Ambermoon: Summary and Rating

 

As if we needed more fodder for our harp/lyre nitpicking: The instrument in this image has the strings in the wrong direction.

        

Ambermoon

Germany

Thalion Software (developer and publisher) 

Released 1993 for Amiga

Date Started: 28 March 2023

Date Ended: 1 November 2023
Total Hours: 82

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)

Final Rating: 51

Ranking at Time of Posting: 477/508 (94%)

     

Summary:

   

A quality sequel to a quality game, Ambermoon takes place on the same world as Amberstar after a cataclysm has shattered the planet. As society rebuilds, a new threat emerges. At first, it seems to involve the same demon/wizard whose imminent return drove the plot of the first game, but the party eventually determines that the true threat is lizard-like alien invaders intent on stealing the world's water. Their quest to stop the invaders takes them to the planet's two moons and beyond. The party begins with a single character--the Amberstar hero's grandchild--but expands to six as the party encounters PCs willing to join.

 

Like its predecessor, Ambermoon combines top-down locations with first-person locations, with influences from Ultima and Dungeon Master. Combat is turn-based and takes place on a quasi-tactical grid, but with players and enemies limited to their respective sides, and I suspect the original inspiration was either Phantasie or the Phantasie-inspired Legend of Faerghail. The RPG mechanics, including character development, NPC interaction, inventory, are all solid, and there are a number of satisfying puzzles. The world is open by geography, if not by plot. The only major negatives are the lack of sound effects and a continuously-scrolling interface that is technically innovative but also slow and cumbersome. Overall, Ambermoon is one of the few games of the 1990s that feels like it has all of the key elements of a modern CRPG. If none of those elements are the best that the era offers, neither are any of them very bad.

     

****

        

It would be irresponsible to wrap up my coverage without covering some of the content that I missed by taking my shortcut through the Thalion offices. (That's a "first," right? We've had developer Easter eggs in games before, but an entire dungeon based on the developers' offices? Can anyone think of any antecedents?) I didn't re-play any of it, but from what I understand from both your comments and videos that I watched:

    

• I only explored three of the palaces belonging to members of Morag's ruling council: S'Riel (the one who tried to help me), S'Orel (the one I killed on Lyramion), and S'Arin. The others belong to S'Endar, S'Trog, S'Kat, and S'Lorwin, and the owners are home in all the other palaces and must be defeated to get their keys.

        

This screenshot suggests I killed S'Arin, but I don't remember the math puzzle in S'Arin's palace, so I'm not sure what happened.

      

• S'Arin's palace features some math puzzles based on eight crystal balls that you find behind secret doors, each with a number on its surface. There are two magic mouths with riddles based on the balls. One of them asks  "What is all together?", looking for the sum of the numbers. The other asks, "What is all together when there are balls below a line and columns after a cross?" You somehow have to interpret this as: (The sum of the numbers on the balls) / (the count of the number of balls) * (the number of columns on the map). I agree with commenter Buck that the language is ridiculous. I'm almost sorry that I cheated you out of the rant it would have provoked.

• S'Trog's palace has a bunch of traps that must be deactivated with levers. S'Endar's palace has a bunch of traps, some of which are illusory, and you have to apparently rely on luck or reloading to figure out which ones are safe to walk through.

• S'Lorwin's palace is surrounded by a moat. You find plans for a sandboat in S'Kat's palace and have to take them back to S'Goldar in S'Angrila to build one.

• Somewhere on Morag's surface is a shop that sells riding lizards, making overland navigation faster.

• There's a random tower on Morag's surface in which you find a dying Moranian named S'Krel. If you give him the ¤6,000 water bottle from the shop in S'Angrila, he rewards you with a yellow orb and enough experience points to boost characters to their maximum levels. This would have made me mad, too. I'm glad I didn't find him.

• The yellow orb is what Valdyn needs to go home. He'll refuse to abandon the party if you try to take him back to the world teleporter, but the endgame text changes from what I experienced to reflect that he's able to use the yellow orb instead of waiting for scholars to manufacture one for him.

      

The text that a "completionist" got.

      

• There was an aspect to the interface that I completely missed until I read about it in Wikipedia: the 3D perspective changes slightly based on the height of the active character. This isn't really worth much beyond a "huh!," though.

      

My Thalion shortcut is, incidentally, the key to a speedrun for the game. This player did it in 10 minutes: Grab the staff from grandfather's house, run to the Thalion offices in Spannenberg, get all the Level 50 employees to join you, pick up every mandatory item that you need (principally the whistle that summons the giant eagle and the harp), fly to the temple, play the harp, run past the magic guardians and Morag dragons, and defeat the machine.     

     

I ignored this message.

      

There's a delightful exchange between Ambermoon author Karsten Köper and frequent CRPG Addict commenter sucinum on the Dungeon Master forum website. It's over 22 years old, and sucinum comes across as the 13-year-old fanboy he must have been. From his perspective, Ambermoon has "the best ending you can imagine for a computer game." When Köper responds, sucinum gushes that he has a script for a third game, Ambersun, already prepared. Köper says that he planned to call the third game Amberworlds before (apparently) ghosting sucinum. Perhaps sucinum will let us know what the plot to Ambersun would have been.

    

As for the plot to Amberworlds, I haven't found anything that offers any detail, but it almost certainly would have involved the world-teleporting technology revealed in the last act of Ambermoon, perhaps connecting the worlds of Ambermoon, Dragon Flight, and Lionheart in a way that goes beyond the simple Easter eggs of this game. It might have somehow involved the book in an unknown language that we found in the mines of Dol Kiredon. I suspect it would have revealed some previous advanced civilization that occupied all of the planets.

    

But it must be said that Ambermoon, unlike its predecessor, does not demand a sequel. There are some mysteries by the end of the two games, but no major dangling threads. In fact, Amberstar and Ambermoon together feel something like a trilogy already, since Ambermoon has an obvious break point. (The fact that I took a long break at precisely that point enhances the feeling for me.) A better-paced series might have ended Ambermoon with the invasion of the Temple of the Brotherhood and the discovery of the nature of the true threat; the third game would have involved voyaging to other worlds, with perhaps a bit more content than in the existing game.

     

That said, Ambermoon is a solid game. That I wanted to skip a bit of the end doesn't change that fact. It turns out I didn't skip very much, and honestly when I did it, I was only momentarily annoyed with how long the game was taking, not absolutely bone-weary to the point of hostility the way I was with Serpent Isle. It has good mechanics for character development, combat, equipment, magic, NPCs, and just about everything else I love about RPGs. "Good" is hardly a superlative, I realize, and I chose it carefully. Almost nowhere does the game achieve, or even stray towards, brilliance. But it is almost uniformly not bad. The one asterisk is in the interface: There wasn't a moment of gameplay in which I didn't wish that the authors had stuck with tiled movement. Other than that, it mirrors its predecessor--and exceeds just about every other game of the era--in getting essentially nothing wrong. I expect 4s, 5s, and 6s across the board in the GIMLET. For 1993, that's a superlative in itself.

      

I award the game:

    

• 6 points for the game world. It has a nice backstory, a heap of lore, and a few interesting plot twists that put it above the typical CRPG. It makes good use of its predecessor while telling its own original story. The connections with other Thalion games were fun. I just wish the game responded more to the characters' actions, particularly in respect to some NPCs.

      

I still think the authors must have been influenced by V.

     

• 5 points for character creation and development. It's good but uneven. The biggest negative is having little creation at all and forcing the main character to play a fixed class. I don't see how it would have required much tweaking to give that choice to the player. While character leveling is consistently rewarding, skill development is extremely front-loaded, and characters earn far more training points than they can spend. Spell learning points continue to remain valuable.

        

The main character at the end of the game.

     

• 6 points for NPCs. Those that can't join have a healthy amount of keyword-based dialogue. A satisfying number can join, and a replay might someday be fun with different class choices. I don't think I gave the original much credit for offering the ability to prompt dialogue by showing or giving an inventory item.

• 5 points for encounters and foes. Like its predecessor, it comes with an original monster list. They have a generally satisfying number of strengths and weaknesses, though not quite as extensive as any D&D game. The better "encounters" were the many puzzles that were both fair (exception above) and well-integrated with the plot. Still no role-playing choices, alas. 

• 5 points for magic and combat. The Phantasie-inspired combat works pretty well. Not as well as it would have worked on an open tactical grid, but well. I would have liked to see a few more options for melee characters, but the variety of spells is excellent, as is the mechanism for using items in combat. I would have liked to see a way to speed up combat. The "fast combat" option should have disabled enemy animations at the very least. 

    

I never got sick of this spell.

     

• 7 points for equipment, an excellent category that would have been boosted only with item descriptions and more randomization. Everything else is positive: the number of slots, the clarity of the datasheets, the uses of "Identify," and the variety and utility of items. I love the way that items become part of the interface. I suppose there's one other minor negative: the copious number of scrolls. I never came close to using them all.

       

Just when I'd reduced my scrolls to a manageable number.

       

• 4 points for the economy. There are useful things to buy, but the rewards are a bit too generous, and the economy is thus hopelessly broken about a third of the way into the game. Some services (repair) are under-utilized, and anyone who actually buys a potion (except attribute-boosting potions) or scroll is a fool.

• 4 points for quests. I would love to see a game in this engine with actual side quests. Here, there's at best a few side-areas. There are no choices or alternate endings except for the text changes involving Valdyn.

• 3 points for graphics, sound and interface. The graphics are improved from Amberstar, but I don't know how you seriously field a game in 1993 without any sound effects. The interface could have benefited from simple keyboard commands rather than the cumbersome use of the mouse and numberpad, and the 3D movement was never anything but infuriating. The developers there were clearly enchanted by a technology "advancement" that needed more time in the womb.

• 6 points for gameplay. Positive qualities are a relatively open world, a modest difficulty (tending slightly too easy), and a small amount of replayability. It's too long, but only at the end did I get to the point where I stopped looking forward to a session.

    

The final score of 50 is exactly what I gave Amberstar. I didn't engineer that, but I agree they're about even in quality--which is another point to the series, since sequels so rarely equal the originals. The categories aren't all even between the two games, but they vary only by a couple of points. [Ed. I was persuaded after this initially published that I was too harsh on graphics, sound, and interface, and thus increased the final score to 51.]

    

The company was a little too modest with this ad. They probably could have removed at least one of those qualifiers.

    

Given the lack of an official English release (I've been playing an unreleased version), it's no surprise that American magazines skipped Ambermoon. British magazines received preview versions in English, which explains this insulting, enraging review by Rich Pelley, who thinks all top-down interfaces owe their lineage to Zelda, all first-person interfaces are copying Eye of the Beholder, and "consoley" is a compliment. He rates it a 30% after only 4 hours, complaining about the simplicity of early-game combat. The review is full of idiotic jokes and non-sequiturs that any good editor should have hacked out. Any Brits who supported this magazine have a lot to answer for.

    

Fortunately, other European Amiga magazines were more discerning, with reviews ranging from a low of 79% (Amiga Format) to 93% (Play Time). Reviews were almost unanimous in praising the graphics (including the monster animation), music, story, and size of the game, but lamenting mostly the absence of sound effects. The continuously-scrolling 3D seems to have been received well by contemporary reviewers, which I understand. I think many of them would agree with me 30 years later that it hasn't aged well.

    

The reception was not enough to save Thalion from dissolution in 1994. Many of its employees made their way to Blue Byte Software, another German developer. These employees include producer Erik Simon, programmer Michael Bittner, composer Matthias Steinwachs, and graphic artist Thorsten Mutschall. Blue Byte's Albion (1995) clearly draws a lot from the Ambermoon interface and engine, and Mutschall's graphics would be noticeable anywhere despite the shift to a science fiction setting. The inventory system, character development system, and automap seem almost identical. I look forward to it, but it alas seems to be Blue Byte's only RPG.

         

A screen shot from Albion (1995) shows advancements in the interface but a similar art style.

       

Karsten Köper, the creator of the series, did not follow his colleagues to Blue Byte. Interviews with Thalion's former employees suggest that he was on the way out the door even before Ambermoon was finished, suggesting that there may not have been a third game even if Thalion had remained intact. (I listened to a podcast interview with Erik Simon and Jurie Horneman in which they indicate they were sick of high fantasy tropes and wouldn't have pursued a fantasy game on their own.) I'm not sure exactly what happened to Köper after that. He appears in the quality assurance credits of a few German games in the late 1990s and early 2000s (including one from Blue Byte), but it doesn't sound like full-time employment. As far as I can tell, he's never been interviewed in English. I'd love to fill that gap, but I'm afraid he might have been soured in the CRPG Addict during his one brief appearance.

   

In 2022, retro game designer Pyrdacor announced both Ambermoon Advanced and Ambermoon.net. My understanding is that the former is an ongoing expansion to the original game and the latter is a full rewrite, but I'm confused as to whether .net includes the Advanced material or whether they're separate projects. Both releases seem to offer interface improvements, including keyboard shortcuts and the ability to increase combat speed, but I'm curious to hear what else they offer--particularly in terms of new content--from anyone who has tried them. A trailer for Advanced promises new areas to explore, new monsters, new items, and new quests.

    

My rating of 50 puts Ambermoon at about the 93% mark on the ratings sheet. It is a rare game to achieve that position almost entirely on the strength of individual ratings of 6 or below. But as I'm often reminded with my students, co-workers, and employees, simple competence in everything almost always outranks genius in just one thing.