Phantasie III: Final Rating

Phantasie III sums up the game-playing experience.

          

Phantasie III: The Wrath of Nikademus

United States

Strategic Simulations, Inc. (developer and publisher)

Released in 1987 for Apple II, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amiga; 1988 for DOS, PC-88, PC-98, FM-7, and Sharp X1; 1989 for MSX and Sharp X68000

Date Started: 7 January 2011

Date Finished: 17 January 2011

Total Hours: 20

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 39

Ranking at Time of Posting: 32/39 (82%)

Ranking at Game 453: 375/453 (83%)

          

I was curiously ambivalent while playing Phantasie III. I won it because I knew that I could. But with the game mechanics, spells, equipment, classes, graphics, gameplay...even the damned villain...identical to Phantasie, it never felt like I was playing anything new or exciting. It is at least a competent game, and not particularly painful, but I don't feel like I missed out on much by playing most of it in front of the TV.

The Phantasie series is the embodiment of the trope that TVTropes calls "Phantasy Spelling": pointlessly altering the normal spelling of words to seem ancient, exotic, or just pretentious. Fortunately, not all series do this or we'd have to contend with Phinal Phantasie. We've seen other examples of this in the blog, including Faery Tale Adventure and Dunjonquest, and we'll see it again with titles such as Wizard Warz, Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation, and Jinyong Qunxia Zhuan. Seriously, people: who are you trying to impress?

I have a lot more readers these days, so I want to make it clear that the GIMLET is supposed to be an objective measure of my own enjoyment of the game. It makes no allowances for the age of the game or the technology level of the times. Oblivion is meant to be compared on the same scale as Akalabeth. Thus, a score of 50 or so in this era would be pretty good, while a score of 75 in the 2000s might be considered quite poor. Before you complain that this isn't fair, keep in mind that my only requirements to get a good score on graphics and sound is that they "aren't painfully bad." A game from this era could have achieved a score in the 80s (though none have, so far) if it combined, say, Starflight's attention to game world and back story, Ultima IV's dialog system, and Might & Magic's variety of quests.

Got it? All right. Let's do this:

1. Game World. Phantasie III feels derivative of a lot of games, not the least of which its own predecessors, in the game world. The continent of Scandor, aside from the different names of towns and such, is indistinguishable from the worlds of Phantasie, Legacy of the Ancients, Shard of Spring, or any number of other titles. In fact, all of the SSI games seem to suffer this certain banality of story and location. And not only is Scandor facing the "same old type of threat," it is literally facing the same threat--Nikademus--as the previous two outings. With three games to build his personality and backstory, you'd think that the player would have a sense of who Nikademus is and what he's all about, but no, all you know (or even need to know, I guess) is that he's evil. Your quest to destroy him is nonetheless pretty clear, and there are sages and such to help you walk through it. And on the plus side, the funeral for Kilmor was a nice tie to both the manual and the previous games, and unlike the original game, your actions have a permanent effect on the world. Score: 4.

And I guess the "plane" architecture is semi-cool.

2. Character Creation and Development. Unchanged from Phantasie. The classes are standard, the variety of monster races a nice touch. Except the need for a gnome to enter the Gnome Caverns, your choices have no bearing on the storyline. Development seems a little too rapid at the beginning and far too slow towards the end. It literally took me about four hours of constant monster-bashing to rise from Level 15 to Level 16. But leveling up, with its improvement of skills (a nice touch) and spells is satisfying. Score: 4.

Training and increasing skills.

3. NPC Interaction. There aren't many NPCs in the game, and none with whom you can have any kind of dialog. The few vital ones, like Lord Wood and Filmon, help you advance the story but don't give you much opportunity for role-playing. As in the original game, it's neat how you find scrolls that give you contextual information about the world and its dungeons. Score: 4.

4. Encounters and Foes. Again, I could largely just paste my comments for Phantasie here: many monsters but oddly undistinguished except in the strength of their attacks and the damage done by their spells. You have some minor role-playing options in deciding whether to fight, greet (hardly ever worked), threaten (never worked), or beg mercy (who does this?) from your enemies. I do like that there were both random and fixed encounters and enemies respawned; without this, I wouldn't have built up my characters enough to win. Score: 4.

5. Magic and Combat. Battle tactics redeem some of the bad elements of the game. Since you can only rest and heal in towns, you have to take care in every encounter, especially in dungeons. If you think you can just breeze through the battle with orcs, you might take just enough damage to give you trouble when you encounter more serious foes later on. Carefully planning battles is the only way to win, and with its multiple attack, defense, and spell options, the game gives you a lot of planning to do. Do I try to wipe out a host of creatures with SWING or do I target the spellcaster in the back rank with my bow? Should I use Firebolt IV here or save my magic points for tougher battles ahead? I like making these kinds of choices, and Phantasie III is really second only to Wizardry in the tactical nature of its combat. In the original Phantasie, I complained that most of the battles were too easy, rendering these tactics moot, but that's definitely not true in this game. Only the paltry selection of really usable spells, and a banal spellcasting system, keeps this category from getting a really "good" score. Score: 6.


       
6. Equipment. There is a lot of variety to the weapons, bows, armor, and other items in the game, and the game is very clear about the relative value in terms of protection or damage, which I like. The "distribution" system is a bit cumbersome, and it sucks that you can't use powerful items the moment you find them--you have to return to a town first. There are no item descriptions, no artifacts, and nothing very unique, though. Score: 5.

7. Economy. Big, scrawled letter F. Any game that lets you end with over 4 million gold pieces doesn't understand the value of gold. There are shops in the town, but none sell anything better than what you can pick up outside. Give me things I can buy with these shiny pieces! It's only good at the beginning stages when you're suffering for gold for training, and every salvaged dagger is a step closer to a new level. Score: 2.

I hate this.

8. Quests. The main quest is a retread of the previous games, and there aren't really any sidequests, aside from a couple of small extra dungeons. The dual-ending of the main quest is rare for a game of this era, but I don't really count it as a "role-playing" decision because you don't make your choice until literally the last minute. Score: 3.

9. Graphics, Sound, Inputs. They're tolerable. The sound features squishes and crunches and got a little better after Phantasie; the graphics (in the PC version) are the same as its predecessor--not painful, but not interesting. Keyboard controls are intuitive enough if a bit cumbersome when assigning battle actions. Score: 3.

10. Gameplay. The game world is so small that it's hard to call the gameplay "non-linear" even if you can literally go anywhere from the beginning. Functionally, the difficulty of monsters and the need to go through certain scripted events makes the game something of a railroad, although as I said there are a few dungeons that you can explore on your own time. Aside from the alternate ending (which you can get by simply reloading), there's no reason to play the game a second time. Heck, there's almost no reason to play again after playing the first game. Score: 4.

The final score of 39 matches the original Phantasie exactly. Although III suffers from being a retread, its tactical combat system, which I probably didn't spend enough time on, makes up those lost points. I'm not sad that there isn't an English Phantasie IV, and that SSI would soon move on to cooler things.

Time to finish up the first NetHack, and then you're all going to forgive me for a brief detour into Pirates!

Phantasie III: Nikademus Wins

You thought this was going to be an "I'm giving up" posting, didn't you?

But so do I! Yes, the game lets you win by joining Nikademus. Read on for more.

When I last wrote, I was quite close to the end of Phantasie III in a physical sense, but far from it in a logistical sense. Physically, all I had to do was get through the Castle of Darkness, one small outdoor map, and Nikademus's castle. In reality, this took a couple of days because I needed to engage in a massive level-building effort.

The Castle of Darkness. Being a mirror image of the Castle of Light, a screenshot of Light helped me avoid traps in Dark.

The trouble came first in the Castle of Darkness, where waves of devils, vampires, and high-level mages assaulted my party and, ultimately, wiped them all out. My visit to the Astral Plane didn't go so well, and four of my characters were turned into undead (they had been around Level 12 before), meaning I essentially had to start over from scratch. Slowly, I built my way up to Level 11-12 again, re-assailed the castle a second time, and lost my entire party again, although this time losing just two to undead status. Crikey.

Fortunately, my wife and I have an annual January tradition of watching the entire Lord of the Rings saga on a single Sunday, so I spent yesterday in front of the TV but simultaneously playing the game. The Plane of Dark offers up some fairly tough but rarely fatal battles, so I literally spent all day on this one map, wandering around and slaughtering monsters, finally getting all of my characters up to Level 16. I also explored the map and came across two "optional" dungeons, one in which a nice old man offered me bowls of soup that increased any statistics I chose.


 
I used the increases on constitution (some of the characters were in the single digits after multiple resurrections). The old man turned out to be Nikademus in disguise, but the attribute increases still held. The other dungeon was a series of dragon caves that yielded a lot of treasure I didn't need--by the end of the game, I was well over the $4 million mark.

These guys look more difficult than they were.

When I went back to the Castle of Darkness, it became clear that in my zeal to avoid a repeat of Saturday, I overdid it a bit. The battles weren't easy, but I got through the dungeon fairly quickly and found a room in which I had the choice to do several things with a wand.

I didn't try "straticonuble," but it doesn't even show up in a Google search, so I'm guessing it didn't do anything.

Messages sprinkled throughout the Castle had spelled a message: "Welcome, adventurers, to my castle. If you join me in my evil ways and destroy Lord Wood, you will be greatly rewarded. To find me, break the wand in the magic circle in my room." Thus, I broke the wand I had found in the first dungeon and was granted passage to another plane, where I at last found Nikademus's Castle.

The Plane of Death. I kept getting hurt by erupting volcanoes.

His castle was about as hard as the Castle of Dark--the high devils were particularly difficult--but by then I had some major damage spells like Firebolt IV and plenty of magic potions, so I got through it in one try. There were a lot of secret doors which made navigation difficult. At last, I came across the evil sorcerer. I remembered to cast "spell 57," which a wizard in the Gnome Caverns had given me. The spell summoned none other than Lord Wood.


 
Here's where things took an interesting turn. Nikademus told me that my actions had been "completely evil" (I guess that was the consequence of smashing those statues in the Castle of Light) and I could join him by killing Lord Wood.


 
The game gave me the option of attacking Wood or Nikademus. I thought about it and decided, what the hell do I care about this idiotic land for? I'd rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. That sort of thing. Thus, I launched myself at Lord Wood and brought him down quite quickly in a barrage of swords, bows, and Fireflash spells.

"More like Lord Wuss!"

Next thing I know, Pluto, god of the Underworld, was personally congratulating me for my evilness and encouraging me to teach others my evil ways. And I guess Nikademus gets to take over the land. Well done me.

All right, all right. I couldn't just leave it at that. I re-loaded and made another trip through Nikademus's castle and this time killed Nikademus. He was even easier than Wood. In fact, neither of them were anywhere near as hard as any of the random battles in the castle.

Nice skirt, Nikki!

In any case, this time I found myself in front of Zeus with an identically worded congratulations, only this time with "evil" replaced by "good."


 
Both endings load you up with equipment and experience points and then let you continue playing the game. I generally like this in later CRPGs, but in this era, where none of the NPCs even acknowledge that you've won the game, it seems rather pointless.

Awesome. This will come in handy in Phantasie IV: There Aren't Any More Sequels So No It Won't.

This isn't the first game to offer "good" and "evil" endings; Wizardry IV offered several of both types. But it's still unusual for the era.

After winning, I read Andrew Schultz's walkthrough (I covered Schultz and his work a few months ago) and discovered that I missed a bunch of stuff. First, there was an entire dungeon--Lord Wood's tent--that I must have mistaken for a town or inn when I walked by. Apparently, I was supposed to battle my way to him and get the final quest to kill Nikademus. Whoops. More important, some of your dialog varies if you imported characters who won previous Phantasie games. The sage Filmon, who bafflingly said he chose my party because "Nikademus would never suspect us" says something else to a party who has previously won: "because you have proven yourself worthy of the task." It's still unexplained why Nikademus keeps reappearing, but I guess whereas my Level 8 priest can resurrect my characters, and Nikademus is a multi-dimensional villain who has his own castle in the Netherworld and is favored by the god Pluto, I can allow the series some artistic license.

GIMLET coming up, and then I promise I'll finish up with NetHack.

Phantasie III: Overdose

The party faces off against five incarnations of Gandalf the Grey.

            
In the last 24 hours, I've done two things that I hate doing:

1. Played so much of a game that I'm thoroughly sick of it.

2. Didn't keep careful notes while playing and now have to compose a long blog posting using memory fragments and random screenshots.

It's possible to overdose on even the best games. Phantasie III is one of those games without good stopping points. The action is fairly fast, and the puzzles are light. You almost always know exactly where you're going to go next, and there doesn't seem to be any reason not to do it now. Hours go by as you maneuver from one dungeon to the next. Suddenly it's dark—where did the day go? Suddenly it's midnight—where did the evening go? You head off to bed vaguely disgusted with yourself for not accomplishing anything else during the day.

And I'm prolonging it with blathering. All right, let me cover the story: when I last wrote, I was about to head off to the Dwarven Burial Grounds for Lord Kilmor's funeral. Oddly, when I got there, I was attacked at various places by dwarves and priests. I felt rather bad about slaughtering them all. The same thing happened in the Gnome Caverns a few hours later. I had a cordial talk with the Gnome King and he gave me a really nice bow, but I massacred hundreds of his followers in the corridors. A little suspension of roleplaying disbelief was necessary.

The continuity with previous games is a nice touch.

The funeral featured dignitaries from the previous Phantasie games, including Lord Wood of Gelnor, who I thought had died in the original game, but maybe that was his uncle. In any event, he's dead now. Nikademus showed up during the funeral, started tossing fireballs, and turned everyone (except me, oddly) to char.

Sign us up!

I returned to the sage Filmon and received a mission to go to the Chamber of Chronis, keeper of time and dimensions, so he could send me on to the Castle of Light. But before I did that, I explored the Gnome Caverns, an apparently stand-alone dungeon unrelated to the main quest.

I haven't posted a lot of dungeon maps, so here's one.

     

There I solved a couple of puzzles to obtain some nice bows. Bows, I find, do less damage than melee weapons, but in the hands of a character with a lot of skill, they greatly increase the chances of an immediate fatal wound. The random monsters in the Gnome Caverns were quite tough, and my characters all advanced to Levels 11-12. Oh, and in one of the rooms, a wizard took all my gold and experience for a powerful spell of summoning that he swore would help me later.
        

The solution to this involved foul-smelling liquid that repelled the viper.

           
Also before visiting Chronis, I battled my way to the end of the long windy corridor in the Pendragon Town Archives, fighting progressively more difficult monsters. At the end was something called the Wand of Nikademus, which the game told me was cursed. Not the treasure I was hoping for. A scroll explained a little more about it:
          

This scroll becomes a lot more fun if you imagine Mickey Mouse's dog taking the wand from Nikademus.

         
Chronis turned out to be an absent-minded, narcoleptic sage who fell asleep while I was talking to him. In his chambers, though, I found the codes necessary to activate his device and transport myself to the Plane of Light, and the key I needed to admit myself to the castle.
         

Chronis's tower.

         
I also came across a scroll that gave me a handy map of the planes. The Dungeons & Dragons influence is obvious.
            

               
On the Plane of Light, I found the Castle of Light and used the key to gain admittance. Here I made a possibly-fatal mistake. There were several statues of beings (a dwarf, an elf, and so on) in various rooms. My only options to deal with them were to leave them alone or to smash them, and since leaving them alone didn't sound like much of any adventure, I smashed them. It was only later, writing this blog and looking at my screen shots, that I realized Filmon had warned me that destroying anything in the Castle of Light was "terribly evil." He actually reminded me twice. Between the Gnome Caverns and finishing the Pendragon Town Archives, I forgot. Bollocks. It didn't seem to affect anything in the castle, but I don't know what I set myself up for later.
         

"Just terribly evil? Or are we talking really terribly evil?"

          
A fairy in the castle told me to go ahead and move on to the Castle of Dark, which I could access by doing the "opposite" of what I did to get on the Plane of Light. Getting to the Plane of Light required entering a code (C2+) in Chronis's machine. Since there's no "opposite" of C or 2, I figured it was just a matter of entering C2-, and I was right. But I forgot to stop by the Hall of Giants again and get the Key of Dark (it was in a room I couldn't access on my first visit), so I have to head back there.
            

             
Right now, all my characters are Levels 12-13 out of a possible 20, but boy has the leveling slowed down. None of them have leveled in the last 2 hours of playing. Meanwhile, the mystics that you find in every town tell me that my score is 43 and my characters are "average." I suspect this means I'm about halfway through.
            

I actually think we're rather exceptional.

            
Other miscellaneous notes:

• I owe the game an apology. Last night, I suggested that your ability to reset dungeons broke the role-playing immersion by allowing you to experience fixed encounters over and over again. It turns out this isn't true (although it was in the first Phantasie). When I reset the Hall of Giants and returned to where I found Lord Kilmor's body, the game told me there was just a bloodstain there. Similarly, resetting the Dwarven Burial Grounds does not cause the funeral to occur again; I just found charred bodies.

• Money stopped being a problem 'round about the Gnome Caverns. I have hundreds of thousands of gold now. You know how I feel about that.

• The resurrection spell means I don't really "lose" characters any more, but I have a couple of them who are facing very low constitution because of repeated resurrections.

• I realized belatedly that there's a "change rank" option in combat that lets you assign party members to the front, middle, or rear. Those in the rear can still be hit by melee weapons of enemies, but apparently they have a lower risk. I have the resurrection spell now, but using it costs a point of constitution, so I'd rather stop having to raise my wizard. I put him in the rear rank.

               

That's the kind of thing it would have been nice to notice at the beginning.

            

• I've accessed some fairly powerful magic spells. Three of my characters have Fireflash IV, the real workhorse from the original game. There aren't a lot of area effect spells, but I just got Mind Blast IV, which works fairly well. Other entire-party spells like confusion, weakness, binding, protection, and quickness I haven't used much. You don't really see their effects, so I'm not sure how well they work.

          

• On the spells, my characters have what seems to me really low spell points. They're all around 15-18. That means I can cast four level 4 spells before I have to return to the inn to rest or use a magic potion (which, admittedly, are rather plentiful). That doesn't last very long in these dungeons. 

• Some of the areas of the game I have to access by swimming across bodies of water. There's a swimming skill that reduces or eliminates damage.

        

Doing this in armor takes a lot of skill. Remind me to do a "special topics" posting on this when I get to Oblivion.

           
I have to focus on some work tomorrow, so I might play a little NetHack since it seems to lend itself better to short gaming sessions. Or, at least, it tends to force short gaming sessions upon you.

***

 

Previous entry in this series

 

Next entry in this series 

 

04/26/2026 

Phantasie III: Over the Hump

Distributing experience to boost the priest.

Reader Arkadesh left some advice after my last post that made sense (and that, frankly, I should have been able to figure out for myself): channel as much experience as possible into the priest character until he's able to cast Healing III (which heals amputations). Once this happened, things got a bit easier although not "easy." I still had a lot of character turnover. Ultimately, I got my party stabilized at around Level 8. Danger remains until I acquire resurrection, though.

Phantasie III, like its predecessors, gives you the ability to alter the "shares" of experience received by each character for each successful combat. You do this upon entering a town. You can't give each character less than 1 share nor more than 3, so it's not completely unbalanced. And while it makes no sense from a roleplaying standpoint, it is a great feature when you find your party in a constant state of turnover.

The mostly-completed Pendragon town archives.

With my party no longer in constant fear of dismemberment, I explored most of the Town Archives south of Pendragon. As in Phantasie, exploration slowly reveals parts of the maps, with special encounters represented by little balls. These can be treasures, NPCs, or puzzles. One was reminiscent of Telengard:

Choosing to "destroy it" was not my smartest option; I was slain by some kind of demon.

Among the items found in the archives are scrolls that (again, like in Phantasie) slowly help explain the game world and its history, geography, people, and features. They also summarize the previous games but without acknowledging the fact that Nikademus died in them.

Phantasie III: One big retcon.

I learned that the current continent, Scandor, is the "center of the civilized world" and that the continents from the previous games are to the south. North of Scandor is the Great Northern Continent, occupied by trolls and giants that occasionally raid the mainland. Nikademus has been tied up in his conquering of the northern part of Scandor by Kilmor, a great dwarf leader. There was also a general (but largely useless) map on Scroll IV.

Moments later, I was on the astral plane.

I say that I explored "most of" the dungeon because on the west side there's a long corridor that throws numerous encounters at me, escalating the difficulty swiftly. I lost my entire party in this corridor twice, so I think I'll save the rest for later.

Um...WHY would he never suspect us, exactly?

More important, an encounter with a "wise old sage" named Filmon provided my first quest: to rescue Kilmor from the Hall of Giants. The Hall of Giants, located by the sea in the southern part of the continent, proved to be difficult but not impossible. The giants themselves (there were several varieties) yielded a large amount of experience, equipment, and gold (although my gold still lags behind the amount I need to fully train), and I entered a wrestling match for a +1 constitution increase. When I found Kilmor, he was dead...


...but he left a scroll that recounted his capture and torture at the hands of Nikademus. Returning to the sage Filmon, I was given another quest to go to the Dwarven Burial Grounds, attend Kilmor's funeral, and mingle with the VIPs there.

Like the first game in the series, Phantasie III is shaping up to be fairly linear in its quests. I suppose theoretically, I could stalk off in a random direction and explore whatever dungeon I choose, but practically I'd get myself slaughtered.

Three other miscellaneous things:

• The game features a very annoying form of copy protection. It appears that every time you move your party to a special encounter, there's a random chance that a question will appear, and it seems to happen about 33% of the time. The questions ask arcana from the game manual. It wouldn't be so bad if it was 5% or 10% of the time, but as it is, I have to keep poring through this PDF file.

• You have the option to reset dungeons upon re-entry, at which point the game "forgets" the map and all the encounters you already experienced. It's a good way to load up on gold and experience, but it somewhat breaks the fourth wall when you can find Kilmor's body again and again.

• The monsters yield consistent equipment by type. Every party of rangers offers up hammers and medium shields +1. Scribes always have level 3 healing potions and robes. Undead gnomes: small axes and small shields +2. I don't exactly mind, as these items sell for decent money, but some randomization would have been better. Since there doesn't seem to be any downside to keeping equipment, I'm not sure why the game even bothers to ask.

I'm not done with NetHack just yet, but I'm on something of a roll with Phantasie III, so I think I'll keep with it until I get bored or it's over, then return to NetHack. Lots of travel this week and next, so please bear with me if my postings start to slack.

Phantasie III: A Hard Start

This is known as an "inauspicious start."

I've been on the road the last few days and not playing much, but partly I've been so silent 'cause I can't seem to get anywhere. The beginning stages of Phantasie III are surprisingly hard--at least, unless I'm missing something. Battles routinely leave my characters bereft of limbs, and I cannot find a single town that sells healing potions sufficient to repair the damage. My quest to do so took me into some areas I wasn't yet ready to face, and as you can see from the screen shot above, I ended up losing most of my party. This has happened multiple times. Yikes.

Even the first dungeon is a bit too hard for Level 1 characters, so I decided to spend a little time wandering the wilderness and building up my statistics--specifically, wandering right around Pendragon, the starting town, since the monsters seem to get more difficult the further you get away. Still, it's clear from my limited wanderings that either Scandor is a busier place than the Phantasie I kingdom, or the game world is smaller. There's a town on practically every screen. Too bad none of them sell Level 7 healing potions.

We're a bunch of cowards.

To try to get anywhere in the game, I've been resorting to a tactic I'm usually loathe to employ: running away. The consequences of a bad battle are so severe that I turn tail if it looks like I can't handle it. It doesn't always work, though, and of course I often misjudge whether I can "handle it." In my current party, most of the characters are Level 4, but I have a wizard with no legs and a priest with only one leg. What am I missing when it comes to healing? Could SSI have really made a game this punishing?

Do I target the tough barbarian rank first, or the easy kobold rank?

The difficulty doesn't mean I'm not enjoying it. In fact, Phantasie III returns me to something like Wizardry-level tactical combat. Specifically:

• Since I cannot save in between towns and I can only fully heal in towns, the difficultly rests in the accumulation of encounters more than individual encounters. I must carefully weigh whether to press on to the next dungeon room or whether to just get out of here. Combats are random and frequent, and I always need to plan on the possibility of several fights on the way out.
• Within individual encounters, there are tough choices. Aiming, attacking, thrusting, and firing bows have different levels of effectiveness on different enemies. I must also consider how to target my attacks by enemy rank and when to use my limited spell points.
• Fleeing is a gamble because if it doesn't work, the enemy gets a free round of attacks.

If only "keep limbs intact" was a skill.

SSI has also introduced its skill system from Wizard's Crown, so every time I level up, I can allocate points to attack, parry, swimming, listen, find trap, disarm trap, find item, pick lock, and fire bow. Even this requires a bit of strategy. At first I just concentrated on attack skills for most characters and allocated the thief skills only to the thief. Later I realized that at this rate, my thief would never really advance far in anything.


When death arrives for the entire party, you find yourselves on the Astral Plane, where a great demon judges each character and decides whether to a) resurrect him; b) turn him into an undead. If the latter option occurs, it appears that the character advances to Level 20 but can no longer be trained or advance in skills after that. Resurrected characters lose their gold and one point of constitution.

I guess that's a step up from being just "dead."

Due to the game's difficulty (or my ineptitude), I couldn't play long enough to give you any more insights, but I did make this recording of the gameplay. In it, you can see my crippled party do pretty well against a succession of enemies before I press too far into the dungeon and get my ass kicked by a couple of giants. My battered party tries to limp its way to the exit, but repeated battles leave all of the characters dead. Three are ultimately resurrected and three are made undead; I ditch those three.

Finally, I'm having the same problem that I had in Phantasie with my characters being ready to level up but not having enough gold to pay for the training. I need to pay more attention to charisma next time I roll new characters. Oh, and one other kicker: the characters age, meaning I can't dither around Pendragon forever.

I've got to be missing something regarding the healing, right?

Game 39: Phantasie III: The Wrath of Nikademus (1987)

Source: MobyGames

    

Phantasie III: The Wrath of Nikademus

United States

Strategic Simulations, Inc. (developer and publisher)

Released in 1987 for Apple II, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amiga; 1988 for DOS, PC-88, PC-98, FM-7, and Sharp X1; 1989 for MSX and Sharp X68000

Date Started: 7 January 2011

     
I hope you like the opening screenshot there because it's the only nice-looking one you're going to see for the duration of Phantasie III. It's from the Amiga version. I had to use it because some sort of corruption afflicted the only abandonware DOS download I could find, giving an error upon starting the game and entering towns (and doesn't display the town graphic). It still seems to save and everything else works okay. But the game is still reliant on the CGA standard and is a bare step up from monochrome.

Now, I can already hear you saying, "CRPG Addict, we warned you about this. Way back in your first posting, Gooberslot told you that you'd be missing out on the best version of many games. Just play the Amiga version for the love of god!" And I basically agree with you, except that I'm almost out of the "DOS version sucks" era, I really don't feel like learning another emulator (not to mention another OS), and if I start using other emulators now, I have no excuse for not having played Questron or, for that matter, Phantasie II. [Ed. I ultimately played them both: Questron and Phantasie II.]

Everything I've read about Phantasie II (by way of uncomfortable segue after not really dealing with the issue) suggests that it was so similar to the first game that SSI didn't even bother to write a separate manual. The only gameplay addition was that players could now throw rocks. The villain in that game, by the way, was again Nikademus, and it had something to do with an orb.

As the back story to the third edition opens, a nameless adventurer strides into an inn in the town of Pendragon on the continent of Scandor, where the innkeeper informs him of the menace presented by...wait for it...Nikademus. Seriously, SSI? I know it's been a while, but let me refresh your memory: the player kills Nikademus in both Phantasie and Phantasie II. Under what possible logic is he alive? He's like the Freddy Krueger of CRPGs, just showing up again, with no explanation, despite having been conquered by the hero in the last installment. Did you have trouble thinking of a name? There are lots of great villain names even among the other Pharisees alone. How about Gamaliel? Shammai? Yohanan ben Zakkai? Okay, that one doesn't work. [Much later edit: 5 years after I won the first Phantasie and 4 years after I played this game, an anonymous reader corrected a longstanding misapprehension: you don't defeat Nikademus in the first game; you defeat the Black Lord, leader of his Black Knights. Moreover, you don't fight Nikademus directly in #2, either. Thus, my gentle ribbing of SSI was unwarranted.]

Continuing with the story, the absurdly enthusiastic adventurer...

...headed off to the guild to assemble his party.

We needn't linger too long on character creation, which hasn't advanced terribly since Phantasie, which I covered last April. There are five key races (humans, dwarves, elves, gnomes, and halflings), with the attribute bonuses you would expect, plus the option to choose a "random" race and get a gnoll, goblin, kobold, lizard man, minotaur, ogre, orc, pixie, sprite, or troll. These beasts excel in one statistic or another but can only be fighters or thieves and end up paying very high training costs because of racism. Non-beasts can also be monks, priests, rangers, and wizards. Ultimately, all character classes can cast some spells, but of course some are more efficient than others. Character attributes are the standard selection of Dungeons & Dragons stats, minus wisdom.

I like to experience a bit of everything, so my motley party consists of:

• Macabeu, a human monk and nominal "leader" of this revolt against Nikademus
• Ezra, an elf wizard and part-time "scribe"
• Koziba, a dwarven ranger
• Joseph, a gnomish priest from Arimathea
• Antonin, a halfling thief
• Hyrcano, a minotaur fighter

Characters start off with a randomly-assigned "social class" that indicates how much gold he or she receives from leveling. There are supposedly four levels: peasant, laborer, craftsman, and noble, but all of my characters are either peasants or laborers. It's a very working-class party.

The game world. Your party is represented by a horse's head. I guess that's better than the alternative.

The characters start off with a decent amount of equipment, but no gold, so the only thing to do is head out the door on the adventure. The manual suggests the first place to visit is the Pendragon town archives, just south of Pendragon, so that's where I went. The dungeons work much as in the first game, which I indicated may have been the first game to slowly reveal the map as you explore.

Joseph is having a little trouble getting around right now.

Having explored some of the wilderness and the first dungeon, these are some "upgrades" to Phantasie III from the original version:

• All characters have bows. My ranger started with a "short bow," but everyone else has a "self bow"--I assume that means they just throw things?

 

• Combat is a little more complicated. It takes place on two screens--one where you line up your actions for the round, and one in which you see the actions' results. The same core actions from Phantasie are here: thrust (one solid swing), attack (two medium swings), slash (three or four light swings), lunge (attack in second rank), and cast a spell. But new abilities are the options to fire a bow (at any rank), and carefully aim an attack at a monster's vital area (that would be his head or torso, snickerers).

He should go into theater.

• In addition to hit point damage, both monsters and PCs can take bodily injuries, a feature that I believe first showed up in SSI's Wizard's Crown. These injuries include simple injuries, breaks, and amputations. Thus, you can have the odd sight of a character with all his hit points but missing both legs. Breaks and injuries heal through rest and spells, but amputations can only heal through high-level spells and potions.

I like the injury system because of the realism, the additional tactics it brings to combat, and the fact that seeing "orc is decapitated!" never gets old. Unfortunately, on my first trip out, Joseph the priest lost both of his legs and Hyrcano the Minotaur lost one of his legs. I don't have high enough spells to heal them, and none of the towns in the starting area sell high-enough potions. A lesser role-player might just ditch the disabled members and replace them, but I'm not as cruel as that. Thus, my first mission in the game is not to explore the first dungeon but to find a town that sells at least a Healing Potion 7 so Paul and Hyrcano can walk again.

I will be playing Phantasie III side-by-side with NetHack, so expect postings on both over the next week or so.