Game 494: Les Chevaliers de l'An Mil (1989)

        

Les Chevaliers de l'An Mil

"Knights of the Year 1000"

France
Independently developed; published by Ubisoft

Released 1989 for Thomson computers
Date Started: 18 July 2023

Date Ended: 27 July 2023

Total Hours: 11 (not finished)

Difficulty: Medium-Hard (3.5/5)

Rating: 30

Ranking at Time of Posting: 318/508 (63%)

           

Some of the more interesting RPGs that I've covered have come out of France. They haven't all been great RPGs, but they certainly stand out in memory: Mandragore, Tera, Le Maitre des Ames, Drakkhen--which I'm still not sure isn't actually Japanese. New ones keep coming to light. Narwhal, The Wargaming Scribe, just alerted me earlier this year to a possible new contender for the first French RPG: Infogrames' Le Jeu des 6 Lys (1984).

      

Les Chevaliers de l'An Mil (1989) is another obscure entry brought to my attention by Narwhal. It is perhaps the least innovative mechanically of all the French RPGs I've experienced, basically cloning Exodus: Ultima III, but it still manages to make its mark thematically. The player controls a party of up to 5 characters, but they're not heroes; they're monsters--agents of the Gods of Chaos--seeking to release the Black Plague on the world. That plot makes the title a bit of a mystery.

      

Unleashing a plague doesn't seem very "knightly."

         

The game released only for Thomson computers (1982-1989), French PCs meant to compete with the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. So far, I've only found two games--this and Tyrann (1984)--that had releases for the Thomson, and this is the only one released solely for the Thomson. [Ed. There are alot more ports and games. I was relying on the sources that make up my master game list rather than a Thomson-specific database.] Emulating has been a bit of a pain despite an excellent site dedicated to the system and its games. Thanks to commenter Tarnyko for helping me get over a crucial hump.

   

The game begins by having you create a named party (I named mine "Les Ferventes") and up to five characters to add to it. Races are trolls, orcs, dark elves, and "chaos dwarfs." (I gather that the latter is a race in the Warhammer universe; I'm not sure if the dates are right for it to have influenced this game). Classes are black guard, barbarian, sorcerer, demonist (despite the name, basically a cleric), anti-paladin (black guard/demonist), and necromancer (black guard/sorcerer). Attributes are strength, constitution, size, intelligence, power, dexterity, and appearance, which I believe is the RuneQuest/Basic Roleplaying list. Based on the main attributes, you have derived attributes of hit points and spell points.

    

Rolling for attributes.

                    

I created:

      

• Grendel, a troll barbarian
• Morque, an orc black guard
• Kafka, a chaos dwarf sorcerer
• Zalman, a dark elf demonist

       

You also get a random amount of money (in ecus) between 150 and 250. After character creation, you have a chance to spend ecus on armor and weapons, with the usual types of restrictions by character class. The name of the weapon also shows you its precise statistics, which I almost wish was mandated by law for other games.

       

A long list of weapons and their values.

        

Spellcasters get to spend their starting spell points on one or more spells from a list of about 20. The list of sorcerer spells, of which I could only afford the first five, is pretty mysterious, with entries that translate as "Dark Fear," "Dust Hand," and "Mystic Haze" among others. The manual is silent on spells, so I imagine you have to learn their uses through experimentation. The demonist list is a little more straightforward: "Cure Wounds," "Cure Poison," and such, though it also has some mysteries.

      

Sorcerer spells.

        

Once you settle on your party, a title card introduces the plot:

           

In the beginning was the balance. The balance was everything and ruled everything. It was the perfect equilibrium. Between good and evil, between law and chaos. Then came the gods, the universe, and, long after, the world and the creatures of the gods. The Gods of Law appropriated the world and populated it with strange creatures and men. The Gods of Chaos then concealed through the world vials containing a deadly disease: The Black plague. The Gods of Chaos invented their own creatures, in the appearance of men, to restore the two vials and thus destabilize the balance.

                

The game starts on a tiled landscape near the town of Sanctavilla. The interface uses the arrow keys to move and single-letter commands for everything else, including (A)ttack, Cast a (S)pell, (E)nter a city or dungeon, and (T)ransact. As longtime readers know, I consider "(Z)tats Clones" to be a special category of Ultima clone down to the use of the "Z" key to bring up character statistics. Chevaliers is almost a (Z)tats Clone. You actually use "J" to view a character sheet, but the "Z" key has you specify an attribute and then shows you how your characters rank with that attribute--a quick way to get a sense of who should represent the party in conversation, force a door, or pick a lock. 

      

Opening moments.

      

Towns are also pulled from the Ultima mode. They have a variety of services and NPCs who offer one-line hints. Sanctavilla had a temple, where you learn new spells, and an apothecary, where you can get healing.

   

Guards all say, "Get out of my sight, microbe, or I'll bust you." Others just say "hum" or "go see it next door!" (vas y voir à côté, in case I'm mistranslating that) and disappear. Some of the hints offered by other NPCs included:

      

• Dungeons are full of traps.
• Silver keys are found at the artisan's house.

        

Getting a hint. You do not want to try to talk to the guys to my north and east.

      

• Some living dead are immaterial creatures.
• You will find horses in the Town of Equus.
• The prison is very well-guarded.
• In certain towns, you will find guilds.
• You will need a key of great value to go to the Guild of Thieves.
• Watch out for brigands in the city.

      

That last hint could be warning about two things. First, when you're talking with NPCs, money randomly disappears. I don't know whether you're paying for hints or whether it's being stolen, but either way, it gets chipped away as you walk around. Second, if you talk to certain NPCs--apparently, any of them with a certain icon--they say, "You are going to die, dog!" and attack you.

   

I thus got my first taste of combat, which works pretty much the same way as Ultima III and IV. You're taken to a separate screen in which you take turns with enemies, each character getting exactly one action per round. Characters can only attack in cardinal directions, no diagonals. 

        

My first battle.

       

Because you only get one move per round, combat can be a bit tedious, as it was in both of those Ultima games. I was already getting antsy in the first battle. I won it handily and automatically looted some 300 ecus from the corpses (no separate chest-opening here). Unfortunately, it's apparently a crime to bare steel in a town even in self-defense, and the town guards swarmed me the moment combat was over. They were impossible to defeat. I tried fleeing, but fleeing in this game gives the enemy a chance to instant-kill you, and then they just re-attack immediately as soon as you're out of combat. My party was soon slain.

       

A full character sheet.

       

I then discovered another unpleasant thing about Chevaliers: it uses permadeath. My party and characters were wiped from the disk. For various reasons not worth relating right now, I couldn't use the save state function of the emulator, so I had to start over from scratch. I later got the emulator working right, so from here on, I took a save state every so often.

    

I continued exploring the continent, which bends and twists around rivers and mountain ranges. I tried to keep the coast on my right. Monsters--which you cannot see until they attack--attacked me about every 15 steps. Monsters in this game have original names but familiar icons. "Blops" look like orcs, "talamons" like snakes, "amarons" like boars, "narogs" like lions, and "yaroons" like deer. There's some kind of beetle whose name I missed. 

        

I don't remember what these guys were called.

      

Magic is treated a bit odd. It appears that each spellcasting character has a number of spell points that he can spend like currency to acquire spells. But once he has a spell, he can cast it indefinitely--nothing limits the number of castings. That said, spells are a bit under-powered. My sorcerer's "Mystic Lightning" is mostly worthless since he misses most of the time. My demonist's "Cure Wounds" keeps us alive, but only barely. It also means that the demonist hardly ever gains any experience, since characters only gain experience when they personally kill an enemy, and the demonist is usually busy with healing.

    

Most of all, though, combat is boring. Every enemy party has around 8-12 enemies who start a mile away. Once in melee range, my characters miss most of the time. Even easy battles take around 10 minutes.

        

Getting killed by some deer.

       

Once I hit 100 experience points with my lead two characters, they reached Level 2, which gave them extra hit points and boosted their attack abilities.

   

Enemies got harder as we got further from the starting town, but I also think they got harder as my characters gained more experience. It wasn't long before we didn't find any easy "blops" anymore. I got turned away from my exploration pattern by a party of "drankoins" (look like demons), which are capable of paralysis. 

        

I didn't last long after this.

       

I found a lot of dungeons--where I couldn't do anything because I didn't yet have any torches. I found two other cities, Pititus-Pontis and Mercatem. Both sold food, which was nice because I was running low. This is clearly one of those games where you spend half of your income on food. Pititus-Pontis also had an armory and a "weapon room" where I could spend money (way more than I had) to train and improve my attack skill. Mercatem had an apothecary, an "artisan" shop selling torches and keys (keys were way too expensive for me), and a guild, where they told me, "Out of here, profaner."

         

Finally!

     

Between the two cities, I learned:

   

• Increase your combat skill in a weapon room.
• Shrines are special places, well-hidden.
• You will need magical weapons against an immaterial monster.
• Thanks to horses, you will avoid many encounters.
• If you get too close to monsters, they will attack you.
• A guild is used by spellcasters to learn new ones.
• You can hire a thief at the thieves' guild.
• Magical arms are in coffers. 
• The corridors of the dungeons are barred with portcullises and doors.
• The vials are very well hidden and well guarded.

        

I keep wanting to translate "fioles" as "beans."

      

• Certain plaques provide you with valuable information.
• You will find lots of curious people in the prison. 

    

I also found a couple of "sanctuaries," but when I tried to enter them, I got the same, "Out of here, profaner" line. The manual mentions sanctuaries and suggests they have a special interface. I'm not sure how I enter them. Maybe I have to find something that disguises my monstrous nature.

       

That's racist.

      

With a few torches in hand, I tried a few dungeons. They break the Ultima mold by being top-down instead of first-person. I couldn't get far in any of them. Some of them had incorporeal enemies, like ghosts, for which I need to find magic weapons. In others, the enemies were just too hard. I did explore enough to see that pressure plates, secret doors, and switches might be a part of the dungeon experience. 

         

A pressure plate closed off the way to the exit.

     

The interface has been a bit of a nightmare. Part of it is the Thomson itself, part of it the game. If I'm reading the keyboard (and the emulator behavior) right, it's set up so that the default is that you have to hit SHIFT while selecting a number key on the top row (it also has a numberpad, but as I've groused about, my laptop doesn't). It also doesn't seem to have a BACKSPACE key. I mean, that's crazy--it must--but nothing on my own keyboard seems to emulate it. Even if it does, the game itself doesn't seem to recognize any form of "escape." If you talk to a shop owner and decide you don't want anything, it can be hard to get out of the interface. For all of these reasons, I often flub entering commands. The game is particularly unforgiving of errors, and I usually lose my turn when I make them. It also has a time limit of just a couple of seconds for entering commands, after which it says "too late" and moves on to the next character or enemy. The emulator is capable of remapping keys, but I didn't discover that until the end of this session and can't figure out how to deal with the SHIFT problem anyway.

      

I don't know how far I'll get with Chevaliers. By now, the fundamental experience that it offers has gotten pretty old, and the whole point of games like Ambermoon is that they do it much better. Antepenult may be the last time I was willing to travel all over a large iconographic game world stringing together one-line hints, and that game had much faster combat. I recognize, however, that if this was 1989, and I was a Thomson owner, I would be erecting a statue to author Laurent Freres for finally giving me what other kids had on their C64s. 

        

Any connection?

       

Before I wrap up, I wonder if my French-speaking readers might be able to help with a bit of a mystery surrounding the game's name. Googling it produces results related to the game but also lots of results related to what I take to be an archaeological project and exhibit on Lake Paladru in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region of southeastern France. I can't determine the date that the find was named. Do you think the game's name is a coincidence, or was it likely influenced by the archaeological find (a la Skara Brae, for instance)?

     

Time so far: 4 hours

 

****

 

Addendum:

 

I played the game for roughly another 5 hours after posting this.

     

The only spoiler I've been able to find online for the game is a world map, and I decided that I don't mind using it. It depicts a square world of around 120 x 120 tiles. Given the shapes of the islands at the edges, I suspect it wraps. The large central continent is the only landmass that you can explore at the beginning. To explore the northern portion, you have to make your way all the way to the east and the north via a thin strip of land. There are 10 dungeons and 4 cities on this continent, not including the two island locations that I cannot yet reach. 

       

The game world, with the towns I've discovered annotated.

   

The economy is brutal. You need money for weapon and armor upgrades and healing, but you're constantly spending it to replenish food. When I reached the city of Navilium (the only one I didn't explore above), I found a new financial goal: A boat, which costs 500 gold pieces.

   

During my explorations, Kafka finally hit Level 2 and got a bunch of spell points. There's a mage's guild in Mercatem, so I went there and upgraded my attack spell to "Fireball," which does a lot more damage than "Mystic Lightning." Zalman, as reported above, took forever to reach Level 2. Grendel plowed on through to Level 5. Levels came every 100 experience points for the first 4, but when Grendel hit 500 experience points, he didn't get Level 6.

   

More lore from Navilium:

     

• Any act of hostility in a city is severely reprimanded.
• Prehensio is an island facing a delta.
• One finds chests at the bottom of dungeons.
• You have no chance of accessing a vial if you are not the most powerful.
• You will need 2 types of key to open  doors or portcullises.
• Volaris is very different from all other cities.

      

I assume it's because of the thieves.

      

• Pay attention to boat prices.
• Ruins are filled with the living dead.
• Near chests you will often find gems.
• The paladins are there to keep the city in order

         

Some miscellaneous things about the game:

   

• Dungeons seem interesting, with various doors, pressure plates, messages, keys, and traps. But there are so many enemies that cause status effects (primarily poison and paralysis) that I don't think there's any way to effectively explore them until your demonist gains a few levels and you have spells that cure those conditions.

         

A dungeon room with doors and pressure plates.

          

• As torches run out in dungeons, the screen goes dark. You don't usually see this in a tiled, iconographic game. It even affects the combat screen. I assume if it goes out, you end up fighting enemies in pitch blackness.

     

Ghouls paralyze me in the darkness.

         

• The lack of any "escape" key (at least that I can find) drives me crazy. There are menus that you can't back out of unless you make a selection. If I sidle up to an armory and speak to the proprietor, as far as I can tell, the only way to get out of the menus without actually buying something is to try to buy something you can't afford, at which point the game says, "Impossible!" and returns you to the prompt. I've literally hit every key.

• NPCs can spawn in towns so that they're blocking access to the counters. Since NPCs never move, the only way to "fix" this is to leave town and hope they spawn elsewhere.

     

Games like this ought to come with a "shove" command.

       

• You can talk to enemies in combat. Sometimes they agree to end combat with no further hostilities. When this happens, you gain 5 experience points.  

      

Kafka prepares to cast a fireball.

     

Despite the exceedingly boring combat, I decided I had to play the game long enough to get a boat. I sat  near Navilium and grinded and grinded, watching my money slowly increase, annoyed to occasionally have to spend it on food. The enemies got harder and harder, and I had to reload a lot. When my purse finally topped 1,000, I triumphantly entered Navilium, walked up to the boat counter, and plunked down the money for a boat. The store took the money and then . . . nothing. There's no boat--not in the city, despite an obvious dock where you'd think one would appear, nor outside. 

   

I don't know whether this is a bug or whether I'm missing some game mechanic. If I can't figure it out, I'm going to have to turn this entry into a BRIEF until some help comes along.

    

Time so far: 9 hours