Game 534: The Castle of Kraizar (1993)

 

The title screen for a game distinguished by its artwork.

        

The Castle of Kraizar

United States

Mnemonic Productions (developer and publisher)

Released 1993 for Commodore 64

Date Started: 29 November 2024

Date Ended: 30 November 2024

Total Hours: 5

Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

        

The Castle of Kraizar is a competent but ultimately frustrating "afternoon RPG" from a single developer. It takes place on a single screen. You wouldn't think that one screen would offer five hours of content, but here we are. The game blends influences from Ultima (1981) and Sword of Fargoal (1982), although it is ultimately simpler than both.

    

You play a hero called The Legender, come to the city of Kraizar to kill Jrakhos, an evil sorcerer who has taken over the castle and unleashed monsters on the innocent population. You start with 40 health, 20 strength, 10 magic, 100 gold, 1 skill point, and no experience. Your goal is to wander around the city, fighting monsters, gaining experience and gold, and using them to develop your character. In addition to becoming strong enough to defeat Jrakhos, you have to find the eight parts of the key to Kraizar.

      

That Ibonek Nawibo doesn't have a good track record with apprentices.

       

The city is ringed with houses, which you can enter. Each time you do, there's a random chance of finding gold or encountering a monster. The keys are seeded in 8 of the 54 houses. Four of the others, plus the towers at the corners of the inner walls, have special services:

 

• In the middle of the eastern block of houses is the Ball and Chain Armory, where you can buy weapons and armor. You can only ever buy the next upgrade from what you already have. There are seven weapons (dagger, hammer, sword, mace, axe, halberd, magic sword) and seven armor types (cloth, leather, banded mail, chain mail, scale mail, plate mail, magic armor). This "scale" of seven items each is one of the game's Ultima influences.

      

That's a lot of money for a weapon that, as we'll see, I won't be using.

     

• In the middle of the south row is the Broken Bottle Tavern, where you can buy ale that cures poison and food that restores strength.

      

My hit points are shaded, indicating I'm poisoned. I need some healing ale.

       

• In the middle of the west row is the Apothecary. He sells spells (there are eight of them, from "Wind" to "Death"), potions that restore magic points, and rejuvenation potions that restore everything to maximum values.

     

Rounding out the elemental spells.

       

• In the middle of the north row is the Wanderer's Inn. Sleeping for a night restores you to maximum hit points.

• The northwest, northeast, and southeast guard towers all have guards who will give you tips and bits of the backstory for gold. 

     

The manual makes it sound like he was born evil.

     

• The southwest building (where a guard tower would be if not for a break in the walls) is the Adventurers' Guild. As you cross various experience thresholds, you can pay money for weapons training and magic training. Weapons training increases your strength and enables you to wield better weapons. Magic training increases your magic skill and enables you to cast higher-level spells.

        

Visiting the guild.

        

Combat takes place in rounds, for which your only choices are attacking with a weapon, switching weapons, casting a spell, or fleeing. Enemies start off easy--rats, spiders, and bats. But as you gain experience, your maximum health points incrementally increase, which leads to tougher monsters, including slimes and snakes (which poison you), ogres, trolls, ghosts, skeletons, cyclopes, werewolves, gargoyles, demons, dragons, and liches. Just about everything scales in Kraizar, including enemy difficulty, the amount you pay for services, the damage you do in combat, and the amount of gold you find in the houses.

             

Combat options against a demon.

      

During combat, the game plays sound effects that I think were inspired by Sword of Fargoal (1982). I encourage you to watch this video not just to hear them but to also get a sense of the pace of the game at era-accurate speeds. It must have been excruciating. I played most of it at 600% and was still impatient.

     

Most of the game is grinding against these enemies. It takes a comparatively short time--maybe 20 minutes--to round all the houses and find the eight parts of the key. It takes four hours (and that's with the machine set fast) to build your way up to the maximum number of experience points, max out spell and weapon levels, and get all of the best equipment. It's tempting to stand outside one house and repeatedly enter it, finding gold and battles, as a method of grinding. But it doesn't really work because you frequently have to rest to restore hit points, and you frequently get poisoned, requiring a visit to the tavern. The inn and the tavern are on opposite ends of the screen. You thus end up making loops around the map rather than grinding in one place.

        

I'm not sure how I ethically feel about saving the city by looting all of its houses for gold.

       

The author made some curious mechanical choices that lead to some frustration and imbalanced combat:

   

• Every time you swing a weapon, you lose strength points, making you less effective in your next swing. Unless you want to stand outside the tavern and buy food after every combat, it's easier just to keep your "hands" equipped as the primary weapon through most of the game, as you lose no strength when you attack with your hands. Damage depends far more on strength than weapon type anyway.

• The magic armor and the  magic sword are more curses than blessings. When you swing the magic sword, it depletes both strength and magic. The magic armor doesn't deplete anything, but it disappears if you run out of magic points (leaving you with plate mail), forcing you to purchase it again.

• Spells cost 10 points to cast per level. The starting character can cast one "Wind" spell before he has to replenish magic, and a character at maximum experience can cast one "Death" spell. Spells are, at best, "Hail Mary" options. Many enemies are capable of draining spell points, so you're almost never at your maximum. I basically didn't cast any spells during the game despite buying them all.

     

Finally, the late game enemies are simply insane. Dragons and liches can destroy a fully maxed and healed character in one hit. You can flee from most enemies, but they often get the first attack. Fortunately, you can save anywhere, and the late game becomes a process of saving every few moves. One thing I appreciate in games that scale enemy difficulty is when they scale maximum difficulty rather than minimum. That happens here. You still encounter rats and spiders when you're at maximum level.

     

Maximum statistics towards the game's end. I think there's some randomness in the max hit point and magic point values, so yours may be higher or lower.

        

When you have the eight parts of the key, all the best stuff, and max levels, it's time to head for the titular castle at the center of the map. There, you fight two battles in a row, the first against a dragon, the second against Jrakhos. If you thought anything in the previous phase of the game was frustrating, it pales in comparison to this final battle. Both the dragon and Jrakhos are capable of attacks that wipe away 2/3 of your hit points at once, plus attacks that drain your level and strength. Each has 5,000-6,000 hit points, but if you survive their physical attacks, it isn't long before you're feebly punching them with your hands, doing 50 points of damage, because your strength is depleted. They're both completely immune to spells.

    

This was not my winning attempt.

     

Your only hope against either of them is that they use physical attacks (rather than strength or magic-draining attacks) and the dice go in your favor or that they try to cast a spell that is deflected by your magic armor. If those things happen during the first few rounds, you can hopefully get in a few whacks for 1,500-2,000 hit points each with your magic sword, although you miss a lot even at full strength. Based on my experience, there's about a 1/8 chance of winning the battle against the dragon and a similar or harder (maybe 1/10) chance of then winning the battle against Jrakhos. You get a rejuvenation potion in between, so the battles are really somewhat independent except for the inability to save. The random numbers that govern their actions and effects are pre-generated, so you can't manipulate the outcome with save states. 

       

Having run out of magic, I'm down to plate mail and hands.

         

After about 20 losses, I wrote a macro to fight the battle for me, reloading if it lost. (Fortunately, the keys for moving one step north and reloading do nothing during combat, and the keys that fight battles do nothing outside of combat, so a sequence of N)orth, A)ttack, L)oad wasted a lot of keypresses but did the job.) I recorded the screen and went off to do a few errands. When I got back, I found that the macro had won the game on loop #42.

   

Winning gets you a narration describing how Jrakhos uses his dying breaths to summon a demon, but the demon turns on him and drags him to hell. You get a couple of nicely illustrated scenes, much better than we typically see in a C64 title.

            

        

And thus the game--as well as this entry--ends on one of Kraizar's strong suits. The author, John Patrick Green of Freeport, New York, clearly had a talent for graphics. It makes sense, then, that he went on to a career in the field, including work on Disney Adventures magazine and the graphic novel series Jax Epoch and the Quicken Forbidden (1996-2005) and InvestiGators (2020-present). I reached out to him through his web site, and we corresponded over the weekend. He tells me I was correct about the Ultima and Fargoal influences, but not about Questron (which I had originally hypothesized). He says that he was also inspired by Times of Lore (1988) and Mars Saga (1988).

         

"You beat me!? I am destroyed."

The demon explains that Jrakhos has displeased him.

The last we see of Jrakhos.

           

Green was able to send me some screenshots of the manual, which I was unable to find online. "I was really into the extra materials [that] games came with back then," Green told me, so he took the time to create illustrations of all the creatures in the game.

The game's bestiary also shows an Ultima influence in the formatting.

         

Green wrote the game while in high school. He published it through his own label, Mnemonic Productions, the same year. His other published games include Melee: The Battle Board Game (1993) and Gun Runner (1994), a space-trading game influenced by Space Rogue (1988) and Sentinel Worlds (1989). Green sold his games through ads in magazines and newsletters, charging $19.95 for Kraizar. He says he only sold about 5 copies, but he went into the project knowing that "the Commodore 64 was very well past its prime . . . and for me it was really just a hobby." As for my frustrations: "I never really spent much time doing a full playthrough from start to finish . . . It is very likely that when actually playing the game, there are conditions the game ends up in that I didn't account for."

      

The manual cover has a similar but not identical image as the title screen.

        

In addition to his graphic novel work, he's dabbled in artwork for video games in recent years. He developed but did not finish a fun-looking adventure game called Nearly Departed, which you can see in trailer form.

    

As often happens with both independent developers and afternoon RPGs, I see moments of inspiration here that I wish the author had the time, interest, and resources to expand upon. I don't think he lacked the talent. Kraizar could be a decent base for a solid game--say something in the vein of The Bard's Tale, with the main screen serving as a compromise between the banality of a menu town and the pointless sprawl of the actual Skara Brae. Various houses and towers could open into dungeons. Add a few more combat options, more balance to the spell system, some NPCs, and perhaps some Bard's Tale-style graphics for the various shop and service screens. I've played such games and rated them "recommended" at least. At the same time, I recognize a place for games that scratch the RPG itch without a major commitment of time. I just think most players would throw the disk across the room after the tenth failed battle with the dragon.

     

However, I'm happy to buy the game for the retail price. Green suggested a donation to Able Gamers, so I'm designating that the "Charity of the Month" and donating 20% of my Patreon proceeds.