Dragonflight: Almost Won (with Final Rating)

As far as I can get before the game inexplicably ends.

Dragonflight

Germany

Thalion Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1990 for Atari ST and Amiga, 1991 for DOS

Date Started: 6 June 2014
Date Ended: 2 July 2014

Total Hours: 58

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 36
Ranking at Time of Posting: 103/150 (69%)

Ranking at Game #457: 341/457 (75%)

All right. Screw this game. I've made it to the endgame, I have all the items needed, I have all the damned spells, but the game just takes me to the "game over" screen, with no explanation, the moment I enter the final area. I don't even care what the answer is. I've wasted too much time on this game to spend even another second.

It wouldn't have been a clean win anyway. Since my last post, I grew so sick of the game that I cheated by looking at dungeon maps online. I don't regret it one bit. The five remaining dungeons were massive--navigational nightmares of secret doors, teleporters, traps, weird fungi that make you charge off in random directions, and hundreds of endless, pointless combats. Even using cheats, it's taken me more than 17 hours since the last post. Without them--mapping every single dungeon exhaustively--it would have taken me well over 40.

These were the plot developments towards the end:

1. The pieces of Eltam: They turned out to make a wand. It was kind of nice because it was the only missile weapon my mage could use, but it wasn't that great. It certainly wasn't necessary to complete the game.

Oh, and you have to mess around with different ways to assemble it. One of the ways supposedly opens locked doors, but I couldn't get that to work.

2. Mastyk: The former headquarters of the black magicians. Other than spells and monsters, the giant dungeon mostly just had hints. One of the hints was that the "Shadow" is actually the "final phase of transformation which Murstor the Angry has gone through." Murstor was the founder of the school of black magic. This would be an interesting nod to the lore if Murstor had appeared in the back story, but he doesn't. The mouth says that "no one knows his aims or understands his actions," and they never became clearer.

I also never encountered him again. Maybe he was supposed to show up at the end game.

3. The map: Finished it thanks to some hints. There's a guy in Scatterbone who has two map pieces, but I'm not sure how you were supposed to discover that in-game. Probably some NPC that I missed said so.

Ta-da: The endgame area, the Dragon Valley, is the continent to the southwest. If the main continent is a dragon, the Dragon Valley is . . . what?. . . its egg? Let's go with egg.

 
4. The mushroom phial: You have to eat it in a particular part of the forest on the "dragon's jaw." Once you do, the area goes all wonky and a hidden dungeon entrance appears. I have no idea how players are supposed to know that this is where they eat the phial. (In the ST version, if I ate it anywhere else, the game crashed.) Anyway, at the bottom of the hidden dungeon, I found the "fragment" I needed to shatter the crystal holding the unicorn captive.

Groovy.

5. The Book of Knowledge: Long explanation on this one:

There was this guy in Trolian who wouldn't talk to me unless I had an "open mind." Thanks to trudodyr, I learned that this was a bad translation, and a better one was "generous heart." I realized he wanted me to elevate my character points. This is done most easily by giving scrolls to the university in Pegana.

Magic has played such a generally weak role in this game, and nowhere has there been a spell that was absolutely required. Figuring I didn't need any new spells, even if I didn't already have them, I just gave all my scrolls to the university, including one that had a "nameless spell." The manual indicated that the spell did mass damage to enemies, but I was already doing just fine in that regard without it, and it was a "black" spell anyway. I didn't figure I'd miss it.

There must be a better way to say this.

With my elevated character points, I went back to the NPC in Thalion. His name was Netaldur, and I had a "list" of his that I'd recovered from Kolbralon, the dungeon in the ice continent. When the characters explained about the attempts to restore magic at the university, he was delighted, and he gave me a "Book of Knowledge" that balanced black and white magic and removed the need to specialize in one or the other.

The book also told me about four spells that I'd need at the end of the game: "Healing Trance," "Fear," "Lightning," and the very "Nameless Spell" that I'd given away to get Netaldur to talk with me in the first place.

Lots of swearing followed, as well as a draft of this post that said "screw it" and refused to go back into the dungeons hunting for the spell.

But after a day of calming down, I sucked it up and re-explored two dungeons before I found the one (Aboltyk) that had contained the "Nameless" spells. It turned out to be a reasonably good mass damage spell. More important, I finally had all the spells needed for the endgame. Gleefully, I headed to the Dragon Valley.

One blow from my "fragment" shattered the crystal holding the unicorn captive and she went galloping off in the sunshine.

"When the last eagle flies over the last crumbling mountain . . ."

Then there was a brief maze culminating in a dungeon door. Entering produces this message:

A mighty gate blocks the entrance to a cave. It is surrounded by a magic glow. But when all of you use the spell from the Book of Wisdom it disappears into the ground. You enter the darkness of the mighty cave. Dobranur lights a torch and in its light you see evidence of a horrible fight. This must be the place where the battle between the magicians took place. A faint glow from the end of the cave attracts your attention. Just in between of some earthbounds [sic] elements, the air seems to become more solid. A sphere of pure magic energy exists there.

At this point, the game immediately goes to the "full party death" "end of all hope" screen. Before anyone asks, yes, I do have the four necessary spells prepared in the spellbooks. Is the solution that the characters have to have them memorized in a particular character order? If so, screw that. I'm not slogging around more dungeons so I can find "Healing Trance" for Bladus, "Nameless" for Dobranur, and "Lightning" for Andariel, which is what I would have to do.

Gerry Müller-Bruhnke's "Thalion Source" web site (previously linked by several commenters) has a few screenshots of what's supposed to happen. The party casts the spells in the correct order, and a dragon comes flying out of a portal. He congratulates the party and indicates that it was Lord Avaram (the orc king who lead the black magicians during the time of the war) who had banished the dragons. He says that the dragons have used their time in exile to become proficient with magic, which they will now use to serve the good of the land and the humanoid races.

This is, alas, not my shot.

I was close enough. It wasn't my fault. I'm calling it a "win."

Let me go back to complaining for a moment. I used the word "pointless" to describe the combats for a few reasons. First, as we covered last time, I hit an experience cap and was no longer getting any character development from all the combats. Second, I didn't need any more character development in the first place. The hardest "normal" enemy in the game is the balron, and my characters were more than capable of taking on waves and waves of them.

"Guardians" wipe out all but one of my party members.

There were a couple of "abnormal" enemies: statues and guardians. Both only die from the "Staff of Stone" I found in the Shadow's cavern. The staff has to be loaded with a gemstone prior to each combat, and it basically shoots gems at the statues, killing them instantly. Without the staff, victory is impossible; with it, there's no danger from statues whatsoever. Guardians are another matter. They kill characters instantly unless they're wearing Dragonrings. Unfortunately, you encounter these bastards long before everyone has a Dragonring. (There's a single dungeon with a Dragonring and no guardians, so I suppose you could wait for it to respawn three times, but that would have made an already-tedious game much worse.) The result was I had to finish a couple of dungeons with only one or two characters alive, then resurrect everyone else at a temple. It's another testament to the pointlessness of the combats when a single character can finish a late-game dungeon.

Not just a single character--the weakest character in the group.

There were a number of other things that make the late game maddening. Monsters roaming the wilderness increase exponentially, so I had to keep stopping and fighting energy balls, ghosts, and "beasts" while just trying to get from one place to another. The later dungeons ate up keys by the dozens, forcing me to leave a few times to re-stock, even when I thought I'd brought plenty. Perhaps realizing that the enemies weren't challenging enough, the developers made traps that do thousands of hit points in damage, forcing me to constantly stop and heal. Many of the levels had complicated teleporter mazes that take you to identical-looking areas, defying mapping solutions.

Cue a long, exasperated sigh.

The Staff of Stone is the only thing that kills guardians and statues, as I said, but it's useless against anyone else (and you wouldn't want to waste the gems anyway). You can't change weapons in combat, and sometimes there would be two rooms in a row, one with say, balrons, and the next with statues. I'd have to fight the first one, leave, save, change weapons, and then go into the second room. Having to re-charge the staff in between combats was equally annoying, and more often than not, I forgot, entered combat with statues, found my staff was dead, and had to re-load.

By the time I was done with the dungeons, I wanted to find the developers, hang them upside down by their lederhosen, and demand to know exactly what, for %$@'s sake, they thought they were doing. The second half of the game is absolutely jaw-dropping in its hubris--in its disregard for the player's time or enjoyment. For most of my time with Dragonflight, I've been calling it "average," but no game deserves even that lofty label if it makes the player expend so much time for so little reward.

Let me GIMLET the thing and be done with it.

 

• 5 points for the game world. The back story tells a fairly original tale of lost dragons and lost magic, and the party's quest is generally clear, although it takes a while for the various pieces to come together. There were some small touches that gave the sense of an evolving gameworld, such as the mushroom potion making permanent changes to the terrain and orcs disappearing as enemies once the orc treaty is signed.

This NPC encounter, too.

• 3 points for character creation and development. There's no creation at all. As the characters gain experience, they increase in health, strength, combat movements, and magic power, and until the middle of the game, when you hit the experience cap, these improvements are generally rewarding. The level cap, and the rapidity with which you reach it, are completely inexcusable.

• 4 points for NPC interaction. You talk to NPCs in houses and wandering through towns, and their intelligence definitely advances the plot of the game and fleshes out the game world. There aren't really any dialogue options, though, and role-playing is limited to whether you give gold to beggars.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. There aren't any classic RPG encounters--just a couple of light puzzles. Enemies are somewhat boilerplate, though described well in the manual, and differentiated in combat by attack type and power.

• 3 points for magic and combat. The combat screen is creative, but not really in a good way. Combat offers few tactics, especially since you can't change spells or weapons after combat begins. Magic is of the typical spell/mana variety, with few offensive spells offering much benefit over physical attacks. Listening at doors to prepare offers the only real strategy.

Battling some "beasts." Rinakles has just turned one to ash with the "Nameless" spell.

• 4 points for equipment. There isn't much in the way of weapons and armor. Basically, there's one magic weapon for each character, obtained by solving a side-quest, and so you generally only get one or two weapon upgrades in the game. There are a few types of armor, lots of potions, some quest items, and a variety of treasures to sell. The potions--including the ability to mix them--would have been more interesting if they had been more necessary, but combat and exploration were easy enough without them.

I'm having flashbacks to my bachelor party.

• 4 points for economy. For the first half of the game, it's pretty good. You're selling individual mushrooms for a little extra gold and desperately trying to save up for that first ship. Late in the game, the economy breaks. My characters ended the game each with 9,999 gold (the maximum) and hundreds of unsold treasures.

• 4 points for quests. The main quest was interesting, with multiple steps along the way. I'm having a hard time figuring out what quests were authentic "side-quests," but there were a few. There's no role-playing or alternate outcomes.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are nice enough, but there's no sound except for repetitive music, which I turned off. The mouse-driven interface was easy enough to figure out, but as usual I'm subtracting points for not making any use of the keyboard except when moving. There's no reason that "T" couldn't have activated the "Talk" button or "C" the "Cast" button instead of forcing me to awkwardly walk with my left hand while trying to click the buttons with my right.

• 2 points for gameplay. It has a strong and welcome non-linearity. But as we've seen, the game is way, way, way too long, with too many large dungeons, too many combats, and too much backtracking around the game world. Dragonflight has absolutely no sense of pacing. And while the game was too long, it was also too easy, with the foes offering virtually no challenge in the latter two-thirds of the game.

Add 'em up and we get a final score of 36. I usually consider a game "recommended" at 35. In this case, I recommend that you play it for a few hours to experience an unusual contribution from some developers who would become famous for other games, but for the love of all that's holy, don't bother to try to win it. There are better things to do with our short years on Earth.

You'll never catch me saying that Dragonflight isn't creative and original. It's just that most of its variations from the norm felt "foreign" rather than "innovative." For instance, in 150 previous games, I've never had to worry whether an NPC was "home" when I knocked on his door. While I grant that NPCs who sometimes answer the door and sometimes don't is a creative contribution, it isn't one that made me feel positively about the game. It rather felt like the game was wasting my time.

The game offers an innovative system for mixing potions, but renders it completely useless. The back story is detailed to the point of being unnecessarily detailed. The combat screen is one of the most unusual I've ever seen, and yet it offers fewer options and tactics than games from a decade prior. Many, many other elements--ships that won't sail where you want them to go and disappear if you walk too far away; "common" spells that the game will let you memorize but you never need them; the "character points" system; the mushrooms that you find by the boatload but that don't do anything; the temples and "temple teleportation" system; the numbering of each city's houses; the ridiculously fatal traps; the traps that make chests or your weapons disappear; the magic mouths; the enemies unkillable except with the Staff of Stones; having to bribe guards with alcohol; the method of finding secret doors--all make you go "huh," but not admiringly. The things Dragonflight does differently make for a weird gameplay experience, not a better one.

We'll encounter the Thalion crew again, with Amberstar in 1992 and Ambermoon in 1993, and from what I've read, they build on the Dragonflight interface but offer a better RPG experience. I look forward to them. If nothing else, Dragonflight suggests a team of developers who had promise but needed a more practice.

Back now to Fallthru, another game that seems to enjoy prolonging itself. We need a few more quick one-offs, like King's Bounty, in 1990.

Dragonflight: The Glass Ceiling

The best that Andariel is ever going to get.

For about 40 hours, Dragonflight offered a middle-of-the-road, inoffensive game. It was sometimes slightly interesting, sometimes slightly boring, sometimes slightly annoying, sometimes slightly amusing. It was never on the extreme of anything. Then it did the one thing that is 100% guaranteed, in every circumstance, no matter how good the game, to absolutely enrage me.

Experience caps.

More specifically, experience caps that are set well below the level that you would expect to reach in a normal game.

Until I hit the cap, leveling in this game had been reasonably rewarding. It happens so subtly, and at different intervals for the different characters, that you often don't notice. Then, suddenly, you realize your character has 100 more hit points than before, or has an extra combat move. The combat moves were particularly welcome, making tough combats easier and easy combats faster. My archer capped at the highest move total, with 6 (9 with the "Speed" spell), and it's been fun to watch her take out 3 enemies in different rows with a move-shoot-move-shoot-move-shoot combo.

But now I won't get to experience that any more, and I still have four dungeons completely unexplored. The last dungeon--12 levels--took me almost another 8 hours. I might have as much as another 40 hours of gameplay where I won't experience any character development at all. Screw you, Dragonflight!

There are two primary reasons that I hate experience caps:

1. They remove the noble, age-old process of grinding as a mechanism to make the game easier. The earliest RPGs, starting with PLATO and extending into games like Wizardry and Might and Magic, reached an accord with players, offering two basic avenues for completing the main quest. You could embrace the difficulty, meet challenges head-on, and triumph through tactics and strategy (with a little bit of luck), or you could grind against Murphy's Ghosts and triumph through over-leveled characters. You could, in short, choose a path of intelligence or a path of brute force.

2. They make you feel like the game world is completely determinate. Obviously, the plot is going to end the same way (or in the same limited number of ways) for everyone. The only choice you have as a player is who your character is going to be when he gets there. Then, you run into a level cap and realize that every character is going to be pretty much the same. Any individual advancement you felt you were doing was illusory; any grinding you did was wasted.

I guess there won't be any more of this, either.

There are two ways to get around these concerns. The first is to implement a complex system of skills and abilities so that even if there's a cap, each character is unique at the endgame in his strengths and weaknesses. Experience caps still piss me off in such games, but it's slightly mitigated. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon Age: Origins are good examples of this mechanism.

The second is to ensure that the cap is so high that a character is unlikely to reach it in a regular game. This makes grinding a still-viable avenue. Quest for Glory, the Ultima games, and most of the Gold Box titles follow this option. Skyrim implements both solutions (and then effectively removes caps entirely with the "legendary" option starting in some recent patch).

Without either of these factors, experience caps mar good games (Pool of Radiance, Baldur's Gate), make average games bad (Dragonflight), and make bad games absolutely horrible (Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation, Don't Go Alone). In the case of Dragonflight, I don't even understand the reasoning. The experience cap is set to 20,000, so it's not like it was about to experience a stack overflow. (Is that the right term?) And why are there extra, unused 0s in front of both hit points and spell points if the experience cap was going to stop any further development in those stats?

Argh.

Okay, aside from the experience cap thing, I finally started to feel like I was making progress in the game. For the first three dozen hours, I felt I was just wandering around somewhat aimlessly, with no clues on the main quest to find out what happened to the dragons and restore magic to the world. But the last session was marked by the resolution of a number of side quests (or perhaps steps on the main quest) that offered a few pointers.

First, I found the two secret caves of "The Shadow" and recovered a couple of quest items. When I last blogged, I had just entered one of them in the dragon's tail. The other was at a bend in the dragon's neck. Based on that description, I started in the northernmost mountain square and determined to search my way southward, but I found the dungeon in literally the first square.

That was a freebee.

Both dungeons consisted of a long corridor with several rooms (the first one had a bunch of pit traps and teleporters, but it would be tedious to recount it) and an encounter with "The Shadow" in the final room. In both cases, "The Shadow" disappeared when I hit him one time, leaving his treasure unguarded. The first treasure was something called a "Staff of Stone" and the second was the magic sphere stolen from the elves, containing the souls of the elven high council.

I want to make fun of "The Shadow" for his pink cloak, but I'm not sure it's pink. Irene is away for the weekend.

With the sphere in hand, I returned to Nimraviel and gave it to the grateful queen, who rewarded me with another "Piece of Eltam" plus a magic bow for Andariel.

One side-quest solved in Brindil-Bun: I gave a few healing potions to a sick guy, and he rewarded me with yet another "Piece of Eltam."

My god, these people really have been deprived of magic.

The orc king wanted me to have the leaders of humans, elves, and dwarves sign his treaty. The elf queen and dwarf king signed it with no problem, but it took me a while before I realized the human leader was the king in Port Pylon. (I had expected it to be the town council in Pegana.)

With the treaty signed three times, I returned it to the grateful orc king, who loaded me up with gold.

After this, I stopped encountering orcs as wandering monsters. That was pretty cool.

This was good because it was clear I needed to buy a new ship. Three unfortunate things about traveling by ship in this game:

• Depending on where you charter the ship, the crew will only go so far.
• If you walk too far away from the boat, you have to give it up. There's no way to get back to Pegana, for instance, while retaining your ship.
• If you crash it into land three times, the crew mutinies.

I had crashed into land twice, and I was getting sick of having to reload every time it happened a third time. More important, I needed to explore the continent to the east, Dorithannon.

I grew up in an orphanage in a landlocked city. Why are you letting me navigate at all?

I chartered a more expensive ship in Scatterbone and headed east, stopping at the antarctic continent on the way, but unable to get into the dungeon because I lacked the password (see below). Dorithannon was surrounded by impassable smaller islands, but I found a landing spot on the north next to a temple. While I was there, I decided to try the "Temple Teleport" spell, which I had recently acquired. You have to stand on a temple to cast it, and it will take you to another temple, as long as you know the name. I tried visiting one called FAROUT which I hadn't otherwise discovered. It worked, and I found out why I hadn't found it: it was on an island in a lake, along with a little city named Sotul. (There's no way to cross inland waterways in this game.) I figured something major would be there, but the only thing of interest was a store selling magic chain. I bought a couple of sets.

It's good they have this shop to sell armor and protect the inhabitants against all those enemies who have no way to get here.

  

Regrettably, I saved after this, and I returned to the temple on Dorithannon to find that the crew had sailed my 8,000-gold-piece ship off into the sunset.

There was a dungeon in the area, but I couldn't get in for reasons I'll describe below. So I explored south and found myself funneled into a narrow passage between the mountains with what looked like some kind of hut.

  
The moment I stepped on the hut, I got the "game over" screen with absolutely no explanation.

I guess that was like Sonny Corleone's toll plaza.

Okay. Using "Temple Teleport," I returned to the mainland near Nimraviel, walked from there to Scatterbone, and spent pretty much all the money I had left on another ship. This time I managed to find a way to the southern part of Dorithannon, to a city called Bagnol. There, the "mogul" gave me a magic crystal sword and two magic chainmails in exchange for 4 diamonds. I'm glad I hadn't sold all the diamonds because the crystal sword ended up being important.

I had two other missions in Bagnol. One was to deliver a letter to a guy named Grednak. He took it and gave me a package to return to Sonok in Luthag. The second was to visit Ostul at House #5 for a map piece. No matter how many times I banged on the door, though, no one would answer.

Yes, I tried moving around and coming back. Repeatedly.

At this point, I had almost run out of ideas. Aside from returning the package to Luthag, I didn't know where else to go. I had one note to give a poison potion to a woman in "Negame," but I hadn't found that town yet and didn't know where it was.

My problem with five dungeons.

There were five dungeons I hadn't explored because all of them wanted some kind of password right at the entrance:

• In the desert on the main continent
• On an island to the south of the main continent
• On the antarctic island
• In the mountains on Dorithannon
• In a swamp on Dorithannon

I didn't know where I'm supposed to get this information. I'd been to every town I could find, knocked on every door I could find, solved every quest I could find, and I didn't have a single clue. I reviewed the documentation and all my notes to no avail.
  
I had just finished typing up a posting, ending with a call for hints. (Yes, I know the site that's been linked several times already has the passwords. I didn't want to know the passwords; I wanted to know how to get the passwords.) Just before I hit "publish," I decided to make one last quick scan of my inventory, and what do you know, I had something called "Note Dungeons" that had every single one of the passwords. I think perhaps it came from the elf queen; there was something in her speech about giving me "a list of the names of the old schools of magic," which I guess these "dungeons" are supposed to be.

Well, hell.

With this in hand, I decided to try a swamp dungeon on Dorithannon, and I ended up spending about eight hours there. It was 12 levels with lots of secret doors and teleporters to confound navigation. One level consisted entirely of logic riddles in the "one always lies, one always tells the truth" tradition, though I thought they were a bit too easy.

Imagine how easy the justice system would be if everyone either always lied or always told the truth.

The dungeon presented me with an enemy I hadn't fought before: a statue. Although the game indicated that it was taking damage from my attacks, no amount of damage I could do was enough. It just wouldn't die.

Previous experience with the "Staff of Stone" suggested that it was a missile weapon, but I couldn't get it to work. Fiddling around with it, I figured out that the staff has to be "loaded" with precious stones like rubies, emeralds, and opals (thankfully, I hadn't sold all of them), which it shoots like missiles. So charged, it was capable of taking out the statue in one blow.

Anyway, the entire dungeon only had a single unique treasure: a "Dragonring." It seems to act as a high-level ring of protection, but other than that, I don't know if it has a unique use. It was about this time that I noticed the experience cap, so I was pretty miffed during my long slog back to the surface. (Supposedly, there's a "Leave Dungeon" spell, but I haven't found it yet.)

Starbucks ought to adopt this classification: small, medium, large, dragon.

   
Back on the surface, I wasn't eager to go into another dungeon again, so I returned to Luthag and delivered the package to Sonok. He, in turn, asked me to go to Franklin in Scatterbone. I did. My "reward" was just a bunch of prattle about magic mushrooms in a nearby dungeon I hadn't yet explored.

But it was what happened between Luthag and Scatterbone that made me think the game might be finally coming near an end. At some point, I had discovered that going off the edge of the map would wrap me around to the other side. The shortest passage from Luthag to Scatterbone was this way, but I was surprised to find an island in between. (It's in a dark part of the world map.) The island turned out to be the Dragon's Vale mentioned in the back story.

An NPC finally has something useful to say.

It was on this island that I finally found the city of Negame, where I'd had a longstanding side quest regarding a woman named Cynthia who dabbles in poisons. I had a stack of poison potions I had no idea what to do with (you can't poison weapons or throw them). When I showed one to her, she was delighted, and she finally gave me some information on the main quest:

I'm aware of your great interest in the long-lost dragons! Yes, of course, you are! Listen: Should you be foolish enough to actually want to visit The Dragon Valley, the unicorn will block your way. Yes, of course I know myself that unicorns are the symbol for sweetness and beauty, you young fools! It's still beautiful, this unicorn, but it's condemned, corrupted by the Shadow's magic. A giant spellcrystal was necessary to change a unicorn into the valley's devil, but the Shadow managed it! And the only chance to free this unicorn and to get into the valley of the dragons is to destroy the crystal! So go and don't try to fight the unicorn, but displace the work of evil.

Great! Well, how do I do that? The answer seemed to come from a wandering NPC: "did you know that crystal destroys crystal?" No, I didn't! Thanks!

Thinking that the endgame might be near, I wandered west from Negame and found myself at the entrance to the Valley. I was taken to combat with a "banned unicorn" and a giant crystal. I figured all I had to do was maneuver Bladus, with his crystal sword, over to the crystal and attack it. Unfortunately, that didn't work. He couldn't get close enough, and the blade didn't work like a ranged weapon.

And that's where I am now. I figure there must be some mechanic that will allow me to destroy the crystal with the crystal blade, but I haven't found it yet.

In the meantime, I have four dungeons unexplored and several outstanding mysteries:

• What are these Pieces of Eltam? I have three of them (out of four, according to the elf queen). If I look at them or try to "use" them, I just get a message saying that it's incomplete.

• Does the dragon ring have a special function?

• Which is more important: the dragon ring or the pieces of Eltam? I ask this because there's a guy in Negame who wants to trade me a dragon ring for a piece.

• Why can't I get into House #5 in Bagnol? There's supposed to be a guy named Ostul with a map piece there.

• Where are the rest of those map pieces? For a while, I was recovering a couple per dungeon, but they all dried up. I still have six to go.

• What is the use of all these "common" spells like "Heal a Tree"? The game hasn't called upon them once.

• In a city called Trolian, there's a long maze through water--the locals call it their "water garden"--that culminates at a house where a guy won't speak to me because he only "sees adventurers with an open mind." What does he mean? Do all of my characters have to be neutral in their magic position (e.g., not leaning towards black or white)? If so, I need to find some black spells for three of them.

Hey! I've been pro-gay marriage since the 90s!

I'll take light hints--not spoilers!--on any of the above. In the meantime, here are some other miscellaneous notes:

• I didn't realize until hours after I had it that Dobranur's magic "battlehatchet" is a missile weapon as well as a melee weapon. This would have saved a lot of time.

• In my descriptions of cities, I'm eliding a lot of time spent knocking on doors and being greeted by NPCs who simply say things like, "Welcome, adventurers! What do you want?" or "You should visit the blacksmith!"

Every city has a bunch of houses like this.

• Bagnol had another "tribute statue," this time to fantasy illustrator Rodney Matthews. 

• A lot of doors in the dungeons seem designed specifically to waste keys. You unlock them (sacrificing a key) and there's literally nothing on the other side. The 12-level dungeon near Bagnol required so many keys that I eventually had to "key scum"--reloading if I found nothing useful on the other side--so I wouldn't have to leave the dungeon to go buy more.

• Creatures incapable of swimming or flying sometimes spawn in the middle of the ocean.

Poor bear. He must be tired out.

Though not too tired to climb onto the boat and attack us, I see.

• I haven't talked much about potions. So far, I've found nine types: healing, magic restoration, imbue a non-magic weapon with magic, strength, spirits, wine, holy water, poison, and dispel magic (the latter seems to be a unique item for that one imp quest). You can theoretically mix them together, but I don't see how that really improves anything. I hardly ever use them anyway. It's easy enough just to wait in place to restore hit points and spell points, and enemies stopped being difficult enough to require strength potions a long time ago. They'd all be more useful if you could use them in combat.

• I also find that I rely very little on magic, with the exception of "Dispel Undead" (pretty much the only way Rinakles gets experience), "Light," and "Healing." Offensive spells in combat like "Magic Arrow" just deplete spell points for little benefit over a regular attack. I haven't found a single use for all these "utility" spells yet (e.g., "Heal a Tree," "Moulded Stones," "Glowing Stone," "Stone Hardening").

Maybe a little more Fallthru while I wait to see if hints come in. If not, I still have four more dungeons to try.

Dragonflight: Overseas and Underground

Finally reaching the exit to the dungeon after eight hours in.

Back in 2010, when I was in the middle of Wizardry, complaining about how long it was taking, someone said, "Wait until you get to the 1990s and every game has 10 dungeons as big as Wizardry." Slowly but surely, this has been happening, but I didn't really notice it until Dragonflight. Over the last few days, I've spent about eight hours exploring and mapping a single dungeon of 10 levels, the largest occupying 28 x 31 squares (although not every space was used). Oh, it didn't take quite as long as an entire game of Wizardry, of course, owing to easier monsters and no permadeath, but it's only one of god-knows-how-many dungeons in the game.

A large dungeon level of secret doors, rooms, combats, traps, and treasure.

Dragonflight, in short, is taking forever. I just passed the 30-hour mark, which already puts it in the top 15% of games I've played for length, and I still mostly have no idea what I'm doing other than progressively getting more powerful. There hasn't been the slightest hint on the main quest. I'm supposed to discover what happened to the dragons all those years ago, and I can only hope that my random explorations are somehow, someway leading me to that goal.

When I last posted, I had just left a dungeon on the far west coast of the continent because I kept encountering locked doors after I'd run out of keys. I went back to the town of Luthag to purchase more. Figuring I'd let the west coast dungeon regenerate before I returned to it, I decided to check out the one other dungeon I knew about, in the middle of southern desert. It was tough because walking through the desert saps hit points every round and I had to make sure I was keeping up with the loss. When I finally got to the dungeon, I descended, lit a torch, and:

There's supposed to be an image here of a magic mouth demanding a password. I missed it because for about four consecutive hours, I forgot that the screen capture key in Steem isn't CTRL-F5 as in DOSBox but rather END. Here's a shot of me opening a treasure chest instead.

Great. Another magic mouth that wants some password before I can proceed. I hadn't received any clues about this dungeon from anyone, so I had no choice but to return to the surface, navigate back through the desert, and return to the west coast dungeon.

It was this dungeon that ended up being 10 large levels, full of monsters, traps, secret doors, and treasure. I say it took me eight hours to complete it, but I'd already done Levels 1-4 in the last post, so the eight hours were mostly just the bottom six levels. Notes from this exploration:

• There were a ton of enemies. My characters slaughtered so many--including my rear two characters wiping out scads of undead with "Dispel Undead"--that everyone more than doubled their experience points.

• As experience points rose, so did health and, most importantly, the number of movements per round. The problem I had with enemies anticipating and avoiding ranged attacks went away (or at least got a lot better) when my spellcaster and archer were able to move more than once per round. By the time I left the dungeon, the archer was up to three moves per round, which usually translates as one to get on a firing line with the enemy and two to actually shoot arrows.

• By far, the most difficult enemies I faced in the dungeon were balrons, who have a ranged magic attack capable of practically halving hit points. They can do it multiple times per round, and I occasionally encountered up to four in the same room. There was one level where there were four such rooms in a row. I had to stop, heal, and restore my magic points between each encounter, and even then I only won by casting "Speed" before the combat and "Heal" every round during the combat.

I also missed shots of the balrons. Here are some skeletons.

• As long as you have plenty of food, healing and restoring magic in dungeons is an easy matter of standing in a corridor and holding down the left-turn or right-turn keys. As you spin in place, both attributes slowly regenerate.

• Enemy difficulty has no correlation with the quality of treasures found in the rooms. None of the balron rooms had a single treasure chest, whereas some of the best treasures were found in rooms with no enemies.

• There were potions. Oceans of potions. Practically every treasure chest had at least six of them. When I got out, my characters had more than 50 healing potions, 20 potions each of spirits and wine, and dozens of others. I'm no longer so afraid to use them, though I'm going to keep at least 5 of each in permanent inventory in case I need them as quest items.

• There were a lot of trap doors that dump you on the next level. I'm a little confused by them. You can "detect" them in a way by "looking" at each square of the corridor, but there's still no way to avoid them. There's no "Levitate" spell or anything similar. Yet I see doorways on the other sides of the trap doors with no other way to approach them. I'm not sure what I'm missing.

How do I get to the door at the end of this corridor? Is it just a mirage?

• There were so many secret doors that I ultimately had to adopt the practice of scanning every wall. Unfortunately, in this game you can't find secret doors just by walking into them. You have to "look" at the wall first.

If you say so.

• There were two map pieces in the dungeon. I still have six to find, but I can confirm that the main continent is indeed shaped like a dragon.

The map shows a lot of places I haven't explored, including everything above the dragon's neck, the island between his legs, the island above his back, and "Antarctica." Fortunately, I now have a ship.

On Level 9, I encountered a magic mouth that said there were special potion bottles meant for dispelling creatures beyond. It asked me what type of liquid was in the bottles. I had no idea that this dungeon was the solution to the quest I'd received in Scatterbone, where the king is plagued with an imp constantly buzzing around his head. Consulting what he told me (made easier by the "notes" the game gives you after each major dialogue), I found the answer: LIQUEUR OF RAISINS. The mouth let me pass to retrieve the special potion in a room beyond.

I got it wrong a couple of times first. I always forget how to spell "liqueur."

Level 10 was a "reward" level--not a single combat, just copious treasure chests. Of course, I still had to deal with this nonsense:

Time to reset the emulator, re-start the program, re-load the game, and hope that this process re-seeds the random number generator.

It was a relief to trek back up and finally exit the dungeon. I immediately made my way to a temple, where my max magic points, for Rinakles, went from 20 to 100. Returning to Pegana, I sold my mushrooms and excess equipment. Fiddling with some of the rings, I discovered that they were Rings of Protection (they just say "ring"), so I'm glad I didn't sell them all.

A bunch of stuff that I'm afraid to sell now.

I sold a lot of the other gems and jewelry--bracelets, earrings, pearl necklaces, brooches, opals, diamonds--but kept a few pieces in case I needed them for quest items. I learned the new scrolls and turned in the ones I'd already found to the University for karma.

30 hours in, and I've solved this one side-quest.

When I returned to King Scatterbone, he happily took my potion. Free of the imp, he rewarded me with gems and a "Piece of Eltam," If I try to equip or use it, it says it's "not complete" and some "pieces are missing." I otherwise have no idea what it is. Maybe all these other side quests result in more "pieces of Eltam," and when the thing is complete, a dragon will pop out of it, and that will be the endgame.

In fact, except for the compass, I have no idea what any of the stuff on this screen is for.

The dungeon exploration accomplished the thing I had most hoped it would: it gave me enough money to "charter" a ship at Port Pylon. When I paid the fee, the game did as I hoped and gave me a ship to sail around freely, not just "passage" to some other location. With it, I was excited about exploring some of the locations on the map that I couldn't reach overland, starting with a dungeon on a nearby island. 

The creators made a combat backdrop for the ship. This makes me want to go downstairs to my Xbox and play Assassin's Creed IV.

The moment I walked in, I got another magic mouth looking for a password. Bollocks.

 

I soon found out another restriction to owning a ship: the crew won't sail very far from the home port. Mine refused to go very far east. I suppose this means I'll have to buy other ships in other ports.

Is the crew aware that I'm capable of casting "Lightning Bolt"?

The crew had no problem sailing west around the main continent, though, which was good because near the dungeon I'd spent so much time exploring, I found an "orc village" that I'd missed before. (It blends into the background a bit, at least for me.) There, I was surprised to meet a friendly orc king who spoke the human language. He explained that he was trying to civilize the orcs, and as part of this effort, he wanted me to take a contract around to the human, elf, and dwarf cities and see if I could get the leaders to sign.

I give the game credit here for a fairly original side-quest.

This side quest reminded me that I hadn't done much about the elf queen's request that I find the stolen sphere containing the souls of the elf elders. One of the possible locations was in the "dragon's tail." I sailed up to the series of islands that make up the tail and didn't see anything, but I hit upon the idea of getting off the boat and "searching" the mountains. I'm glad I did, because I found a dungeon on my second try.

And there was no magic mouth looking for a password!

I leave you having entered this dungeon, and I'm trying to decide whether to explore it or to do the orc chief's quest first. I suppose I'll try a few levels and see how long it takes. It would be nice to return to Nimraviel with the sphere.

My opinion of the game hasn't changed. There are no great moments or awful moments, just moments. I'd happily give it up except for not wanting to break a long winning streak. You'll probably see a post on FallThru and perhaps a 1980s game before I post next, though.