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Monday, August 19, 2024

BRIEF: Paladin II (1992)

There we go with "version 1.0" again. I'd rather they lied to me and started at "version 2.3."
     
Paladin II
United States
Omnitrend Software (developer); Impressions Games (publisher)
Released 1993 for DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST
Rejected for: Insufficient character development
              
I investigated Omnitrend's Paladin (1988) back in 2011, won a couple of quests, and decided that while it was a decent squad-based strategy game, it wasn't enough of an RPG to meet my definitions. Thirteen years later, I make the same ruling about its sequel. In 2011, I numbered and scored it anyway, but I decline to do so now.
    
The first game had you in charge of a titular paladin, who despite his name was more like a mercenary. Some of the quests were a bit evil. Someone looked up the definition of the word between the two games, because in the sequel you play a "legendary hero, and a knight of great renown" with a specific mandate to "seek out and destroy evil and to defend and protect the weak." This is accomplished through a series of 20 independent quests with specific objectives and time limits: rescuing hostages, defeating bandits, slaying trolls, finding stolen property, defeating evil wizards, and so forth. The game even comes with a scenario builder so you can create your own.
         
Setting up the game. Creating a new paladin just involves choosing a name.
     
Playing each scenario is similar to being in permanent combat in a traditional RPG like the Gold Box games or Knights of Legend (1989). The party takes turns moving across a large map. Each character has a number of "movement points" that serve as an energy pool for walking, attacking, casting spells, and using items. You don't need to exhaust one character before moving on to the next--you can cycle freely among them. When you're done, you end the turn, and the enemy characters get to go.
       
Our goals for the mission.
      
The paladin and his allies have no permanent inventories, but they can find a variety of gear during the missions, including potions of healing, magic swords and shields, explosive crystals, Amulets of Levitation, and magic scrolls. 
         
An early scenario is called "Capture," and it asks you to wipe out a group of bandits led by a warlord named Kesrin and stop them from selling dangerous scrolls to an evil mage. You're joined on the quest by three swordsmen, a thief, a mage, and a ranger. It took me four tries to learn the controls and conventions well enough to win the scenario, and I found myself enjoying it by the end. It's very tactical, with considerations of character attributes, gear, terrain, facing direction, obstacles, traps, spells, and usable items. It has just the right amount of complexity, I think, although as with Knights of Legend, I wouldn't mind if the maps were smaller and it were a bit easier to find the enemies. 
     
My paladin (leftmost character) attacks an enemy from the side.
       
As with the original, timing seems to be everything. You definitely don't want to run up to enemies and then end the turn; that just gives them a free round of attacks. You need to engineer the opposite, or at least stage your characters so you can rush the enemy and attack a few times in the same round. Spells and some usable items are immensely powerful, but costly, so you have to save them for the right circumstances.
    
Finding the evil scrolls--and what looks like a demon.
      
I can report that the graphics and sound are a little better than the predecessor, although the game commits the common early-1990s sin of trying to depict too much with too few pixels. The characters are supposed to have cloaks and armbands and facial hair, but they just mostly look like blobs to me (my colorblindness undoubtedly plays a role). The controls are significantly improved, with redundant mouse/keyboard commands and options to turn off animations so you can get through the whole thing faster. You can move diagonally, unlike the original, but movement is still a little janky; it takes too long by keyboard, but the mouse just flat-out doesn't work a lot of the time, refusing to deposit characters where you try to drag them.
    
Available spells for the mage.
     
While I admire the tactics, the missions just seem awfully long. You spend a lot of time just mincing your way across the map; it perhaps would have been better if you could move the characters as a unit when not in combat, or at least set movement paths that they could automatically use from round to round, like in Warlords II.
    
The "paladin died" screen.
       
The characters have attributes--specifically, skill levels on "Melee," "Aiming," "Seeing," and "Detecting"-- and the game is almost an RPG in that these values can increase after a mission. But they can only increase for the paladin (the only permanent character), and only if he participates actively in the mission. When I won "Capture," my paladin's "Melee" and "Aiming" skills went up by 2% each. That technically passes my definition of an RPG, but my paladin started with "Melee" and "Aiming" values of 20%. He'd have to play 10 missions (and get rewarded for all of them) to even get to 40%. And that's just one character out of up to a dozen that you control in missions. Character development is thus not a primary feature of gameplay. It's a small bone to toss players without unbalancing the difficulty of the missions.
     
And the victory screen. Or else I'm shoving that wizard off a cliff.
        
Despite my rejection, I think it could be a fun game if you like tactical combat. Allen Greenberg gave it a positive review for that reason in the March 1993 Computer Gaming World. ("A paladin, of course, is an apprentice knight," he tells us. What?!) Dragon, on the other hand, in the same issue that gave five stars to Lemmings (1991), gave it only two stars, with criticisms towards the interface, speed of the game, and graphics. 
    
Connecticut-based Omnitrend specialized in strategy and simulation games, including the Universe series (1983/1986), the Breach series (1987/1990/1995) , and the Rules of Engagement series (1991/1993). The company is still around today, but they left game design in the mid-1990s to focus on communications software.
 

35 comments:

  1. I noted that my version of Darklands was 483.07.

    This game reminds me of Time Horn which you covered a while ago. I guess more accurately, Time Horn should have reminded me of Paladin I.

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    1. You're right. I completely forgot about Time Horn. Did I say anything about Paladin in it? . . . I did!

      That game had four persistent characters, though, and a lot more in the way of character development.

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    2. I came here to make an off-topic comment about a rare Italian game suddenly appearing in your “Upcoming” list and was welcomed by a comment referring to the only other Italian CRPG appeared on this blog. A very nice coincidence!

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  2. Would definitely buy communications software that had Confuse and Fireball options

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    1. Audible laughter was produced.

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    2. In my fairly robust experience, comms software usually has confusion enabled by default.

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    3. Thanks to Bluetooth, these days I'm lucky to get anything casted except Silence.

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  3. What is the plan going forward when it comes to more strategy/tactics based games?

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    1. I'll be inclined to include them if character development is a more important part of gameplay, or if the game has other RPG elements like persistent inventories or quests (e.g., the Warlords series). If they end up getting too numerous, I'll have to think about changing the rules.

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  4. [editing my game list] “I guess I can add this one.”

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  5. "Or else I'm shoving that wizard off a cliff."

    This is Sparta!

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  6. Regarding "apprentice knight": I'd bet real money that CGW's critic got themselves tripped up on "padawan," from Star Wars.

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    1. AlphabeticalAnonymousAugust 19, 2024 at 9:07 PM

      I would take that bet. I think the term 'padawan' hadn't been introduced until the prequels (Chapters 1-3) came out around the turn of the century, yes? I was fairly into Star Wars in the 1990s and I don't recall offhand the term 'padawan' ever being used.

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    2. In my memory, it was in circulation - maybe from comic books or novels? I was not deep into that fandom, though, so my memory could be playing tricks on me.

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    3. I think your memory is playing tricks on you, since Google Books doesn't know this word that early.

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    4. I was reasonably into the EU stuff through the mid 90s - the novels and some of the Dark Horse comics - and “padawan” was definitely not in circulation; it was introduced in Episode I.

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    5. I thought he confused paladin with a squire. They didn't have Wikipedia back then to quickly check. I would expect a regular CRPG reviewer to know the difference by heart but I don't think Greenberg was one.

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    6. Yes, in 1993 tabletop D&D was still firm on the definition that Paladins are knights with a strict code of honor, like Sir Galahad.

      It wasn't until the 2000s that D&D started using "variant paladins" that are evil and/or chaotic, and can act as they please without any code or honor. Nowadays RPGs have a lot of so-called paladins that have nothing to do with the classic definition.

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    7. And of course I would expect a regular CRPG reviewer to know tabletop D&D.

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    8. I did some Googling and found one poster asserting that "The word also appears in the 1993 series Tales of the Jedi as well as the series Knights of the Old Republic (the comics of course, since they came before the games)." But obviously even this is too late to help with Paladin II from 1992. Looks like I'd lose that bet!

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    9. I thought it was a plausible speculation based on the sounds of the words alone, but yeah the timing isn’t right.

      (I saw that note about Tales of the Jedi using the word “padawan” but I’m a bit skeptical; there’s no specific citation, the otherwise-obsessive Wookiepedia makes no mention of anything like that, and I just checked the RPG supplement compiling info on the TotJ characters and setting and the word is never used)

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    10. Wookipedia seems quite insistent that it's from 1999 -
      "The term "Padawan" first written as "Padawaan" appeared as far back in George Lucas's first story treatments for the 1977 film Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, then titled as Journal of the Whills. It wasn't heard, however, before the filming of the 1999 film Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace"
      https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Padawan#Behind_the_scenes

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  7. Think of the Dragon magazine as you like, but 'Lemmings' (1991) definitely was a five star game.

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    1. Oh god, now I have that song stuck in my head again :P

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    2. Yeah, it's one of the best video games of all time. In my book it's 10/10 (or maybe 9.5/10, but it's close to percection).

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    3. Yep, agreed. Giving 5/5 to Lemmings seems appropriate. Covering Lemmings in Dragon less so, but I suppose they had their reasons.

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    4. You think Lemmings was a 5/5 game for an RPG magazine?

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    5. Considering Dragon magazine routinely covered things that aren't RPGs (such as board games, fantasy stories, and generic geek humor), yes Lemmings deserves those five stars. And arguably, six stars.

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    6. The same issue also gave five stars to M4, Push-Over, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Amazon: Guardians of Eden. The Incredible Machine got four.

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  8. Apparently, you could import your character from the first Paladin (assuming in your case you kept it for thirteen years and probably across different computers) or Breach 2.

    I don't recall -that- many CRPGs which made this possible not just for sequels, but even across franchises / game series. BT 3 comes to mind where besides characters from the previous games you could also import those from U3, U4 and the first three Wizardry scenarios (whether the latter ones made sense is another question). Another example would be some Gold Box entries.

    "I'd rather they lied to me and started at "version 2.3." "

    And then you and your commenters would think 'there has to be an earlier released version' and search for it high and low - what a collective waste of time that would be, so careful what you wish for ;-).

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    1. Apparently Omnitrend developed an "Interlocking Game System" around the Breach games where the spaceship game Rules of Engagement would sometimes resolve a battle by launching Breach 2, having you play a scenario, and then transferring the gained experience back to your fleet commander in Rules of Engagement . So these folks obviously worked very hard on inter-game compatibility. Though letting you import a character from the fantasy Paladin to the science-fiction Breach 2 seems a bit much.

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    2. I can't believe people forgot about Centauri Alliance allowing you to take characters from Bard's Tale 3 and I think more games on top of that, maybe a Might and Magic game?

      Anyway, they're neat ideas, but judging by the Omnitrend games I've played and how Centauri Alliance came out, it was definitely time wasted not working on more important aspects of the game.

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    3. I just had a flashback about how one thing that NFT enthusiasts (remember NFTs?) said they would accomplish is that they would let you bring items and characters from one game to a completely different game, as if that made the slightest amount of sense.

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  9. Another game I wanted to like more than I actually did. I fired this up about six months ago after it came back to me, so funny that I should see it as a BRIEF on your site now.

    It isn't an RPG, I agree, but I perhaps thought something more could be strung together with campaigns but it never really worked like that. As you say, the controls were confusing, the 'improvement' in your main character (and only character) so slight and the lack of connecting threads made this an interesting but ultimately not very good game.

    What I do note is that you gave this a BRIEF due to an element of character development. I wonder therefore, if you'd be giving UFO:Enemy Unknown the same treatment sometime down the line.......

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