Might & Magic II: Final Rating

The results of attacking 65 Devil Kings. Each one has 5,000 hit points and is worth 30,000,000 experience points. I would wager that this battle is impossible even at the highest levels. I couldn't even kill one.

Well, I really stretched that one out, didn't I? 53 days from the first post to "Won!" Of course, I wasn't playing during this entire stretch, but that's a long time even to have a single game on one's mind.

Might & Magic I remains my highest-rated game so far, largely because of the variability in equipment, the strong economy, the variety of quests (it was the first game to feature real "side quests"), and the overall quality of gameplay. The gameplay in Might & Magic II is largely identical to MM1, but with a different plot and better graphics. (It would be a good idea to review my rating for that game before reading this.) Hence, I wouldn't expect the score to be a lot different. Let's see.

1. Game world. The game benefits from a large world, many dungeons, varied terrain, and terrain-specific encounters. Its backstory is interesting, although the plots of the main villain are not well integrated into the game itself. I dock a point for basically repeating the first game's twist (the world is really a spaceship) and for featuring the same villain (but without providing much more information about him), but I have to add some points for doing a better job reacting to the player's actions: NPCs remember your deeds and react accordingly. The blend of sci-fi and fantasy remains unusual, and I still don't find it very convincing--see my questions at the end of yesterday's posting. Final score: 6.

2. Character creation and development. The Cuisinart thing really bothered me. Most of the game, you're struggling for each experience point, and battles in which you net 50,000 or 75,000 experience are a real reward. Then, suddenly, you face a foe that earns you 7,500,000 experience, and sends you up several levels every time you fight him. It makes slogging through dungeons much less rewarding when you know you could just skip all that, pound the Cuisinarts a few times, and get the same result. The selection of races and classes are nothing special, but aside from the Cuisinarts, leveling is swift and satisfying. The class-specific quests are also a welcome touch, although the developers removed any role-playing based on alignment (as in the first game). Final score: 5.

[Later edit: I realized I neglected to talk about the skill system here. It's a good step for the series, but it's not implemented very well. The reason I forgot about it is that you generally select your skills early in the gameplay and then never really think about them again. There is nonetheless some strategy associated with the choice of skills, and while it's not enough to advance the score, it's worth a mention.]

3. NPC Interaction. Still the weakest part of the series. You encounter kings, lords, merchants, and other NPCs, but none of them offer dialog options or any real opportunity to role-play. Interaction is all one-way. Final score: 3.

4. Encounters and foes. Andrew Schultz's walkthrough of the game lists an unsurprising total of 255 different monsters. They were extremely varied in their attacks and even more so in their resistances. Some are resistant to certain sexes, some to various types of magic, some to melee weapons. A good player needs to take careful notes or have a good memory. I wasn't a good player. I kept forgetting if it was the Cursed Corpse or the Coffin Creep that drains your magic, and whether it was the Iron Wizard or the Warbot that casts "Eradicate." It doesn't help that many use the same icons. The game allows you to encounter up to 255 enemies at once, which is a lot more than the first game and provided a unique challenge in the beginning stages. In later stages, mass encounters were generally fodder for the CTRL-A combo, although going back to the Tundara dungeon and casting "Holy Word" on 200 Killer Cadavers was definitely a high point. There's a good balance between random encounters and fixed encounters, and rarely did it seem (unlike The Bard's Tale III) like there were too many encounters. Final score: 6.

"Revenge is a dish best served cold*."
*This is funny because it takes place in the Tundara dungeon.

5. Magic and Combat. I detailed the combat system in a posting in March an the magic system a couple of days ago. Since you only have to survive one combat at a time, it's not quite as tactical as Wizardry. I actually liked it better in the beginning stages, when every passage felt potentially dangerous, than in later stages when I was CTRL-A'ing my way through battles with demons. There are plenty of combat options, though, from different types of attacks to spells to uses of magic items. What I didn't like was the imbalance between outdoor combat (which became laughably easy towards the end, thanks to Moon Ray and Starburst), and indoor combat, in which you never get a mass healing spell. Final score: 5.

6. Equipment. Largely unchanged from MM1, but still very good. You can equip six items and carry six others, and there are many, many types of items to find, some of which provide attribute increases, cast spells, provide resistance bonuses, or just do mad damage against your foes. There seemed to be no upper limit to the +s that a weapon or armor could achieve. I liked that even non-spellcasters could use magic items, turning my thief into an emperor of electrical destruction when I filled his pack with Storm Wands. The "Specials" at shops always provided a good selection, even at high levels. I also liked that items were mostly randomized within the game world, but there were some fixed item locations. One of the best CRPGs of the era when it comes to equipment, the game lacks only descriptions. Final score: 7.

Quick rundown: the Stealth Cape, Thief's Pick, and Looter Knife increase thievery. The Sapphire Pin increases luck by 15. The (B)ronze Chain Mail boosts fear resistance (as well as armor class). The Storm Wands cast Lightning Bolt, the Flaming Sword and Fireball Bow cast Fireball, and the Freeze Wand casts Fantastic Freeze.

7. Economy. Until I found the magic well in the Luxus Palace that converted gold to experience, I thought the economy was horribly imbalanced. It still is, really. Except during the first town, you almost never hurt for gold. The game could have done a better job with this, offering lower gold rewards and making things like NPCs, healing, and blessings cost more. As it was, the only time I worried about money was when a Leprechaun (nasty bastards) zapped it all away, but even then it only would take me 20 or 30 minutes to recover millions. The first game was a little tougher and more fun. Final score: 6.

8. Quests. The Might & Magic series continues to shine here. It remains the only series in this era with a strong selection of side quests as well as a compelling, multi-stage main quest. The main quest was slow to reveal itself, just like in the first game, but it was one of the more interesting main quests of the CRPGs I've played, and it fit well with the game's back story. Every map featured a side quest or two, and the class-specific quests were a very nice addition. My only complaint is that many of the quests relied a little too much on notes scrawled on dungeon walls. Still, in my opinion, this is the best aspect of the game. Final score: 8.

One of many side quests and special encounters.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Inputs. The graphics are much improved over MM1. They are detailed, animated, and nice to look at. Nothing like modern games, but certainly not distractingly bad. Sound continues to consist of bloops and overly-repetitive victory music. The set of keyboard commands is probably the best of any game I've played: quick and intuitive. Final score: 5.  
               
10. Gameplay. Another way in which the series excels is its nonlinearity. In fact, one might say that the game is nonlinear to a fault: you have to explore extensively before you even realize what you're supposed to do in the game. Towards the end, the game started to feel a little easy, but most of the time it felt just right. As in the first game, a new selection of transportation spells deliver themselves every time you start to feel like exploration is a drag. I personally felt that it lasted a bit too long, but I think that had more to do with my erratic playing schedule than the fault of the game. The only serious drawback to gameplay is a lack of replayability. Final score: 7.

The final score is 58. That's two points lower than I ranked Might & Magic I. If you want to howl in protest, believe me, I understand. From a purely objective standpoint, it seems like II should be better than I--if only for the graphics alone! But, to be perfectly honest, I enjoyed the first game a little bit more. I think the quests had a little more depth, the game was better balanced, and the plot was more original back then. It's still the second-highest ranked game in my blog, though, and I did have a lot of fun playing it.

I spent some time tonight reading Schultz's walkthrough to see what I missed. In case anyone is interested:

• The different meals you can purchase in the tavern do a lot more than I gave them credit for. I knew that eating roast peasant and cream of kobold soup led to some encounters with angry relatives, but I didn't realize that other meals were necessary to get NPCs.
• Finishing the Gourmet's quest (you have to eat every item in every tavern) apparently clears your palate, and makes sure the aforementioned peasants and kobolds stop attacking you. I must have eaten again after I finished this quest because they were still attacking me at the end.
• I forgot to tip the bartenders at each tavern, and it's from the tavern tips that I would have learned when the circus is in town (Days 140-170, apparently; I ended the game at Day 93, so it would have been a long wait).
• Drinking in the bars provided attribute boosts. I never noticed.
• In some of the dungeons, there are places that boost your attributes by 10 points permanently. I didn't realize that you could keep returning to these locations and get more boosts. It seems like cheating.
• I completely ignored skill potions because I didn't understand what they did. Apparently, they increase your level and cause you to do a lot more damage and make it more likely that enemies will flee. You can use them multiple times to really pump yourself up. Whoops.
• The guardian pegasus's name was Meenu. Solving the quest would have netted me 100,000 gold. Hardly worth it.
• Killing the elemental lords wasn't necessary.
• Apparently, there really was no other way to get the Orb out of Dawn's Mist Bog. Schultz was aghast at it, too.
• The reward for completing the Dragon's Dominion (which I didn't) was an extra 1,000 hit points. Wow. Turned out I didn't need them, I guess.

I think it's actually cool that there were some things I never found or finished. It's a sign of a complex game.

I don't know what Moraff's Revenge is, but it's up next!

Might & Magic II: Won!

"One of the most accomplished game players around!" You read it here, folks.

     

The ending of Might & Magic II raises all kinds of implications that we must discuss, but for now, suffice to say that I've saved CRON. Before I go into the specific endgame steps, I'll point out that thanks to a comment from Ziad, I picked up a final quest before the end of the game. It involved going to two previous centuries, killing the ancestors of Lord Haart, and retrieving artifacts from each of them. This was worth 250,000 experience. I had found clues on dungeon walls as to their locations. Neither was hard to kill.

It takes guts to send someone back in time to kill your own ancestors.

     

As far as I can tell, this quest and giving King Kalohn the Orb are the only reasons to time travel. I tried going back to the first century to see if I could catch the elemental wars, and to the seventh century to see if I could see Kalohn defeat the elemental lords in the Dead Zone, but no luck. Thanks also to Ziad's hints, I know the Circus only appears late in the year, and I don't need the attribute boosts enough to wait around for it. I also declined to finish the dragon caves, mostly because I was on a roll and wanted to finish the game tonight. Now, on to my issue at Dawn's Mist Bog Cavern. The solution was so idiotic that I hate to write it. When I first hit upon this solution, I actually thought I was cheating--exploiting the way the game deals with NPCs to avoid finding the "real" solution. But, nope, it turns out this is, in fact, the "real" solution. Ready? I had to give the Orb to an NPC, "dismiss" the NPC from the party, and go pick him up back in town. How much sense does that make? If my PCs couldn't get out of the cave with the Orb, how did the NPC manage to do it? At least MM2 isn't alone in this foolishness: in Baldur's Gate II, your NPCs always manage to find their way back to the Copper Coronet no matter how remote a place you ditch them. With the Orb in hand, I took Lord Peabody's time machine back to the 800s and returned to the location where King Kalohn fought the Mega Dragon. This time, my arrival actually did some good:

Would it have been too much to show a cut scene of this "epic battle"?

     

Returning from the ninth century ("returning" simply involves resting until you get kicked back to your own time; I guess time travel is a temporary condition), I visited the Luxus Palace Royale and found King Kalohn on the throne instead of his daughter. Hell, for all I know, he doesn't even have a daughter in this timeline.

But if he's king, then who sent me back in time?

     

Below I've pasted a video of the part of the endgame described above. It bogs down a bit in the middle because I got attacked by a horde of goblins. I tried to show some other features of gameplay, such as inventory and mapping, at the same time.

Square Lake is just outside Middlegate. It was inaccessible until Queen Lamanda named me the "chosen one." It's a very linear dungeon, greeting you with this sign upon entrance... ...and throwing a tough combat at you every 15 steps. I got through it without too much difficulty, although I had to flee combat a few times and raise dead characters five or six times. After about 15 combats, I made it to the final corridor. I was greeted by 66 devil kings, who "bowed down" to me as the "chosen one." The game gave me the opportunity to attack them, I guess as a kind of last epic battle, but I declined.

Devil kings also show up again in Might & Magic VI. They don't bow, though.

     

Beyond the devil kings was my old nemesis from MM1: Sheltem. He was surrounded by some other demons and devils, but he went down surprisingly quickly. Apparently, Sheltem had been up to some mischief, because beyond the battle was a computer monitor that informed me CRON was about to collide with a sun. I stopped this using the WAFE password that King Kalohn had given to me. But WAFE only got me into the computer. At that point, I read Sheltem's message and got one of the most unique end-game challenges I ever experienced: That's right: not only a cryptogram, but a timed cryptogram. I didn't even notice the "timed" part until it was too late. I was messing around taking notes for this entry, and by the time I got to trying to solve it, I only had three minutes left. Moreover, I had absolutely no idea what the thing was asking of me. How does a cryptogram have a single-word "answer," and what "code" is it looking for? Ultimately, I figured it out: the game wanted me to spell "Preamble" using the cryptogram's own code. But to do that, I would have to crack the cryptogram first. I couldn't do it in three minutes and CRON was presumably destroyed just after I was. I reloaded and fought my way through Square Lake again, resolving to use the full 15 minutes. It turned out that I didn't need it. "Preamble" had put the preamble to the U.S. Constitution in my mind (for my non-U.S. readers, most U.S. high school students end up memorizing the preamble at some point), and I realized almost immediately that this was the preamble to the U.S. Constitution ("We, the people of the United States of America, to form a more perfect union..."), but with "United States of America" replaced by some other five character word (represented above as "Gqlli"). So to render the word "Preamble" in code, I simply had to find the first letter of the third word ("people," as in "We, the people"), the letter that corresponded with the third letter in "perfect", the second letter of "We," and so on. Getting it right produced the screen at the top of this entry. I got enough experience to raise my characters to around 75, and the game let me continue playing. A return visit to Kalohn showed that the game world did acknowledge my victory. Okay, let's ponder the implications of what we've learned. CRON, like VARN in Might & Magic I, is actually a space ship. The winning screen says that I saved "CRON and all of its VARNs," so the VARN (Vehicular Astropod Research Nacelle) must be a part of a CRON (Central Research Observational Nacelle). CRON had been created by the "Ancients" to populate a distant planet, and it looks like we've just arrived. What is the name of the planet? Well, it's contained in the cryptographic preamble above. "Gqlli," based on the other letters, resolves to "Terra." And Might & Magic III is subtitled "The Isles of Terra." Pretty cool! But none of this makes sense. If the Ancients created CRON, then what is the relationship of the elementals to the Ancients? The game's backstory (covered in the first posting) isn't simply mythology: I've been to the elemental planes and battled the elemental lords. Did the Ancients create the elemental lords? Are the Ancients the elemental lords? "Terra" is the Latin word for "Earth"--am I supposed to have just witnessed the original population of Earth? Even more mysterious, the same elemental planes and lords show up in later Might & Magic games set on different worlds, but it's pretty clear to me that in this game, the elemental planes are part of CRON. Also: how, precisely, did I get from the VARN in MM1 to CRON? How do we explain things like magic and undeath in the context of science fiction? How did King Kalohn know the password to the computer in Square Lake? Was my time travel just limited to this CRON, or could I have traveled back to meet the Ancients? Who, precisely, are Corak and Sheltem? Are they Ancients? I'd see if any web sites answer these questions, but I don't want to see spoilers for later games (I played III-V so long ago I barely remember them). Feel free to discuss in the comments. In the meantime, I'll put my GIMLET together.

Might & Magic II: Magic

Uck. I'm never eating anything in a CRPG again.

I'm going to do something a bit odd here. I'm in the last dungeon of the game (I actually got all the way to an end but got screwed up by a cryptogram, of all things), but I'm going to save the recap of what I did to get here for the "Won!" posting later. Instead, I want to take some time to review something I've only glossed over in previous postings: the game's extensive magic system. The Might & Magic series has one of the more detailed magic systems of this era. While it does not have as many spells as The Bard's Tale III, nor the same creativity in spellcasting as Dungeon Master or Ultima IV, nor the same tactical intensity as Wizardry, the game does strike a nice balance among all of these favorable attributes. The basic facts about the Might & Magic II spell system are these:

• There are 96 spells in the game--48 cleric spells and 48 sorcerer spells--organized into nine levels. Clerics and sorcerers gain one spell level for every two character levels; they have the full set by Level 17.

• Archers gain sorcerer spells starting at level 5, and paladins gain cleric spells starting at the same level. Both classes can only go to spell level 7.

• Some spells are awarded immediately upon achieving the spell level. Others have to be bought in temples or magic guilds, and still others must be found. Late in the game, I found a wizard who sold me all available spells for 2 million gold.

Defeating the Mist Warrior nets you one of the most useful spells in the game.

• Each spellcaster has a number of spell points dependent upon his or her prime attribute: intelligence for sorcerers and archers, personality for clerics and paladins. There are fountains in the game that can temporarily raise the spell point maximum. Resting recovers all spell points.

• Some spells have a fixed cost; others have a spell point cost dependent on the character level (these typically do more damage).

• Some spells require only spell points; others require gems. Gems are plentiful throughout the game. If the game had made it more difficult to find them, it might have led to some more strategy as the player tries to conserve them, but I was never in danger of running out.

Towards the end of the game, my sorcerer had a maximum of 440 spell points and had a comfortable 1,224 gems.

• Most monsters have some type of spell resistance or immunity. Some are immune to all spells.

• Some monsters drain your spell points. Phase Spirits and Coffin Creeps can drain all characters' spell points in a single attack. With Phase Spirits, this is particularly bad news because they cannot be hit by melee weapons and they are immune to most (all?) damage spells. I honestly don't know how you defeat Phase Spirits if you don't manage to kill them all in the first round.

• You find many objects in the game that take the place of spells. For instance, the Ray Gun, in addition to raising your accuracy, casts Energy Blast. A Witch's Broom casts Fly, and a Super Flare casts Lasting Light. All characters can use objects. I loaded up my robber with Storm Wands so he could cast Lightning Bolt round after round.

The Lich's Hand casts spell 5-2: Finger of Death.

96 spells is a lot to keep track of, and looking over my usage, I think that I could have gotten through the game with only 9 spells: the cleric spells of Power Cure, Moon Ray, Raise Dead, and Town Portal; and the sorcerer spells of Lloyd's Beacon, Fly, Lightning Bolt, Teleport, and Dancing Sword. These probably account for 80% of my spell usage. The rest fall into one of nine categories: 1. Spells that cure conditions you rarely experience. These include Awaken, Cure Poison, Cure Disease, Restore Alignment, Uncurse Item, and Remove Condition. I think that during the game I was poisoned maybe once, I never suffered a disease, and I never came across a cursed item. My alignment never slipped. Remove Condition came in handy for a couple of paralysis fixes, but nothing beyond that. There's a spell called Shelter that supposedly prevents you from being attacked while you rest, but I was never once attacked while resting. 2. Spells that never work. Top contenders are Apparition, Silence, Sleep, Web, Finger of Death, Feeble Mind, and (for me) Turn Undead. The failure rate on these is so high that it's hardly worth wasting a round to cast them.

Finger of Death fails again.

3. Spells that are useless after Level 3. The sorcerer spells of Flame Arrow, Electric Arrow, and Acid Spray, and the cleric spells First Aid, Cure Wounds, and Pain. These are useful in the beginning stages when you need to damage low-level creatures or heal a few hit points, but they soon fade to the back of your mind like cantrips you learned as an apprentice. Similarly, Location is only valuable until you have a character with the cartographer skill. 4. Spells that make me suspicious of their effects. There are a host of spells that sound like they do good things, but that don't show any visible effects so you have to discern them from the amount of damage you do or take. I'm talking about Bless, Heroism, Shield, Weaken, Holy Bonus, and Invisibility. These sound like spells I should cast to gain a combat advantage, but I'd rather save my round for things that I know work. 5. Spells that duplicate what the temples do for you. The protection level offered by Protection from Magic and Protection from Elements depends on the level of the caster. As I finished the game, I had only just reached the level in which my casting those spells gave me more protection than if I went to a temple and kept donating 100 gold until they cast the spell for me. The temple blessing also gets you Walk on Water, Guard Dog, Eagle Eye, Wizard Eye, Lasting Light, and Levitate. Since I always got a blessing before venturing out, I rarely had to cast these spells. (Wizard Eye, oddly, takes a ridiculous number of spell points--almost 1/3 of the characters' total.)

Temple blessings give you the full complement of protection spells you see to the right.

6. Spells that come with too high a cost or risk. Resurrection heals eradication but at a cost of 1 endurance point to the raised character, 5 years of age to the raised character, and 1 year of age to the caster. Better to take the character to a temple. Divine Intervention ages the caster 5 years. Rejuvenate backfires and ages the character as often as it works. Duplication, Recharge Item, and Enchant Item might end up destroying the item. None of them were worth the risk to me. 7. Mystifying spells. This category deserves its own sub-bullet list, because I could never figure any of these out.

• Entrapment: "Surrounds the battle with a magical energy field preventing all from escaping." The problem is that enemies don't try to escape unless they're ridiculously overmatched, in which case the experience reward you get from killing them is negligible.
• Prismatic Light: "A powerful but erratic spell that has completely unpredictable effects." All this spell does is randomly choose some other group-effect spell to cast, like Sleep or Paralyze. Why would you cast Prismatic Light instead of just targeting them with a specific spell you know will work?
• Nature's Gate: A spell that just teleports you from one outside location to another one, seemingly at random. One level later, you have Fly and can go exactly where you want. I think it's only useful on the one day you can get the Starburst spell with it.
• Air/Earth/Fire/Water Transmutation. The spellbook suggests that you need to cast these spells to explore the elemental planes, but I never did and I was able to explore just fine.

8. Spells that only work on one creature. At higher levels, targeting a single creature always seems to be a bad use of spell points. Most individual creatures that you're really keen to kill have spell resistances anyway. I never used any of the Encasement spells, for instance. 9. Overpowered spells. I hardly ever used a large selection of higher-level damage spells: Fiery Flail, Mass Distortion, Implosion, Inferno, Star Burst, Mega Volts, Incinerate, and Meteor Shower. A lot of them only work outdoors, and by the time you're high enough level to get these spells, you can handle almost any outdoor enemy with melee attacks and castings of Moon Ray (simultaneously heals the party and damages enemies) every round. Others only work on a single creature, with the same problem as above. Sorcerers already have a spell called Energy Blast which scales with the level and seems to do almost as much damage (when it works). Mostly, it comes down to the lack of a need to be very tactical in combat (which I covered in a March posting); once you get a selection of spells and combat tactics that generally work, it doesn't pay to get creative.

Meteor-showering some goblins just for fun.

There are a handful of spells that are occasionally useful for specific purposes: Surface to get out of a dungeon; Create Food in case you forgot to buy some; Identify Monster to see how many hit points your foe has; Jump to get over a trap; Time Distortion to escape combat; Etherealize to get through a wall; Holy Word to kill all undead; and so on. If the nine spells listed above make up 80% of my casting, these addition spells account for another 15%. What do you think: is this common among CRPG players? I'll bet 75% of the wizard spells I cast in Baldur's Gate are Fireball, Magic Missile, and different levels of monster summoning. What I can't decide is if this is just laziness or if the games really are unbalanced towards certain spells. One thing is certain: Without the large selection of navigation spells, including Fly, Town Portal, and Lloyd's Beacon, gameplay in the later stages of Might & Magic II would be somewhat excruciating. One final note: the names of these spells, and their effects, remains unchanged throughout most of the Might & Magic series. Almost all of them appear in VI-VIII, although separated into categories. In those games, I found Starburst and Meteor Shower a lot more handy. We've been on this game long enough, wouldn't you say? Time for the winning posting.

Might & Magic II: Stuck in a Bog

A childhood dream fulfilled.

Well, I was a little cocky last night. Not only am I not at the winning stage yet, I'm a bit flummoxed about how to get there. First, let's deal with the stuff I got right.

On the elemental planes, I got a series of red messages. I already had the yellow messages. The interleaves were very complicated: I had to put the messages in a particular order, then take differing numbers of letters from each one before it all came together. The yellow messages finally spelled out:

If personal statistics you'd like to enhance, with circus games you should take a chance. Win dumb prizes, but don't feel bad. You can offer these toys to an old man who can be had. His hut is in the wilderness dwarfed by a tree. For the toy, he gives you a tip for free. Drink from the inner limits pool. Though once it was acid, now it is cool. With thirst now thoroughly sated, go back to the circus and play games to raise those statistics which you truly hated.

Very interesting, but as I covered yesterday, I can't seem to find the circus in session. Let's look at the red messages:

To right ancient wrongs, the solution is very long. The Triple Crown must first be done, with Arena, Monster Bowl, and Colosseum to be won. Next, the party must split individually so that each may fulfill their personal destiny. Request an audience with the Queen so the Chosen One can be seen. Travel through time with Talons and Orb. Save the dead king from destruction and get the password. Then visit the lake geometrics to find the passage to that which you must hurriedly fix. JVC.

Once again, JVC has a gift for the obvious. Obviously I needed to have figured out most of this to even get to the messages in the first place. Nonetheless, it does tell me something about what happens after I save Kalohn. I'm sure the "lake geometrics" refers to a dungeon near Middlegate that won't open for anyone save the "chosen one."

All right. Let's talk about Dawn's Mist Bog. This evening, I explored it from top to bottom, slaying legions of creatures and resurrecting my party members as they (frequently) died. I defeated some Lucky Dogs and rolled in Lucky Charms to get a permanent luck increase. I rescued two NPCs named Holy Moley (I'm immune to this by now) and Slick Pick. I defeated a party of 200 greedy snitches.

At last, I assaulted Dawn herself, along with two enchantresses. She fell a little easier than I expected: her minions were much tougher than her.

Nice outfit, though.

The Orb turned out to be hidden behind a secret door. Approaching its chamber, I was met by a party of four Orb Guardians. The battle with them was apparently in an anti-magic zone, because none of my spells (including healing) would work. But they fell fairly quickly to my weapons.


At last, the Orb was in my clutches! I took it from its pedestal and put it in my pack. Now, armed with this and the Talons, I can travel back in time, save Kalohn, and win the game! I triumphantly made my way to the exit, and:


What the hell? Why would the Orb want to do that? Well, it doesn't matter, because I found that Dawn has a secret portal to Murray's Resort Isle. Clearly, I'm supposed to take that. I make my way over to it, only to get the same message as above. Okay...I'll just use my "Town Portal" spell. Nope, that failed. How about "Lloyd's Beacon"? Failed. "Surface"? Also failed.

I wandered around Dawn's for an hour, trying to find an alternate exit, but I can't find anything. The only way it let me out was to drop the Orb. When I then went back in to try again (thinking maybe it was a game bug), I realized that snatching the Orb meant sacrificing my todilor, capitor, fluxor, and radicon, so now I have to go get those from their castles again. Aaargh!

Well, at least Murray was happy with me:


Now I'm scouring my notes to see what I was missing. Maybe I was supposed to pick up another clue somewhere. The only dungeons I haven't explored fully are the basement of the Luxus Palace Royale and the dragon caves. I guess I'd better go through them and see if there was an object or message that I needed.

If this turns out to be something stupid, I'm going to be very angry. No spoilers! I need to figure this out myself. (If you want to leave a message for posterity in ROT-13, feel free.)

Might & Magic II: On the Main Quest

This is what happens when you try to jump steps in the main quest.

    

When I last wrote, I was about to visit Dawn's Mist Bog Cavern. But it looks like I can't get the Elemental Orb from her place yet anyway, so I retreated and started cleaning up other bits of the map and leftover dungeons. Here are a few final discoveries:

• I mentioned in an earlier post that there are "message posts" all over the world's surface that give you nonce strings of letters and punctuation. I've found two colors of messages: green and yellow--specifically 4 green signposts and 9 yellow ones. A clue in a dungeon told me how to interleave the characters on the green messages, and they produce the following:

For each individual to become true, see the jury which resides at Mount Fairview. Travel in groups of appropriate class. A robber can aid all others with their task.

Oh, dear. Leaving aside the abysmal meter, the substitution of assonance for real rhymes, and the poor grammar in the final sentence, the real problem with this message is I already knew this! Hell, all of my characters but one already have their promotions! MM1 did this to me, too. These messages are useless. I don't have the interleave code for the yellow yet (I hope I didn't miss it somewhere), and I can't figure it out just by looking at it, but I hope it tells me something better than this.

• One of my unsolved mysteries was on Map C3, where a voice kept asking for a password. I later realized the password must be "DRUIDS," since letters on the rocks in the surrounding area spelled this word. Sometimes I wonder how I ever finish a CRPG. Anyway, in the dungeon, aside from a bunch of traps, I found some cans of spinach that permanently increased my strength. I also solved a quest for the head druid, but all it got me was the Divine Intervention spell, which I already had.

This is one password that ought to have special characters.

• In the dungeon of Castle Hillstone, I found a magic pool that, when I drank it, turned all my characters male--permanently. This is not good because there are some creatures that males can't damage. I was trying to figure out how to reverse this when the game solved it for me by having my party slaughtered by warbots (yes, hostile robots are among the monsters you face). When I returned, I didn't drink from the pool again, but I did find a magic well that accepted my gold in exchange for experience. There was one of these in MM1, too. I love this. Now I have an excuse to keep getting rich.

It is hard to imagine real-life adventurers doing this.

• In a volcano named gemmaker, I found a lot of gems, and not a single combat.

• I finished the quests for Lord Slayer and Lord Wood. At the highest levels, Slayer wanted me to kill a bunch of monsters around the various maps, and by the time he gave me the quest, I'd already done it. Similarly, Wood wanted me to recover three antique swords, and I already had them in my possession. Easy experience.

There are still a few quests open that I can't figure out or finish right now. There's a location on map B2 where a sign promises a circus, but the circus is never there. A guy on another map wants a cupie doll, and I suspect I need to get it at the circus. A dungeon full of dragons is too tough even for my high-level characters. Finally, I still haven't figured out the name of the guardian pegasus, and I have no idea how to find it. On to Queen Lamanda. She wouldn't speak to me until I dismissed my ninja hireling--the only character not to get his + yet. After dismissing him, she gave me what amounts to the game's main quest (I think). I took a look at the backstory in the game manual again. In the mid-ninth century, King Kalohn went to battle the dragon created by Acwalandar, the water lord. Kalohn had previously used the Orb of Elements to defeat and imprison the elemental lords, but apparently by the time he had to face the dragon, the Orb wasn't at full power. I'm guessing I need to retrieve it from Dawn's cavern and bring it back to Kalohn. But first I thought I'd just pop over and see if I could help him defeat the dragon, Orb or no. I used Lord Peabody's time machine to go back a century. I trudged around the Quagmire of Doom until I found the location of the battle. Alas, I was too late:

"If only you had the Elemental Orb of Talons," the game continued.

     

I then got slaughtered by the "Mega Dragon" (none of my attacks or magic could damage him) so clearly I need the Orb. From a message in Vulcania, I know I need the four elemental talons before I can get the Orb, so I headed for the first elemental plane: Air. I wandered around for a while, killing elementals, before I found the talon I needed, but I was missing something: Okay. Searching through my notes again, I see that I forgot a message from the Tundara dungeon: "The four discs are needed to get the corresponding talons." Messages scattered about other dungeons tell me that the four discs are in various locations in Castle Xabran, which is in...well, I can't find it on my maps. Ah, but here's a message from a cave in Map E3: "Mystic Castle Xabran, holder of secrets, lies unknown in the 9th century at C2 at 14,8." Thank god I took good notes. Returning to Lord Peabody's machine, I travel again to the 800s (I wonder if there's any point traveling to the earlier eras), and I find Castle Xabran at the given location (it's just a pile of ruins in modern times). Aside from the four discs (which I found quite easily), Xabran had an interesting "hall of spells," which told the locations of all of the spells in the game that you need to "find." How someone from the ninth century knew where spells would be found in the tenth, I have no idea. I also found the interleave codes for the yellow and red messages, which I started finding in the elemental planes (before, I thought there were just yellow and green messages), and a list of all the locations where I can find hirelings (again, in the next century!).

Acquiring the fire disc.

      

I was wondering how I was going to get out of the ninth century, but as soon as I left Xabran, for some reason I was back in my own time. That was convenient. Armed with the four discs, I made my way to the four elemental planes, slaying each of the elemental lords (I'm not even sure this was necessary)... ...and recovering the talons... This took several hours, so I'm wrapping up here for the night. Tomorrow, armed with the four talons, the todilor, the fluxer, the radicon, and the capitor, I need to storm Dawn's Mist Bog and get that Elemental Orb. It's feeling like the next posting might be a "Won!" posting!

Might & Magic II: Mazes and Monsters

I'm sensing a lot of sexual tension here.

            

Lots of dungeon crawling today. I explored castle basements, caves, ruins, and dungeons. They were filled with monsters and mysterious messages that I need to solve the game's various puzzles and quests. 

           

A primary point of dungeon exploration is to get clues like this.

           

All of the castles have two dungeon levels below them, none seeming to have anything to do with the castles themselves. Inexplicably, most of them offered the ability to travel via portals to the others. 

          

          

A lot of the dungeons feature areas in which certain races and classes are banned, for no reason (it seems) but to make things a little more difficult. Generally when I encounter these, I cast "Lloyd's Beacon" to mark the location, "Town Portal" to one of the towns, remove the unwanted character or characters at an inn, and "Lloyd's Beacon" back to the original location. It doesn't add much to the game experience except time. 

             

In this example, I found an artifact only usable by humans, ironically.

 

In the Castle Pinehurst dungeon, I found this wizard, who offered every spell in the game for 2 million gold. I had almost all of them by then, and knew where to get the rest, but I also had plenty of gold. It still seemed like a bit of a cheat. 

          

         

Interspersed with the dungeon explorations, I started to do the character-specific quests one-by-one. At my level, they haven't been terribly hard. The most difficult part has been getting to and from them. Since each character must go alone (or accompanied by a robber), I don't have my full complement of traveling spells. But between roads and NPCs (who I can dismiss once I find the location), it hasn't been crushingly difficult.

        

Mistress Quickly earns her plus.

         

Of the character quests I've finished so far, the sorcerer quest was by far the most difficult, but also the most fun. I had to navigate two castles (good and evil) full of word puzzles. The evil castle, for instance, began with a message that said "All that are even are less but odd. All that are odd become more odd." The first room had two doors, marked #1 and #2, with a message that said "It's not one," meaning that it's 2. But since "all that are even are less but odd," I really want Door #1. Similarly, the next room had four doors with the notation that "it is one." But since "all that are odd become more odd," I really want Door #3. Fun stuff.

                   

After navigating my way through these doors, I encountered the evil wizard Ybmug in a stasis field with two sets of codes on the walls on either side of him. I couldn't figure out which ones to enter at first, but searching my notes I found a message from the Vulcania dungeons: "To unlock the frozen secrets of Evil, try Right 46 and Left 23." A lot harder than just killing things, which is all the other characters had to do. My cleric got her + by restoring Corak's soul to his body. I rather thought that when this happened, he might give me some hints as to the main quest, or otherwise tell me anything about CRON, Sheltem, and so on. But he just thanked me, gave me some useless advice about where to find the encasement spells (I already have all of them), and disappeared. In some dungeon, I finally encountered a Dagger Jaw, got that reward from Lord Slayer, and was given a third quest to slay a Fire Faery.

                

Finally, in my explorations, I encountered one enemy so bafflingly evil, it's hard to believe it actually exists: the Phase Spirit. They are utterly immune to melee damage, and a single one can drain every character's hit points to 0 in a single attack. Unless the sorcerer or cleric can kill them all in the first round, there is effectively no way to win against them.

         

Somewhere along the line, my "Turn Undead" spell stopped working completely. It fails every time, for both my priest and my paladin. Their alignments haven't slipped, and I otherwise can't figure out what could be causing it. Other spells seem to work fine. Any ideas?

          

One dungeon I've yet to explore is Dawn's Mist Bog Cavern. I know where it is. It seems a lot of things are riding on this dungeon. My ninja needs to kill Dawn to get his plus; some guy named Murray wants me to kill her; I need to free a couple of NPCs; and per the message above, the Elemental Orb is there. My guess is I'll go there next.

Might & Magic II: The Land Explored

A composite map of CRON, pieced together from 20 screen shots.

First off, I know I haven't been great at keeping a solid posting schedule lately, but the last two days isn't my fault: Blogger has been down. It was rather infuriating having something to publish and not being able to publish it. It also looks like Blogger's problems caused a lot of your comments to get deleted. I have a number in my e-mail from May 11 and 12 that don't appear in the threads. They're not in the spam folder, either. But we'll just have to grin and bear it.

I've already covered the major outdoor features in a previous posting, but the other day I finished my exploration of the surface of CRON, minus a 3 x 3 square on one map (upper right) that contains a "Dead Zone" which melts the skin off my characters every time I enter it. This must be the location where Kalohn defeated something (see the back story in my first post on the game). You can see the elemental plains in the four corners, the ice tundra in the northeast, the desert to the east, and the major roads that connect the cities.

Might & Magic II joins other games like Ultima IV on shaky cartographic grounds. The game world wraps around itself, so that if you go off the map's north edge, you find yourself on the south edge. You don't have to have training in geography and map projection (and I do) to know that this simply doesn't make sense. The only way to render a spherical surface on a two-dimensional map is to generate significant size distortion at the poles, much like the Mercator projection of the Earth:

Hint: Greenland is not actually as big as Africa; Africa is 14 times larger.

But this doesn't work on the MM2 map, because the four elemental planes are clearly supposed to be in the "corners" of CRON; it makes no sense that I can hop from the Plane of Fire to the Plane of Water in one move, and yet I can. It makes even less sense given that CRON really isn't a planet, but rather a bioengineered spaceship.

The "Eagle Eye" spell in the upper right shows the "Four Corners" of the elemental planes.

Suspending disbelief and moving on, though: The furthest corner square in each of the four corners contains a portal to the "Time" of that element. I expect I will have to journey to these locations to get the four talons that make up the Elemental Orb, but I haven't precisely been given that quest yet. In the meantime, wandering around these four areas leads to encounters with air, earth, fire, and water elementals, who are reasonably tough customers.

Fortunately, however, on one of the maps is a fountain that raises all your attributes to 200 for the next battle. Although it's surrounded by difficult combats, it's a fairly simple matter just to fly to the map and teleport to the precise location of the fountain. If I use this to buff before combat (often in conjunction with "Lloyd's Beacon"), there's almost no combat that I can't win.

This resulted in a severe game imbalance with a trio of foes on Map B2 called "cuisinarts" (presumably because they slice and dice you; I believe the enemy makes a re-appearance in Might & Magic VI). They do devastating damages to my characters--more than 1,000 hit points each. But here's something about combat in Might & Magic that I'm not sure I made clear: when a character is knocked down to 0 hit points or less, he doesn't die; instead, he is rendered "unconscious." If at that point he takes any more damage, he dies, but melee opponents don't target unconscious characters. Thus, the only real danger is 1) if all the members of your party are knocked unconscious; or 2) if your foes have a "party effect" attack like fire breath or acid spray, which will turn unconscious characters into dead characters.

Thus, as long as I can keep healing unconscious characters at the end of each round, I can keep my party alive no matter how much melee damage the enemies do. Since I got the "Moon Ray" spell (which heals all party members, as long as they're outdoors), I can do this. In consequence, staying alive against enemies as tough as cuisinarts is simply a matter of killing them before they can knock my entire party unconscious, which is basically only possible if they get both of my healers in the same round. With the aforementioned attribute boost to 200, that isn't possible even for them.


Killing the cuisinart trio nets me 7,500,000 experience points. To put this in perspective, the highest experience point award that I typically got before defeating the cuisinarts was about 50,000. In four combats against them, my characters went from Level 20 to Level 36. All my characters have max spell levels and my fighters have multiple attacks per round, doing serious damage. This is not very good game balance, and I've resolved to leave the cuisinarts alone rather than make it worse.

I would never have solved these two encounters, on different maps, if not for meticulous notes.

In other outdoor news, Might & Magic II has a lot of special encounters on the game maps, just like the first game. I still haven't solved them all. I don't know the name of the guardian pegasus, and somehow I need to find a cupie doll to give to a raving old man. One notable map location was Murray's Resort Isle in the southwest. I first encountered it just exploring the map and nothing happened for me there. But I later found if I purchased a ticket from the travel agent in Middlegate, it led to a series of attribute-boosting encounters.

All right. Based on my notes taken over the last couple months of game play, this is what I know: I now need to complete each of the character-specific quests to get my characters their +s and thus obtain an audience with Queen Lamanda in the Luxus Palace Royale. From there, I'm guessing I'll have a quest that involves time travel (I've gained access to a time machine and have various notes about where people are in previous centuries). I assume that I will have to eventually visit each of the four elemental planes, get the four talons, assemble the Orb of the Elements (or whatever it's called), and defeat....what? That's the real question. Other than some vague notes about Sheltem (the villain from the first game), I'm not really sure what the threat to CRON is.

Unlike my gameplay in I, I have mostly not been exploring the various caves, castles, and dungeons as I come across them. My intention at this point is to map all of the indoor and underground locations, complete the character-specific quests, and then get on to the main quest.

If I have any readers in the Kansas City area, you have the opportunity to achieve your quest to buy me a GIMLET on Monday or Tuesday nights next week. (This is a quest you all assume by reading this blog in the first place.) E-mail me if you want to give it a go.