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Friday, August 9, 2024

Enchantasy: Half and Half

These battles are getting harder and harder.
     
As I start this entry, it's been almost three weeks since I've played the game. That's never a good situation to be in. When I play games for pleasure, I routinely drop them entirely if too long passes between sessions, a fate that befell Baldur's Gate III a couple of months ago (although I did get far enough to have technically "won" the game, if you regard a certain bad ending as "winning"). With Enchantasy, there's the additional difficulty of not really being sure what to do next.
   
To recap, the main character--a magician's apprentice named Chester--and his friends have been tasked by the Mages' Guild with the recovery of the Eternal Grimoire, before the forces of darkness can find it. Ancillary quests include figuring out where the forces of darkness are coming from and finding the missing prince so that his uncle Hawthorne can't seize the throne.
   
I start in the city of Portsmith. Looking over my quest list, I decide it's ridiculous I haven't rescued the missing Joey from the dungeons of Keldar, and I resolve to grind until I'm strong enough to do that. 
     
Blasting a ghost with a lightning bolt.
       
We march back and forth for a couple of hours in front of the city, fighting all monster groups, usually killing them with arrows before they reach us in melee combat (although some of them have spells or missile weapons of their own). I was just talking about how I hate archers in most games, but I guess I make an exception for my own party. There are a lot of games in which missile weapons make combat a bit too easy--Baldur's Gate comes to mind--but Enchantasy does it well, first by limiting your arrow stock to 99 (and, honestly, even that is a lot for four people to carry) and second by making arrows so expensive. In all the time I spent grinding, I went nowhere financially. Every gold piece I earned went back to arrows.
    
We gain a few levels and spend the training points. I put everything Chester earns into "Magic," while Jared (fighter) and Rodell (ranger) alternate between "Weapon" and "Bow." I mostly favor fighting skills for Shyra (thief), too. Eventually, I'm going to have to prioritize "Lockpick," "Language," and maybe even "First Aid," but for now I'm just trying to get over this hump.
    
Feeling stronger, we return to the Keldar dungeon . . . and the cursed rats are gone. The first enemy group we face is a hodgepodge of foes, including invisible sprites, which I've come to hate. But what happened to the rats? You may recall that in a previous entry, I defeated them with three characters dead and decided to reload. It's possible that the game stores enemy status separately from party status, though, and it had already marked the rats as cleared. I'll have to test that later with another fixed encounter.
      
What we find instead of the cursed rats.
      
All the other enemies we face in the dungeon are far easier than the rats, so we make swift progress, although we have to return to town for arrows a couple of times.
   
We find a lot of barrels and chests with minor treasures (keys, food, a little gold), some behind secret doors or walls that we have to blast with dynamite. You can discern these special walls via subtle changes in the wall pattern, but another way is to cast "See Secrets," which shows you everything worth investigating in the immediate area.
     
This shows me that the chest has something in it and there's a secret area to my east.
    
One wall that we open with dynamite takes us to a chest with a copper shield. Excited, I throw away one of my wooden shields, only to find that no one is strong enough yet to equip the copper one.
   
There's another thief in this dungeon, willing to sell lockpicks and train the "Lockpick" skill. Incidentally, I figure out the little lockpicking "game," but it's hard. To succeed at lockpicking, you have to randomly stop three tumblers by hitting a key. The tumblers stop on numbers between 1 and 99, and they move too fast to time exactly where they stop. You need all three numbers to be below a certain value, depending on your "Lockpick" skill, I guess. I don't know what the specific value needed is for a skill of 4 or 5, which is what I have during this session, but the only time I'm successful at lockpicking, all three tumblers had values less than 25. The odds of getting three values in a row that low are less than 2%. Fortunately, keys always work when lockpicks fail.
      
The numbers are too high and I fail.
        
We do not find Joey. We do find a teleporter to another dungeon. At this point, my assumption is that the teleporters connect different dungeons all across the game world and they're primarily a means of transportation, so it doesn't occur to me that Joey might have gone through this one, particularly since you're supposed to need a "Telegem" to open it. Instead, I waste time returning to Keldar and re-talking to everyone about JOEY and casting "See Secrets" in every house in the city.
      
Using a Telegem on a teleporter.
      
Finally, I return to the dungeon and use a Telegem at the teleporter. We're taken to an isolated section of dungeon with no outlet, so that kills my theory about the teleporters existing for transportation. We fight more battles, running out of arrows and resorting to fully melee combat (except for Chester with his power sling and spells). Incidentally, when you attack an enemy with a melee weapon and miss, the game shows an animation of him dodging out of the way. This is another thing that the author took, I think, from The Magic Candle series.
    
Behind a locked door, we find a sort-of "academy" in which every battle is with a group of "dark cadets." A chest holds a return Telegem.
      
They do not attack one at a time.
      
Finally, we come to a door with someone crying and calling for help behind it. It's Joey!
       
How you doin'?
    
He thanks us for his rescue and runs off, saying he can find his way home. It's always a bit unrealistic when NPCs do this, but I'm so thankful that I don't have to escort them that I let it go.
    
Back in Keldar, Joey's mother gives us 25 gold pieces and some experience points. Finally, a quest solved!
     
Note Joey standing next to her.
      
Now that I know better how dungeons work, and particularly the uses of "See Secrets," I decide to search the dungeon at Macino again for the burglar Blaze. It's mostly a waste of time. There's still a door that no lock or pick will open (including my skeleton key), so maybe he's behind there. I do find a secret passage I had previously missed, but it just leads to a chest with a broadsword, which none of my characters can lift.
    
Back in Macino, I decide to take another round of the city, asking about Blaze and searching for, I don't know, a key to the locked door or something. Most people still insist that he's in the dungeon; but Worrell still thinks that he's dead and buried on a small island.
        
Worrell sticks to his story.
      
On the west side of town, behind a locked door that I never opened during previous visits (a sign outside says "Closed for Repairs"), I find a ladder down to an alternate section of the dungeon. It dumps me in a room with a single battle and no apparent exits, but I soon find a secret door on the north wall. That leads to a room with another locked door--that won't open to keys, picks, or even my skeleton key. Maybe I need a higher lockpicking skill to even try? I don't know. I have to give it up for now.
      
My excitement was short-lived.
     
My re-exploration of Macino does produce, in a healer's treasure chest, an ointment. I've found plenty of medicines, salves, and potions, but no ointment until now. I know someone who's been asking for one--a sick woman back in Keldar. She gives us a Telegem (yay) for it but also enough experience for a couple of characters to rise a level. I go to the training center next door and train Chester in another magic level, and guess what spell comes with it? "Unlock Magic." Alas, this does not turn out to be the solution to either of the locked doors in Macino, and I end up wasting another trip to that city.
       
I wonder where Rick Abel got the idea for all of these side quests. It certainly wasn't from Ultima V or The Magic Candle.
        
Looking over my quest list, I decide to head next to the Forest of No Return, south of Keldar, where I'm looking for a magic horn. This is the first time in the game that I've done any serious non-city, non-road exploration. Consulting the map, I follow the road from Keldar to where it ends after crossing a river. I follow the coast south, stopping at two wells. One poisons all of us and the other gives us +5 temporary armor class. 
   
The forest turns out to be a maze (as the name suggests) with a precise path. The accumulation of combats forces us to turn back to Keldar for arrows and healing several times. At first I try fleeing from most of the battles, but it turns out you lose 5 experience points every time you retreat.
      
I'm ready for combat.
    
At length, we come to a hut in the middle of the forest. Inside, we find the body of Mage Riddick, a Council member. Among his belongings, we find 15 gold, a hunter sling (better than my power sling, it seems), and 3 food. A well in his back yard fully heals us. 
      
Rudimon told me about this, but I can't believe they just left his body here.
       
We finish the forest maze but find nothing else that leads us to the magic horn. Perhaps Riddick had it and it was stolen when he was murdered, or perhaps I need to go through the entire thing again, searching every stump and pile of dirt.
    
Towards the end of this session, I realize I've been under-utilizing my mage. Part of the problem is that maximum spell points are so low that you can only cast a handful of offensive spells per battle. On the other hand, magic potions are so cheap that I should probably fill my inventory with them every time I'm in town. I recently got some mass-damage spells for the first time: "Lightning Storm" and "Flame Frenzy." Battles are definitely getting harder, scaling with my party's leveling, so I need to start increasing my firepower.
       
I can cast three of these before having to sleep and recharge.
      
I still like the game a lot, but man I wish I didn't keep running into walls. When an NPC in Ultima V said you'd find something at a particular place, you damn well found it there, and without a lot of fuss. At least Joey is finally free.
   
Time so far: 16 hours

36 comments:

  1. Sounds like the Addict stopped playing BG3 at exactly the same place I did. I do intend to go back to it, but there's a lot of inertia.

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    1. AlphabeticalAnonymousAugust 9, 2024 at 3:57 PM

      Sounds similar to when I stopped playing through Skyrim: I thought I had made it and defeated the Big Bad, but... I was disappointed to learn otherwise.

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    2. I am trying and failing to imagine any place in Skyrim where that kind of confusion could arise. Please elaborate.

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    3. AlphabeticalAnonymousAugust 11, 2024 at 3:31 PM

      Ha - well, I never claimed to be a CRPG expert. I had traveled all over to learn the name of the wind (or what have you) so that the monks on the mountain would finally tell me how to kill the great evil dragon leader. Then I met that dragon (perhaps on top of that same mountain), fought him using the new magic words... but found that he just flew away at the end of the battle, rather than letting him finish him off. It's been a while, so I'm sure I'm remembering some parts imperfectly.

      Anyway, I had somehow geared myself up to think that this imminent confrontation was going to be the climax of the game... but obviously, it wasn't! Add to that, at around that time our first kid was getting old enough to start demanding significantly more time & attention -- so I gave the Skyrim Switch cartridge back to our local library, and haven't played it since. I would still like to finish it someday; maybe in 15 years or so. I'm currently still slowly inching my way through Pool of Radiance.

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    4. As a Skyrim fan that's almost painful to hear, haha. The dragon at the top of the mountain isn't the bad guy, or even A bad guy, he's the most interesting and thoughtful character in the entire game.

      "What is better? To be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?"

      I hope you do revisit it.

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    5. Yeah, I wanted to respond to AA, but I just didn't know where to start.

      On the positive side, if AA finishes the game in 15 years or so, it might be just in time for the sequel.

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  2. Losing XP when fleeing from battles - have there been other games doing this? Of course there is the eighth of/for valor in U4, but that's a bit different. And the impact depends on how much XP you sacrifice compared to your usual XP gain over time, i.e. how easily and quickly you can make up for such loss.

    I expect you mentioning BG3 will trigger some comments on that game - let's see if there will be more than on the one actually played in this session ;-).

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    1. Ha, just as I posted this, the first comment was about BG3, q.e.d. ;-).

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    2. In Final Fantasy IV you would drop some money from fleeing.

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    3. There are also rare FF weapons that either get buffed by or weakened by running away.

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    4. It's funny because in real life, you usually get more experience failing than succeeding.

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    5. To be fair, running away isn't so much failing as not even trying in the first place, so losing (out on) experience is somewhat appropriate.

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    6. In this game, you take the same loss whether you retreat immediately or fight to the final hit point of the final character before retreating.

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  3. This game is really reminding me of Exile. Obviously that's because both of them were heavily influenced by Ultima V, but there's something about the town design that reminds me more of Exile than any Ultima game. Although the world map in Exile isn't nearly as railroaded.

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    1. Someone mentions certain similarities of Enchantasy with the Exile games even regarding some names and related plots in this thread on the Spiderweb forums (might contain spoilers on both).

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    2. It's an interesting coincidence, but I think it's unlikely that Jeff Vogel was playing shareware DOS RPGs in the early '90s. Also, Ultima V's villain is named "Blackthorn". I'd be more likely to believe that both shareware games were influenced by that (consciously or otherwise) than that one influenced the other.

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    3. Man, that Spiderweb thread is hard to read, but one does get the point. That said, maybe there's some other reason why they have the same names? Maybe they lived near each other? The games aren't that similar outside of names and general inspiration, and I doubt that Vogel is going to have that similar a minor plotline and that similar a name even if he has played it.

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    4. Just two more years till Chet plays Exile and we will know for sure how similar they are! I mean this was the 90s and the age of people just ripping off things from anywhere - i just played a old hideo kojima game published by konami called policenauts where the lead characters look exactly like the lethal weapon leads

      https://www.giantbomb.com/a/uploads/scale_medium/18/187748/2776836-maxresdefault.jpg

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    5. Well, I know Exile very well and I only know about Enchantasy what the Addict has written about, but so far I'm not noticing any similarities in plot. There are two characters with the same names and that appears to be it.

      Rick Abel appears to have lived in New Jersey his entire life, while Jeff Vogel is from Seattle.

      Yeah, Kojima used to be even more blatant about his movie and anime references. SNATCHER is basically "what if Blade Runner but also Terminator?" The original release of Metal Gear 2 had character portraits that were literally just digitized photos of Mel Gibson, Sean Connery, Richard Crenna, etc.

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  4. "When an NPC in Ultima V said you'd find something at a particular place, you damn well found it there, and without a lot of fuss."

    Aside from this specific thing of it being potentially annoying when a quest extends beyond the expected endpoint, I'm curious whether a Ultima-style scavenger hunt can have a high difficulty level and still be fun for most players.

    Some game mechanics are still - or even more - fun when the difficulty is raised, and the higher difficulty is accepted by most players. I think this applies to most good combat systems. But other game mechanics seem to fall apart at higher difficulty levels.

    Is Enchantasy's main quest more difficult to solve than Ultima V's? Maybe it's too early to ask. Are there other CRPG main quests in the style of Ultima's scavenger hunts which are complex and hard to solve (but not due to hard combats), yet which are still fun for most players? I suspect that this is hard to design.

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    1. This is an interesting question; I think it is possible to design a "scavenger hunt" to be more difficult without upping the frustration factor a lot, but it would require managing expectations.

      One rough idea is: when the NPC tells you where an item is, it is always there, but might require some searching (for example, the horn is in the hut, but maybe behind secret door, in a hidden cellar, or something like that; in case of first-person perspective game, it might be under or behind an item of furniture that needs to be moved).

      But this needs to be made clear to the player somehow, otherwise missing one or two items might lead the player to believe that the clues are useless. This is demonstrated by Chet's issues with the dungeon structure and poor Joey.

      Another issue is that players might not be as interested in scavenger hunts as they are in combat - it might be an interesting niche within the genre, but if the audience isn't big, it would probably have to be an indie game.

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    2. A good example of puzzles at a massively increased difficulty level is La-Mulana, a popular indie ruins-exploration metroidvania known for its hard puzzles. It's not an RPG but that kind of puzzles could easily exist in an RPG as well.

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    3. I agree with KK that probably only a subset of RPG fans would be interested in more challenging scavenger hunts or puzzles. Among them probably those who also have a penchant for adventure / interactive fiction games exhibiting such things.

      People like RPGs for a variety of reasons and if you do mainly or more so for combat, story, character development or (a combination of these and/or) other elements besides that one, you're likely to get frustrated by it and not enjoy the experience much.

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    4. West of Loathing is a very good example of this: it has a nominal main quest that is very straightforward, so it doesn't take much puzzling to win the game. However, to get the best ending, one must solve three scavenger hunt-style hidden quests, which are extremely obscure and scant on directions. You may not even realize that these are quests to solve and not just random weird locations that you stumble upon (in a game full of random weird locations) until you win the game and see the ending slides.

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    5. It's entirely possible that I will invest a few more hours in this game, solve the quests that are currently stumping me, and regard them as masterpieces of game design. I mean, the Joey quest was relatively well done. To solve it, I had to blend NPC dialogue with environmental observations and master several game mechanics. In the end, I don't think it was unfair. The Blaze quest only feels unfair right now because I still haven't solved it.

      I do like when modern games use their advanced graphics to make you really study a scene and figure out the answers to puzzles from visual cues. Irene and I are playing The Sinking City on the Xbox right now, and there are a few places where you really have to poke your head into corners and study every scrap of paper to figure out what happened. That's not quite possible with an iconographic game.

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  5. This semes as a long one, have anyone finished it?

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    1. A cursory search suggests I will be the first. I will leave it to interested commenters if they want to conduct a non-cursory search.

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    2. You knew some of your commenters would not resist this 'challenge' ;-).

      There are people who claim online to have beaten it (e.g. in this thread or in the comments to this video), but AFAIK no one has documented that which I think is one of the distinguishing features of this blog, especially for lesser-known games.

      We also don't know if any of them maybe used hex editing (besides the number of saves) or other cheats to make it easier, though they might just be 'legitimate' playthroughs of people who had the interest, time and perseverance and/or just not many other games to play at the time.

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  6. "When I play games for pleasure, I routinely drop them entirely if too long passes between sessions, a fate that befell Baldur's Gate III a couple of months ago"

    Still don't know any good solution for this. One thing the player can do is to write down the next concrete goal whenever closing a session. And one thing the developers can do is to allow changing the difficulty level on the fly so the player can jump back in again at a lower difficulty level, in order to re-learn the game's combat tactics and his party's abilities. (But how many players would use that option for this purpose?)

    But for the first hour or so after a long break, continuing from where you left off would probably still feel slightly uncomfortable because you're aware that lots of hints, capabilities or tentative goals have faded into the fog of your memory.

    An expansive automatic quest log which records every little hint would help, but I wouldn't want such a thing while playing. It turns me into someone who checks items off a list. I guess some Oracle feature which provides increasingly specific hints could help.

    Making the main quest straightforward might be a solution if there are challenging optional questlines, like VK mentions above.

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    1. It's hard to come back to games. I find the first moments of floundering through a half-remembered haze quite uncomfortable.

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    2. There are games that use the loading screen to clue You in on the next quest, big goal or just the enemy You are fighting. It helps.

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    3. One thing I wish Baldur's Gate III had, and I wish all RPGs with limited encounters had, is an arena mode. Let me test out my builds before using them in a real fight!

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    4. That's a good point. You'd think it would be relatively easy in modern games to add that capability.

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    5. There's a few JRPGs that have a "story log" you can always consult that will tell you the plot so far, what your next goal is, etc. It's super useful when you inevitably put the game down for a while when it's been 100+ hours and you're still on Disc 3 of 4...

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  7. "Forest of No Return" is either an exceptionally accurate warning, or a lie. It's like an unstable atomic state - in a CRPG, it should quickly collapse to "Forest of Sometimes Return".

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    1. A couple of years ago, I drove through Death Valley and didn't die. I was so disappointed.

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