Darkside of Xeen: Won!

A final score in the billions is a good example of the inflation of everything in this game.

       

My last entry must have been maddening for anyone who knows the game well. I was minutes from winning, but I kept allowing myself to get distracted.

   

To win Darkside proper, I just needed to finish going up the various levels of Castle Alamar. Level 2 had a large area full of rings of elemental power, with four "sundials" in the corners. If I tried to walk in the elemental area, I got dumped back to the first floor. Clearly, I had to set the dials, but to what?

   

For some reason, I expected the answers might be found on the elemental planes, so I went back to the skywalk and revisited the Plane of Fire. That was a waste of time, but more on that in a bit. While I was there, I remembered that I'd taken screen shots of about 15 statues with various clues last time, so I went sorting through those. One of them said: "Nine is the time." I thus set all the dials to 9 and opened a way to a stone head in the center of the level who asked me Alamar's real name. I answered SHELTEM, and the way to the next level was open.

      

This is one way to avoid having to grout.

   

The next level had a bunch of individual squares of each of the four elements. I had to figure out the safe path. Again, a statue had my back. One of the statues in the basement had a long string of letters representing air, earth, fire, and water, and together they traced the safe path through the elemental forces and to the stairs.

   

The ending was anticlimactic in terms of our own participation. A cinematic took over as we went up the last set of stairs. It shows Sheltem sitting on his throne. "Come to me," he says, as the door opens. Someone from the party tosses Corak's soul box into the room. It lands on the floor; the lid pops open; and Corak emerges. 

       

I still don't understand exactly what these guys are made of.

       

"Corak?!" Sheltem screams. 

    

"Yes, it is I. You have nowhere to run, Sheltem."

"Nor do you!" Sheltem retorts. He takes off his helmet, revealing a scarred and burned face--half-destroyed, really. "I'm ready for you this time. This fight will be your last."

    

Then I shall head to Gotham City!

     

"I cannot fail!" Corak declares as their battle begins. We get about half a minute of the two entities casting spells at each other. Finally, Corak bounces some kind of energy beam off the ceiling and then Sheltem's throne, hitting Sheltem in the back and driving him into Corak's grip. 

    

This is just a bizarre-looking throne room.

        

As they grapple, Sheltem says, "Admit your defeat, Corak."

  

"I do," Corak replies. "Initiate self-destruct, Code zero-zero-one."

       

"Do not want!"

     

"What?! No! No!" Sheltem hams, as some kind of energy dissolves both entities as well as the floor beneath Sheltem's throne room. For some reason, the hole in the floor shows open space beyond, including a nearby planet. As their remains get sucked out into space, a bolt comes out of somewhere and blasts away Sheltem's tower. That seems like an unnecessarily thorough self-destruct sequence.

       

What are we even looking at?

    

The party then gets a winning screen, but of course things aren't over yet. The next screen has a note from the Dragon Pharaoh that the World of Xeen still needs us and that we should return to the Great Pyramid.

   

If you're interested, my score at this point was 2,523,228,511.

    

The game reloads in Castleview. We cast "Town Portal" to get to Olympus and then took the skyship to the top entry of the Great Pyramid. There, the Dragon Pharaoh outlined the steps necessary to bring about the final destiny of Xeen: turn on the four machines in the corners of the other side of the world, awaken the elemental sleepers on this side of the world, rescue Prince Roland, and open the way to the cloud world above Darkstone Tower. We had already rescued Roland, of course.

    

Much of the rest of the game was perfunctory. We visited each of the elemental planes in turn. Each had elemental enemies aspected to the plane: fire idols, water terrors, earth blasters, and whirlwinds. Some of them were hard to hit even for my high-level party, but they couldn't really damage us, and when we did hit, they died in one or two. Each plane had a single treasure chest with 1,000 gold and a few items. Each had a shrine that offered us an elemental "test," the purpose of which is unclear. And each had a statue that together told us the exact same things that the Dragon Pharaoh had just told us about how to win the game.

      

That sounds like a weapon in a Buck Rogers game.

   

From there, we returned to the Clouds side, where the only difficulty was judging how many squares to "Teleport" to the floating platforms in each corner. Once there, we activated four reflectors, each aspected to one of the four elements.

       

Maybe it doesn't know the words.

       

To open the way to the clouds above Darkstone Tower, I needed the Chime of Opening from the Southern Sphinx. I was somewhat annoyed by the dungeon. At Level 150, I still had to buff strength to open the coffins (none of which had anything anyway), my ninja failed at disarming most traps, and everyone kept getting cursed. It was trivial to drop a "Lloyd's Beacon" and zip over to Vertigo for healing and uncursing, however. The monsters were easy enough--dragon mummies and ghost mummies and phase mummies. Being able to kill them in one hit somewhat justified all the leveling I'd done.

   

When multiple dragon mummies don't bother you, it's time for the game to end.

       

Still, the dungeon seemed to be designed to troll me. There's a section of pendulum and blade traps that can tear apart even a high-level party, and a couple of enchanted candles wanted me to pay 2 million gold, each, to disable them. Who has that kind of cash at this point in the game? I nearly ran out of money having the temple cast "Uncurse." Then there were these barrels that just handed out 2 million experience points, as if experience isn't utterly worthless by this point in the game.

   

Either this is just to screw with players, or the game really has no handle on its own economy.

     

The sphinx was three levels, and it had the same sort of deal as the northern sphinx I explored a lifetime ago. We had to descend into the basement to find the letters that spell the sphinx's name, then speak that name at the stairway from the main level to the upper level. It was like the developers read my last entry, because as one final needle, they made the sphinx's name PICARD. 

    

Actually, I guess that wasn't the sphinx's name, but rather the mummy that rules the sphinx from his throne on the upper floor. He said he'd give me the Chime of Opening in exchange for a widget ("a hypothetical item of which its existence has never been proven"). We had one from ages ago. I couldn't remember why, but a check online shows that we got it for bringing Halon the Inventory a hot lava rock. Picard gave us the chime, and we warped out of there. Honestly . . . a "widget"? If you're the developer of this game, how do you not make Picard demand a Tribble instead?

     

If the revival series has any guts, it will end with Picard getting mummified on a distant, flat world.

       

I steeled myself for Darkstone Tower, forgetting that I'd already cleared it, so that was a nice surprise. I just had to return to the top staircase and go up to the cloud level. There, we met the game's final challenge: a pointlessly long spiral walkway with little signs advertising New World Computing's other games. It took a good 10 minutes to follow the path all the way to its terminus. I feel like they should have thrown in some combats here. 

       

Did you have to disable "Teleport"?

      

The walkway ended at yet another pyramid, and entering it triggered the endgame sequence for the World of Xeen expansion. You can watch it on YouTube, but I'll summarize it for the sake of completeness. The image shows a domed platform on the top of a very long pole--almost a space elevator. I have no idea where this is supposed to be. I guess maybe the final pyramid takes you there, but the in-game graphic doesn't show anything extending upward.

        

Where did this thing come from?

        

"And so the call went out to the people throughout the lands of Xeen that the prophecy was nearing completion," we learn. "They came in great numbers to witness the momentous occasion." As we're about to see, one hopes that they came in total numbers. On a dais surrounded by packed bleachers, Queen Kalindra and Prince Roland get married. Kalindra "presents" the Cube of Power and Roland "presents" the Scepter, and these artifacts are combined on something called the "Altar of Joining." 

         

The Ancients originally seeded each XEEN with three artifacts, but that got awkward.

         

A light bathes the room, shoots upward from the chamber, and reaches an apex in space above the world of Xeen, which we see now for the first time as it is: a thin rectangular wafer. (The terrain seen on the Clouds side is a pretty good match for what you find in-game.) The beam splits and arcs from its apex, with four separate beams going to the corners of the land and hitting the four reflectors. Somehow, these reflectors do less reflecting and more relaying, sending the beams around to the Darkside, where they form their own apex. 

     

My screen shots are going to be lag behind my descriptions for a while.

        

I'd love some geometry major to tell me what shape we have at this point. If the lines were straight, we'd simply have a couple of pyramids with rectangular bases (I don't believe "pyramid" presumes the base is square), joined at the bases. But instead, the graphic shows the lines arcing to each corner, forming something like a Reuleaux polyhedron but with a flat base.

   

Whatever the shape is called, the game pretends that two of them joined at the base basically form a sphere. A bunch more beams of light appear, giving shape to the sphere, which then turns solid. There's a final flash, and we're suddenly looking at a planet with continents and water and everything.

         

The original Xeen looks a bit like a Pop Tart.

      

This is not uncool, but there are a few problems. I have no problem with the idea that we just created a planet. The game already established that there are portals to the four elemental planes at the corners of the world. It's not a stretch to suggest that by opening those portals and using some combination of magic and technology, the ancients could channel and manipulate the elemental forces in such a way as to create a planet. I might have rewritten the terminology a bit. The "reflectors" might become something like "focusing beams" or something, but I'm otherwise down with the concept. 

       

See, to be "reflectors," there needs to be a beam coming out somewhere.

      

My issue is that the graphics suggests that the old two-sided Xeen forms the core of the new world. You literally see the sphere forming around it. I don't know if the sphere is hollow or solid, but either way, the people in that dome are in for a tough time. What I would have done is show the dome--which already looks like a flying saucer--popping off its spindle, heading up into space, and then firing the beam downwards. You could then imagine that it was like an ark, keeping the inhabitants safe until they could land on the new world. 

  

A better ending all around would have been to set the endgame in the core of the world rather than the clouds above it, then show the new planet sort-of "puffing" into existence out of the existing wafer. You could then pretend that the existing structures were preserved on the new world.

      

Okay, I'm with you so far, although we have to assume there's something in space causing the apexes to form where they are.

     

But sure, if I was willing to accept multiple VARNs attached to a CRON, I'll accept this. It's a cool ending to the lore of the series, and I wish the game had been more interested in that lore than making Star Trek references. Might and Magic is best when it gives you hints about its universe to ponder. Think about pyramids in general. What are we to make of them, and the clearly Egyptian themes like sphinxes and mummies and pharaohs? Is this just a clumsy borrowing of ancient Earth culture, or is there a deeper suggestion here that the Ancients visited Earth, or even came from Earth? (The answer is almost certainly the former, but it's more fun to pretend it's the latter.) Not only do we later encounter a pyramid on Enroth, but its guardians are called defenders and sentinels "of VARN." How does that jibe with previous lore?

     

See, this is where you lose me.

       

We never did find out what happened to the Might and Magic III party that supposedly "beamed down" to Xeen. If they were the original inhabitants of Newcastle, that doesn't explain how they later made it to Enroth. If the party in Clouds is supposed to be the same party, it doesn't explain why they don't have the same default names, or why they're busted back to Level 1. One possibility is that Enroth orbits the same star as Xeen--that it's that other planet you can see in many of the Xeen screenshots. The III party beamed down, got lost or had other adventures, and later hopped back into one of the two crashed ships and flew to the sister world.

     

A couple of days ago, commenter Jason Mehmel posted some excellent insights as to why the developers might have allowed such jarring transitions from serious plot to slaptstick comedy and nerdy references. In a concurring reply, P-Tux7 remarked both accurately and prophetically: "I'm pretty sure 'SUPER Goober'" was still burned red-hot into Chester's corneas when he watched the endings (the first of Darkside, and then Xeen as a whole) try to be awesome and heartwarming."

    

The simple fact is, I highly value good lore. It hasn't come up that often on my blog because so few games do it well, even through the 1990s, but I highly prize a good setting and backstory in which you learn little pieces of it as you explore. This is probably why Morrowind remains my favorite RPG, and why I feel so positively about The Elder Scrolls in general. The world-building is massive, and while a casual player will experience the major themes, names, and plot, I love that practically every dungeon I explore, every house I burgle, every NPC I speak with, is going to tell me something interesting about the world.

        

What's happening to all the people on Xeen?

       

You can count on one hand the game series that even attempt to build an interesting game world through 1993. Of them, I have to somewhat "write off" the Dungeons and Dragons games, just because you need so many external sources to really involve yourself in the game worlds. After that, you only have a few things left: Star Control, Starflight, Ultima, and Might and Magic might be a comprehensive list. In 15 years and 500 games, we have maybe four series that have any sense of world-building--one of the things that I most look for in a game--so I hope you can understand why I get so irked when developers undermine their own world-building with a bunch of nonsense. Being a fan of an ongoing setting is fun--see all the great discussions people have about the Star Wars and, yes, Star Trek universes, Babylon 5, Doctor Who, Brandon Sanderson's "Cosmere." Those fans forgive occasional lapses. The words are big and complicated, after all. Some of the most fun in fandom is trying to reconcile seeming inconsistencies or plot holes. "The author forgot" is never any fun. Let's find an in-universe reason that the Eagles didn't fly Frodo to Mount Doom or no one ever used the "Holdo maneuver" before. I want to find an in-universe reason that we never meet the Might and Magic III party on Xeen but they somehow show up on Enroth later. But that desire is weakened by every pair of flying feet and every mummy named "Picard." Why would I put effort into a setting whose author clearly didn't care? This is what gets Star Wars fans so upset about the last trilogy.

     

Scratch that theory.

      

"Your problem," you now want to tell me, "is that the Might and Magic series was never meant to be taken that seriously." First off all, sod of with the passive voice. I'll believe that it "was never meant" to be taken seriously when Jon Van Caneghem shows up in the comments and says so. Second, if an author doesn't want his work taken seriously, the least he could do is not tease the audience. Make it outright parody, like Keef the Thief. Don't make me believe in the Avatar and then send him to Mars. Imagine getting all the way to the A Dream of Spring and finding out that Jon Snow's parents are Lyanna Stark and Bozo the Clown.

    

Here, the opposite happened. By the end of my last entry, the New World Crew had gotten me to the point where I was ready to wash my hands of the entire series. Then, Xeen ends with a bunch of stuff that makes it interesting again. I don't like being yanked around this way. My memory is that it gets a little more stable with The Mandate of Heaven, but unfortunately it's going to be a long time before we get there.

   

Final Time: 44 hours