Knights of Legend: Final Rating

A blond 1980s guy tries, and fails, to look menacing.

Knights of Legend

United States

Origin Systems (developer and publisher)Released 1989 for DOS, Apple II, Commodore 64

Date Started: 24 March 2013
Date Ended: 20 May 2013

Total Hours: 96
Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)
Final Rating: 43
Ranking at Time of Posting: 73/94 (78%)

Knights of Legend is the damnedest game. If you've been following my postings, it must have been baffling every time you saw a new one. Its deficiencies are just jaw-dropping: no sound; the inability to trade gold from one character to another; a training system that doesn't allow you to progress beyond novice level in some weapons or even at all in others; ten keyboard commands just to move one step; almost no keyboard shortcuts; incorrect information given in the manual about everything from statistics to spells; a needlessly complex spell system; enormous combat maps where you spend half your time just trying to find your enemy; an absurdly Spartan approach to saving the game; and a bug at the very end of the game that would have prevented most pre-Internet players from winning.

And yet, there are moments of genius and stark originality: the "foresight" system in combat; beautiful graphics; a well-designed world and story; memorable NPCs who respond to keywords; the ability to fit armor to each character; a large selection of interesting character classes; a tactical combat system with dozens of options, but all of them logical; and a "trophy" screen that anticipates the "achievements" of the modern era. Things take maddeningly long in the game, but they happened just often enough--a difficult enemy falls, a quest map is cleared, a new trophy is obtained--to give a shot of dopamine right when it was necessary, and to keep me playing all the way to the end. PetrusOctavianus (perhaps the game's most prominent champion on my blog) had the right term a few days ago: "morbidly addictive."

It's tempting to call it a "flawed masterpiece," but it's far too flawed for that. I absolutely cannot recommend it, but at the same time, I'm a little disappointed if my coverage didn't make you want to check it out at least briefly. I don't know how this is going to translate into a numeric score, but let's see:

1. Game World. The back story is very detailed, well-written, compelling, and utterly inconsequential to the game itself. In its description of the land, the history, the races, and the present set of circumstances, Knights of Legend lives up to Origin's best titles. As you wander the land, you encounter interesting personalities in the towns and keeps. But the core of the gameplay--the quests and combats--are completely divorced from this story. They could be happening anywhere (with the sole exception of the final battle). Enemy fortresses and keeps don't even appear on the map until you get a specific quest to assail them. Hardly any of your actions effect permanent changes in the gameworld. Score: 5.

2. Character Creation and Development. You select your six characters from a list of classes defined by their geography (e.g., Krag barbarians, Htron pirates, Poitle Lock rogues) or histories (e.g., the reformed Dark Guards). Again, these sound awesome, but once selected, the classes essentially become a set of numbers and lose any ability to role-play these rich histories. The game is unique in having shopkeepers and innkeepers that will refuse to serve certain races and classes, though this is more an annoyance than a feature.

An armorer reacts harshly, but understandably, to a Dark Guard in his shop.

In terms of development, there isn't much. The primary mechanism is the accumulation of "adventure points" which you can spend on offensive and defensive skills with various weapons. Building these skills is absolutely crucial to the party's ability to survive in combat, which makes the game's approach to training all the more mystifying. Certain trainers will only work with you if you have a certain minimum skill, but there's nowhere in the game to get that skill. Some trainers are the sole trainers in certain weapons, but only go up to 20 or 30 skill points where others go up to 60-70. The result is that you max out on favored weapons very early, and if you want to keep leveling the character, you have to train in random weapons that he probably will never use.

Hela at game's end. 45 is the highest you can get with the halberd, so I trained her in random other weapons to keep leveling her. She still ended the game with 2,366 adventure points.

There really isn't any reason to "level," though--which requires a visit to the arena after you've channeled enough points into training. The only benefit, other than the ability to train more (which ceases to be a benefit once you've maxed in your primary weapon) is that your "title" increases. As a "commoner--apprentice," Hela is about one-third of the way between "peasant" and "knight-baronet." The value of the title, as far as I can tell, is only in the player's satisfaction in achieving it.

And yet, even though real character development is limited to adding offensive and defensive points to weapons, there's some authentic satisfaction associated with doing so, and the effects are palpable in combat. I wish there had been more to it, but I can't say that there isn't any development. Score: 5.

3. NPCs. One of the more interesting parts of the game, even though (like the game world and story), they exert very little influence on the mechanics of gameplay. They're memorable and well-written, with well-designed character portraits, and interacting with them uses the keyword approach that I like in so many Origin titles. Unfortunately, there are no dialogue choices or role-playing opportunities. Score: 5.

 A touching bit of back story from an NPC that amounts to very little.

4. Encounters and Foes. The various foes you face in the game are well-described in the manual and satisfying in their variety of strengths and weaknesses. Many of them are unique to the game, though based on common tropes. Aside from the text you get before each mission, though, there are no "encounters" as such, and no real way to role-play your approach to the various enemies. It's also a bit banal the way that every combat features only a single enemy type. Score: 4.

The "mist giants" are original-ish.

5. Magic and Combat. Combat is the highlight of the game: extremely tactical, with options that we don't see in any other games to date. I love the ability to anticipate the enemy's actions, to choose from a variety of attack and defense types depending on the circumstances, and to use the terrain to the advantage of the party. If the quest-based combats weren't so large and so long, I'd be unabashedly positive about this aspect of the game (and those issues are really more of a gameplay item than a combat item).

Partly concealed in a doorway, Coll kills the final enemy in the game.

The magic system is a little less successful. I didn't fully explore it, but then again, I didn't really need to; it's essentially optional. The system--stringing together syllables to make spells that have various effects on various creatures of various strengths and various ranges--is unusual and interesting, but the reality of the game doesn't match the description in the manual, and I didn't feel like puzzling through the confusion. It's a little odd that all spells tie to the eight attributes; there's no "fireball" spell or anything like that. You directly damage health, fatigue, and stuff instead. Spells are keyed to specific creatures or classes of creatures, so if you want spells to damage every possible class at long range, for instance, you need five separate spells. Still, the game deserves some credit for allowing spell customization; it's perhaps the first game in my chronology to do so. 

For magic, I never experimented beyond healing spells.

The system of damage to body parts and the importance of fatigue are also strong characteristics of this game. The bottom line is that if you enjoy this game at all, it's almost certainly for this category. Score: 8.

6. Equipment. This is another reasonably good category. In an era where most games offer perhaps a weapon, a suit of armor, and a shield--and you always buy the best one--this game features 11 wearable equipment slots plus 7 pockets. You have to carefully balance protection with weight so as not to overly-fatigue your characters, and armor requires custom fitting to offer the best protection. My only complaint is that you don't find much good equipment in the game--a handful of magic items and weapon upgrades--and there's no reason not to finish the game with essentially the same armor purchases you started with. Also, some of the weapon slots go unused: I never found a single necklace or belt in the game, and only two rings. (Perhaps these were planned for expansions.)

Coll proudly displays his gear.

Finally, there were far too many shops selling bafflingly worthless items. The ability to create "forged" items from a few ingots is really not that impressive since you don't get to determine anything about the result except the name. Score: 5.

What would I possibly do with any of this?

7. Economy. There are quite a few things to purchase in the game: equipment, horses, healing, training, and rooms at inns. It's enough that gold is precious at the beginning of the game, and you pick up every stray weapon you can from slain enemies to sell. After you max your training in the various weapons and buy the best horses, gold loses its value considerably. The inability to trade gold among characters is a bizarre interface oversight. Score: 4.

8. Quests. There isn't exactly a "main quest" in the game, though the manual seems to set one up. Instead, you get a series of 24 quests organized into various groupings. Once you finish 23 of them, the ultimate one is sort-of the "main" quest, concerning the rescue of the knight Seggallion. The quests are perhaps the most disappointing part of the game. They all feature the exact same dynamic, centering around the annihilation of a group of enemies and the retrieval of some talisman, and they offer no role-playing choices (except perhaps whether to kill all the enemies or just take the object and run). Since you have to complete them all to get the last one, I can't really regard any of them as "side quests." The trophies were a nice touch. Score: 3.

9. Graphics: I thought the graphics were beautiful. Certainly, a lot of work went into them, from the animated opening to the well-drawn monster and NPC portraits, to the establishing shots every time you enter a city or keep.

These shots even tell you something about the basic layout of the interior.

This is balanced by no sound at all (except during the opening animation) and a frankly horrible interface. There's no reason that common commands couldn't be mapped to letter keys: "I" to access inventory, "A" to attack, "S" to shoot, and so on. Instead, I got repetitive stress in two of my right fingers from constantly hitting the < and > keys, the only way to scroll through menu commands without the mouse. Other interface elements, such as the cumbersome method of trading and equipping items and the inability to trade gold made the game absolutely maddening. In this category, the game only gets credit for the graphics. Score: 2.

10. Gameplay. This one is tough. I have to give it some points for nonlinearity, since you can do the quest "groups" in just about any order. It also gets some small credit for replayability given the huge number of character classes, although this would affect nothing but combat tactics and it's impossible seeing myself spend another 50+ hours on the game. Neither can I say that it's too "hard," exactly, except for a few challenging battles. The game's basic problem is that it's tedious. Everything takes too long in this game: navigating the combat map, finding enemies in combat, killing them, finishing all 24 quests, shuttling between the arena and training sites, staving off random combats as you try to get from place to place, even equipping weapons and armor. Saying that the game is "like a guest at a party who overstays his welcome" isn't enough. It's like a guest who overstays his welcome so long that he's still there for the next party, and then he hangs out too long after that one, too.

The way this game could have been much, much better is to have only about 12 quests, maybe in groups of 3 with some kind of major plot point after each one. But the real assemblage of 24 quests, 21 of which were completely unmemorable, is exhausting. I was ready for it to be over in March. Score: 3.

The numbers add up to 44, but I'm subtracting one point for an unforgivable bug, which puts the final score at 43. That's not bad as things go. It puts it in the top 25% of games I've played so far, on par with games I honestly enjoyed, like Star Command, Demon's Winter, and Chaos Strikes Back. But this is the rare type of game that's lesser than the sum of its parts. There are some really good elements here that just don't effectively come together in what we might call a "good" game. If the score doesn't adequately reflect that, I hope the text does.

At least I'm not the only one of two minds about the game. Dragon apparently reviewed it twice, completely panning it in March 1990 and then giving it 5/5 stars in May 1990 in a review that praised Porter for his programming skills and called it an "outstanding adventure." MobyGames currently has two user reviews for the game; one is titled "Knights of Legend is a turn-based role-playing game that is well-developed" and the other is titled "Gaming hell." The bigger problem seems to be magazines that didn't review it, though. Scorpia gave hints for the game in the March 1990 Computer Gaming World, but the magazine otherwise seems to have ignored it. I'm not sure how well it was publicized; I scanned six issues of CGW and couldn't find a single ad for it.

The manual has a touching story about how developer Todd Mitchell Porter created the basic concept for the game with three fellow RPG lovers while sitting around a restaurant table in Pella, Iowa in 1981. Porter tinkered with developing it for a while, and he got extremely lucky when a friend introduced him to Richard Garriott. Garriott both optioned the game and hired Porter, who worked a bit on Times of Lore (1988) before his creation was published in 1989.

The reception must have been difficult for Porter. He planned a host of expansions that, thanks to flat sales, were now impossible. But he stayed at Origin for a while and is credited on Ultima VI (where Seggallion returns!). He went on to develop a strategy game for SSI called Renegade Legion: Interceptor (1990) and is credited on several other games before he transitioned into other industries. He says he now makes software for the casino industry. He stopped by and commented on my second-to-last posting a couple of days ago, so be sure to check that out.

We're now going to divert to NetHack for at least one posting while I try to figure out if Romance of the Three Kingdoms is really an RPG.

Knights of Legend: Won!

It was not, in fact, the beginning of another saga.

After my last posting, I essentially did nothing except play Knights of Legend for 24 hours straight. When I finally went to bed, combat tactics and movements invaded my dreams and kept me from anything restful. It'll probably screw me up for the entire week, but at least I won the damned game. Consulting my notes, I see that this game took me an epic 96 hours to win, the longest so far in my chronology. I got some good postings out of it, but from a gameplay perspective, I can't say it was worth it.

Only in the last quest did the game finally produce any kind of tie-in with the plot outlined in the manual, and it became clear that the history of Pildar, Seggallion, and Duke Fuquan was supposed to serve as a backdrop for multiple expansions, and not just this primary game. Leading up to this final quest was a series of...I started to say "increasingly difficult missions," but that's not quite right. There was a series of missions of extremely variable difficulty, including some very difficult ones. But the last two were oddly easy.

Towards the end game, each solved quest got me a keyword or clue to the next one.

After the last posting, when my skills were already at the max level allowed by the game in each weapon, I didn't bother to get any more training or leveling; it was just one quest after another. Because I no longer needed to pay for anything but saving (I even found a free way to get healing after battle by finding some roaming monks), I just went from quest to quest. I didn't follow PetrusOctavianus's advice about buying spells, either; I mostly relied on weapons alone in the final battles.

More of these endgame quests tended to reward my characters with tangible objects rather than just adventure points and good will. These included:

• A magic halberd called the "Death Blade" that turned my Ghor Tigress, Hela, into my best combat character. That makes two magic halberds in this game, and one magic greatsword, but nothing special in any of the other weapons. Another example of this game's weird imbalance.

Hela proudly wields her quest reward

• "Speed Boots" that enabled a character to run four steps instead of just two each round. I gave them to my leader, Coll, who also had the Courage Cloak. He was able to run swiftly around the battlefields towards the end of the game.
• A "Shade Ring," which seemed to make it difficult for monsters to see my character. They'd bumble around even when he was right up next to them. I also gave it to Coll; I figured it was better to have one uber-powerful fighter than a selection of moderately-powerful ones. Coll ended up cleaning up some of the latter maps almost solo.
• A magic ingot that created a battle axe. But I got this as a reward for the very last quest, so it didn't help me at all, which was fine because none of my characters had battle axe skills.

The final sequence of quests--six or seven of them--were all interlocked and proceeded in a specific order. Like all the quests in the game, they followed the "Questing by Numbers" template: agree to retrieve an object, get someone else to tell you where the enemies actually are, travel there overland, slay the monsters, grab the item, and return. Many of the enemies were capable of causing fear, but the effects of this capability seemed to paralyze my characters less often than in the mid-game.
 

Aedd seizes up while trying to fight a cliff troll. This map split my party into two groups, but both were at the ends of good ambush points.

 
It would be tedious for me, and unrewarding for you, to recount every one of them, but here are a few highlights:

1. Aurin the Stalwart outside the city of Shellernoon wanted me to retrieve an unnamed item stolen from him by unnamed creatures.

The creatures turned out to be djinns, fairly tough, but the map was even more interesting, consisting of a long, narrow bridge with a small village on the other end. At least I didn't have to go hunting the creatures.

There's Coll, way out in front of his companions.

Aurin's missing item? See for yourself:

This game is way too long to be screwing with me with this kind of thing.

2. By far, the most annoying combat map in the game was that of the Sledges, where Lord Shellernoon asked me to retrieve some kind of "ward."

The Sledges themselves weren't that difficult despite being fear-causing. Rather, the difficulty was the map. Unlike all the other maps in the game, which were in keeps or fields or other reasonably open areas, this one took place in a huge maze--a maze with only one path to the exit (where the quest item was), and in which all my characters started in a different position.

Yder, my lightly-armored archer, tried his best, but he didn't last long when he started in a dead-end facing a huge Sledge.

I won the quest on the first try, but it took nearly four hours. After the first hour, with my characters bumbling feebly about, I realized I would have to map it. This was difficult since they weren't all together, but I ended up starting with five separate maps (one character was knocked unconscious right away) and piecing them together when the characters found each other. This is the result:

The *s are where my characters started, and the $ is the treasure at the exit. The yellow path is the one that my furthest-afield character (Coll) had to take to get to the exit. By the time I finally found the egress, I would have gladly just taken the quest item and run, but it turned out the last foe was waiting there anyway. If this whole thing doesn't seem so bad, keep in mind how long it takes simply to plan and execute a command to move one square in a specific direction. Fortunately, the Sledges themselves weren't very hard, and my strong melee characters were able to defeat them individually (which is good, since there's almost no place to set up a multi-character assault in the maze).

1/12 of the way closer to my goal.

4. The Sledge quest was the third-to-last. After I turned in the Ward of Shellernoon, Lord Norgan told me to "seek out the black Dwarf, Dundle!"

I had thankfully taken copious notes about NPCs, and I knew where Dundle was to be found, but he had absolutely nothing to say to me, no matter what I asked.

It turned out the game was sticking it to me one final time. An anonymous saint of a commenter informed me that there's a bug in the game, and while Dundle does indeed point the way to the final quest, Lord Norgan really meant to tell me to see Denswurth, in nearby Olanthen. Denswurth's quest, to wipe out some trolls, was pretty lame and easy, and I suspect that the developers originally intended for the player to go right to Dundle but decided to shoehorn an extra quest into things to make it an even 24 or something.

I got through the troll quest pretty quickly, despite their ability to take massive damage without falling...

Why...won't...you...DIE?!

...and the fact that three of them were hiding out on a rampart that only my flying characters could reach:

If I hadn't chosen a Kelder, I guess I just would have had to take the quest item and run.

5. Thanks to the same commenter, I knew to go to Dundle for the final quest, which he gave me when I spoke SEGGALLION to him. It turns out that he knew where Seggallion was (not in the inaccessible Tower of Pildar, thankfully) and bade me rescue him from the clutches of the cyclopes (yes, that is the correct plural) holding him prisoner.

I knew I wanted to video the final battle, so I spent some time just messing about and learning the map before re-loading my characters and engaging the cyclopes for "real." They were reasonably hard but not too hard. About half of them were in a big field near the beginning of the map:

And the other half were entrenched in a very long corridor winding through the mountains. It was a lot of luck when I could line up a scenario like this, with multiple characters able to engage the enemy at once:

When I finally defeated the last cyclops, I was treated to a multi-screen endgame narrative in which I opened the stone door to Seggallion's prison and freed him from his chains. He warned me about the threat that Pildar posed and suggested that my next quest--had the game resulted in any expansions--would be to find the missing Duke Fuquan to warn him.

Little does he know that he'll soon be lost in Britannia.

After that, the game let me continue playing. I returned to Dundle and got a magic ingot (which I forged into a battle axe) as a reward.

What other realms would those be?

I tell you what: I'm thoroughly exhausted with this game. I took more than an hour of video of the final battle, intending to narrate it later, but I can't seem to muster the energy to edit and comment on the video. I'll see how I feel tomorrow when I start writing the GIMLET. It ought to be interesting.

Knights of Legend: The Fearsome Creatures of My Quest

I hate these guys!

About two-thirds of the way through Knights of Legend (at least, based on the total number of quests), I've become convinced that there's no actual "story"--that the manual's coverage of Pildar the sorcerer, the missing knight Segallion, and the missing duke are all just window dressing. Every quest so far has been utterly unconnected to this setup, instead involving the fetching of some object from a random set of creatures. 

There's the evil Pildar's castle, but I don't think there's any way to reach it.

After my last posting, the game started to introduce harder creatures and some new variations to the tactical combat map. There was a selection of giant-level enemies that caused "fear" in my party members. This meant that every time my characters tried to attack them, there was a chance--it seemed to be around 50%--that the the character would become "paralyzed with fear" instead. Fortunately, this didn't affect defense or movement, and one of my characters had a "courage cloak" that made him immune.

One map featured a series of islands instead of the standard "keep-based" combat map, with tough enemies called sylphs.

Don't let the enemy icons fool you. The icons look like orcish creatures no matter what the enemies really are.

I exhausted my arrows shooting at them from my starting island before giving into melee combat. Even though I could funnel them to me through single squares, only two of my characters were standing at the end of the battle.

But by far the most unnerving addition to some of these quests has been starting in different positions on the combat map. For the first half of the game, every combat started my characters together, in a group, but in the second half, I've had two quests where the group was broken apart--once in two groups of three, and once in two groups of two and two groups of one.

Coll and Onia start alone--with two minotaurs closing in on them.

There's no real logical reason for this. My party arrived at the encounter in a group, so it wouldn't make sense for them to deliberately scatter. But whatever the cause, one of these maps produced the most difficult battle so far in the game. It was the final quest in the "Htron/pirate" quest group, and I was trying to recover a treasure chest from where a resident of Htron had buried it decades before. Unfortunately, a group of minotaurs had built a keep there in the meantime.

Notice it doesn't say, "you approach the stone walls cautiously...and decide to split your party into four separate groups." But that's what happens anyway.

Every tactical battle in Knights of Legend comes with a meta-struggle, fought by the player, between tactics and speed. Battles drag on so long that the player is motivated to get them over as quickly as possible, which involves having the party (deliberately) split up, engaging multiple enemies simultaneously, and running from place to place. There are plenty of combats where this works fine, even if you lose a character or two in the process, but then there's a rare battle where you have to think carefully about literally every step you take, just like a chess game. This was one of them. It took me four tries to win the battle.

The difficulty was half due to the party-splitting. The layout of the map was simple: a central keep bisected by east-west and north-south roads. But my characters started spread out on all four points of the map, two of them alone. In general, when the party starts split up, I've found that the best approach is to try to unite as soon as possible, but in this case, the only place to easily unite was the center of the keep, which meant blasting through a bunch of minotaurs first.

The survivors assemble in the courtyard.

 
The key to winning the difficult combats in the game is anticipating what the enemy is going to do. Occasionally, if you're lucky with your intelligence and foresight, this is explicit, and it's one of the best parts of the game. Here, for instance, Moro (my Kelder) is fighting alone against a minotaur north of the keep. He's already slain one.

Reading the minotaur's body language, he realizes that it's going to thrust at Moro's feet in the next round. It doesn't plan to really defend itself at all, instead putting all its energy into the attack. Thus, Moro plans his own attack by swinging powerfully at the minotaur's head and preparing to jump to avoid the thrust:

When this works, it's enormously satisfying, and it must be said that Knights of Legend, for all its flaws, is unique in providing this level of satisfaction. Archers, who can target at range, can also make these assessments at range, thus providing a reason to always keep one arrow remaining in the quiver.

Yder the archer correctly deduces that the badly-wounded minotaur is going to slash at the torso of Moro (#4) and defend by dodging. In response, Moro is going to defend by backing up, and Aedd (#2) can put all his energy into attack. I find that the only attacks that reliably connect when the enemy tries to "dodge" are aimed at the enemy's legs.

But even when you don't know exactly what the enemy will do, you can often guess. Consider this scenario:

I have two minotaurs advancing down the walkway on Hela. It is near-100% certain that the lead one will move forward in the next round. So I have Hela plan a "berserk" attack--slow but powerful--for the empty square between her and the minotaur. She may get unlucky and swing before the minotaur moves. But if she's lucky, he'll walk right into the swing of her halberd without any defense.

She was lucky.

Unfortunately, even the best use of tactics can't make up for characters who have to take on powerful enemies solo. The minotaurs were capable of knocking me out in one hit, and even in my victorious version of this battle, my party members went down one by one.

Terrain plays a huge role in combat. You've seen from plenty of my previous postings how I've found doorways and bridges to use as ambush points, luring enemies to me one-by-one. The minotaur map didn't have any good ambush points, but there were other important uses of terrain. For instance, after Coll was knocked unconscious, Onia--an archer with no melee skill--found herself alone with two advancing minotaurs. First, she led them along a peninsula, sniping at them as they advanced...

And when she had nowhere else to go, she took to the air with her Flying Cloak and went out over the water, where the remaining minotaur couldn't touch her.

Nyah nyah nyah.

The fourth time through, I defeated all 12 of the minotaurs, with only Aedd (a fighter) and Yder (an archer) left conscious at the end. By then, Yder was well out of arrows and was resorting to helping Aedd by pummeling the minotaurs with his fists. The two of them together had to collect the quest item and all their fallen comrades' equipment. The winning battle took 90 minutes, but I spent probably three hours on the three losing battles preceding it. That's 4.5 hours to complete 1/24 of the game.

At least I got a ring that does absolutely nothing out of it.

Some notes:

• Every one of my characters is maxed in training with their primary weapons. This means if I want to gain more "levels" (rising from a peasant to a knight), I need to start training in other random weapons. I'm not sure if there's any purpose in this.

• Not long ago, I realized that this entire time, I've had Coll equipped with a great hammer instead of a war hammer. All his skill is with war hammers. I guess I must not have realized there was a difference.

• Lately, I've had enough money that money hasn't been a problem. I realized that my characters were mostly wearing the same armor that they had bought at the beginning of the game in Brettle. I visited a couple of smithies to look at upgrades but I ultimately concluded that with protection/weight balance considerations in mind, the armor I'd bought in Brettle at the beginning is probably what I should stick with. There's no place that you can spend a lot of gold on magic armor that's simultaneously protective and light weight.

Moro is trained as far as he can go with the greatsword, and he's got plenty of cash.

• I finally bought the best horses for everyone, but to be honest, I haven't noticed any improvement in my ability to ride away from random combats. I've mostly stopped fighting random combats, though; instead, I simply sheath my weapons in the first round and flee.

• When a character collapses or gets knocked unconscious in combat, it's a huge pain in the neck. His weapon falls on the battlefield and you have to pick it up at the end of the combat. But the unconscious character doesn't revive until after the spoils-distribution phase, meaning he can't pick up  his own weapon. Someone else has to pick it up, then trade it to the owner, then switch to the owner to equip it. 

• I flirted a little more with magic before ultimately concluding that I wasn't going to fiddle with it beyond the healing spells I'd already purchased. The basic problem is that it's so enemy-specific that you need a good idea what foes you'll be facing before it makes sense to buy a spell. I think the developers had this idea that prior to each quest, the player would collect intelligence on the likely foe and visit one of the magic guilds to customize the spell for that foe. But the whole process is such a pain in the neck that it's not worth it. I didn't even bother for the minotaurs despite losing to them three times in a row.

I probably won't post on this game again until I've won. Not unless it takes a major turn in the plot or gameplay. By the count of open trophy spaces, I have 9 quests to go.

I'm getting there.

Knights of Legend: Questing by Numbers

The party prepares to fight a group of extras from the "Thriller" video.

After the last posting, which left me in the city of Olanthen, I decided to circle the map in a counter-clockwise direction and see what I encountered. I soon found myself in a depressed city called Poitle's Lock, where I completed two quests: the recovery of a wand needed to defeat a sea serpent from some skeletons, and the recovery of an heirloom that was stolen by some thugs in a heist.

The wand/skeleton quest was ridiculous. I found myself in a series of caves in which I had to travel single file. This would have made combat difficult, but it turned out combat wasn't necessary; the skeletons started falling down dead on their own, and they kept at it--most of them on parts of the map nowhere near me--until they were all gone. I never had to strike a blow. I have no idea what was causing that; my best guess is that the game loaded them up with so much equipment, they got exhausted trying to move and just collapsed.

Always nice when they kill themselves!

So that was a freebie. The second quest was a little harder. I had to travel a long way from Poitle's Lock to the center of a forest, where it took a while to find the thugs' fortress. The fortress was huge, and the battle took three hours as I explored every corner of the map trying to find and kill all eight of them. Once I found them, though, they were easy to kill. I've only had a couple authentically difficult combats in the game. They're just really long.

The quest system in Knights of Legend is extremely repetitive. Since I don't have a lot else to tell you tonight, I thought I'd walk you through a little pictorial montage of the process used by essentially every quest in the game.

Step 1: Get a hint from one NPC that another has a quest.

In this case, I needed to complete the serpent wand quest first.

Step 2: Ask the quest NPC about the relevant keyword and accept the quest when he asks "will you do this?" No matter what the quest, it will involve the retrieval of some item.

I was going to make a Ghosbusters joke about his profession before I looked it up and found that a "lockkeeper" is an authentic profession, referring to someone in charge of a lock on a waterway.

Step 3: Ask around town until someone tells you where the enemies are located.

Step 4: Head out into the wilderness and consult the game map to help narrow down where to search for the enemy base.

The outdoor areas are pretty. I wish there was more to do in them.

That's where I need to go.

Step 5: Probably fight a random battle or two on the way.

Damn it.

Step 6: Reach the general area of the enemy base, and wander around until you happen to step on the right pixel. Probably fight another random combat or two in the meantime.

This is an annoyingly large forest.

Step 7: When you finally find the enemy base, choose to "partake" of the combat.

Step 8: Count the number of enemies on the initial encounter screen. You want to know how many you have left to track down at any given point during the combat.

I've yet to fight a combat in which there was more than one type of enemy. Perhaps they don't exist.

Step 9: When combat begins, try to figure out where you are vis-a-vis the enemies. This might involve a little scouting.

My party fans out.

Step 10: Find a good ambush point and lead all the convenient enemies to it. (By the way, the icon used for the enemies is the same no matter what type of enemy you're facing.)

That's it...one more step.

Step 11: When the enemies get so far away from the ambush point that it becomes annoying to track them down and lead them back, send your party out into the field to hunt them down instead.

Step 12: Optional. You might find the quest item in a building while you're exploring the combat map. You could take it and flee, but you'd lose out on the experience and gold from the battle.

All quest items are represented as swords.

Step 13: Enjoy the victory screen when you finally track down and defeat everyone.

Step 14: Distribute the spoils of war--including the quest item--to your party. You need to try to be equitable with this: because there's no way to trade gold from one character to another, ensuring that everyone has something to sell is really the only way to ensure everyone gets paid.

Step 15: Head back to the city where you got the quest, but don't forget to hit a few random combats along the way!

Get...out...of...my...way!

Step 16: Heave a sigh of relief when the city gates are finally in view.

This is a nice shot. You can definitely see the locks of Poitle Lock.

Step 17: Turn in your item and collect your reward, if any.

He gave me a "Coat of Courage." I thought I was pretty brave already.

Step 18: Sell all the excess junk you picked up.

Step 19: Go to an abbey and heal any wounds that you received during the combat. If you're lucky, it won't eat up too much of the gold you made.

Step 20: Enjoy the new icon on your awards screen.

Nine down, something like 15 to go.

Step 21: For god's sake, save your party, whatever it costs.

Only in a CRPG is a hotel bill bigger than a hospital bill.

This limited process unfortunately means that there's really nothing to "discover" as you explore both the world map and the combat map. There are no special encounters, no opportunities to truly role-play, no chests to open, no puzzles to solve, no lore to find outside the NPCs in towns, no combat "bosses." There are no quests that require you to do anything truly different; the game mechanics wouldn't have allowed me to actually slay the sea serpent, for instance. The quests end up being extremely repetitive, as if you were playing Skyrim but only doing Urag gro-Shub's book-fetching quests.

I've been recording all of my battles, hoping to find a real nail-biter that I can use to illustrate the details of the tactical combat--really the only good part of the game--but nothing so far has struck me as a particularly good exemplar. Perhaps next time.

On to the next one...