Legacy of the Ancients: Won!

"Knowing nothing of the planet?" Did the game forget its own backstory?

       

Well, it took longer than I thought, but not in any meaningful way did it take "long." Much of my time was spent screwing around trying to find coins so I could view all the Museum exhibits. I'm not sure I explained this very clearly before. In the Museum are a number of digital "exhibits," each of which takes a certain type of coin--jade, topaz, amethyst, sapphire, and so on. Each exhibit tells you something about the game world, and some of them give you objects or money, transport you to various adventures, or give you a quest. Viewing all of them was crucial to advancing. Some coins I had to find in specific places, like chests in the castle, and others I bought from random merchants. It turned out I had to return to Castle Kelfor about 9 times, fighting legions of guards each time. Each visit got me some clue or object that I needed to use somewhere else to get me another clue or object that allowed me to penetrate deeper into the castle. I discovered belatedly that some seeds I found on my first visit turn me invisible and would have saved me a lot of fighting.

    

I never could have guessed that password.

     

The ultimate result of Kelfor was to find a mysterious old wizard called the Guardian who branded me so that members of the resistance would be able to identify me. This did exactly one thing for me: it allowed a healer to give me a ruby coin. It took me about 90 minutes to find the healer, visiting every single town in the game before I finally remembered there was a town out on the pirate islands I had forgotten about. That's where she was. Aaargh. 

     

        

The ruby coin allowed me access to a special dungeon contained within the Museum, where I spelunked eight levels to find the four jewels that would neutralize the Wizard's Compendium. This wasn't too much of a challenge except that I accidentally quit without saving and had to go through the whole process of getting the key the second time. 

       

The dungeon, despite all the build-up, was actually quite easy.

         

I thought to video-capture it on the second run. The nine-minute clip below contains just about everything the game has to offer: towns, outdoors, outdoor combat, buying and selling things, the Museum exhibits, and a dungeon. Note the primitive sounds, which I neglected to mention before. 

      

      

After the dungeon, I flew on a pegasus across the sea to the Warlord's castle. It was a long trip, and one wonders how he's managing to terrorize the main continent from such a remote outpost, especially whereas I needed to thaw a frozen pegasus to get there.

      

      

The fortress was a bit of a challenge. The game forced me to get captured the moment I walked through the door and stripped me of my weapons and armor. 

      

This is always a tiresome device.

       

I escaped from jail by killing a guard, and I soon found an axe and some plate mail. I then had to hack my way through dozens of tough guards who were relatively impervious to spells. 

            

Along the way were two cut scenes showing the Warlord taunting and threatening me. I finally caught up with him in this room where the Compendium itself kept attacking me, not only sapping my hit points but also destroying my healing herbs! Totally uncool. At long last, I killed the Warlord and was informed that the castle would self-destruct in five minutes. 

      

      

At this point, the game completely wore out its welcome. It took me way longer than five minutes to chop my way through the many guards remaining between me and the exit. This is bad gameplay design, don't you think? I mean, once you've killed the big boss, the game ought to be pretty much over.

             

At length, I returned to the Museum and was given the Galactic Medal of Honor by the Caretaker. I also videoed the end, from the time the Warlord's fortress exploded to the last scene. 

      

        

It's quite long, first because I forgot where to find a certain exhibit and I spend a lot of time wandering around. Then the game insists on recapping the entire plot for about five minutes. Still, it's one of the few end-game victory cut scenes that we have in this era, and I suppose I ought to appreciate it. The final shot sets up a very obvious sequel: 

       

       

This is already pretty long, but I think I'll figure out the GIMLET ranking right here instead of saving it for another posting.

     

1. Game World. You have to give it points for originality. Sure, the world itself is fairly standard fantasy fare, and the peasant-rises-up-to-defeat-the-evil-warlord has been done to death, but the framing device of the Galactic Museum is quite original. The problem is, I don't know how well it works. If the Museum is supposed to be a secret, why do the shops sell a spell that has no purpose except to take you to it? Why are the coins all over the place? The land itself is a bit mysterious--who is this Kelfor whose castle I keep raiding? Should I feel bad about killing all his guards? The bad balances the good. One good element is that as you get closer to the end, the Warlord's minions start raiding towns and killing healers (I forgot to mention this above); I like games in which the game world changes noticeably in response to the player's actions. Score: 6.

      

2. Character Creation & Development. Very unsatisfying. "Creation" consists of just giving a name. There is no opportunity to role-play races, sexes, and classes. Leveling is all quest-based (and linear) and has nothing to do with the legions of monsters you slay. The only good points are the mini-games by which you develop dexterity, endurance, and intelligence. I spent over an hour on the intelligence mini-game, which consisted of a variation of Liar's Dice. Score: 3. 

     

The intelligence-boosting mini-game called Stones of Wisdom was actually far more addicting than the main game.

      

3. NPC Interaction. Ultima I-III-level stuff: you speak to them, they tell you one thing. No dialog options, no role-playing. If you count the Caretaker and seers as NPCs, though, it is necessary to speak to NPCs to learn about your quest and the game world. Score: 3.

      

4. Encounters & Foes. No other game offers quite the catalog of creatures that Legacy of the Ancients offers, but the only real unique thing about them is their names. They don't really do anything special. The creatures respawn constantly, which I usually regard as a good thing--when killing creatures gets you experience. I suppose there is some very very minor "role-playing" in that you can choose to speak with some creatures instead of fighting them. Score: 3.

       

5. Magic & Combat. The magic system consists of six spells which you buy in units: two virtually identical blast spells, a "befuddlement" spell that stuns your foes (I never used it), a "kill" spell that clears out dungeon corridors, a strength spell, and a spell that takes you to the Museum. It couldn't be less imaginative. Combat is similarly unsatisfying; you just have one attack option. Yes, some creatures take more damage from certain weapon types, but by the time you've got that nailed down, you're strong enough that it hardly makes sense to bother swapping out equipment. Score: 2.

      

6. Equipment. Weapons and armor are very basic, although the "rating" system is unusual, and the sale price makes it easy to tell which item is best. There is quite a lot of supplementary equipment that you can find and buy, from grappling hooks for climbing mountains to "magic ice" that allows you to cross small bodies of water. Nothing earth-shattering, but interesting. Score: 4. 

        

7. Economy. Late in the game, you have way more gold than you need, but for most of it, you're spending most of your cash on spells and herbs. I like the gambling mini-games, and I like that the "break the bank" bit makes it hard to get too rich playing. Score: 6.

       

 8. Quests. The game has essentially one quest, arranged in various stages or chapters. No side quests, no alternate outcomes, and no real role-playing. Score: 2.

     

9. Graphics, Sound, and Inputs. The graphics are decent enough for an isometric game of the era, especially in the Apple II and C64 versions (which I didn't play). The sound is 8-bit throwback and a bit painful. It slows down the gameplay and I couldn't find any way to shut it off. Controls are through the keyboard and intuitive enough. Score: 4.

      

10. Gameplay. The game is very linear from the outset. Although you can explore much of the world right away, you can't really do anything until you begin the main quest, and that proceeds in a lock-step order. There is no replayability to the game. The difficulty feels right, the pacing is okay, and the five mini-games (three stat-boosting, two gambling) are fun diversions. It's a short game, but I wouldn't want to play it for too long. Score: 5. 

      

The final score of 38 puts it about on par with 2400 A.D., of which it reminds me a bit. Both of the games were short isometric outings in fairly limited and somewhat boring gameworlds despite interesting sci-fi framing plots. All right, it's well past time to do what I'm going to do with Le Maitre des Ames. After that, it's on to something called Mission: Mainframe.

Legacy of the Ancients: Mildly Amusing Curio

Apparently, intergalactic space travelers still wear cloaks and carry candles.

Legacy of the Ancients is an okay game that moves along at a decent clip. I spent enough time playing today to get several entries out of it, if I wanted. My major accomplishments were to:

• Accumulate a lot of money through gambling and use it to buy magic items
• Have the Wizard's Compendium stolen (this doesn't sound like an accomplishment, but the game suggests it was necessary)
• Build up some of my character stats
• Raid Castle Kelfor for gold and items
• Plunder a pirate cave
• Get some quests from the Museum and its caretaker

This didn't make any sense, but I realized later that (for some reason) I needed to visit the museum exhibit on healing herbs before I could buy any.

The game lets me buy up to 99 of each of its 6 spells. The first two, magic flame and firebolt, are the most valuable of the lot, usable in both outdoor areas and dungeons, and they do about 10 times the damage of my best attack. The other most valuable magic item is healing herbs, of which the game lets me carry 40. But buying the full complement of this kit costs around 10,000 gold pieces, and monsters deliver only about 10-50 per kill, so I thought I'd raise funds through gambling.

Cute, but hardly worth the effort.

There are two gambling mini-games: blackjack and "flipflop." The latter game is like a giant Plinko board in which you bet on where a ball will land. It's interesting but too time-consuming, especially given that the rules of blackjack in this game are extremely favorable. I find my edge is around 115%, so as long as I keep my bets modest, I always wind up ahead in the end. This seemed a bit too simple and it was: it turns out that after you win about 2,000 gold pieces, you "break the bank" and guards swarm and pummel you (you can get the same outcome by robbing the bank). The only way around it is to travel from city to city, never winning too much money. What with the monsters I had to fight on the way, this took a little while.

"I swear I wasn't counting cards!"

In the midst of it, some thieves ambushed me and stole the Compendium. Lest I reload, apparently, the game warned me that this step was a necessary part of the game. Scripted events that you can't avoid no matter how badass your character are staples of CRPGs, of course, but it's handled oddly, and I'm not sure why it wasn't just part of the backstory to begin with.

Isn't that handy?

I lost track of all of the different types of monsters I've encountered. Only a few of them, such as "Eaton warriors," have names reminiscent of any other CRPGs. Some of the names include bone dwellers, carrion manglers, mime ghouls, neural clouds, pit strikers, practon piercers, slime weirds, stinging rakishes, venom floaters, ventro flailers, wave skimmers, and wind stalkers. I would give the game points for originality except that the creatures aren't very well distinguished except by name. A few of them (at least, the ones in dungeons) have special attacks, like dissolving your armor, breaking your weapon, or draining your endurance, but for the most part they're interchangeable by name and unmemorable by icon.

Insert "yo momma" joke here.

Part of the game's tactic is supposed to be that certain weapons work better against certain foes--you can figure this out by trial-and-error or by buying clues from seers. But either way, it's hardly worth the time to swap out weapons when most enemies die from a few blows anyway.

  

Weapons, I should mention, come in several varieties--knives, clubs, bladed staffs, and so on--and in various conditions ranging from "shoddy" to "great." I learned the hard way to keep hold of a couple of different weapons for when one gets shattered.

To reach the castle island, I had to buy a boat.

Things picked up when I raided Castle Kelfor, but the game follows Ultima I's and Ultima II's traditions of turning me into a mass murderer for the sake of the plot. I must retrieve certain artifacts from the chests in the castle, but opening chests causes the guards to swarm me, leading me to mercilessly slaughter them.

I'm sure he was just doing his job.

The castle also featured a mysterious woman named "Cassandra" who increased my "charm" attribute.

  

Ultimately, I got hold of a magic tulip that, when returned to the Museum, netted me another boost to my "charm" skill and an extra level.

  

Oh, yes--leveling. From what I can tell, I don't gain levels in this game through combat. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any reason for combat except to get enemies out of your way (and make a few paltry gold pieces). Instead, the Caretaker levels me up when I solve certain quests. I'm level 3 now; I don't know how may levels there are in the game. I had to find my way back to the Museum first, which turns out to occupy a corner on the westernmost part of the continent. Entering it involves answering some copy protection questions with the help of a fan page.

  

After raiding the castle, I followed another monitor in the Museum to the Isles of Three Sisters...

  

...where I explored an eight-level pirate dungeon. The dungeon was in first-person view and featured a variety of tough monsters, chests, and traps (I learned the hard way that I needed to "examine" each corridor before striding on down.) I got very rich (>10,000 gold) from this trip and also found a jeweled crown.

  

When I returned to the museum, the Caretaker gave me a quest to recover the selfsame crown and a scepter. I returned the crown immediately. I'm not quite sure where to go for the scepter just yet--I think I've explored all of the places on the map--but this seemed like a good place to knock off for the day.

I did die twice. Dying has very few consequences: you are immediately resurrected with your full complement of hit points, but with only a handful of food and gold pieces. Fortunately, the game lets you stash money in the bank (where it gains interest) just for such a situation. When I noticed this, it reminded me to take a break from the game to check on my IRA account, which--just like watching Veronica Mars in the middle of Faery Tale Adventure--is a good sign to me that the game isn't really captivating. I'm sure I'll still finish it, since it doesn't seem like it's going to take much longer, but we're talking Ultima II-level game play here, and we've seen a lot of CRPGs advance much further than that.

I'm going to invest a couple more hours tonight, and if I haven't won, I'll take a Le Maitre des Ames break. Otherwise, you might see a "won!" posting tomorrow.

Game 36: Legacy of the Ancients (1987)

Those would be Doric columns.

        

Legacy of the Ancients

United States

Quest Software (developer); Electronic Arts (publisher)

Released in 1987 for Apple II and Commodore 64; 1989 for DOS

Date Started: 25 December 2010

            

Before I get in to Legacy of the Ancients, I should mention that I haven't moved on from Le Maitre des Ames yet. I'm just doing that thing you said you wouldn't mind where I play two games at once. I'm still in the midst of translating the manual for Maitre and getting used to the interface. I think the game has a lot of potential, but it seems a lot like work, and I'm feeling lazy this weekend.

Legacy of the Ancients is the opposite of "work": it is an uncomplicated, plain little game--almost a throwback, really. It uses the same game engine as Questron, the first CRPG I ever played, about 26 years ago. I didn't play it as part of this project because of my PC/DOS restriction--a restriction that has come to feel a bit foolish, since this is yet another game in which the DOS version offers the poorest graphics (you can see a comparison of the C64 and DOS graphics at the game's MobyGames site).

The game starts with the basest character creation possible: I simply name my character (I chose "Lailoken") and the action begins. I play a poor peasant in the land of Tarmalon who one day comes across a dead body on the side of the road. It belongs to a nameless previous adventurer who was in the middle of the quest to destroy a powerful and dangerous magic scroll called the Wizard's Compendium. I loot his body for the Compendium, two jade coins, and his magic bracelet and soon find myself transported to a mysterious building.

           

"Only a poor peasant" strikes me as uncomfortably classist.

              

The building is the Museum of the Ancients, an edifice constructed in times of yore by a race of aliens. It is apparently one of many scattered on different worlds. The museums allow the Ancients to view life on different worlds, but they are forbidden from interfering with the worlds' developments (a video monitor warns me not to "feed the Tarmalon natives"); the caretaker of the museum on Tarmalon apparently decided to break this rule.

          

It's like Might & Magic crossed with Star Trek.

           

As I continue wandering the hallways, the bracelet begins speaking to me with the voice of the previous owner, charging me to "neutralize the evil Scroll of Spells before it destroys everything!" The rest of the museum is filled with similar monitors that take coins of various denominations. With the two jade coins found on the body, I view exhibits titled "Art of Weaponry," which allows me to take a dagger, and "Thornberry," which tells me about a typical Tarmalon town, in which rich and poor live separated by a stone wall. Having used my last coin on the latter exhibit, I take the exhibit's offer to transport me there.

        

             

And thus the game begins. Thornberry is a typical CRPG town, with a weapon and armor shop, a bank, and a transportation shop. Gameplay is isometric, with graphics on par with Ultima IV. Commands are all through the keyboard, with available actions listed on the left side of the screen.

           

          
At the food shop, I got a quest to deliver a bag of mail to the town of Big Rapids:
         

          
I also found a gambling parlor, where I indulged in a few rounds of blackjack featuring rules I would love to see on my next trip to Atlantic City.
           

"Natural blackjack pays double! I'm not leaving until--hey, let go of me!"

            

In the wilderness, I encountered creatures both hostile and friendly. So far, I have fought and killed pulp crawlers, bone dwellers, slash nettles, blistopods, scorpods, ventro flailers, carrion manglers, pit stalkers, venom floaters, and wind stalkers. All slain foes give up gold or items, and some of them can be converted to food--yes, this is another game in which you must maintain a rapidly-dwindling food supply.

            

Combat is, unfortunately, no more tactical than in Faery Tale Adventure. You just keep mashing "F" until you or the creature dies. There is a magic system in the game, but it reaches all the way back to Ultima I for its inspiration--you buy spells at shops and cast them until they run out, then buy more.

        

What, exactly, does "psycho strength" mean?

          

Not all encounters are hostile. I bought some food from a bandit, a museum coin from a farmer, and a potion from a merchant.

        

             

As I slay creatures, I don't have any idea if I am developing experience or anything. My level remains firmly fixed at 1. The game manual seems to suggest that the museum caretaker will be the one to level me up, but I haven't figured out how to get back to the museum yet. I did figure out how to develop at least one statistic, though: one of the towns has a neat mini-game in which you have to fend off fireballs.

           

          

You do it by simply turning in the direction they're coming from, which sounds easy, but it gets pretty dicey at high levels when multiple fireballs are coming at the same time from multiple directions at different speeds. I did okay my first time out.

            

             

I had hoped that each town would feature a different side quest, but apparently they all involve mail delivery to the other towns. Nonetheless, I get about 100 gold pieces for each delivery, and it's an easy way to make money while I explore and figure out my next move.

If it seems like an unexciting game, well it is, a bit. But the mini-games and gambling are a neat touch, and it's a good game to mess around with while I'm supposed to be watching It's a Wonderful Life with my family.

There's a big blizzard approaching New England, and I don't feel like dealing with it, so I managed to get a last-minute ticket to San Diego tomorrow morning. I know my blogging usually falls off when I'm traveling, but this time I don't have any particular business to do, and I'm actually looking forward to the idea of hanging out on my hotel balcony, playing games, and only leaving my room to restock my wet bar. If I have any readers in that city, I'll be glad to meet you for a drink at the Green Flash.

Tomorrow, we'll see what strikes my fancy the most: the interesting-but-difficult foreign game or the slightly-boring-but-simple Legacy of the Ancients.