Game 560: Excelsior, Phase One: Lysandia (1993)

 

Welcome back, True Believers.

       

Excelsior Phase One: Lysandia

United States

Castle Software (developer); published as shareware
Released 1993 for DOS, 2000 for Windows

Date Started: 17 October 2025

      

Excelsior is a superior Ultima clone, so superior in its opening stages, at least, that I hesitate to even use the word "clone," which seems pejorative. But it is clearly inspired by Ultima, down to the tiled iconographic perspective, the use of most of the keyboard for the game's commands, and the detailed "handbook" that gives the player a tourist's view of the game world. 

    

The backstory (perhaps only a framing story; time will tell) casts the player as a "Fixer," an agent of the Council of World Watchers, sent to various planets as necessary to "correct any deviation in the cosmic fabric of planetary history." You have already served the Council for two eons. Your latest assignment is to the planet of Lysandia, where some unspecified evil is growing. "The populace is losing their will to advance, and progress is stagnant." The mission requires you to adopt the guise of a local, and thus the character creation process is couched as the Fixer selecting the body he or she will inhabit for the duration of the mission.

      

Part of the backstory.

     

As for that process, it's far more extensive than any Ultima, and I really hope the game makes use of its complexity. Every character starts with 15 points allocated to strength, dexterity, and intelligence and 5 allocated to luck, charm, and piety. After giving the character a name, the player next selects the race, which modifies the statistics. There are 13 race options: human, elf, dwarf, gnome, halfling, imp, troll, half-orc, half-elf, half-gnome, giant, golem, and glynn, the latter being a kind of angelic being with yellow skin. The effects on attributes are predictable: elves get lowered 1 point in strength, and raised 2 in dexterity and luck; trolls get 3 points of strength, -4 to intelligence, and -3 to charm; and so forth.

    

Sex is next. Males get +1 strength and -1 dexterity, women the opposite. "Sexless" is an option for imps, golems, and glynns, given their magical nature. The player then allocates a pool of 30 points to the three primary attributes and a pool of 5 points to the secondary ones. 

         

The final steps of character creation.

      

There are 13 classes available: warrior, archer, swordsman, ranger, militiaman, mage, cleric, paladin, scholar, bard, rogue, pirate, and assassin. These classes have various attribute minimums, not covered in the book, so it takes some experimentation to allocate the right number of points to meet the requirements. I wanted to make a sexless golem paladin, which is possible with 30 strength, 25 intelligence, and 8 piety. Yes, yes, hah, hah, paladins are always "sexless." 

   

The final step to character creation is assigning two skills from a list of 12: bandage, survival, scribe, lockpicking, seamanship, dark eyes, fencing, marksmanship, swimming, music, fist-fighting, and magic. Sometimes, a class gives you a skill already. My paladin had "Magic." I chose "Dark Eyes" and "Survival."

      

A final selection is the character's alignment, which is not absolute but set on a scale from "evil" to "good." I made my paladin modestly "good," but more on this in a bit. 

      

My starting character. Well, close to it, anyway.

      

Gameplay begins on an outdoor map, with the character standing between a city to the west and a castle surrounded by a moat to the east. The tiles are small, allowing for 26 x 18 of them to appear in the view window. My character starts with 60 hit points, 3 magic points, 250 food, and 100 gold pieces.

         

A new world awaits.

       

As I begin any Ultima clone, I tend to run through the same investigative questions.

    

How's the interface? 

   

Answer: in the best Ultima tradition. One command per keystroke: A)ttack, B)oard (a ship), C)ast, D)rop, E)nter, and so forth. Most of them are so obvious that I rarely need to look at the list of commands that can be called up with H)elp. Movement is with the arrow keys or numberpad, the latter allowing you to move diagonally.

    

Without any trouble, I head east to the castle, enter, and begin looking at things and talking with NPCs.

 

Is it going to offer NPC dialogue or just NPC monologues? 

    

In other words, for NPC interaction, is it going to clone Ultima I-III or Ultima IV and V? The answer, alas, is the former. NPCs mostly give generic lines.

   

But the game doesn't limit NPC monologues to one sentence. They frequently deliver entire paragraphs that the player must scroll, and every so often deliver messages so long that a black screen opens up to contain it all. There aren't many NPCs in the castle's single large level. Here's what they offer:

   

• Guards: "Enjoy your stay, and obey the law!"

• Clerics: "Come join my search for a higher being." 

      

That would be me.

       

• Warriors: "There is no more noble calling than that of a warrior." 

• Swordsmen: "There's no finer weapon than a well-made blade." 

• Andrew the Deft: "Know me as Andrew the Deft, friend." 

• Damian: The Ceremonial Man at Arms. Offers to train me in swordsmanship for 50 gold pieces. That answers one of my questions, at least: skills that you don't take during character creation can be purchased later. 

    

I later forget to return here. I guess I need to start making a list.

      

For services, the castle has a tavern where you can buy food, a bank where you can deposit and withdraw money, and a panel of six guildmasters who oversee the "leveling up" process when you gain enough experience. More on that later.

      

How do secret doors work?  

       

All games, whether iconographic or first-person, tend to offer four answers to this question.

   

1. There are no secret doors.
2. You have to search for them. Success may be certain or dependent on a character skill.
3. You just walk right into them; "secret" doors are in fact illusory walls.
4. You have to solve some kind of puzzle. 

      

Seemed like the obvious place to look.

       

Excelsior uses the #2 approach, with no skill involved. The places that the player must search are pretty obvious. You may have noticed that unlike many Ultima clones, the game does not occlude things that the character would not be able to see from the current position. That plus the fairly large view window means that "secret" areas are sometimes visible in their entirety. Almost right away, I find a secret larder off the tavern. That leads to the next question.

 

Is this the sort of game where you can just take things, or is that wrong?

    

It's amazing how relevant that question remains into the modern age. During the period where this blog was dormant, and I should have been playing old RPGs if I was going to play any RPGs at all, I admit I downloaded Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon (short review: like the "Scrollslike" approach; annoyed by the authors' irreverent, nonsensical use of Arthurian characters and themes). Almost right away, you're confronted with the question of whether it's okay to take this head of cabbage from the kitchen. You often don't know that a game has some kind of crime and bounty system until you screw around and find out.

         

No one seems to be bothered.

          

In this case, I grab sacks of food, hold my breath, and wait for the guards to snap to attention and start streaming towards me. They don't, so I guess I'm okay. The guards' lack of response automatically answers one of my follow-up questions: "Are any of the things I'm not supposed to steal technically key plot items that I'm required to steal, thus subsequently requiring me to slaughter dozens of castle guards?" You never forget your first RPG.

 

I also naturally check my alignment after the little heist, but it doesn't seem to have budged on the scale. 

      

What kind of king do we have here? 

     

That's another question that coincidentally echoes in Tainted Grail. If this is a boring Ultima clone, the king will be a benevolent Lord British-like character who sets me off on the main quest. Here, King Valkery seems more of an affable tyrant. He greets me with a "Welcome, commoner!" but says he's too busy considering a 30% tax increase to talk to me.

     

At least I didn't get a big exposition dump about virtue.

      

It's the king's mage who sets off the main quest. He has one of those multi-screen dialogues. As I (the character) speak to him, I recognize him as one of the Elder Fixers on the Great Council. He's the one who sent a warning about the problems the world is facing. He doesn't tell me much about said problems, but instead suggests that I find three mystical amulets which will help develop my attributes. He names three towns where I can find the amulets or at least leads on the amulets: North Blagsell, Roaldia, and Embiscule.

       

Part of a long encounter with the king's mage.

        

What sort of equipment system does the game offer?

    

The answer: much closer to Ultima V than the earlier games in the series. You can dual-wield weapons, for one thing. Instead of just one item of "armor," you can equip a helmet, gloves, shields, boots, and a torso item. On the negative side, there are no statistics available; you just have to assume that items that cost more are better.

    

I find a dagger and wooden shield in a secret area of the castle, but I naturally want better stuff, so I head out of the castle and west to the town of Oooblyae. The town has a tavern, a provisioner (torches, shovels, lanterns), a weapon shop, an armor shop, a spell shop, and a healer. I buy cloth armor and a shortsword.

        

Selections in the armor shop.

       

For NPCs in Oooblyae, one of them repeats that there's an amulet for each major attribute. Another tells me that there's a cartographer who can "aid me in locating a multitude of different places" in Castle Infinitum to the southwest. A third is proud of her pet duck that she's trained, and indeed you can visit the duck in a small pond in the town's center.

 

In an Ultima game, that would be a mantra.

       

What kind of combat system are we looking at?

        

This question has nothing to do with the duck. I could have segued that better. As you explore the land, enemies spawn randomly across the landscape and then head directly for the character. At Level 1, these enemies include gremlins, goblins, and kobolds. 

       

Things get out of hand.

      

Combat mostly uses the early Ultima approach. There's no separate screen. You just hit A)ttack or C)ast (if you have an offensive spell) and specify the direction. After combat, though, we find a more Ultima V approach in that enemies can drop multiple things, and just about anything otherwise found in the game—gold, food, weapons, armor, torches, and so forth—might be part of the NPC loot.

    

Combat is a lot harder than I would have expected. Multiple enemies can spawn at once and surround you. You miss a lot at Level 1, and they hit hard. I was killed in my first couple of battles with goblins. You can try to "escape" into a town, but the enemies remain on the map waiting for you when you emerge. That leads to the next question:

   

How can I reliably heal myself?

    

This is again a question that transcends Ultima clones specifically. The new player is always looking for a sense of what the damage/heal cycle is going to be. At one end of the spectrum, there are games that essentially restore you to full health after each battle, so that you only ever have to worry about one battle at a time. At the other extreme are games for which it is impossible to heal without some kind of resource, making the accumulation of battles as important as the individual battle.

   

The player usually seeks some kind of infinite resource that "breaks" this cycle. For instance, there are many games in which health regeneration does not happen automatically, but spell point restoration does (again, we see a parallel with Tainted Grail), so as long as you have a healing spell, you have an infinite resource. If health and mana regeneration both rely on food, potions, or other resources, the game becomes a lot harder. 

    

I can't have too many rounds like this.

     

Excelsior was very difficult in its early stages. There is no infinite resource. Health does not regenerate automatically. Healers and inns cost more money than the player makes from even several battles. For a while, I couldn't get out of a downward spiral in which I kept losing hit points in battle and hardly making enough money to compensate.

   

Fortunately, the game has a healing spell, and magic points do regenerate automatically (and quickly), but it costs 50 gold pieces for a spellbook and another 25 for the spell. I eventually got to a point where I was trapped in Oooblyae because I was down to 5 hit points; there were three enemies waiting for me outside; and I had no money. Unable to recover from this, I had to re-start the game and make the spell my priority.

     

How does the magic system work? 

    

Even Ultima has so many answers to this question that there's no common style across the series. The first two Ultimas made spells inventory items that you bought and used individually. Ultima III introduced the "pool of mana" approach, and the rest of the games built on that by adding first the need for reagents (Ultima IV), then the need to know the syllables associated with each spell (Ultima V), and then the need to purchase the spell first (Ultima VI and beyond).

     

Excelsior's approach is to make you buy a spellbook to hold all your spells, then buy each spell once. After that, you can cast your spells infinite times. The game gives each spell a two-letter code that you type when casting it, but it's not quite the same as the Ultima syllable system. "Anti-Pain" (AP) costs just a couple of mana points, so even though I started the game with only three, I could cast it, walk around, cast it again, and ultimately get back to full health as long as I could get to the safety of a town.

         

I buy my first spell.

         

But Excelsior has a wrinkle that I've only really seen in one other game that I can recall: Thalion's Dragonflight (1990). Each spell is given an alignment, and the spell costs less the closer the character is to its alignment. Moreover, as you cast spells, your alignment slowly shifts towards the alignment of the spells you're casting. In my case, "Anti-Pain" is on the "good" side of the scale, but only a few ticks above neutral. Thus, as I healed myself, I gradually became more "evil." I'm not sure how much sense that makes philosophically.

        

All I wanted to do is stop the bleeding.

        

Anyway, "Anti-Pain" still didn't protect me much on long journeys between cities, so I decided to spend a little time grinding around Oooblyae, at least until I had the best equipment the city had to offer.

   

How does character development work?

    

Same as Ultima III and beyond: experience and leveling. The Guildmasters take the place of Lord British as the principal agent of leveling. Gaining a level conveys more hit points and magic points; spells become more powerful; and there's a hint that glowing orbs found in each castle (behind a maze of secret doors, in the case of the Orb of Strength in Castle Excelsior) will increase attributes once the character has the associated amulet. You may recall that Ultima V had glowing balls in the dungeons that served a similar purpose.

       

These guys remind me of the "review board" of Skara Brae (cf. The Bard's Tale).

        

For now, the increased magic points and hit points were enough to make me feel a bit safer, and I was happy to see that the number of hit points cured by "Anti-Pain" also increased. 

    

Enemies scale to meet the character's level. At Level 2, I started encountering hobgoblins, gnolls, and mummies. So far, none of them seem to have any special attacks or inflict status effects. After some experimentation, I decide that having two weapons (providing two attacks per round) is more valuable than the additional defensive value of a wooden shield.

      

Not yet, anyway.

           

As I stabilize at Level 3 and prepare to set out around the land, I have two final questions:

   

How big a problem is food going to be?

    

Not much of a problem at all, it seems. It depletes slowly and is replenished cheaply. You often find a few dozen meals on slain enemies. As Hour 3 approaches, I'm still working off the initial allotment. No prolonged period stealing fish and chips for this fixer.

 

How am I going to navigate?    

    

Poorly, perhaps. The game did not come with a world map, and so far, there's no hint of any coordinate system. I feel like any top-down game ought to offer one or the other, ideally both. For now, I don't think I'll map, but I may have to do so if the world is large or complicated.

       

Perhaps there isn't just one world.

       

I would normally follow the coast in a clockwise or counterclockwise pattern, but an NPC mentioned a cartographer in Castle Infinitum. If the game does have a coordinate system, it's probably to be found there. Off we go into another world.

   

Time so far: 3 hours 

"Bard's Tale" Developer Fighting Aggressive Cancer

Happy fall, everyone. While you're waiting for my blog to return on 20 October, please consider donating to the "GoFundMe" for Rebecca Ann ("Burger") Heineman, who is fighting a sudden and aggressive cancer whose treatments are only partly covered by insurance. 

 

Ms. Heineman was an early programmer for Interplay and worked on The Bard's Tale (1984), Borrowed Time (1986), Tass Times in Tonetown (1986), The Bard's Tale III (1988), and Dragon Wars (1990). She has remained in the gaming industry right into the modern era, her most recent game (according to MobyGames's ludography) the PC and Mac ports of Nightdive's Killing Time: Resurrected (2024). 

Daemonsgate: The Legend of Yelda

The next phase of the quest.

    

I start this session in the ruined city of Tan-Eldorith, looking for the research notes belonging to Dorovan, the sorcerer who opened the titular daemonsgate. He was trying to figure out how to teleport across distances, but his experiments were sabotaged by the Pilots' Guild, which wanted to maintain their monopoly on teleportation-based travel. Said sabotage caused demons to flood into the world and destroy the cities of Elsopea, including the Pilots' Guild, so I hope they feel it was worth it.

      

As I load, the party is outside the city. I must have escaped to rest after the last session; it's not like there are any inns in the demon-infested ruins. Every time I re-enter, I have to fight several battles with demon guards. They look enormous and intimidating when I approach them, but they're not too hard in battle. However, all battles sap fatigue, and if the battles go poorly, I might start getting messages that the party is tired and needs to rest almost immediately, requiring me to head back outside again.

    

The large city is surrounded by a high (intact) wall, and the only way to penetrate is through a destroyed gate to the south. Like most cities in the game, it is annoyingly large. I mean, I can't fault it for realism. Imagine being told that you need to collect some "research notes" from an unnamed building in Manhattan. It would take a long time to search them all. It just doesn't necessarily make for a fun game.

           

        

Most of the buildings here are obviously destroyed from the outside. The intact ones are ransacked on the inside or have their doors fused shut. Some buildings have been converted to barracks and are full of beds, but we cannot rest there. Demon patrols are everywhere. It gets old constantly leaving the city to rest, so I end up saving near the middle of the city, exploring, and reloading when I don't find anything.

    

Eventually, in the northwest quadrant (but not the corner), I find a building that was "once the center for the study of the magikal arts," but now "home to foul daemons and other filth." Inside are a number of pentagrams drawn on the ground, a couple of them occupied by huge demons. After killing one of them, something like a book is revealed beneath where he stood, and I snap it up: Dorovan's Notes.

         

This guy is standing on the quest item. He was easier than he looks.

       

I spent a lot of time looking for the Pilots' Guild building that will supposedly let me teleport out of here, but I don't find anything. I'd love to know where it was supposed to be—maybe in a different Elsopean city? The closest thing I find is a central building with a "plinth upon which the city's energy gem sat," but I don't find the gem, and there's no obvious sign of a teleportation mechanism.

          

Kudos for the grammatically accurate sentence.

        

Thus, I reluctantly leave the city and settle in for the long track back to the northern end of the map. It takes about 45 minutes of real time to walk all the way up there, crossing rivers, camping when we get tired, fighting random battles, meeting random NPCs, and so forth. We enter Dryleaf, go to the tavern, pay Captain East to take us to Joruli Point, enter that city, find the place where Alathon was staying . . . only to be handed a note by a maid. Alathon has moved on to Trade Town, the city north of Dryleaf.

        

Growling at having wasted 300 gold in passage for this information, we return to the mainland and walk north to Trade Town. Alathon is in the bar, and it takes me a while to figure out how to hand him the notes. It's the same set of commands as if you want to trade items among party members; as long as you're standing near NPCs, you get their portraits in the interface after you cycle through all the party.

           

Giving an item to an NPC.

       

"This is a good start," Alathon says, dashing my hopes of a quick game. "But I will need time to peruse the notes, time that the civilized kingdom does not have." He goes on to suggest that while he tries to figure out how to close the gate, we at least stop more daemons from joining the existing horde. The Kzzir, the ancient lizard-like people who were the first inhabitants of Hestor, built a barrier during their time that confined the daemons to Elsopea. If I want to activate it, I need to find the old Kzzir city of Yelda.

    

I'm not sure that your reaction sufficiently acknowledges that we just traversed the entire continent and back.

        

True to its name, Trade Town has a bunch of shops. There, I soon discover that most of the stuff I looted from the daemons in Elsopea has no value. No one wants to buy Doomblades, Daemon Axes, or Darkness Amulets. But I did make enough gold during my travels to upgrade everyone's armor to plate (the best I've found so far). I also sell about half of the reagents I've accumulated because I haven't found any recipes that use them. The manual only lists three potion recipes, and none of them use the reagents (e.g., blackroot, blackheart, lightning seed, diamond dust) that I've been finding.

     

The obvious place to go to learn about the location of Yelda is back to Joruli Point. I resist the idea for a while because I just came from there, but when I can't find any responses to "Yelda" in Trade Town or Dryleaf, I once again pay for passage. It pays off. Several scholars have something to say about it, though most of them just think that it's a legend. They tell me that Roberto Zildir, a scholar in Vorsai, has studied the Kzzir and might know something about the city. 

   

What do you suppose has to happen for someone to get the nickname "fiveshanks"?

            

We head south to Vorsai, which we visited before, and find our way to the Library of Vorsai, supposedly founded by Zildir. We don't find Zildir, and no one seems to know anything about him, but a scholar named Udo in the library tells us that a book called Examinations of Old Races gave hints as to the location of Yelda. They don't have a copy in the library, but there may be one in the private collection of Ludovic Gruber. I previously visited Gruber's house and stole a book about daemonology. There were hints that Gruber had gotten himself killed trying to summon a daemon.

        

No one is home in Gruber's manor, and there are no books, but there is a trap door that I don't remember from my last visit. It leads to a basement laboratory with smashed bottles everywhere and a summoning circle on the floor.

      

              

We soon run into a "lab daemon" who attacks us alone. I assume it's going to be an easy battle, but it turns out that none of our weapons can wound it, so we have to flee. This—as is one of the oddities of the game—makes the enemy completely disappear, allowing us to enter the door he was presumably guarding. 

        

Notice that the game itself can't decide between "demon" and "daemon," so don't get on my case.

        

There, on the floor, we find the book we came seeking. It has a different title, The Eldar Races, but it's clearly the same book. The author, Helmut Cooltag, says that he discovered Yelda on a visit to The Stumps. The Stumps is a region of hills south of The Wall and east of Dryleaf. There's a city there called Cooltag's Rest that seems like as good a place as any to start.

    

Cooltag's Rest is a town centered around a gold mine. I've been here before, chasing rumors of a demon in the mine. I thought it was a side quest at the time, but it soon becomes clear that it's part of the main quest. The town is, as always, too large and difficult to explore. Nonetheless, I again have to hand it to the author for his world-building. This is believably a mining town. There are barracks for miners and their families. There are cart tracks crisscrossing the town, and buildings explicitly dedicated for mining equipment, storage of mining carts, repair of mining carts, and storage of gold dust. I didn't mention it before, but there was a similar situation in Dryleaf, which is supposed to be a logging town, and has rivers with logs floating along (well, not "floating" because there's no animation, but you get the idea). If only there were more to do in these places.

      

The author thought of everything.

         

Everyone in Cooltag's Rest is talking about the closure of the mine, which apparently happened after the miners broke through to the third level and unleashed something horrid. The only other gossip is that the mine foreman, Johan Schultzmonger, is having an affair with Francisca Whiplash, a local prostitute. As for Helmut Cooltag, he was lost in the mine while "on the verge of a great discovery." 

    

I find Johan Schultzmonger in his office where he insists that he can't give me the key to the mine and that Francisca Whiplash and he are: "Aah, business associates. Yes, associates." Nonetheless, I must have rattled him, because when we end the conversation, he slips me the key.

        

You probably should have negotiated terms first, man.

       

We spend about half an hour wandering three unnecessarily large levels, connected by an elevator that does not scream "elevator" at first glance. There is absolutely nothing to do on these levels except follow track after track and hit dead end after dead end. There aren't even any nuggets to pick up.

     

This is the supposed elevator.

       

Finally, we find an illusory wall on Level 3. Just on the other side, we destroy a couple groups of stone guardians. The walls in this section are lined with what looks like computer equipment, but it's hard to tell. Past a few more battles, we find a heavy door. "The hinges on this heavy door have seized up," the game says. "Also the cistern that counterweighed the opening mechanism is empty." Attempting to pick the door just breaks my thieves' tools.

          

I'm having trouble picturing the mechanism here.

        

We had seen and ignored some lubricant and lead weights in the mining supply buildings, so I have to head all the way back there, grab some of both, and return. The two items do the job, and the door opens.

    

The ancient library beyond has one book on the floor, the diary of Helmut Cooltag, who was trapped here and decided to translate as many of the books as possible before he ran out of supplies or the stone guardians killed him. The book mentions the barrier that Alathon talked about. Known as the "Matrix Configuration," the barrier involved a beam of energy connected through five temples built into something called "Skull Mountains." They have to be activated in a certain order, and the first is on the island of Scaeth. I check the map, and Scaeith, or "Sgaith" as the map has it, is an island off the coast to the northeast. The closest mainland cities are Helm and Pestur's Wake.

      

I think The Matrix: Configuration was one of the sequels.

           

Desperately hoping I've hit 2,500 words by now, I do a check and find that I'm 700 short. Sighing, I retrace my steps out of the mines and head east. You understand that as I travel across the world, I'm eliding every night spent in camp, trying to rest, having to fight random battles (which at this point pose no threat at all; my characters basically kill enemies the moment they come in contact with them), and reloading after the game crashes, which it does just about every time I forget to exit an NPC screen via the "Control" menu rather than hitting ESC (which works reliably on every other screen). 

 

I intend to try Helm first, but for some reason, the game has me keep running into dozens of identical-looking NPCs in the wilderness. I try asking one about SCAETH, and he suggests that the way to get there is from Pestur's Wake. I thus head for the more northern city.

       

A random wilderness NPC.

        

You're sick of me saying this, but again Pestur's Wake is an obscenely large city with multiple walled keeps surrounded by pointless expanses of pavement and grassland. A large open-air market has a bunch of merchants who seem to sell one thing each. It takes us forever to find an inn that we desperately need, and once we find it, we discover that for some reason the "Buy/Sell" menu won't activate, so we can't stay there. 

      

Again, some fun world-building that's mostly wasted.

        

There are a number of shops, a mercenary guild, and a town hall. In the latter, we find Councilor Pestur, the ruler of the town, but he has nothing to offer. NPCs keep telling me that Scaeth is to the east but not how to get there. Practically every other NPC in town, when asked about themselves, says, "I am the master of this guild." I tell you, I'm not a fan of the proliferation of quest markers in modern games, but this is an RPG that needs them.

        

We are not in a guild. Maybe in this city, every person is her own guild?

             

Anyway, word count or no, I'm out of things to talk about. I can't find any leads in Pestur's Gate, so I'll try Helm next, unless I just abandon the game. I've already verified that the Internet does not need me to document its ending, and it's just starting to feel like a real slog.

       

Time so far: 25 hours 

 

Ishar 2: Messengers of Doom: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

Dr. Doom cameos to set up the next game.

         

Ishar 2: Messengers of Doom

France

Silmarils (developer and publisher)
Released 1993 for DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST; 1994 for Macintosh 

Date Started: 28 July 2025  

Date Ended: 4 September 2025

Total Hours: 20

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

      

Here I go for the second time in a row, trying to reconstruct what happened in a game I played weeks ago. My first screenshot shows the party in a richly-decorated room, taking something off a table. The best I can figure, this is the commander-in-chief's office, which we opened with the key that we got from Zeldy's neck. I believe the item that we're taking is an air amulet stolen from the temple on Zach's Island. No . . . wait. I guess we're taking an idol stolen from the temple, which we then returned to the temple, for which we were rewarded with the air amulet. Forgive me if I have something messed up there.

         

I never got to kill the guard captain. We saved the world but didn't solve the corruption of Zach's Island.

        

My next note is: "Tossed $40,000 worth of evening clothes in the trash." This seems to be about the Blue Velvet club. The first time we visited, we were arrested and tossed in prison, an event that simply repeated when we visited again. There's a hint somewhere in one of the taverns that the club expects you to show up dressed to the nines and wearing pendants, which was supposed to be a clue to spend $8,000 each on five sets of evening wear from one of the shops in town. I don't think I figured this out for myself. I wrote down that there were two places in which I used a walkthrough, and I'm pretty sure this is one of them.

         

Zuburan dons some fancy clothes.

     

Our attire let us join the party, which apparently led us to a sad old man named Olbar who gave us the map to the final island—his island, as he was one of the original companions in Crystals of Arborea. Only he didn't "give" us the map; he put it on the table for us to take. This is different from all of the other maps in the game, which led us to leave the bar thinking we'd received the map, throw away $40,000 worth of clothing, realize later that we didn't have the map, and have to re-buy the clothing and re-visit the club.

        

Look at that goblin gettin' all funky.

      

Before visiting the new island, we returned to Akeer's Island, as I felt that the amulet was the key to getting past the invulnerable air spirit. It was; the creature simply wasn't there. We fought our way through skeletons and mummies and some kind of lion-headed beast ("Paralyze" worked very well on him) and ultimately made our way to a series of prison cells.

        

Nice skirt, Simba.

     

A girl named Grimzel was in one of them. "Take me back to my father," she ordered. To get her into the party, I had to dump Yornh, the priest, which fortunately everyone else was cool with. Grimzel had pretty miserable statistics, but her spells at least replicated what I lost in Yornh (which didn't make sense to me, as she was a scholar, not a priest, but even as she leveled, she never gained the other spells that my scholar gained). She couldn't wear or wield anything useful, and I didn't really bother to equip her. For the rest of the game, I kept her in the back and just had her heal other characters.

        

I just now noticed that she's blind.

       

It took me forever to find a secret door that had to be opened with a button—a mechanic the game does not introduce until this point. A puzzle involved using the skulls we'd been finding to weigh down platters suspended from the ceiling by chains. We had to fight a guard dressed in blue (again, "Paralyze" was a god-send). I believe he was guarding a room with the last glass-encased bone belonging to Grimzel's father.

     

Bluer than velvet were his eyes . . .

      

We returned to Jon's Island, moving fast and frequently healing to avoid having to buy furs again. Yes, I had also thrown away those clothes, even though I should have realized I'd have to return. We put the bones on the five pillars, and with a resounding "Dwilgelindildong!," the druid Grimz was standing before us.

     

I hope the order doesn't matter.

      

I now had to make another space in my party. I tried expelling Grimzel, but Grimz wouldn't join without her. (And to make a full confession, none of my party members would countenance her expulsion, so I had to murder her just to see if Grimz would join without her.) Thus, with reluctance I gave up Karorn, my only good warrior after Zubaran. There was no way I was giving up Eliandr or Khalin's spells. I was way over-relying on "Change of Timescale" by this point. 

   

Grimz was about as useless as his daughter. He also promptly went into the back rank. He couldn't equip or carry anything, and he only came with four spells. Fortunately, one of them was "Fireproofing," which turned out to be vital for the endgame. I believe Grimz is the only druid character, and thus the only character with this spell. Otherwise, the player could skip a decent part of the game.

         

Grimz is smart but nothing else.

       

After we revisited the Blue Velvet club and properly got the map, we set sail for Olbar's Island. The only landing point immediately took us into the final dungeon, where the first foe was some kind of fire elemental, capable of blasting most of us to smithereens without "Fireproofing" refreshed every minute or so. Even with the spell active, he took a long time to kill. Only Zubaran and his Living Sword +20 were capable of doing any serious damage.

     

I haven't figured out the spell yet.

        

Not long after the fire elemental, we had to repeat the process with a dragon. I couldn't get the timing right on how often I needed to cast "Fireproofing," so I just ducked out of combat and saved every so often, reloading if anyone died. I should mention that Zubaran didn't need "Fireproofing," as he had the shield that Griml had enchanted. I started to wonder if a single character with that shield could just solo the game and skip a ton of content that involved finding the various pieces of Grimz. The problem is that unless you were prepared to return to Zach's Island a lot to rest and heal, you'd need a magician to cast "Change of Timescale" or at least someone to cast "Heal." Maybe the knight could do it. I don't think the magician, who can wield a shield, could do it on her own, as she can't wield a weapon powerful enough to do any damage to the late-game enemies in melee combat. It's possible I'm missing something, though. Could that "Invulnerability" potion substitute for "Fireproofing?" I never tried it and have no idea how long it lasts.

          

This dragon looks very uncomfortable.

       

We fought through skeletons, mummies, liches, some kind of crone with horse legs, and more lion-ogres, picking up piles of cash that we wouldn't spend. We had to find a few more secret doors and trigger several pressure plates to open the way forward. Finally, we made it to the door outside Shandar's chambers. Here, again, I needed a walkthrough. To open the door, I had to click on it with the parrot, which we had purchased ages ago. I think the rationale is that we had previously come upon an unnamed sorcerer practicing some kind of password, and the idea was that the parrot repeated the password. Why one of us couldn't have repeated the password, I don't have any idea, particularly since it's the same mysterious goofy word that I've been making fun of for half the game.

         

Is it possible that this word doesn't sound as idiotic in French?

             

With the baboon, mouse, and man-eating plant still unused in our packs (do any of them do anything?), we entered the final chambers. Shandar was a bit of a pushover, although I did have to keep "Global Psychic Protection" and "Fireproofing" going constantly. I nailed him with a bunch of offensive spells, moved in, and just had Zubaran hammer him until he died. He was capable of casting "Inversion," so I had to be careful that Zubaran wasn't hitting other party members instead of Shandar. I think this is how I lost Grimz at some point, but I didn't really care, since the final cut scene took over as soon as Shandar lost his last hit point.

     

Shandar hits us with a spell.

     

The unsatisfying endgame showed the fortress of Ishar from the outside as day transitioned to night. There was an absolutely pathetic volley of like three fireworks, barely visible. As the words "The End" appeared, an ominous cloaked figure wandered into the frame, his gaze fixed on the fortress. Or maybe he was just watching the fireworks.

 

This is the extent of the "fireworks."

       

The GIMLET is not going to be great for this one. I really didn't like anything about it except the graphics. I found the difficulty extremely unbalanced (admittedly, I contributed to that by over-grinding at one point) and the puzzles a bit too obscure.

       

The text and dialogue were either unnecessarily obtuse or poorly translated. For instance, if you try to enter the club before 20:00 or any of the shops after the same hour, a message comes up that says, "Shut up over there!!! Haven't you seen the time!?" I don't know what it says in the original French, but why couldn't it just say, "We're closed!"? "I think this place is bewitched" isn't really the clue that you need to cast "Exorcism." (Oh, yeah, we had to do that once in Shandar's place.) Did the translators not know the word "cursed," or were they trying to make it harder for the player? I have the same question about the "Ent Alarm" potion. There are countless such examples.

     

We were supposed to get from this that he was practicing a password.

      

Let's give it a go:

     

• 3 points for the game world. There's a bit of lore, but most of it is derivative of Tolkien or unnecessarily vague. Early in the game, I didn't really understand what the story was about. By the end, I did, but I still found it incompetently told, mostly through sparse, poorly-translated text.

• 3 points for character creation and development. I rather like the idea of selecting party members from NPCs, but the game ruins its own ideas here by failing to fully develop them. The "voting" system is just silly, and I didn't find any consequences whatsoever from the party affinity score. There's no point in having good and evil characters when there are no role-playing choices in the game. Character development is mostly important for the acquisition of spells.

• 3 points for NPC interaction. Most of the NPCs in the game offer a couple of lines of hints. The ones occupying the streets of the cities have no purpose whatsoever, and I later learned that they can simply be slaughtered with no consequences. I liked that you could have NPCs join the party.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. I never like games that don't name their enemies. The foes that the game offers have a decent number of strengths and weaknesses that require mostly spell solutions. I give a couple of points for the puzzles. I found a couple of them too obtuse, but a few were well-clued by NPC dialogue if I paid attention, and I always like when Dungeon Master descendants go beyond purely mechanical puzzles like levers and pressure plates.

     

The "skull puzzle" on Akeer's Island.

         

• 3 points for magic and combat. The game messes up its Dungeon Master roots by making the "cool down" period so short that you really just need one character to repeatedly attack. That leaves all tactics associated with spells, and I admit that the game offers a decent variety of these, requiring the player to carefully experiment to find the right tactics. The grid for assigning positions is unnecessarily complicated (or, to look at it another way, doesn't use its full potential). It really only matters whether the character is in the front rank or not.

        

Some of the enemies in Shandar's place. Note that I have all the spell panels open.

          

• 4 points for equipment. The system is all right. You have a satisfying number of slots among five characters, and it's pretty easy to tell what's best via cost and the name of the item. The reagent and potion system could have been better developed, for instance by allowing the player to mix potions before he needs them.

• 4 points for the economy. I can't complain that it runs out of utility. You need money for equipment, food, lodging, and even certain plot points. I ended the game well before equipping my party with all of the best stuff. But it's somewhat absurd that the only respawning enemies who drop gold are found on Zach's Island in just a couple locations, and it's ridiculous that you cannot sell items.

       

I could have spent a lot more time in here.

       

• 2 points for a main quest. I don't really see any side quests. There are a couple of ways to solve some of the puzzles, and I give credit for that in "Encounters and Foes," but there are no real role-playing choices to make in the quest.

• 5 points for graphics, sound, and interface. It gets most of that for the graphics, which offer more detail and artistic quality than 90% of the games in its era. However, looking over my entries for the first Ishar, I almost prefer its graphics for monsters. They were far more straightforward and less stylized. As for sound effects, it has a few, mostly in combat, nothing worth getting excited about. I do, however, give it some extra credit for its use of ambient sound, which we still aren't seeing in the average game. I was not a fan of the mouse-driven interface (it has some keyboard backups, but not many).

        

I love that Shandar took the time to decorate his dungeon with stained-glass windows of himself.

        

• 5 points for gameplay. I give it some credit for some nonlinearity, a small amount of replayability (trying different party members), a modest difficulty, and a short playing time.

   

That gives us a final score of 36. In years past, I would have said that it was on the cusp of what I call "Recommended," but as we get deeper into the 1990s, I think that the "Recommended" threshold has to be raised. I can't find the entry where I offered a more complicated formula, but it was something like the game year minus 1952, which would put the "Recommended" threshold at about 35 for 1987, but more like 41 for 1993.

     

I ranked the original Ishar at 38, which goes with my memory that I liked it a bit better, although the differences in specific GIMLET categories are slight enough that I may have just been in a better mood on that day in 2020.

    

I still don't know how we were "messengers of doom."

      

If MobyGames and Wikipedia are to be believed, Ishar 2 never had a North American release, which explains why Computer Gaming World never got to it. The magazine did offer a preview, in a larger article about European games, in the January 1994 issue. Calling the two previous titles "pretty grim" and "very continental in approach," it didn't predict good things from Messengers of Doom. MobyGames's round-up of reviews shows a lot of them, ranging from 54% in the German Power Play to 93% in the English CU Amiga. The average is about 80%, but wow is there a bifurcation, with almost all the German reviews below that mean and almost all of the English ones above it. The English reviews, particularly the Amiga ones, are predictably in love with the graphics ("among the most breathtaking seen on the Amiga" says CU Amiga), which I've already agreed with, but they're not, you know, everything, particularly when it comes to RPGs. The German ones are more in line with my own feelings, still praising the graphics but noting weaknesses in the gameplay and story. The one French review on the site, from the December 1993 Tilt, weighs in at exactly 80%, which I find refreshingly non-jingoistic. 

    

A modest review in the July 1993 The One (86%) has an important insight: "It's still very easy to lose the thread of the plot and end up wandering around without a clue as to what you're meant to be doing." This is exactly what I mean by the relative incompetence of the storytelling and game world.  

    

I put Ishar 3 on the 1994 game list, I guess mostly because it seemed silly to play two games in a trilogy and not the third, but I can't say I'm looking forward to more warm tears and ding-dong-dings. YouTube videos suggest that it has the same engine as Ishar 2. It appears to let you both import and create party members. The graphics seem mostly as nice as ever, but reviews appear to be even worse than for Ishar 2.

     

It's nice to have won a game. It's been a couple of months. I'm going to need you to be patient for just a bit longer, though. One calamity after another has rolled right into the busy opening month of the fall semester, and as you can see from the dates on this entry, I've been having trouble finding time to write about game sessions that have already taken place, let alone playing new games. Things always improve by Columbus Day.