1990 Loose End #1: Legend of Faerghail

    

Legend of Faerghail was an early representative of a clear 1990s trend: an explosion of interesting RPGs from German developers. I played it in the fall of 2013 and called it, in my "Final Rating" post, an "interesting misfire." Starting with a base reminiscent of The Bard's Tale, it added a bunch of innovative features, including a combat mechanic that drew from both Wizardry and Phantasie, and excellent graphics and sound--including some of the first ambient sound. Alas, it had too many mistakes and half-developed ideas to rate very highly.

I still would have finished it except for a bug I encountered that made an entire castle disappear, preventing me from continuing the game. That was in the Amiga version. The DOS version was already bugged beyond belief, so my only option would have been to re-start with the Amiga and hope the bug didn't recur or attempt the Atari ST version, which is only in German. I decided to simply quit, even though it ended a very long winning streak.

There's supposed to be a castle here.

Last summer, 6 months after my final post, I heard from Olaf Barthel, one of the three principal developers of the game, who started our correspondence by saying, "your observations and assessment of the game's merits and shortcomings are spot on"--a quote that some of my regular commenters should feel free to repeat more often. We traded a series of e-mails in which he offered a wealth of information about the game's development. The exchange made me feel a lot better about Faerghail, and based on it, I fully intended to re-engage the game, peppering my new posts with information from Olaf's e-mails. But every time I went to fire it up, I was reminded that I still faced the same bugs and probably wouldn't be able to finish it.

Now that I'm in 1991, I suspect I won't ever return to Faerghail, but the least I can do is offer some of Olaf's insights on the game.

Olaf, Veith Schörgenhummer, and Matthias Kästner were the creators of Faerghail. They started development when they were in school together and all 18 or 19 years old. The scenario was based on a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that Schörgenhummer had designed. At first, they were simply trying to create something for the German domestic market, which was a bit light on RPGs at the time. But their publisher saw potential in the international market and insisted on an English translation and DOS and Atari ST ports.

I had long wondered about the game's name, and in particular whether it was intended to evoke the earlier Fargoal. Apparently not. In 1986, Olaf was studying in England as an exchange student and bought a book called Irish: A Complete Introductory Course. Later casting about for a name for the game, Olaf pulled the book from his shelf, flipped to a section that listed common Irish surnames, and stabbed his finger on "Ó Fearghail." They dropped the "O" and switched the "a" and "e" so no one would read it as "fear." The funny thing is, this is the second game I know of to get its name in this exact way; the first was Eamon. I love the idea that we nearly got The Legend of Flaithbheartaigh.

The page from which Olaf took the game's name.

   

Olaf confirms that the game was built on a foundation of The Bard's Tale, Phantasie, and first edition AD&D rules (the second edition wasn't translated to German until the game was already finished). Inspired by the ability to dig through walls in Moria, they added the "smith" class with his demolition abilities (something I never really explored). This part I love and leave in Olaf's own words:

The reason why there is a monk, but no female counterpart, was in that we couldn't quite picture how it would look like. It is something of a stretch to imagine how the monk, wearing a cloak and hood, could be capable and effective in unarmed combat. It would have been an even greater stretch to imagine a nun, wearing cloak and veil, in the same role as the monk. Because we did not have a female monk, we added the female-only healer class instead.

Something I didn't realize while playing the game is that monsters, while randomly roaming the hallways, actually pick up treasure. This accounts for why I didn't find chests in the same places sometimes when I had to re-load a level, and why some monsters inexplicably offered more treasure than others. As for the monsters themselves, the generic "ghost" images were a late-game addition. Originally, the game was going to be like The Bard's Tale, where you just stumble upon enemies but don't see them ahead of time. Eventually, after playing Dungeon Master, the team decided they wanted to see monsters in the environment, but they didn't have enough time to create images for every one.

Olaf agrees about the inferiority of the DOS version. It was an awkward time to develop for DOS, right in between the CGA and VGA standards and the AdLib and SoundBlaster capabilities. Ultimately, they just didn't have the time and resources to invest in better graphics or any sound. A fundamental weakness of the DOS version is that you can "clear" monsters in the wilderness areas, which makes it impossible to later grind for food. You end up spending most of your gold keeping the team fed.

My comparison of Amiga (left) and DOS (right) graphics.

As for the translation issues we encountered, Olaf says that the manual and game text were translated professionally, but by people who didn't understand the context of RPGs and had trouble with terms like "dungeon master." He recalls having the same "riddle trouble" that I did when he played Wizardry VI in German, got nearly to the end, faced a riddle whose answer should have been "pen" or "quill," and yet couldn't get the game to accept any appropriate German word. Ironically, Olaf wrote to me in absolutely flawless English. In a few years, he could have done the translations himself.

Faerghail was Olaf Barthel's last game, but he has had a long and rewarding career in the computer industry. (This interview goes over many of his contributions.) Veith Schörgenhummer also called it quits after Faerghail, and Olaf lost touch with him. Matthias Kästner, on the other hand, went to art school and has continued to work in the German games industry as a designer, animator, art director, and project leader. His credits include graphics on Fate: Gates of Dawn (1991), Neocron (2002), Back to Gaya (2005), Mata Hari (2008), Black Mirror II: Reigning Evil (2009), Black Prophecy (2011), and The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief (2013).

Olaf offered a lot more about the game, and rather than try to work it into paragraphs, I'm going to paste his own words below for anyone who's really interested in the details of graphics, sound, and programming.

*****

All text below except for the bolded headers, image captions, and text in brackets is directly quoted from Olaf Barthel's e-mails to me between 12-14 July 2014.

On the development process:

At that age you can move the world, just by sheer force of ignorance and sticking to your guns. In retrospect, that type of approach must have made it harder for everybody who was involved in making the game.

Not only were the three of us pressed for time, as the final exams were approaching (we passed -- working on the game did not have a negative effect on our marks), our producers and collaborators at reLINE software must have been tearing their hair out, given the complexity of the game.

What originally started out as a more modest product evolved into a multi-platform game (Amiga, Atari ST, PC), in two different languages, using unproven technology (reLINE software wrote all their games in assembly language; Legend of Faerghail was written in 'C'), by an unproven designer/programmer team.

Legend of Faerghail was the first, only and last big commercial game the three of us collaborated on. We all were hobbyists/amateurs, who were self-taught and learned the craft through writing software for and painting on the C64.

On monster AI:

The monsters roaming the dungeons follow simple A.I. rules. When a dungeon level is loaded, the monsters are always reset to start positions, and then proceed to roam the halls. They will patrol the hallways, search for treasure (and pick it up, if they feel like it: if you encounter and kill these monsters, the loot will include the treasure they found) and try to follow the player if they can spot it. You can even bait certain types of monsters, which will then stop following the player and stick to the bait. The A.I. is not particularly good, though (Pac Man has stellar ghost A.I. compared to Legend of Faerghail).

On saving the game:

Saving the state of the game to disk and later restoring it evolved over time, with auto-mapping getting squeezed in very late in development. Because of memory constraints I was unable to store the positions, attributes, etc. of all roaming monsters and the level auto-map states for all dungeons the player had visited up to this point. This is the reason why upon reentering a dungeon level, monsters respawn and the level auto-map is reset.

On the Amiga version:

-The game was originally designed specifically for the Amiga, which is why there are sound-effects and, for its time, modest graphics effects. The prototype dungeon crawler even used the Amiga-specific high resolution graphics mode (640 by 512 pixels in 16 colours). These platform-specific features and resolution were eventually scaled back because of the Atari ST port. The PC port arguably had even more restrictions than the Atari ST version. The Atari ST version even supports a 640 by 400 pixel black and white mode.

We never realized that we might have been one of the first computer role playing games to feature ambient sound and day/night cycles in 1st person perspective ("Ultima III" certainly had day/night cycles, but the on-screen visuals never reflected the gradual change of time). Building this feature into the game seemed natural, given the capabilities of the Amiga.

The three of us designed the ambient sound of the game. The Amiga offered four channels of 8 bit digital stereo sound, and we tried to make the most of it. For the sound effects we must have watched (or rather "listened to") just about every adventure movie that was available on VHS tape at the time. I recall that most of the combat sound effects came from Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers.

The Amiga version had to work well on the standard type of Amiga at the time, which had only 512 KBytes of main memory available. Because of this restriction, the game may at times choose not to load monster portraits or sound-effects. However, the game adapts if you have more memory to spare, giving you more monster portraits, sound effects, etc. and it will even cache assets (just set your Amiga emulation to use 512K of fast memory, or more).

The game covers three disks, in the Amiga version, and can be installed to hard disk in order to speed up disk access (it has no on-disk copy protection). The game even supports multi-tasking, which means that given enough memory, you can use the Amiga for productivity software and play the game at the same time.

The reason why saved games can be corrupted is likely because you did not wait for disk activity to finish after saving the game to disk. Because of how floppy disks work with the Amiga operating system, there is a small delay after the last write access before the file system concludes the write operation and spins down the floppy disk. This delay is independent of the floppy disk emulation speed. Hence, if you save to disk, wait 1-2 seconds before you restart the emulation or switch it off.

On the DOS version:

The game itself was designed and "prototyped" on the Amiga, and at some point had to be ported both to the Atari ST and the "IBM PC compatible" platform. This proved to be challenging on many levels: the game was not intended to be ported when designed, game design was still evolving and ongoing, and at reLINE software nobody had the necessary experience in programming the PC in the 'C' programming language.

This was at a time when the IBM PC compatible platform started to become relevant as a gaming platform, both in Europe and internationally. reLINE software had already acquired a development system, with AdLib sound card and EGA graphics. By comparison to the Atari ST and certainly the Amiga, the PC was not a mature platform, because it lacked an operating system. The development tools in particular were immature: the Atari ST had an excellent Turbo 'C' compiler, but the 'C' compiler used on the PC by reLINE software had so many quirks that porting code from the Amiga almost always amounted to a rewrite.

Holger Heinrich at reLINE software took on the challenges of porting Legend of Faerghail to the PC, and from what I recall this was an exceptionally difficult task. Not only did Holger have to port a game which was not intended to be portable, he also had to learn programming the system from scratch.

The PC development platform itself was by no means uniform or stable either. Back in 1988/1989 the term 'compatible' in "IBM PC compatible" had claws and teeth. How you programmed the graphics hardware varied greatly by manufacturer, and since there was no operating system to help you along, you had to use low-level operations to get it to do something useful. I recall that reLINE had to test the game on a special IBM PC compatible machine manufactured by Tandy, which had both a significant market share in the U.S. and which had its own peculiarities to account for.

Porting the game to the PC amounted to rewriting the game code, both because of the quirky 'C' language development platform, and because the code was not particularly portable to begin with. What worked well on the Amiga had to be adapted for the PC, and you probably saw the side-effects of this approach play out.

On the challenges of mapping from a 3D perspective:

The "3D" view was the first tough problem to crack when we designed the game prototype. We had to find a way to make both the perspective work, and find a system for building the image from components (walls, doors, stairs, special illustrations). What Matthias and I arrived at was what you see in the finished game. Each element in the perspective layout was designed according to a template (this [image] is from my original 1988 archives). The game uses a central perspective, and the visible space is three steps deep.

Both the background (floor and ceiling) and the foreground elements are slightly asymmetrical. This was a deliberate design decision: whenever you turn or take a step forward/back, the game redraws these elements by mirroring them horizontally. This makes the view appear slightly, but noticeably different from how it looked before, supporting the fact that something has changed when you moved.

The basic "3D" view design was adapted from The Bard's Tale, but it never occurred to us that our version did not give the player a sense of what is left or right of the wall he or she is currently facing [This was something I had complained about in my reviews].

On location design and content:

We wanted to make the individual location map layout reflect the architecture of the respective place. This is why, for example, the monastery layout looks like how you might find a European medieval monastery does, and why the individual levels of the Elven pyramid become smaller and smaller the further you ascend the pyramid. Each level can cover 36 by 36 individual rooms, but we never used all of that space, not even in the wilderness (trees and walls cover the edges).

Our idea was that each dungeon layout should be different, with respect to the location. Again, The Bard's Tale provided the motivation for this decision: we did not want use the same "one size fits all" style level design in the game.

The size of the game, with all the different dungeons and their many respective levels, came back to haunt us. We arguably succeeded at building a game world, but we struggled with making it interesting. This is why the puzzles and the game's overall campaign design (one single quest, no sub-quests and certainly no branches in the story) are not as ambitious as the technical design of the game world (this seems to be common problem even in contemporary computer game design; Assassin's Creed I and Watch Dogs come to my mind, for example).

The campaign design upon which the game was originally intended to be built did not provide enough content to fill the game world with. The world had simply become too large. Filling the vacuum proved to be very difficult, because we lacked the necessary experience and storytelling background. What ended up in the game therefore came from what surfaced when we stirred the pond, so to speak. The three-part key staff, for example, comes from Raiders of the Lost Ark (which probably borrowed it from a 1930s serial in the first place).
      

On combat:

We adapted the look and the basic mechanics from what we were most familiar with, this being The Bard's Tale. We tried to add some small incremental improvements to this model. Unlike in The Bard's Tale, our game shows you the placement of the enemy and your player character, and does not represent this information as numbers only.

As we discovered during development, the overall visual design of our game made how the combat played out on screen look rather bland and somewhat pointless. This was tactical combat at its most tactical: you gave instructions to your party, very much like a coach, and wait on the sidelines until this round had concluded. The text on the screen would give play-by-play commentary on what was going on.

Because we discovered these shortcomings late in development, our options to address them were very limited. We provided two variations to the basic formula. The first was the quick combat option: you do not need to read the play-by-play commentary scrolling across the screen, you just get to see the final results of the round. The second was to add minimal animations which identified who was attacking who, which type of character (fighter/magic user/animal) was involved, and also add sound effects (hit/miss/equipment damage). We affectionately called this the "Punch & Judy show" when we developed it (although it is arguably not quite as violent).

The distance between combatants does make a difference during the combat, but maybe not as much as it should. The closer you are to an enemy, the more likely you will succeed in hitting it (and the more likely you are to get hit). Missile weapons and spells should make a difference if the distance is larger.

On monster graphics:

As the game evolved, we added more and more distinct enemy types; we wanted to avoid recycling enemy portraits, as The Bard's Tale did. Unfortunately, this decision increased the workload for creating the portraits, which is why instead of one single artist, three artists eventually worked on the monster portraits (Matthias Kästner, Rainer Michael and Frank Knust). Some of the portraits were adapted from existing illustrations, sometimes by scanning, retracing and coloring what we found in the AD&D manuals and magazines.

The portraits throughout the game are extremely well-done.

The dragon featured prominently in the game's title screen, and which also happens to be the monster you meet in the end game, originally comes from the cover of an AD&D monster manual, and was redrawn by Matthias (this is Matthias' original drawing, in which the priest in the foreground wears a blue tunic).

On the language system:

We added it so that you could get out of encounters without fighting. It turned out that regular combat was somewhat uninteresting, and providing the player with options to retreat or parley instead would offer less boring alternatives.

Once we started down this road, the next logical steps were to offer bartering and recruiting as part of the language system. Recruiting is actually a variation of what happens in The Bard's Tale when you summon an elemental to fight for your party.

One reason why the language system is not as useful as it should be is that there are bugs in the implementation which I only recently discovered. In order for parley to succeed one member of your party needs to be able to speak the language of an enemy. Because of a bug (it is an off-by-one error) the parley can only work if enemy and party member *do not* speak the same language.

This is finally explained!

On "whimsy":

As development progressed and really started to drag, the tone of the game began to drift. What originally began as a serious story, built around a mystery (what happened to the Elves?), slowly started to pull in material to fill the void left by the game world being larger than the story designed to fill it.

The seriousness of the game's tone invited commentary, not necessarily in the form of parody or satire, but it was time and again necessary to lighten things up a bit. This is why there is a snarky comment about magical Elven plumbing, and an inflatable rubber dragon (which comes from a cartoon found in a D&D magazine), for example, and the end-game text featured in the final dungeon is bordering on being funny (at least in the original Klingon, but not so much in the English translation).

As we learned over time, being a D&D dungeon master does not require that you keep the game's tone strictly serious. Fun can come in all shapes and sizes, and not just in how well your character holds up in combat. Equipment can break during combat, attacks can fail. Your character may not face such events stoically, he might even curse (historical note from a foreigner: I understand that "cursing" actually used to mean the use of profanity; in the context of our game it is just the use of obscenity). This is what happens in Legend of Faerghail. When an attack fails, there is a very small random chance that the character will quietly say "sh*t!" (in the Amiga version). We did get called out for that little bit of whimsy, and strangely enough only by U.S. players. Incidentally, that is Veith Schörgenhummer's voice which we sampled for the sound-effect.

We could not resist adding easter eggs to the game. You already found the "Indiana Jones" reference--did you notice that there was a sound effect for that, too? [Alas, I did not. I was probably playing with the sound off for some reason.]

I still don't know what the "wands and sunshine" part means.

 On copy protection and the endgame:

We disliked shipping a game with copy-protected disks. For one thing, we had learned long ago that it did not take long for copy protection to be overcome (look at the contents of the many Amiga abandon-ware game web sites and judge for yourself--almost all of these games were once copy-protected), it also meant that we would have had to somehow adapt the game and its distribution media to support copy protection. We lacked both the expertise and the time to accomplish this.

Our solution to add a bit of copy protection was to put vital information required to succeed at the game into the manual. This is why there are numbered maps both in the manual and on the sleeve of the manual.

If I remember correctly, the end game requires that your party survives traveling through very hazardous terrain. Your party receives an amulet with a map on it early during the game, and that map is pictured on the reverse side of the manual. The map was designed so as to make photocopying it very, very hard. It is the key to traveling through the hazardous terrain in the end game. Now if only we had dropped more hints on what that map is good for, and if the numbering of the maps in the manual actually corresponded to the numbers, as used in the game text...

 *****

It's an interesting game, and I'm glad I had the opportunity make more of its backstory known to the world.

Legend of Faerghail: Final Rating

Legend of Faerghail

Germany

Electronic Design Hannover (developer); Rainbow Arts and reLINE (publishers)

Released 1990 for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS

Date Started: 8 November 2013
Date Ended: 5 December 2013

Total Hours: 19 (unfinished)
Difficulty: Easy (2/5)
Final Rating: 32
Ranking at Time of Posting:  71/128 (55%)
Ranking at Game #456: 303/456 (66%)

It's time to accept that I won't be going back to Legend of Faerghail. I think I gave it a good chance: I tried both the DOS and Amiga versions and found them buggy in their own ways. I spent some time trying to solve the bugs in the Amiga version, then switched back to the DOS version to see if I could win it there, and finally just admitted that I didn't care enough about the game to keep trying.

The game is an interesting misfire. It starts with an interface and quest reminiscent of The Bard's Tale but adds some innovative features. The quest is original and intriguing, and the combat system blends some neat characteristics of games like Wizardry and Phantasie, along with some fun animations. It has excellent graphics and sound.

Unfortunately, almost everything it innovated, it screwed up. It introduced some new classes and made them irrelevant. It introduced a system by which the characters could learn to speak to every creature in the game, and then made it unnecessary to speak to any of them. It introduced food as a logistical challenge (and an associated morale system) and then loaded the characters up with so much that I eventually had to drop meals on the floor. It introduced NPCs who would join the party for specific reasons and then never say anything again. It set up an interesting combat system but made it so long that you almost always want to use "quick combat," and it made combat completely optional since every one (except the final, I assume) is escapable. It offered nice graphics for monster portraits and screenshots but screwed up the navigation graphics by not showing items in your periphery and by making every enemy sprite a ghost. It offered pocket-picking (and an associated jail system!) but didn't provide enough gold to make it worthwhile. It had a system by which weapons and armor become damaged but then made it a trivial process to fix them. In almost every way, it undermined its own positive contributions.

When I last blogged, I had uncovered some intriguing information about the history of Faerghail having to do with an ancient alliance between a demon and a dragon. They were defeated by a group of champions who banished the demon to another dimension and imprisoned the dragon in a cave. There was some suggestion that either or both had returned and had found a way to corrupt the minds of the good races--and was thus responsible for the elves turning hostile.

Let's fill in the gaps with a visit to Saintus's blog. He seems to have the most comprehensive discussion of the game on the Internet. Fueled by childhood nostalgia and a pile of maps that he created more than 20 years ago (speeding his re-play), he completed it over two months in the fall of 2012, though he had his own corruption problems.

Saintus played in a different order than me, but he discovered mostly the same things. From his blog, I learned that the gunpowder I'd been carrying could have been used to blast open walls or locked doors and find hidden places. But it's a one-time-use item, meaning I'd have to keep going back to the mines to get more if I wanted to use more. He smartly dumped his thief after a few hours (which I didn't), noting that the thief hardly ever successfully disarms traps, and anything else the thief can do is unnecessary. He mentions certain encounters in the elven pyramid that I didn't experience, but I managed to get through it anyway.

The castle turned out to offer a horror theme, complete with echoing steps, flashing thunder and lightning, and undead inhabitants.  The castle is ruled by a vampire lord, whom you have to trap with the mithril ball to escape. The one necessary item from the castle seems to be an emerald, which coupled with a ring from the dwarven mines and a staff from the Temple of the Dragon Servants merges into a key that opens the final area.
 

The final enemy, courtesy of Saintus's post.

I'll let you read Saintus's harrowing account of the final area if you want. Suffice to say that it has a lot of tough monsters and a crazy-difficult area where you have to navigate through trial and error and every wrong step kills you, much like the "mine" level in Wizardry IV. This would have had me tearing my laptop apart with my teeth. The mines emerge into a wilderness area that takes you to a volcano. A guardian poses a riddle whose answer is the non-word "iceflower" which also would have had me destroying walls and furniture. The sarcophagus from the monastery becomes necessary to sail across a river of lava. The level culminates in a battle against a dragon, upon whose death you throw the demon mask from the elven pyramid into his pools of blood to win the game. The closing screenshots talk about peace and accolades for the party but don't help you understand any better what the hell was going on in the game.

The closing shot, again from Saintus's post.

 

In a GIMLET, I give it:

1. Game World. The game sets up a reasonably unique world and scenario but doesn't follow through with enough detail. The core mystery--why have the elves suddenly turned hostile?--is compelling, but the game leaves you to piece together the answer with overly-cryptic hints, and I honestly can't say whether that's deliberate or just poor game design. There is some reasonably good lore in the form of books, and some very good prose during exploration of dungeons, but the two valleys seem small, constrained, and thematically inconsistent, and the game rarely distinguishes itself from other fantasy worlds. Score: 4.

2. Character Creation and Development. It deserves some credit for introducing classes not seen, or rarely seen, in other RPGs of the era (blacksmiths, healers, monks, illusionists, barbarians), then loses that credit for making the distinctions relatively meaningless. Character leveling is slow but satisfying with the increase in hit points, attributes, skills, and spells. I wish the game had done more with the language system. Score: 4.

3. NPC interaction. There are a few NPCs who will join the party, although they aren't necessary and their abilities are variable enough that it might be better just to use the slot for another player-created character. The disappointing thing is that they come along in specific places for specific reasons (e.g., the monk who wants revenge on the dwarves who sacked his monastery) but then never say or do anything when the quest is completed. I like that a few NPC monsters will join you if you ask. Other NPCs are one-conversation-only encounters in specific squares. Score: 3.

4. Encounters and Foes. Until you fight, every foe is technically just an NPC, and you have the option to trade, recruit, and negotiate a withdrawal. The problem is these options hardly ever work. When trade does work, you find the other party has nothing you want and won't buy your items--the one thing that would have made it worthwhile. You find yourself slaughtering friendly parties because it's faster than anything else.

The excellent monster portraits help distinguish the game's foes, but only a few of them have special attacks that require some kind of special tactic. For the most part, they just wallop you. Though you can clear dungeon levels, the enemies respawn when you return.

Beyond the regular encounters, there were a nice variety of special encounters in the maps, such as informants who offer intelligence for a price, a sword-in-a-stone, and copious riddles--though some of them are nonsensical in English, and some are nonsensical in any language. Score: 4.

I've got a $25 Amazon gift card for anyone who can tell me what he was looking for.

5. Magic and Combat. There are some good combat options with the different ranks and such, and the animations that accompany each attack are fun--a few times. Then combat becomes a rote matter of hitting (Q)uick combat over and over. It's also a bit odd that the party can simply (W)ithdraw from combat at any time with no penalty. The magic system offers too few spells too slowly to make much of a difference in the party, and spell points deplete too quickly. Score: 3.

The combat is rote, but at least it's quick.

6. Equipment. Underwhelming. Each character class can equip a different variety of weapons and armor, but upgrades don't come very quickly after your initial purchases, and there's no way to assess relative value except by the sale price. There are a handful of potions and scrolls and such, but I had trouble figuring out how to use some of the magic items. The weapon and armor condition score was a potentially-interesting twist rendered trivial with a smith in the party. Score: 3.

7. Economy. Utterly broken in a feast-or-famine sort of way. Most treasure chests in the dungeons offer only a handful of gold pieces, but a few offer thousands. Since they reset when you enter and leave, you can get all the gold you can carry very quickly, and it's never a problem again. Meanwhile, there's nothing in the equipment store worth buying, though you do need gold for training and skill development. Score: 2.

8. Quests. The main quest reveals itself in stages and isn't bad. There are no explicit "side quests" but there are a couple of "side-dungeons" that help build experience and equipment. Score: 4.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. (I'm rating the Amiga version here, as the DOS version has reduced graphics and absolutely no sound.) The character and monster portraits and cut-scene graphics are very well-composed, and the game did a good job with different lighting levels depending on time of day or the strength of the characters' light spells. I particularly liked the sound, which features some of the first ambient sound I've experienced in an RPG, including soft howling of wind and chirping of crickets at night, water dripping in the dungeons, and bird calls outside during the day.

The outdoor and corridor graphics have more detail than many games of the age, but the lack of the ability to see objects and passages in your periphery really screws up navigation. I liked that the interface offered a choice between easy-to-remember keyboard commands and the mouse, but not that simple acts like transferring gold required too much effort. Score: 6.

10. Gameplay. The game is quite difficult during the first level, where every combat round can leave you with dead characters and insufficient money to resurrect them. It gets a lot easier later, when you can withdraw from any battle that seems to be going poorly and take a 24-hour nap right in front of your enemy, and loading up on all the cash you want is a matter of returning to a treasure room multiple times. I'd like to credit it with nonlinearity--all of the dungeons are open at the beginning--but you have to assail them in a specific order to fully complete them and get all the necessary items. Since the game gives you only a few hints as to this order, and since the dungeons reset when you leave and return, you could spend a lot of time bumbling around for nothing.

Also on the negative side is the size of the dungeons. They might have hundreds of squares per level and only one or two interesting things to encounter. You spend a lot of time wandering and mapping for no reason. Finally, I invested 19 hours in the game. If it hadn't bugged out on me, it probably would have taken another 15 to win. This simply wasn't a good enough game to deserve 34 hours of attention. Score: 2.

I do have to subtract 2 points for the bugs. After some online research, I'm convinced that these were present in the original versions and didn't just pop up during emulation. It deserves a third lost point for poor translation in parts of the game that, among other things, make two riddles essentially unsolvable without spoilers. That gives a final score of 32.

Contemporary reviews of the game were all over the place. The most positive is probably found in Amiga magazine from December 1990, which said that, "this is by far the best attempt at a roleplaying game to date." Not only better than the entire Ultima series or Gold Box series, mind you, but by far better. I think we can dismiss the rest of this review out of hand.

Zzap! had a more measured review in December 1990, praising its excellent graphics and sound (they particularly noted the ambient sound) and noting its innovations without discussing their downsides. The weakest score given by the magazine was in the "puzzle factor" category (78%), and I wonder if this has to do with the language issues. Few of the reviews mention this, and I have no idea how the reviewers got through the PLOUGH riddle before the Internet.

The reviews start to get worse in Australian Commodore and Amiga Review, which echoes the others in its admiration for the graphics and sound but bemoans the large dungeons and copious combats. Peter Olafson's review in the February 1991 Computer Gaming World comes closest to my "pan" of the game. Despite an initially-positive first impression, he found it "rough-edged in places and ill-thought-out or incomplete in others." As I did, he notes several features that had promise, like the languages, but ultimately "doesn't appear to have been fully implemented." He also comments, though not at length, on the "sloppy" translation from German to English.

Olafson also comments on something that I had to reload the game to verify. I utterly missed it the first time, partly because I must have assumed it was a random syllable and partly because I rarely fought without "quick combat." When you engage in regular combat (not quick) and watch each animation, when a character misses an enemy, he very clearly says "sh*t." I think this might be the first time there was a spoken obscenity in an RPG.

The worst review I've seen is a quick summary by Scorpia in the October 1991 issue, as she "surveys" all of the RPGs currently on the market: "German import that never should have crossed the Atlantic. Poorly translated manual has several mistakes. Graphics are ugly to tolerable. Combat is absurd: characters in the rear rank can be hit by opponents nowhere near them. There is nothing new or of interest in the game; a mediocre effort at best." Wow. I get what she means about most of these items, but the graphics are "ugly to tolerable"? Perhaps she looked at the DOS version.

Legend of Faerghail is one of only two games that MobyGames lists for Electronic Design Hannover; the other is Mit Jeans und Hellebarde ("With Jeans and Halberd"), a text adventure from 1989 involving a modern man in medieval times. But many of the personnel also seem to have worked for reLINE software (one of Faerghail's publishers), which produced a few other games, including the RPG Fate: Gates of Dawn (1991), which I hope is as good as it sounds.

For now, I need to wrap up with Lords of Chaos and start making better progress through 1990.

****

Over a year after posting the final rating, I offered an additional entry on Legend of Faerghail based on some excellent comments received from one of the principal developers.

Legend of Faerghail: Buggin' Out

There's supposed to be a castle here.

Legend of Faerghail is doing its best to make me quit. To recap:

1. I started with the DOS version and got a few hours into it before realizing that the game was buggy in a way that prevented encounters from showing up in the dwarven mines (and perhaps other dungeons as well). I had to switch to the Amiga version and start over.

2. The game offers at least one riddle that, poorly translated from a reference likely unknown to non-German-speakers, is essentially unsolvable without a spoiler.

3. Several Amiga versions are bugged in such a way that prevents winning the game. After studying the message boards linked to me by my readers, I downloaded the "bug-free" version...

4. ...only to find a bug that prevented any graphics (monster, chests, anything) from showing up while exploring the Temple of the Dragon Servants...

There's supposed to be a fire elemental in this screen. Incidentally, this was a fun riddle. The answer was not "mirror."

5. ...and a more serious bug that caused the entrances to the derelict castle and the elven pyramid to disappear after leaving the Temple of the Dragon Servants.

I tried to solve the last issue by reloading a saved game from a time when the entrances were still visible, but after I wasted several hours re-exploring the Temple, I exited to find that the derelict castle was gone again. I read enough of a walkthrough to know that the derelict castle has something I need to win the game, and I need something from the Temple of the Dragon Servants to finish the castle.

(Please don't bother responding with solutions unless you've experienced this specific problem and know how to solve it. I've been to all the boards and tried all the standard stuff already.)

The Temple (which for some reason I've been calling the "Temple of the Savants" instead of "Dragon Servants") was a relatively brief dungeon that held so much treasure I couldn't carry it all, reflecting the game's extremely poor approach to an economy.

Each one of these chests, and many others, held around 500 gold pieces each.

In addition to the treasure, I found a strange book that chronicled the major artifact weapons to be found in the game (I have three, and I think I maybe discarded a fourth) and a "Mithril Ball" which, judging by the message I got from the woodkeeper near the derelict castle, is somehow necessary to defeat a vampire lord. There was also a "Keystaff" that I got from a statue.

The enemy parties in the dungeon took a level in difficulty. Most of them, judging by the description, were of a saurian species, including warriors and priests. They had a way of targeting all their attacks on my poorly-armored mage and killing him in one round. I finally got to the point where I had to withdraw after every successful round, save, heal my mage, and re-enter combat, repeating until victorious. The experience rewards were quite good, though, and I was able to advance everyone to Level 8 before discovering I couldn't advance any more in the game.

I've tried transferring my saved games to different versions and a host of other things to no avail. I could try reloading from an even earlier saved game, but I don't know if I have the stamina to repeat the same dungeons or the interest to keep bothering with a game that I find mediocre overall. So expect the next post to be on Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday while I think about it.

Legend of Faerghail: Riddle Me This

I do have to give you that one.

Legend of Faerghail has become more interesting and more annoying in about equal measure. More interesting with some hints as to the plot; more annoying because the hints are so cryptic and in some cases translated poorly from German. More interesting with some tough riddles; more annoying because one of them is so tough I can't solve it.

When I last blogged, I had finished up the monastery near Cyldane, emerging with a mysterious (and extremely heavy) sarcophagus and some tomes that explained the titular legend in more detail. All I had left to do in the Cyldane area was to explore a walled region in the north of the map. As I entered the area, an old priest asked to join me on my way to the "oracle." I ditched Eljot, who had been with me since the monastery, and let him in. His name turned out to be Ihl Kazar, who (probably non-coincidentally) shares a first name with the author of "The Legend of Faerghail" books I found in the monastery.

It's a small annoyance, but I don't know why the game makes you type out "YES."

     

When he joined, he gave me a leather bag and said something about wearing the "mask" as long as it's not in its bag. He also told me to check out the gravestones in the elven cemetery before going to the "pyramid." He turned out to be absolutely useless after that; he won't even attack in combat. For some reason--mostly because I forgot I could parlay NPC monsters into joining me--I kept him around for several more hours, reasoning that at least he was drawing some enemies' attacks.

As we progressed along the path to the oracle, we encountered three elementals posing riddles. As you know, I enjoy riddles in games, though I'm wary when they're translated from another language. In this case, they didn't do too bad.

1. "The more it gets, the more it eats, and has it eaten all, it dies."
2. "A father's child, a mother's child, but son of none."
3. "I talk without soul, I hear without ears, I talk without mouth, and I'm born in the air."
4. "Two little windows, they have no glass, they stand next together like flowers in the grass. Two little windows, they show us the world, they show us the stars, the forest, the field, and the fold."

If I ran into this guy in a passageway, I'm not sure I'd be able to concentrate on his little poem.

      

I found numbers 1 (FIRE) and 4 (EYES) far too easy, number 3 (ECHO) gave me a little pause, and I'm embarrassed how long it took me to figure out number 2 (DAUGHTER), which should have been more or less instant.

At the end of the path, in a stone circle, a "thundering voice" told me to "go to he, who submitted to evil, and find the face of Balaan. Break his imprisoned fire and drown his vision in the dying of life." I imagine that will somehow be helpful later.

At this point, I'd finished everything (I think) in the Cyldane area, so I went back into the mines to return to the Thyn side of the valley. But I thought that since I was now stronger, I'd try to explore the two lower levels of the mines. Level 4 produced not much of interest except a little creature who, for 250 gold, told me that to kill Balaan, I'll need "weapons and armor that bear a very special emblem."

These little creatures keep popping up everywhere. I don't know what they're supposed to be.

At the end of the level, I faced an elemental who offered a riddle that I couldn't solve, not even after I got a hint later. This is the riddle in its entirety:

What is it, that not many like, but directs even the greatest of king's actions. It's much like a sword, and made to hurt, but it never draws blood even though wounding thousands. It thieves no-one but does make rich. It spans the whole earth and makes life fit. The greatest kingdoms it has founded, and built the oldest of them all, but never has it begun a war and the peoples who trust in it will live in plenty for ever more....

Nothing I tried--NEED, WANT, FAITH, DEATH--worked, and none of them quite fit anyway. The hint I later received in the elven pyramid was to "think about the work of the dwarves." I returned and tried METAL, IRON, SMITHING, MINING, and several other similar terms, but again none really fit anyway. I admit I'm stumped on this one. If you have a guess (not if you know the answer from a walkthrough or a previous play), feel free to comment.

In the meantime, I had plenty of other places to go. I trudged back up four levels of mines, returned to Thyn, and visited an "old priestess" in a forest clearing who I'd bypassed before out of the lack of a clue on what to do with her. I "used" every item in my possession until she finally responded to the amulet and gave me a Staff of Healing.

 

Doesn't look that old to me.

In terms of dungeons, I had three places remaining: the derelict castle, the elven headquarters, and Temple of the Savants. Figuring my quest started with the elves, I headed there. To get in, I had to answer a query about the lineage of the elves from the game manual, though I don't understand from studying this diagram how Scagnar is Findal's youngest uncle.

The elven "pyramid" consisted of four levels that gradually got smaller as they went up. The accumulation of room descriptions and hints suggested that the elves had recently become martial and bloodthirsty when their king was deposed and they made some kind of alliance with dragons. The pyramid featured the best graphics so far, with neat touches like detailed paintings on the walls:

   

Wandering monsters included elven guards, elven officers, elven mages, dwarves, and lizard men, and none of them were particularly hard except the mages. The mages have a "stun" spell that never seems to wear off  no matter how long I rest after the battle. Nor do I have any effective counter-spell. The only way I could find to cure it was to return all the way to the town and go to the temple, which I did exactly once. After that, I simply withdrew from any encounter with mages.

The levels were also full of treasure, so much that I had to retreat to the town and its bank several times--a process made all the more absurd by the fact that chests respawn when you return. Eventually, I just stopped picking up gold, knowing I could always return for the loot if I needed it. I marked locations of high-value treasure chests on my map.

In addition to gold, I found lots of good weapon and armor upgrades, including elven chain and some "dragon chain" and "dragon leather." Everyone has a pretty high AC now except for my mage, who hasn't found anything that he can wear. 

Another weird little creature told me that "only gem, corona, and staff make the key to the mountain." Okay, then. A dwarven warrior in a jail cell warned me that my amulet is "not genuine." A lot of people have stuff to say about the amulet; it's a good thing I didn't reject it at the beginning of the game.

      

At one point, I freed a lizard man from a jail cell and he gave me two maps. Reading them in-game referred me to numbered maps in the game manual, much like the journal entries you find in the Gold Box games, Wasteland, Dragon Wars, and such. They didn't really help. They showed locations of secret doors, but I'm in the habit of always looking for secret doors anyway.

     

I liked this image of a lizard man. I suppose it's plagiarized, too.

       

At the top level of the pyramid, I had an encounter with the "Mask Bearer" who went down in a few hits, leaving a glowing mask behind. The game didn't give me any option to pick it up, but remembering Ihl's statement that connected the mask to the leather bag he gave me, I used the bag and got it that way. I tried then using the mask, and it turned the character who used it into the new Mask Bearer and I was forced to kill him. I reloaded and just kept the mask for (presumably) later.

     

        

Also on the top level was a long corridor blocked by two "black flames." A previous scroll I found had said to defeat such flames with holy water. Unfortunately (see below) I didn't know which of the potions in my backpacks were holy water, so I tried random ones until the flames went down. In a cell on the far side of the flames was the imprisoned elven king. I'd hoped he'd explain a little bit about what was going on with the elves and such, but he just said that now that I'd freed him, he'd be able to fight his ancient enemy. He gave me the aforementioned hint to the riddle in the dwarven mines, said my amulet was the key to getting to the bottom level of the mines, and he gave me an elven bow.

      

Without this hint, I probably wouldn't have figured it out.

      

While exploring the pyramid, I discovered some locked doors that were passable by my thief's lockpicking or, when that failed, repeatedly bashing into them. But I also found some that clearly required a key, and I never found those keys. I hate leaving areas unexplored, but a thorough scouring of the pyramid didn't produce any more keys, so I'm not sure what that's about. Dejectedly, I left and returned to Thyn to level up.

     

This would be "rubbing it in."

      

My biggest problem with the game right now is that I'm loaded with items that I have no idea what they are. Some of them are probably treasures that can be sold; others are quest items; and others are perhaps magic items I haven't figured out how to use. These all include:

• A "holy symbol" found in a chest in the elven pyramid. My paladin can theoretically use it, but it's not equippable.
• A "golden casket," also found in a chest
• A coal sack found in the dwarven mines
• A barrel of explosives, also found in the dwarven mines
• The sarcophagus from the monastery catacombs. It would be really cool to get rid of this because it weighs 300 pounds (out of 530 capacity for the character who has it).
• A whole series of keys from the elven pyramid--air, fire, earth, and water--that opened no doors there (or perhaps some did, but not all)
• An "elven bow" given to me by the elven king. Just a good weapon, or a quest artifact?
• "Crafts" from the monastery
• Several copies of books titled "Lord of Rinse" and "Book of Stars." Also one titled "Book of Herbs," and another titled "The Capital." None of these produce text when you "use" them, unlike some other books.
• A "sacred dagger" from the elven pyramid
• A "drum of fear." Forget where I got that.
• Numerous scrolls of "enchant armour." You'd think they'd enchant my armour, but if I try to use them, I just get a message that it's "of no use in this situation."
• The mask from above

I'd appreciate any hints as to these items, because I'm seriously thinking about just selling the ones I don't understand.

I'm also a bit annoyed by the way the game handles potions. There doesn't seem to be any way to identify them. If I try to sell them at the store, the shopkeeper will say, "I'll give you X gold pieces for that Potion of Whatever," but that's the only way I can determine the nature, and it doesn't rename the potion when he says that. I have to remember what each potion does by its position in the inventory.

     

Not to mention what is a "Potion of Kybol"?

       

Other miscellaneous notes:

• I keep encountering "tradesmen" as wandering monsters. You'd think, given their name, they'd be interested in trade, but they never respond to my overtures. They just want to fight.

They look so friendly, too.

• I've had three NPCs join me so far, and none of them have said anything interesting after I added them to my party. There was no victory speech from Eljot when we cleared out the dark dwarves from the monastery, for instance.

• I've accumulated food so fast that it's weighing me down too much. There doesn't seem to be any way to drop it, but I got rid of a lot of it by trading it to my NPC before I booted him out of the party.

I now have the derelict castle and the Temple of the Savants to explore, plus the bottom level of the dwarven mines if I can ever figure out the riddle. My characters are Levels 5 or 6; I've been getting about one level per character per dungeon. Flush with cash, I've trained all of my characters in every language in the game: animal, orc, troglodyte, elf, dwarf, lizard man, "dark," and "magic."

This game has its moments, but I was ready for it to be over some time ago. It just doesn't feel like a six-posting game. I'm hoping I can win it in one more.

****

Further Reading: My first, second, third, fourth, and fifth posts on Legend of Faerghail, plus coverage of the game on "CRPG Revisiting old classics."