Game 122: Legend of Faerghail (1990)

    

Legend of Faerghail

Germany

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

Released 1990 for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS
Date Started: 8 November 2013 

As my longtime readers know, I'm a big proponent of the idea that great games transcend technology--that today's players can still enjoy the great titles of the early era, no matter how primitive their graphics and sound seem in 2013. Heck, if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't have just added dozens of titles to my backlist.

But at the same time, that doesn't mean I always want to feel like I'm playing an "old" game. I'm ready for 1990s developers to kick it up a notch, to show me that they're making use of SVGA, soundblaster, and better storage capacity. Hell, computers were already shipping with CD-ROMs in 1990, but I don't think there's yet a game on my list that wasn't available to players swapping floppy disks. I don't expect the next game to be Ultima Underworld or World of Xeen, but it sure would be nice to play a game that made me feel like those titles weren't very far away.

The Legend of Faerghail isn't going to be that game. Oh, sure, it's pleasant enough. It fuses a quasi-Bard's Tale exploration screen with a combat mechanism reminiscent of Phantasie. There are skill and language systems that do credit to the game. But for the most part, it feels like we've been here, done that.

Consider the attributes: strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, and wisdom. The races: human, dwarf, elf, halfling, half-elf, and half-orc. There is some innovation in the classes, with illusionists, healers, monks, barbarians, and blacksmiths joining the standard D&D gallery of paladins, warriors, rogues, priests, druids, and magicians. None of this feels like the developers sat down to really create something.

The skill system, while not exactly "new," adds something that some other first-person party games don't have.

That's my starting point, anyway, so let's see if Faerghail is able to impress me from here.

The back story has some original elements. It casts the PC as a dissatisfied young farmer. One night at the tavern, as he or she listens to adventurers swap tales of the monsters they've slain, a mysterious man named Sarian approaches. Sensing the PC's discontentment, Sarian suggests that he or she present himself or herself to the Count of Thyn for a mission. It seems that the elves have lately become inexplicably aggressive and have waged war on the region. Thyn is in desperate need of soldiers, and the count thinks that the PC might be able to convince the neighboring Count Hagror of Cyldane to spare some. The PC is instructed to scout the nearby inn for some companions, head to the blacksmith for equipment, and set off. Oh, and while the PC is on this diplomatic mission, he or she should also "find out the reason for the strange behaviour of the normally peaceful Elves and wipe out this cause of their aggression." I mean, I would think that this little side-quest would somehow render the main quest unnecessary, but whatever.

You begin by "looking for" characters in the inn by specifying what race, sex, and class combination, but of course this is all just a thin veil for creating the characters yourself. I didn't find that there was much variance in the attribute rolls to matter how many times I tried them. There are some odd inconsistencies here. Sex, race, and trade (class) are listed in that order, but the interface lets you go back and forth among them. If you start by selecting a female, you can't choose the smith or monk classes, but if you start as a male and select the smith class, then the game has no problem letting you go and change the sex to female. There are other restrictions based on race: no elf paladins, halfling barbarians (in fact, halflings can only be warriors or rogues), dwarf magicians, or half-orc druids, for instance, but it only takes reversing the trade/race selection order to make all of these combinations possible.

Creating a character. Despite allowing female half-orc barbarians, the game doesn't provide a proper character portrait for one.

I rolled the following six characters:

• Boone, a male human paladin
• Sandahl, a female half-orc barbarian
• Ladd, a male dwarven smith (the smith class, which can repair weapons and armor, is one of the few original contributions in this game, so I felt I had to try it)
• Grace, a female halfling rogue
• Holt, a male half-elf magician
• Chalke, a female human healer

Equipping Chalke's starting gear.

Once you assign and equip your characters, you're off to the town. Thyn is a menu city with an equipment shop ("emporium"), bank, inn, temple, and a "house of trades" where you can improve your skills, learn spells, and study languages once you have enough gold and experience. Lacking these, I immediately set off for the wilderness and was given a mysterious amulet on my way out of town.

The wilderness area looks much like those in The Bard's Tale II and III, with the need to maneuver around trees and such. A big difference is that the game passes in real time even if you just stand still.

While beginning my mapping process, I was approached by a warrior named Siegurd who wanted to join the party, but I didn't have any room. Guessing that this game will be a lot like The Bard's Tale III, with floating NPCs able to take empty slots, I decided to dump Sandahl the barbarian (the game said that she went off to the nearest inn) and bring Siegurd on board. Once he was in the party, he told me that he was heading to Cyldane, too.

Not long after, I had my first taste of the game's combat, against "4 elven officers." The combat system is somewhat like Phantasie, with the various "ranks" of enemies facing each other. You have some initial options--attack, greet, talk, flee--after which (assuming you attack) each character can choose to attack, defend, cast a spell, sneak, or use an object. Attacking characters can move forward into one of two ranges: "kill" range, which maximizes offensive capabilities, and "attack" range, which sacrifices some offense for defense.

Once you line up your attacks, you can either (A)ttack to watch them execute one at a time. A little animation appears briefly in the lower left, and the screen tells you the results. You have to acknowledge them with the ENTER key.

Or you can just enter "quick" combat and see the results of the actions, including the number of hit points lost, any damage done to weapons or armor (which is a thing I'll cover in a later post), and bonus points earned. You don't get a summary of the enemies slain, but you do see their little icons disappear if you've killed any.
        
When the combat is over, the game gives you a summary of the experience and gold earned by each character. The experience seems to be dependent on how successful you were with your various attacks and movements, and in the first few combats, my NPC, Siegurd, got the lion's share.

The game remembers your actions and positions and not only sets them as the defaults for the next round, but also for the next combat, which is nice. A couple of times, when I faced very low-level, easy enemies, it was simple just to cycle through the combat rounds. Enemies I've faced in the opening area include elves, orcs, bandits, rats, bears, and deer. They don't just appear out of nowhere--you see them walking about the area, but oddly they all look like ghosts.

Even right at the beginning, combat is quite difficult and deadly, and I kept losing characters. You can pay to resurrect them at the temple, but it's pretty expensive for a starting party. I had to jettison some of them and replace them with other characters of the same name.

The game has a reasonably funny joke if you select a living character for resurrection, though note the punctuation, which we'll talk about in a minute.

Hit points and spell points don't appear to regenerate automatically; you have to rest to recover them. The easiest and safest place to do this is in the inn back in town. I also find I have to return to town now and then to replenish rations, which my characters automatically eat at a rate of six per day. The inn is also the key to restoring the party's morale, which progresses from "good" to "mediocre" to "alarming" depending on how long you've been walking around and how many wounds you've taken. At least, that's what I thought. But I can't seem to get my morale off "alarming" no matter what I do, even though all my characters are "good," have full hit points, and are well-rested.

So far, I've mapped a bit of the opening wilderness area. The way the game presents walls and objects is very odd. Consider the image below. In most games, this would mean that there is a wall to the left, right? Unfortunately, no. I'm actually standing at the corner of the apex of a north/south wall and an east/west wall, and I'm facing south. Walls, trees, and doors that are directly to your right or left don't show up in the view at all; you have to turn and look at them. This is in contrast to how most games depict walls in the active square, and it keeps hosing up my maps.

Incidentally, you don't accidentally want to bump into walls or trees. Some character takes significant hit point damage.

In my original draft of this opening post, I spent a long time complaining about the horrible spelling, grammar, and punctuation in both the game and the manual. Later, I realized it was developed by a German company and everything had been done in translation. While this means I won't spend as much time making fun of them, I will say that if you're a non-English-speaking game publisher and you're producing an English version of your game, you might want to hire someone who actually speaks English to translate the manual and in-game text. Consider these two paragraphs from the manual:

[Wisdom] is the man attribute of Clerics, Druids and their powerful 'lower' classes, i.e. - Rangers, etc. This talent enables the 'lower class magician' to perform magic by use of memory / wisdom; a Cleric may perform magic without the use of a spellbook and well learned phrases - as a 'normal' magician would not... Female characters have, more often than not - a somewhat higher Wisdom bonus.

The second kind [of role-playing game] is the 'real' role-playing-game: Here, a group of gamers meet, and each player 'plays' a character. A gamesmaster 'directs', (tries to direct) the game, (in computer-role-playing games, the computer simulates the gamesmaster's functions) - controls all NPCs, and all random occurrances (with the use of dice), steers the group into situations of which he gamers often have no influence (and are now and again not allowed to have), and guides the destinies of the player-characters. The gamer tries to 'play' his character (created using dice, and with differing traits) as realistically as possible within the fantasy, or science fiction world of the gamesmaster.

We've got misspellings, unnecessary uses of quotes (and the wrong kind of quotes), dashes mixed up with commas (and the wrong kind of dashes), unnecessary hyphens, unnecessary commas, parentheses immediately following commas, and an overall description of "role-playing-games" that manages to utterly confuse me as to what they are despite having played them for 30 years. The author is absolutely in love with "i.e." and "etc."; both occur on almost every page, sometimes multiple times, often with the "I" capitalized.

There isn't enough text in-game for it to really bother me, so I'll let it go from here.

There's not much else to say at this point. I think I have enough experience for at least a couple of my characters to level up, but that costs around 1,500 gold pieces, and I haven't come anywhere close to that yet (an average battle might give me 4 per character).