all over the place. Spells cost too many spell points, but it's also too easy to restore those points.

   

That gives us a final score of 21, four points lower than I gave to the first Power Stones title. That one was far more innovative, with a mix of outdoor and indoor exploration, an economy, NPCs, and puzzles that were a little less absurd. This one feels like it was meant to be lost.

    

Tony Olive reviewed the game in the August 1990 Rainbow. He didn't get out of the first tower, and some of his information is wrong (you don't have "over 50 spells"; you have exactly 20), but he found what he experienced fast-paced and exciting. The review smacks of the desperation you find in a lot of Color Computer reviews, where they know they have a miserable platform for CRPGs and they don't want to criticize one of the few titles to come along. I would have liked to read a review from someone who made it as far as the "Santa" puzzle, but alas I couldn't find one. I don't find it improbable that LanHawk and I are the only two people to have ever won the game.

        

I never got to ask Bill Cleveland who the other two Cs were.

              

The Three C's Projects, headquartered in Hamlet, North Carolina, sold the game primarily through magazines like Rainbow, charging $25, or about $60 in today's dollars. Someone sent me a link to a Color Computer newsletter in which owner/author Bill Cleveland announced he was leaving the business, but I can't seem to dig it up now that I need it. I think it was from late 1990 or 1991, and he indicated he just didn't have time for it anymore. He became a dentist in his hometown instead, which was probably a good career move. I tried to reach him back in 2022 after I played the first game, but he wasn't interested in talking about it.

   

Thus, we never got the third title in the trilogy, so we never found out the name of the third stone (after the Mind Stone and Spirit Stone) nor how all three stones would be united and used. I'm going to assume that the third stone was the Power Stone and at the climax of the trilogy, Thanos shows up and grabs them with his gauntlet.