Game 444: Towers (1993)

 

Notice there is no subtitle in this version.

      

Towers

United States

JV Enterprises (developer); published as shareware

Released 1993 for Atari ST, 1994 for DOS, 1999 for Game Boy Color

Date Started: 12 January 2022

      

It might be derivative of other titles, but Towers offers the most interesting set of platforms that we've seen so far. It's not many games that went from the Atari ST to DOS, let alone from there to the Game Boy Color. The sequel gets even weirder: it was released the following year for the Atari Falcon (a high-end ST) and the under-served Atari Jaguar console. You don't often find a developer with that kind of programming flexibility.

The developers in this case are Jag Jaeger and Vince Valenti, two University of Nevada at Las Vegas students who teamed up in 1989 to form JV Enterprises, later JV Games. The company still has an active web site and released its most recent game in 2019 (a mobile word game called Friends & Secrets). Jaeger and Valenti are still running the company, although they've also worked other technology jobs over the years, presumably to pay the bills when game sales weren't enough. The company's early releases, like Towers, were all shareware, or rather what they called "tryware": you got a full-featured version of the game, and if you liked it, you sent them $15 for the manual. I have written to the company asking about the manual but have received no reply as yet.

        

I don't know whether this image is from a film or whether some SCA members got together.

     

Fortunately, the backstory is told in title cards before the game begins. A company of warriors is sailing to the distant land of Diratose to join the fight against Sargon, "the man in black." A storm shipwrecks them on an island called Lamini, or the Land of Towers. The land is governed under a feudal system, with lords living in towers of varying heights according to their wealth. The shipwreck survivors are healed by the locals. To survive, they take jobs for the sheriff, who eventually tells them that Lord Baniff hasn't been heard from in weeks. Two of the companions set out on a mission to get an audience with Baniff and find out if he's all right. The entrance collapses shortly after they enter his tower. The Game Boy version of the game has a subtitle--Lord Baniff's Deceit--that serves as something of a spoiler. This subtitle does not appear in the Atari ST or DOS versions.

   

The player chooses from among four companions: Garand, Tasler, Merton, and Andros. Garand is described as a warrior, Merton a wizard, and Andros an acrobat. Tasler doesn't have a class in his description; he's just an able young man with "a strong will to live." I don't think the selection really matters anyway. Clicking the button next to their portraits rerolls the game's attributes--strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, hit points, and mana--and the rolls seem to be random (8 to 19 for the main attributes) regardless of the stated background. Once in the game, any character can use any weapons, armor, and magic.

        

The four playable characters.

      

As the game begins inside the wreckage of the entrance, the experienced player will immediately see its Ultima Underworld (1992) inspiration. The paper doll character looks nearly identical, it has the same sorts of inventory slots, and those slots are represented by circles rather than (for most games) squares. Health and mana are represented as containers of liquid, although here they look more like thermometer stems than potion containers. The game arguably improves upon the Underworld interface by shrinking its message window to make space for its spell syllables, so that the player doesn't have to leave the inventory view to cast spells. Even many of the item graphics are clearly based on Underworld. There are no "Talk," "Look," or "Use" options in Towers, alas, meaning probably no NPCs and no puzzles of any complexity.

 

Guess I can't go back that way.

 

The comparable interface from Ultima Underworld.

       

Combat is a bit different, as we'll discuss, but the biggest difference is in movement. It would have been impressive if two college kids had successfully replicated the continuous 3D perspective, and indeed they didn't (although they seem to have figured it out for Towers II a year later). The game uses tiled movement with four fixed views from each position. You cannot look up or down. You can interact with the world by clicking in the view window; this is how you pick up items and push buttons. For combat, though, you don't swipe with the mouse like in Underworld; you click a single "attack" button in the lower right. Doing so does produce an Underworld-like animation as your weapon thrusts outward. Overall, though, the movement and combat system (as well as the buttons and levers that you interact with) feel more like Dungeon Master (1987) than Underworld. The creators were clearly inspired by both games.

        

Facing a little goblin on the first level.

      

But they do have an unexpected treat in store for the 1992 player--one that I unfortunately cannot experience. You may recall that I said that two characters enter the tower. While the player controls only one character, two players can hook up by modem to tackle the dungeon together. Such a feature is rare even by 1993. I have no idea how it worked technically; I suspect I would need the manual to successfully replicate it, even if I figured out how to set up DOSBox with a modem.

   

Fortunately, unlike (say) Bloodwych, cooperative play doesn't seem to be terribly necessary. The early game, at least, is remarkably easy. For this session, I explored the first two levels, each 24 x 24, but using the "worm tunnel" approach, and with a lot of unused space. The button and lever puzzles have been simple, with buttons usually opening the nearest closed door. There were about half a dozen enemies per level, none of them terribly dangerous. Damage in this game is easily healed by resting. A hunger system discourages you from resting too often, but food has so far been plentiful (enough to feed two people!).

    

My map of Level 1. I'm bothered by the empty areas, but I've checked every wall for secret doors.

      

I've found equipment in little piles on the floor, usually with a blood smear or a pile of bones nearby to indicate that they came from previous adventurers. The character starts with absolutely nothing (odd given the backstory) but soon accumulates leather armor and boots, food, throwing items like rocks, a bag (which you can right-click on to get more inventory spaces), scrolls, potions, and simple weapons like clubs, daggers, light axes, and short swords. The message window gives you no feedback on how much damage your weapon is doing.

  

A pile of loot.

      

You also see no names for your foes. So far, I've faced three of them: little goblins in loincloths, something that looks like a "mud elemental," and skeletons. In combat, you click the narrow "attack" icon to thrust your weapon outward. Unlike Underworld, but like Dungeon Master, there's a cool-down period after each attack. You get a little puff of carnage when the enemy takes damage. Enemies run away when they get low on hit points, forcing you to chase them down.

    

Hitting a skeleton with an axe.

     

The magic system uses syllables like Underworld, but you don't have to find runes to go with them. Instead, you find scrolls which tell you how to string together the syllables to make spells. So far, I've found two: ME RA KI ("Magic Missile") and KELE KI ("Fear"). There are two slots for you to prepare spells, which you then cast by clicking on them. My spells fail about half the time I try them, and I'm not sure what governs this.

  

The character has a level, but in two dungeon levels, I didn't level-up once. I'm not sure if it happens automatically or if there's something that I need to do. There's no separate "experience" statistic, so I'm not sure if you get experience solely from defeating foes or from other actions, too, like casting non-combat spells or solving puzzles.

    

A "mud elemental" approaches. I have two "Magic Missiles" waiting to cast (the ME RA KIs in the lower-right).

   

On Level 1, I found a message scroll in one pile of gore. "I have been tricked!" it claimed. "Twas better to rot in prison then [sic] to die here." A scroll on the second floor offered: "Our master is as good with strategy as he is with sorcery."

        

Finding a message on the first level.

    

The first level ended in a door unlocked by a nearby keyhole. I had to find my way there by "solving" very easy button puzzles to open a series of doors along the way. One of them led to an area with the key. There were a few secret areas, found by simply walking into walls, but all of them just led to some extra treasure. Nothing essential was behind a secret door. This was true of Level 2 as well.

 

The second level has been more of the same, although with multiple keyed doors, each opening to a different key. I found the stairs to Level 3 before I'd opened all the doors. I think I've explored the level exhaustively, so I assume that I'll find my way to those areas via alternate stairways or pits from above.

      

Opening a locked door on Level 2.

       

That brings me to another aspect of the game. It follows the Dungeon Master tradition of giving some of the areas open ceilings that correspond to pits or trenches on the upper levels. There were some places on Level 2 where I could fall back down to Level 1, although none that led to new areas.

 

This "trench" on Level 2 . . .

. . . leads to this corridor on Level 1.

       

Unfortunately, this destroyed a theory I'd been developing. Near the stairway between Level 1 and Level 2 is a little placard that reads "E2-E4." There's a similar one on the next level that reads "E7-E5." I thought this meant I was skipping two levels on the first stairway, but that doesn't make sense with the pits, and it also doesn't make sense because the second placard should therefore start with "E4." Whatever is going on with the placards, it's clear that there are more ways than stairs to transition between levels, which might open up some of the "empty" areas that I mapped on the first two levels. Either that, or there are types of secret doors other than ones that you walk directly into.

  

I don't know what this means.

     

Other notes:

   

• The game is almost all mouse-driven. The numberpad works for movement, but to attack, pick up items, activate buttons, and cast spells, you have to use the mouse. It is possible that there are keyboard shortcuts I haven't found, though. I haven't tried every key in every situation.

• Items of armor go directly on the paper doll. Other items of inventory go in the various slots. One mystery is gauntlets. I've found two pairs--one regular, one Gauntlets of Strength--but I can't figure out how to use them. They don't go directly on the body. If I put them in the "weapon" slot, my fists do change appearance to be armored, so I suppose they simply might be alternate "weapons."

• In addition to doors that you can open, there are occasional windows that let you see into adjacent rooms without giving you the ability to pass through.

     

I'm not sure either Dungeon Master or Ultima Underworld had these.

    

• Most of the doors have buttons on both sides, even when you could never have gotten to one side without opening the other. I suppose this would help if you were fleeing enemies. 

• The game freezes about once every 15 minutes. Regular saves are vital.

       

So far, Towers has been a perfectly pleasant game if not particularly challenging. It's a nice contrast to WarWizard, for which I can't seem to make any progress because I don't know what to do, and Angband, for which I can't seem to make any progress because the game is endless. It will be nice of Mr. J or Mr. V responds with the manual (and, of course, a few other insights), but so far I've been able to figure it out. 

    

Time so far: 3 hours

   

Game 443: Moria (1986)

 

The title screen/main menu.

      

Moria

France

Independently developed and published (presumably) as freeware

Released 1986 for DOS

Date Started: 9 January 2022

Date Ended: 10 January 2022

Total Hours: 11 (about 8 characters)

Difficulty: Very Hard (5.0/5)

Final Rating: 17

Ranking at Time of Posting: 90/444 (20%)

   

This French roguelike is listed as Moria 2 on several sites, and that is its file name, at least in the version I found, but the title screen just calls it Moria. The "2" wouldn't really make sense, as it has nothing to do with the 1983 roguelike (which wasn't available on the microcomputer until 1988 anyway). Instead, it's an adaptation of Rogue--to the extent that it even has the same attributes and lists them at the bottom of the screen in the same order.

    

The programmer either wanted to do something different or didn't know how to program the rooms and corridors of the original, so Moria's dungeon levels are all tiny rooms and doorways. I feel like I've seen this style in some previous game, but I can't quite place it.

 

 

   

Beyond the nature of the map, these are the changes from Rogue:

    

• Moria has no "search" command. There are no secret doors to find anyway. There are traps; you identify them automatically when you're one step away.

• Moria has only 15 levels to Rogue's near-30. They're larger and packed with more monsters and treasures, though, so the game feels about the same size.

• In line with the change in the name of the game, Tolkien monsters are introduced, including Uruk-hai, Nazgûl, Mewlips, and "whargs." The "floating eye" monster from Rogue is specifically re-cast as an Eye of Sauron. More on Tolkien influences below.

      

A balrog turns out to be Sauron.

       

• Because of the additional monsters, some classic Rogue monsters don't appear, including the aquator, the medusa, the ice monster, the venus flytrap, and the rattlesnake. The game thus avoids some of the more annoying status effects from Rogue. There are still fairies who steal your items and thieves who steal your gold, replacing nymphs and leprechauns in the original.

• The commands are generally translated; for instance, you a)bandonner un objet rather than d)rop it, and you b)oire une potion rather than q)uaff it. There are similar changes to the letters that represent monsters. This isn't universal, though, as (for instance) "T" is still used to throw an object, and the floating eye is still represented as an "E" rather than an "O." Although most of the text of the game is in French, when you first start a game, it inexplicably asks you in English to "Wait a little minute, while I dig the Moria."

• The game offers some "graphics" instead of the all-ASCII approach taken by the original Rogue. The main character uses the same smiley face icon as the 1985 Epyx re-release of Rogue and the 1986 Rogue Clone. There are also characters for potions and armor, but everything else is a letter or keyboard symbol. 

• You cannot move diagonally.

• You can go up stairways to return to earlier levels, and the game does remember their layout and treasures.

• Your position is randomized when you arrive on each level (going up or down), although the stairways remain in fixed locations.

• In addition to hunger, the game has a "thirst" mechanic by which you must occasionally drink a potion whether you need it or not. There's a special "thirst-quenching" potion (désaltérante) added to the game to help in such situations, the only equipment addition that I saw.

The game begs me to drink.

      

• Perhaps most important, the game has no "save" command. At least, it has none that I can find. None is listed among the list of commands, and I tried every key not listed with a specific command, with both SHIFT and CTRL, and found nothing that worked.

• Changes to the endgame covered below.

       

Everything else is pretty much the same as Rogue, including the "character creation" process (just a name), the starting attributes (12 life, 16 strength), starting equipment (mace, mail, bow and arrows, food), and the different types of inventory items you can find. As usual, potions have colors randomized for each new game, wands have different materials, and scrolls have different nonsense words. You can experiment with these items and hope you identify them or you can wait for Scrolls of Identification (although you have to test scrolls to find even them). When you die or win, your score is calculated based on your experience, the dungeon level you reached, and the gold you amassed.

 

"Character creation."

 

   

What I often forget about Rogue is that it's far harder than NetHack. It gives you fewer tactical and strategic avenues. The food system (and in this variant, the thirst system) makes it almost impossible to grind. Enemies rarely drop loot, so you're stuck with whatever seeded in the levels in the first place. A winning game depends enormously on the random numbers producing an ideal set of equipment.

    

Moria manages to make Rogue even harder in the endgame. Monsters that you never even want to try to take on in a melee fight start appearing around Level 8. They include dragons, Nazgûl, balrogs, and galgals. (A galgal is a type of Celtic burial mound. The term was used by Francis Ledoux in his 1973 French translation of The Lord of the Rings for "barrow"; "barrow wights" became êtres des galgals.) The nature of the corridors in this game makes it hard to get away from enemies, so you end up relying a lot on limited Scrolls of Teleportation, Wands of Slow Monster, Wands of Confusion, and Potions of Speed. Scrolls of Mapping are a god-send in trying to find the stairways down. (Stairways down look exactly like stairways up, which is another annoyance.)

    

A mid-game equipment list.

       

On Level 10, Sauron appears, disguised as a balrog until you get close to him. I suppose he technically might be defeatable with a really high weapon and armor enhancement, but I couldn't even come close. He almost always hits, and he can easily kill a high-level character in a couple of hits. He can also pass through walls. You want to spend as little time on the level as possible.

        

Sauron chases me. He's a smiley face just like me, but our colors are reversed.

   

On Level 15, you find the object of your quest: a Silmaril. Morgoth appears on this level and, much like Sauron, is either invincible or nigh-invincible. You just want to get out of his way.

      

I find this game's Amulet of Yendor.

    

Rogue is pretty easy once you get the Amulet of Yendor. You just make your way back to the surface by retracing your steps. The monsters keep their original level difficulties as you do, so once you clear the bottom levels, you're home free. Moria has a couple of screws to twist instead. First, once you pick up the Silmaril, your hit points stop automatically regenerating as you move. You can only heal by finding (rare) Potions of Healing. Second, digestion starts occurring a double-speed. Thirst may come on even faster than that. I died from thirst more than from enemies trying to get back to the surface. Finally, hard enemies continue to dog you all the way back to the top, long after you've left the levels on which they originally spawned.

   

Winning doesn't even get you the congratulatory message about the Fighter's Guild that you got in Rogue. Instead, you just get a message that says: "You have won. Bravo," along with the leaderboard.

      

You couldn't even spare an exclamation point?

      

This is one of those games where it's hard to imagine that anyone has ever won it legitimately. Even if you're extremely lucky with loot, there are just so many situations in which you find yourself in a dead-end with a dragon (or, even worse, Sauron or Morgoth) behind you and no more Scrolls of Teleportation. A winning character would have to get his weapon and armor up to around +7 and reach Level 15 with a few Potions of Healing, at least four Potions of Thirst-Quenching, and half a dozen Scrolls of Teleportation. (There's a Ring of Teleportation, too, but I couldn't get it to work.) You want to make sure you find all the "up" staircases on the way down so you're not looking for them while your health isn't regenerating. You'd also want to mark them by dropping some equipment next to them so that you don't fight your way through a horde of enemies only to find you've reached the "down" staircase. Caching unwanted potions near these stairways would be a good idea, because when you're dying of thirst, you'll be grateful for even that Potion of Hallucination.

           

Morgoth hits me as I try to flee him and find the up staircase, far to my northeast. (I've revealed half the level with a Scroll of Mapping.)

      

I didn't try hard to win legitimately, but Moria also makes it nearly impossible to win illegitimately. Most roguelikes allow you to save, but they enforce permadeath by deleting the saved game file when you reload it (or sometimes when you die). Moria enforces permadeath by not offering save feature in the first place. To conquer it, I downloaded a variant of DOSBox that allows for save states, but it was almost more trouble than it was worth. I found that the states would usually open reliably in the same DOSBox session that they were created, but they almost never worked (they would open, but no key commands would work) if DOSBox itself was closed and re-opened after creating them. I don't like the idea of save states with DOS games anyway, so I deleted the program after I finished the game.

   

It did get me through this one, but with so many reloads I don't even want to try to guess. I wasn't trying to impress anyone with this one; I was just trying to document the endgame. 

   

In a GIMLET, I give it:

   

• 0 points for no game world.

• 1 point for character creation and development. Creation is only a name, and development is just more max hit points.

• 0 points for no NPCs.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. I'm so tired of Tolkien references. A few of the other foes have some interesting abilities.

• 2 points for magic and combat. There's no magic system, and combat comes down to a couple of options.

• 4 points for equipment. The variety of usable items is always a strength in roguelikes.

   

A Potion of Strength always brightens the day!

     

• 0 points for no economy.

• 2 points for a main quest.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are functional enough for a roguelike. Sounds are just boops. The interface couldn't be easier to master, even with the commands in French.

        

The easy-to-master command list.

      

• 3 points for gameplay. There's a certain replayability to any roguelike, and some level of difficulty is part of the fun. This one goes a bit too far and lasts a bit too long.

   

That's a final score of 17, which is 7 points lower than I gave Rogue. I'm rating them 12 years apart, but there are also balance issues with Moria that creep into enough categories that its overall score is hurt.

Moria is credited on the title screen to an "AJM." I have no idea who that is. If anyone knows please share. I can't even figure the nation of origin. "France" is a guess based on the language and what a couple of web sites say, but they're probably guessing, too. It could as easily be Québécois, Belgian, or Algerian.

   

I'm still playing Angband but making such slow progress it might be a while longer before I have an entry's worth of material. Moria might not be a great game, but it least it has a sense of decency when it comes to the length.

 

WarWizard: Mapping from Above

 

      

My map of the game world so far.

         

The above is all I've accomplished in about eight more hours of WarWizard gameplay. I can't tell you how much I hate trying to map top-down games. There's no easy way to do it. I've tried the "stitch together screenshots" method, most notably with Shadow Keep (1991), but that takes forever, and if you're not pixel-perfect in matching overlapping or adjacent areas, you create errors that compound fast.

   

Of course, the same is true of the alternate method, which I'm using here: trying to replicate things tile by tile. I typically do it in rows. The WarWizard screen is 11 x 7 tiles with the character in the center. I start in a random part of the world and map all 77 tiles around me, then add one row or column at a time as I move. This method can result in essentially the same problem. When you finish your circumference of the world and the tiles don't match, finding and fixing the source of the problem is about four times as difficult as in a first-person game.

   

My map of 2088: The Cryllan Mission (1989). This one was more difficult because the world wraps.

       

Mapping is even harder in WarWizard than the typical tiled game because the graphics are advanced enough that the tiles are drawn not to look like tiles. There isn't a "water" tile and a "grass" tile the way there is in, say, early Ultima games. There are instead, for instance, "75% grass that blends into a 25% water" tiles, "mostly grass but with a hint of water in the southeast corner" tiles, and "half-grass, half-forest" tiles. I don't have the capability to figure out how to map those literally, so I have to pick the dominant feature, but that creates issues. For instance, the creators often use four "mostly desert but a hint of water in the corner" tiles stitched together in a cube to make it appear that there's a pond where the four corners come together. That pond functionally isn't "there"; it doesn't impede movement, as each for the four tiles is "really" a grass tile. Do I not map it all? If not, I lose an important navigational landmark. Do I make them all water? That makes the pond more like a lake, and suggests I can't step on those squares. Do I choose one of the four squares at random? That creates confusion that might screw up my map later.

        

This "pond" is actually four grass tiles with bits of water in the corners. It doesn't really "exist," as I can walk on all four tiles. Do I map it or not?

       

There are lots of other ways to make mistakes. I'm mapping new rows and columns when they show up on the edge of the screen, either (in this game) three or five tiles away. Sometimes I misjudge size and distance. You can see it in the map above on the eastern shore. I'm relatively sure that the coastline is supposed to be even all the way down, but something I did gave an extra column starting about 25% from the top. Probably there were a line of "half-water, half-land" squares that I interpreted as "water" at the top and "land" further down.
     

I probably would never have become a CRPG addict if I had to do this for every game. Fortunately, having to map a top-down game is a rare occurrence, as there are lots of ways that developers relieve you of the responsibility. These include:

   

• Making a first-person game instead. First-person games tend to be easier to map because you're only mapping a couple of squares at a time. They tend to occur in areas of fixed size (e.g., the Gold Box's 16 x 16), so it's hard to go too far astray. Most important, they tend to be smaller. For WarWizard, I've already mapped coordinates up to 126 x 83,  which by itself is over 10,000 squares, and I haven't even found the northern and western shores. Wizardry, in contrast is only 4,000 squares total.

• Making the maps small and easily-navigable. Ultima is a good example of this. Although its game world is a relatively large 168 x 168, it is organized into small islands that are easy to explore. There aren't a lot of natural barriers to block you otherwise, so once you have a hovercar, you can explore the entire world in strips.

• Providing a world map. Even a rough outline of a continent is generally enough to prevent me from having to make my own maps. Once I have a sense of size, shape, and relative distances, I can divide the map into smaller areas and identify an optimal exploration pattern for each, annotating towns, castles, and dungeons as I find them.

      

 

One of my early maps of Fate: Gates of Dawn (1991). It wasn't important that I map everything--just enough to identify key locations and help me figure out an exploration pattern for other areas.

     

• Provide a mechanism for determining coordinates. Even if the game doesn't come with a world map, some method of identifying your coordinates in the game world is usually enough to keep me from having to make a comprehensive map. I might still throw together a basic map anyway to plot cities and dungeons and judge relative distances, but I usually don't feel like I have to map everything, particularly since you don't need an unbroken line of terrain from one point to another to ensure accuracy. Fate: Gates of Dawn (1990) is a good example. Although that was a first-person game, it had a world the size of a top-down game. I mapped more of it than was necessary, but I could have gotten by with just mapping key locations and a little of the terrain around them.

• Have an in-game automap. This is the most obvious solution, of course, but it's rare for this era.

       

I don't know how many CRPGs I've encountered that have lacked all of these features, but it's probably fewer than 12. And because I find mapping top-down games so annoying, I'm usually willing to take a peek at someone else's map when I get lost. So if we're talking about games that lack all of these features and are so obscure that no one has posted a map online, we're down to the single digits. Unfortunately, WarWizard is one of them.

       

As you can see from the map I've already created, however, WarWizard''s world is anything but simple. The land is riven with mountain ranges and waterways that prevent easy point-to-point exploration. Mountains and forests block your view of what's beyond. Important cities and dungeons are found in the middle of dense swamps and forests at the ends of hidden mountain trails. Finally, the hunger and fatigue mechanics discourage you from getting lost and having to do much backtracking. This is the sort of game for which you do need an accurate map.

         

This is what happens when you put cartography above everything else.

       

Unfortunately, my focus on mapping destroyed the other progress I had made with the game. While mapping, I was only concerned about uncovering the next row of tiles, not keeping my party fed and healthy. They started to starve and eventually died. I simply shrugged, reloaded, and went in a different direction. But since the game saves periodically as you play, the periods I could explore after reloading got shorter and shorter, until at last my only saved game was a party literally steps away from death.

  

When I do start again, I will probably see if I can make something of the places I've already discovered rather than continue with the map. I'm pretty sure I've identified the only dungeon "southeast" of Caer Tiran, which should let me finish at least the first quest. 

Do any of you have solutions for mapping or navigating top-down games that I'm overlooking?

Time so far: 11 hours

 

Game 442: The Sword of Hope (1989)

 

      

The Sword of Hope

AKA Selection: Erabareshi Mono ("Selection: The Chosen One"), original Japanese title

Japan

Kemco (developer and original publisher); Seika Corporation (U.S. publisher)

Released 1989 for Game Boy (Japan); U.S. version released 1991

Date Started: 3 January 2022

Date Ended: 6 January 2022

Total Hours: 8

Difficulty: Easy (2.0/5) with modern emulation, probably at least moderate in the original

Final Rating: 22

Ranking at Time of Posting: 165/444 (37%)

    

As I mentioned in relation to The Final Fantasy Legend, I never owned a handheld gaming device, and there was never a time when I was interested in one. Even today, when I have something of a smartphone "problem," it doesn't extend to playing games on the device. I just find it too limiting.

   

But I can certainly understand the appeal of something that keeps you entertained when you can't be at your console or computer, and I was surprised to find both Legend and Wizardry: Suffering of the Queen to be more advanced mechanically than I thought would be possible with such a device. 

      

There's a power vacuum in the kingdom of Riccar.

       

The Sword of Hope, one of the earliest handheld RPGs (it was released the same year as Final Fantasy Legend, though later in it), is more what I expected from the platform: a highly-linear, single-character game with a lot of grinding and limited mechanics. It would have passed the time if I was in a situation where I needed time to pass, but I can't imagine picking it up if I had anything else to relieve the boredom. Having said that, I'm curious how readers who have owned handheld consoles used them. Did they occupy your attention on an average day at home, where they competed with (depending on the household) computers, regular consoles, televisions, and books? Or did you mostly use them "on the road" when other alternatives weren't available? 

   

The game is set in the land of Riccar, where an evil dragon was long held in check by a magic spell that involved the titular Sword of Hope thrust into a painting of the dragon. (Whatever created that situation sounds more interesting than the plot of the actual game.) But the dragon managed to get into the head of King Hennesy of Riccar and slowly corrupt him, eventually convincing him to remove the sword. Once freed, the dragon summoned an evil god named Mammon, who turned the people of the land into trees.

       

Cliff Huxtable has had enough.

      

The player character is the king's son, Prince Theo, born under a prophecy that he would put things right. The king tried to murder Theo when he was an infant, but a knight named Pascal rescued the baby, fled the castle, and raised the boy in the forest. Meanwhile, three wizards named Martel, Shabow, and Camu cast a spell to seal the king and his castle underground, limiting any further harm he could do. The child, now grown, sets out to find the Sword of Hope and deal with the dragon.

     

There is no character creation process. The character starts with copper armor and a "probite" sword, which sounds like something I should swallow for better digestive health. His attributes are dexterity, stamina, and agility. He begins with only one spell but gains more by finding scrolls and leveling up. He has some wheat, which restores hit points, and "herb," which restores magic points.

   

The Old Man (Pascal) has a few words of encouragement before he sends you out of his hut into a forest. A Shaman lives nearby and will heal the character's wounds for 5 + 1/L gold pieces. The Shaman also has a crystal ball that imparts advice, and the starting "Teleport" spell returns you to the shaman if you're in trouble. Finally, visiting the shaman is the only way to save the game, which is done through a code rather than an actual save.

      

The Game Boy let you type Greek letters?!

        

Screenshots of the game will look like it's three-dimensional, but it's not. You can't turn. Instead, you move from one fixed scene to another like an adventure game. The controls are simple: you use the arrows to move a selection cursor around the bottom half of the screen, which includes both movement options and other commands. "A" executes an option; "X" cancels. 

     

A typical screen. I can move in any direction, but there are enemies waiting in three of them. Although this looks like a first-person view, it's not. You can't rotate to face the other doors or behind you.

 

   

The three commands that you can execute in any area are "Look," "Open," and "Hit." Either because of bad game design or bad translation, none of them mean what they actually say. Instead, they serve as interchangeable "mess around with" commands, and you essentially have to try all of them with everything to be sure you don't miss anything. Throughout the game, you do such nonsensical things as "opening" a rose to find a hidden path, "hitting" a wall to uncover a painting, "opening" a dwarf to talk to it, "hitting" a chest to be healed, "opening" a vine to find a seed inside, "looking" at the same vine to climb it, and so forth. After putting you through all of that, the game has the gall to occasionally act affronted when you try to do something like "hit" or "open" a person.

       

You have to try everything in this game.

     

Combat comes along frequently. Sometimes you see enemies on your little directional map, represented as black dots. Other times, they just show up. They can appear up to three at a time and more can join in battle in subsequent rounds if there are fewer than three. Your only options in combat are to attack, use an item, cast a spell, or flee. After choosing the action, you and the enemies go in an at-least-partly-random order of initiative. Successful combat delivers experience and gold.

       

Combat options against two cyclopes and an ape.

      

I found the number of experience points needed for the next level to be completely unpredictable. The first 10 levels are hit at 10, 35, 85, 165, 265, 405, 585, 785, and 1035, which ranges from +11% to +150% of the previous level. At each new level, you get fixed upgrades in the three attributes, max hit points, and max spell points, plus one new (fixed) combat spell. Non-combat spells are typically used to solve puzzles and must be learned form found scrolls.

         

The shopkeeper. Prices go up as you level up.

     

The opening area only has 19 areas, including a shop where you can buy wheat, barley, herbs, and a suit of silver armor. You can carry a maximum of 255 gold in the game, so you want to visit this vendor when you get close to the maximum. But you can also carry only a maximum of 7 wheat, barley, and herbs, so ultimately you end up wasting a lot of money and the economy really might as well not exist.

      

The opening area is small. The other maps only get a little bigger.

      

On every forest square, you can "look" at the trees (which are actually citizens) to get a whispered hint. The major goal of the area is to find a tree in the town square and intuit that you want to "hit" it to get it to reveal itself as a treant. After a few rounds of combat, in which it's only susceptible to magic, it tearfully hands you the key to Martel's domain. Episodes like this are repeated in the other domains, and you ultimately acquire the two other keys. 

    

To get through here, I'll need to find Shabow's key.

     

Throughout the game, you progress by visiting locations in a precise order and doing things in a precise order. The Sword of Hope resembles a lot of Japanese RPGs of the era in that:

   

1. The places you visit involve a lot of backtracking, mitigated here by the game world not being that large.
2. The things you do are often nonsensical.
3. There's a lot of grinding in between.

    

For #2, I'm not just talking about the nonsensical use of commands that I already mentioned. Even the plot developments don't make a lot of sense. When you first visit Martel, he insults you, and there's a suggestion that perhaps he doesn't believe that you're the prince. Maybe some players would think, "I must convince him!" but that wasn't my first thought. I didn't much care. But after I explored his domain and found no way to move forward, I began to wonder if Martel was supposed to give me something.

      

Martel lectures me on cultural norms.

    

There's a chapel in Martel's domain, and one of the tree hints is: "Haven't you heard of seeking inspiration at the worship site?" "Seeking inspiration" turns out to involve using the "Grace" spell that I learned from a scroll inside the chapel. I guess that was fair--cast "Grace" in a chapel--but what came next was a little unintuitive. Casting the spell got me a magic charm, which did nothing for me by itself. I had to turn it into a "ruby charm" by using it in the room with the chapel's pipe organ. How I was supposed to know this, and why it worked, is a mystery known only to the developer.

       

I'm surprised Nintendo didn't quash this.

     

I had heard about a "ruby charm" earlier. One of the tree hints is that the player's mother, Queen Remy, kept a ruby charm. So using the Ruby Charm somehow proves that I'm the son of the queen, which led Martel to upgrade my sword. He then asked that I help his pigeon, who seemed to be suffering from an ailment. The solution was to "hit" the poor creature, which caused it to lay an egg, called the "W egg" for some reason, which I took. In these situations, I always wonder whether the story elements and puzzle solutions make sense in the original Japanese, or if you know Japanese tropes, or whether they were just as bizarre in the Japanese release.

       

I also wonder about the language. The translation isn't laughable, but it occasionally leaves out an article, or mangles a plural, or uses a word or phrase that just doesn't work right. It's hard to believe that such issues were impossible to detect and fix; it would have required the input of only a couple of English-fluent playtesters. Part of me wonders whether the slightly-off language isn't in fact a strategy, a way to repeatedly emphasize the "Japaneseness" of the game and thus excite the imaginations of players who in the 1980s were increasingly demonstrating a philia for all things Japanese.

      

In this world, the quality of something goes from "probite" to "3 star" to "extra" and to, finally, "adage."

           

Whatever the case, the game proceeds in a linear fashion. In Martel's domain, you make your way through a graveyard and down to the bottom of a well (the well has about a dozen screens; it's a big well). You open a chest, which releases a giant slug, who has the key to Shabow's domain. Shabow's domain is a bit larger than the first two, and you have to inspect every stone and tree for secret passages. One of these gets you behind a waterfall to Shabow's house.

   

Shabow says that you're not strong enough to wield the Sword of Hope (at least he did at my level) but says he'll help if you bring him a moon fragment. You have to find your way through a cave maze with lots of one-room passages to find the chest that has the moon fragment. It is guarded by a happy-looking "shadow." 

      

I'm going to wipe that grin off your face.

      

Shabow takes the moon fragment and then tells you he doesn't actually know where the Sword of Hope is. He raises the quality of your existing sword to "extra" (this is apparently better than "3-star") and asks that you talk to his pigeon ("look"), who has apparently fallen in love with you and thus happily hands over her "B egg" while imploring, "Please don't forget about me, ever."

   

A giant lizard in Shabow's domain has the key to Camu's domain. You've got to free a fairy and answer a bunch of random questions from her in the correct order to learn that a vampire back in Martel's domain has a unicorn horn that's keeping Camu locked in a pagoda. (I am proud to designate Hope the only RPG in which you free an enchantress from a pagoda by retrieving a unicorn horn from a vampire.) Camu is grateful for her release, upgrades your sword to "adage," and suggests you "open" her pigeon to get its egg; the pigeon naturally objects and instead just hands you the "R egg."

         

There were about 8 questions like this. I just answered randomly and reloaded until I finally got what I needed.

      

Returning to the Old Man with the eggs brings forth some revelations. First, it turns out that the sword you've been carrying all along is the Sword of Hope (also, confusingly, called "Wish"), but it needed the three eggs--representing wisdom, courage, and love--to unlock it. The Old Man then reveals that the millstone in his house conceals the way to the underground castle.

       

This sentence hurts my brain a bit.

      

You have to navigate an underground maze to get to the castle, and here you find the most obnoxious enemies in the game, druids. There are a few dozen monsters in the game, and mostly they're just interchangeable meat sacks, albeit some with spellcasting powers. They include giant moths, skeletons, goblins, apes, lizards, orcs, centipedes, and hags. Druids are so annoying because they have spells that drain your health and magic and give them directly to the druid. I died far more at their hands than from any other monster. Dying just resurrects you in the old man's house, so it's not a huge deal.

   

Eventually you find your way through the caverns to the castle gates. They're locked, but if you plant a seed pod in front of the gates, it grows into a vine that lets you climb into the second floor. You can meet the spirit of your mother if you use the ruby charm in her room. She tells you to search (actually, "hit") the throne for a secret--literally a spell called "Secret." Casting this in the den causes a mirror to turn into a portal, and you can use it to enter a "mirror world" that has the same layout as the castle, only backwards. In a room in this mirror world, you find a room with a painting on the wall (which you expose by hitting the wall). This causes King Hennesy to appear and attack you. Hennesy's death transitions directly into a combat with the dragon. Both are tough, and immune to magic, so you have to beat them by basically alternating physical attacks with healing spells.

        

Squaring off against my father in the final combat.

    

There was a bit in the final battle with the dragon that I didn't quite understand. I guess the dragon wounded my left arm, causing me to contemplate the birthmark there and to realize it looks something like a sword. Switching the Sword of Hope to my left hand activated some latent power that ensured that every attack made against the dragon was a critical hit. He still wasn't easy. 

     

Casting "RECMAX" during the dragon battle.

      

Once you kill them, the denouement has Hennesy awaken from his stupor. You return to the surface in triumph, the land is freed from darkness, the wizards lift the castle from underground, and everyone is happy again.

     

 

 

I admire how hard they tried with the graphics in the end-game screens.

            

What I didn't cover in the above narrative is all the grinding that has to happen between key boss encounters in each of the areas. I ended the game at Level 25 out of a maximum of 31 levels. Playing through the actual plot took about half the total time; the rest was spent on grinding. Grinding is slightly facilitated by an "auto" combat option that makes your choices for you. It's relatively intelligent. It mixes physical attacks with a variety of spells, heals you if your hit points get too low, and uses your consumable items if you need them to restore health or spell points. It's not great about detecting enemy immunities, but you can otherwise use it safely for most of the game's battles. This coupled with my emulator's "warp" mode meant that grinding was a bit easier for me than it would have been for a 1989 player. I also happily used save states instead of restoring with a code at every loss.

    

In a GIMLET, I give the game:

   

• 2 points for a silly game world.

• 3 points for character creation and development. There's not much complexity to it, but you do feel notably stronger after each level-up. You hit harder--eventually getting to the point where your melee attack affects all enemies--and you get a new powerful spell at each level.

• 2 points for NPCs. These are mostly the trees, which give you hints throughout the game.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. The foes, as above, aren't generally anything special. Even bosses are just tougher versions of what you find on the map. (One element I like about good Japanese RPGs of this era is how boss fights usually change the rules in some way and require new tactics.)  I'd like to give more points for "encounters," and I would if there had been any logic to them.

• 3 points for magic and combat. You get a decent variety of damage, mass-damage, draining, and buffing spells, and I probably over-relied on auto-combat instead of exploring all their advantages and disadvantages.

      

I look for the right spell against a skeleton and an elemental.

      

• 2 point for equipment. Other than the usable items, you get sword and armor upgrades at fixed locations and events. I overlooked some of these.

• 1 point for the economy. Your 255 gold fills up fast. Generally, you always have enough for healing and maxing out your supply of items, which means the economy might as well have been dropped.

• 3 points for quests. There's a main quest with no choices, and I guess there are some side quests. I missed a few of them. I could have gotten some platinum armor if I'd solved a side quest involving a knight's ghost, and I could have gotten a fruit which would have fully refreshed my health and spell points in the final battles. There was also apparently a "spore" somewhere that would have had a chance of putting the king or dragon to sleep for a few rounds. I didn't strictly need any of this, but then again, I reloaded a lot in those final battles.

         

I forgot to recount this part, where you make the moon whole by climbing to the top of a tower and re-attaching a fragment.

      

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I'm really rating the platform in this category and not the specific game. I don't think the developers could have done any better with the graphic capabilities of the device (in fact, I think they tried pretty hard), and they created an interface that works well with the limited inputs, but I still didn't much like either. Sound effects are just some boops. Incessant music accompanies gameplay, so I muted the game for most of my time with it.

• 2 points for gameplay. Linear, not replayable, and a bit too simple, it at least didn't last very long. 

  

That gives a final score of 22. If this had been my first Game Boy game, I would have been unsurprised by this total, assuming the platform wasn't capable of a better RPG. Having experienced The Final Fantasy Legend and The Suffering of the Queen already, I would instead guess that this one was probably rushed so it would hit the market when it had little competition.

      

Notice how the title really only works with "sword." You'd never title a game Morning Star of Hope or Bec-de-Corbin of Hope or Sniper Rifle of Hope. There's just something about swords.

      

This is one of those games for which I might as well have just linked to someone else's contemporary review, said "ditto," and offered the GIMLET. Of course, I never know that until after I finish and then start scouting. Zenic Reverie, the "RPG Consoler," covered the game in 2014, and he offers a more detailed recounting of the narrative. He played it more honestly than I did (I let myself look at a walkthrough when I was stuck for more than 10 minutes or so) and thus got frustrated in more places. His review is peppered with phrases like "how did that make sense?" and he called it the "worst grind to date." Joseph Shaffer offered a similarly negative review in 2013 on Honest Gamers in which he also mentioned the nonsensical plot and puzzles and the grinding and backtracking. So it's not just me.

        

This was Kemco's first year for RPGs, although I think Ghost Lion for the NES was likely released earlier than this one. The company has a few dozen later console RPGs to its credit. They're still going strong as of this year. 

         

The shaman's "magic word" is the publisher and developer's names backward.

       

Why did I play this? It just came up on a random roll of the dice. I know that when I dip into console RPGs, many of my readers want me to play particular console RPGs, but I rather think my random method helps me get a sense of what the average was.