Legends: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

       

Legends

United States

Asgard Software (developer and publisher)

Released in 1987 for TI-99

Date Started: 19 October 2017
Date Ended: 4 November 2017

Total Hours: 18

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5); this is partly user-definable

Final Rating: 29

Ranking at Time of Posting: 139/267 (52%)

 

I was too hard on Legends in my first entry, particularly since it offers perhaps the only traditional CRPG experience on the TI-99. (Tunnels of Doom is arguably a better game, but it's also a bit of an outlier among RPGs.) It copies a lot from Phantasie, but in some ways ripping off Phantasie is, paradoxically, original; most clones at the time were clones of Ultima or Wizardry. Finally, Legends gets better as it goes along and you get past the initial grinding phase.

The game's primary sin is a lack of balance. Take the issue of character development. To survive extended trips to the dungeons, your characters essentially have to attain the highest levels (15), or near so, before they set out. This means that the experience you earn in dungeons is mostly wasted, and you spend the bulk of the game with your experience maxed. You waste so much experience, in fact, that I wonder if the developers didn't intend for characters to die frequently, and for the party to continually have to train replacements.

     

These buttons turn the lights on and off.

     

The difficulty setting is another odd addition. Early in the game, when you're trying to grind, it makes sense to sometimes set it to 3 or 4. You're taking a gamble, but you're rewarded with more experience, more gold, and faster development. But once you decide to clear a dungeon, you're just punishing yourself if you set the slider at anything other than 1. They're difficult enough at that.

After the last session, when I was trying to grind enough to survive extended trips in the wilderness, I discovered a somewhat lame shortcut. Recall that if you simply stand still in the wilderness, you get attacked by a random enemy within a couple of seconds. Since the "1" key chooses the "fight" option, chooses the "attack" option for individual characters, and serves to acknowledge all messages that pop up in between, you pretty much just need to hold down "1" and it will cycle you through random combats indefinitely. You have to keep a periodic eye on it to make sure that you don't die, but otherwise you can easily go from Level 3 to 15 in just a couple of episodes of Stranger Things.

Throughout the game, my primary issue was one of money, not experience. I earned enough experience for Level 15 while I was still trying to pay for training for Level 9.

    

Training starts to get prohibitive.

     

Finding the dungeons is a small pain. The game world is unnecessarily large at 15 screens, and you face an insane number of random encounters while moving around. These can be mitigated with "Stealth" potions, which last for a random amount of time, but I was always too poor to invest heavily in potions.

  

This map section has a dungeon, a teleporter, and an inn.

     

Scattered among those 15 screens are half a dozen inns, where you can rest to restore hit points and spell points, and half a dozen dungeons. There are 5 teleporters, which return you to Wizard's Rock if you enter the right code, found in one of the dungeons. These are mostly a waste of time, because if you save the game while in the wilderness and re-start it, you find yourself back in Wizard's Rock anyway.

There are two special encounters in the game world, both providing some textual background. One discusses the nearby Knights' Outpost, which I'll describe in a bit; the other discusses the view you have of Ashtar Creel's mansion on a southwestern island.

   

    

The game's approach to dungeons is odd in several ways. There are six of them, each made up of four screens except Creel's mansion, which has three. Like Phantasie, Legends asks you if you want to save your progress as you transition from screen to screen; unlike Phantasie, it remembers all of the dungeon screens, not just the last one you visited.

      

Entering a dungeon near an inn.

    

Dungeons come in two types, and there are three of each. The first type has no monsters at all, just traps and treasures. The treasures include weapon and armor upgrades. These dungeons are faster to navigate than the second type, but in some ways they're more difficult. The ranger's "disarm traps" ability maxes at around 85%, so he flubs 1 in 5 or 6 traps and causes damage to himself or the party. You also find a lot of chests that have a tendency to explode when you try to open them. Since you can only cast spells in combat, and there are no combats in these dungeons, the only way to heal is to leave or to carry an inventory of healing potions.

    

This happens far too often.

 

These dungeons are primarily valuable for the weapon and armor upgrades they provide. When you run across a piece of equipment, the game asks if you want to keep it, and if so, who gets it. It automatically overrides anything you're already carrying, so you have to keep track of what the characters already have, lest you equip them with something worse than what they were carrying. Weapons start with dirks and axes and slowly improve until you end the game with magic weapons like a "god longsword," "demon maces," and "wizard's teeth," the highest of these doing around 20 damage points at maximum. The best protection comes in the form of "legends armor" for three characters and enchanted robes for the wizard. The fighter, ranger, and cleric can wield silver, gold, and elven shields; the mage gets a "wizard's cloak" to compensate for his lack of a shield.

   

One of the best weapons in the game.

    

The second type of dungeon has monsters--all fixed, none random. You can find potions and gold in these dungeons, but no item upgrades. You can last in them as long as your hit points and spell points hold out.

Both dungeons have the occasional message or special encounter, signaled (as in Phantasie) by a little dot on the map. There aren't as many role-playing options in these encounters as Phantasie offers, but there are a few. As you explore, the game changes descriptions of your current area: "An old dusty hallway," "a dark hidden room," "an old road with potholes," "inside a small temple." Some of the descriptors are a little odd, suggesting people or options that don't actually appear, like "Glom's Price-Rite Pawn Shoppe" and "Mad Ernie's Inn."

      

A rare role-playing choice.

     

As I mentioned above, I explored mostly with the difficulty set to 1. Although it probably hurt me with gold, it ensured I didn't have to return to the same dungeon multiple times. The monsters were still pretty hard. Their most annoying weapon was the "Slow" spell, which reduces the number of attacks for each character from 5 (at max levels) to 1. You can "Dispel" it, but that's a cleric spell and the cleric always goes last. Often the enemies would just cast it again in the next round.

       

They're not evil; they're just late.

    

Because I had to save most of my cleric's spell points for "Dispel," I didn't get much use out of any other cleric spells. I mostly used the ranger for healing. The wizard's "Firestorm" comes in handy, but the wizard always goes third in combat, and very often, the first two characters would have weakened an enemy but not killed him by the time the wizard's turn came up. At that point, "Firestorm" was a waste of resources (since you can only target one enemy at a time). Fortunately, the wizard is a decent melee fighter with the right equipment.

   

At least it's honest.

    

There is one persistent annoyance with dungeon encounters, and thankfully Adamantyr helped me understand what was happening. If you're ambushed in a dungeon, giving the enemy the first round of attacks, the game somehow leaves the "ambush" flag permanently set. Every encounter after that one becomes an ambush. Drinking a "Stealth" potion, which otherwise doesn't work in dungeons, resets the flag.

Most of the dungeon screens are mapped as you enter, but this is deceiving. Any bit of wall may open up into a secret area if you try to step into it, or turn out to have a treasure or encounter hiding under it. You basically have to test every single wall square, from every direction, to make sure you don't miss anything. This is particularly true because the passages to other sections of the dungeon are all invisible secret doors lining the outer hallways, and many occur in non-obvious places.

      

My initial arrival in a dungeon map.

The final map of the same area, after revealing all the secret walls.

    

I explored the dungeons in roughly a counter-clockwise pattern; in the end, I wished I had done the opposite. The first was cued as "old ruins," and it was a trap/item dungeon. In one encounter, a skeleton had scratched numbers in the wall that correspond to the world's teleporters. Another special encounter in "Sadie's Diner" led to a clue to "seek out the white dwarf who was last seen in the west." I got some decent weapon and armor upgrades here.

     

     

Then second dungeon, an encounter dungeon, was called "Dumpmoat West," and early in the dungeon, a special encounter indicated that they used to be luxury apartment complexes. There were no special encounters or items in it; it was useful primarily for its caches of gold.

     

"Dumpmoat" just screams "luxury."

    

The third dungeon was the ruins of an old temple, again a trap/item area. A special encounter with a blind monk got me the code to a vault door when I gave him some money. A beautiful woman locked in a cell turned out to be a trap; it exploded when I opened it to release her. Inside the vault was a "temple key" that allowed me access to the temple back at Wizard's Rock, which provides healing and (at last) resurrection for dead characters.

      

My reload count fell quickly after this.

     

Fourth, I explored the old Knight Outpost. Early on, you encounter a sleeping old warrior, who you can wake or murder. If you wake him, he gives you the password to the armory: INVICTA. The dungeon has an incredible number of weapons and pieces of armor as well as some addition text that fills in the game's lore. Finally, freeing the white dwarf gives you the magical password (ORM SOT) to close the gate in Creel's mansion. For the item upgrades alone, it would have been so much easier to explore this dungeon first.

     

    

The penultimate dungeon was an old graveyard. Its purpose was to deliver the Azure Amulet necessary to close the portal in Creel's mansion. Ultimately, this and Creel's mansion are the only absolutely necessary dungeons in the game, although you would need prior knowledge of the password from the Knight Outpost.

   

A major quest solved. Note the developers' initials in the dungeon walls.

    

The dungeon is swarming with undead, including spirits and vampires, and some of them have the ability to cast a spell called "Level Loss." They do this so frequently that I had to enter and leave the dungeon twice, and both times they had gotten my characters down to Level 2 or 3 from Level 15. There is no "restore" option in the game.

Normally, this would infuriate me, but it turns out that level loss isn't a big deal in Legends. It's even beneficial. When you lose levels, you don't lose the maximum hit points and spell points that you earned from leveling up. You don't lose access to your higher-level spells, either. The only thing you really lose is the extra attacks, and this is just a difference between 3 and 5. Meanwhile, when you get back to the city, you can use your accumulated experience to re-level up, earning even more maximum hit points and spell points. "Level Loss" is, frankly, the only means of character development late in the game.

There were a few mysteries in the game:

     

• One pub clue says that "one of the numbers is 21+50. Another is 50+33." I don't know what these refer to. None of the teleporter codes are 71 or 83.

      

I never figured out what this tavern tale was referring to.

     

• About 6 dungeon encounters left me with gold keys. These never appeared to unlock anything.

• In a vault in the temple ruins, a skeleton had written something about an ogre. I don't think I ever met an ogre, and it didn't turn out to be a clue to anything.

• The Dark Knights are set up as a major obstacle, but they rarely appear in the game except in the final dungeon, where they are easily defeated.

          

The party takes on the Batman twins.

        

The final dungeon is Creel's mansion, on an island to the southwest. For most of the game, I assumed that a teleporter would take me there, but once I exhausted the codes, I realized that wouldn't work. I was on the cusp of asking Adamantyr for a hint when I realized that he'd already provided it by noting in his own review of the game that "some of the water [squares are] actually shoals, which you CAN walk on." This jibes with the in-game description that a "sand bar" connects the mainland to the island. Bottom line: by finding the right set of water squares, you can just walk there.

      

Entering Creel's mansion.

     

Creel's dungeon is a three-screen affair. On the second screen, you find a book of spells. On the third, you find the portal to the netherworld. With the spell book, the Azure Amulet, and the white dwarf's password, you can close it.

     

Reaching the endgame.

     

This causes Creel to appear. He's a powerful character with 900 hit points and the ability to cast spells, but he attacks alone. As long as you've saved enough spell points for "Firestorm," the highest levels of which do more than 100 points of damage, you can kill him in a few rounds. Defeating him brings up the winning message at the top of this entry.

       

Ashtar's son, Carl, watched in horror as the party avenged the wrong Ashtar had done to the kingdom. A blast of errant magic sent Carl spinning through the portal. Coming to his senses on a strange new world, he discovered he had new and unusual abilities . . .

      

I had a technical glitch during my gameplay, not worth recounting in detail, but I was saved by Adamantyr. I owe him several times over for the ability to successfully finish this game, and I thank him accordingly.

In a GIMLET, Legends earns:

• 3 points for the game world, including a derivative but clear backstory.

    

A few text-based encounters help fill out the backstory.

    

• 2 points for character creation and development. Having to have exactly four characters of those specific classes is a bit too limiting; character development throughout the game is stunted; and the level cap is too low.

• 1 point for NPC interaction. This is generous. There are only a couple of NPCs in dungeons, and these are more "encounters" than NPCs.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. The Phantasie-style encounters were the best part of the game; I wish there had been more. Other than that, the bestiary is original and satisfying enough. I didn't explore the pre-combat options very much, even late in the game, but they do occasionally work, and they still reward you with experience and gold when successful.

     

Green dragons were common enemies in Creel's mansion.

     

• 3 points for magic and combat. Combat offers relatively few options and the spell list is pretty short.

• 3 points for equipment. A small selection of weapon and armor upgrades is the best part of the game. Potions are equally important, though I didn't spend much time talking about them.

     

My mid-game potion inventory.

    

• 4 points for the economy. Needed for training and potions, it never stops being relevant. It just lacks complexity and is perhaps a little too restrictive.

• 3 points for a main quest with no options and no side-quests, but one of those points goes to a couple of side-dungeons.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface, all only "adequate."

• 3 points for gameplay. I applaud the relatively nonlinear approach to the dungeons, but overall the game is a bit too large, too long, and too grindy. 

         

This gives us a final score of 29, which is higher than I thought I'd rank the game when I first started. TI-99 owners will probably object to rating Legends 7 points higher than Tunnels of Doom (1982), the platform's only truly original RPG. While I agree that Tunnels is a more iconic game, and more impressive for its year and platform, Legends offers a better experience as an RPG specifically.

I had an e-mail exchange with author Donn Granros this week. He said he met Ed Johnson in a class on TI assembly language. The two shared a love of the machine, with Donn specializing in graphics and game design and Ed more interested in the underlying engine. They considered a 3D game but found that the TI-99 didn't do well with 3D corridors, so Donn adapted what he had learned from Phantasie and tabletop gaming.

The Legends titles got good reviews and a set of dedicated fans, but the TI-99 was a minor platform even when new, and a cult platform by the time Donn and Ed were designing their games. They made "peanuts" by Donn's recollection. However, they both learned enough about programming to transition to IT roles in their respective industries. Donn, already in his mid-40s when Legends was written, spent his career at a tool distributor, retiring in 2013 to focus on painting. Ed became the systems administrator for Davanni's, a Minnesota pizza chain, and according to LinkedIn is still there.

Donn is still a fan of the TI-99 and laments what could have been if the company had better supported its computer and hadn't restricted third-party development. I'll only encounter it one more time, for Legends II (1989)--at least until I reach the games that Adamantyr is making for it in the modern era.

Next on the 1987 list, I look forward to finishing a game that has remained unfinished on my list for almost 7 years: Le Maître des Âmes.

*****

Ages ago, at the bottom of one of my Fate: Gates of Dawn entries, I wrote:

Maze Quest was supposed to be the next game after that, but I think I have to render it "NP." The game is really just a shareware tease for a full game called City Quest, but the full one doesn't seem to exist any more. Maze Quest's characters can only achieve Level 2. Moreover, when I tried to play it, it didn't emulate well. It froze frequently and wouldn't respond to my navigation commands, instead spinning my party around randomly. It otherwise seems like a competent dungeon-crawler, so if anyone comes across City Quest, I'd be happy to give it a try.

Somehow, this experience disappeared from my spreadsheet and mind, and Maze Quest ended up appearing on my "upcoming" list yet again. I have removed it again for the same reason, hopefully permanently this time.

Game 268: Legends (1987)

      

Legends

United States

Asgard Software (developer and publisher)

Released in 1987 for TI-99

Date Started: 19 October 2017    
      
You have gone 20 levels down and 20 levels back up in your search for the Amulet of Yendor, rising in the process from a scared serf to an invincible warlord. The quest item is tucked securely in your belt and the exit is in sight. Suddenly, a little Level 1 goblin appears in your path and growls. You're torn between annoyance and amusement. You faced hordes of these when you were a Level 1 adventurer, but you outgrew them a long time ago. Do I step around him or smack him across the room without breaking stride?, you wonder, knowing that by even considering the question, you're spending more time on this foe than he's worth.

You try to side-step him. He dives in front of your legs and trips you. You don't fall, but it takes a couple of seconds to right your balance. Now you're pissed. You're going to crush the little bastard's skull. You swing your mace at him but he dodges at the last second, chortling at you. You swing again; he jumps aside. You swear aloud. Fifteen steps from your destination, and you have to deal with this? You turn again towards the door, vowing to just ignore him, but now he runs up and jumps on your back, digging his claws into your neck. "Get off me," you bellow, twisting your body to and fro as his grubby nails pierce your flesh.
      

I'm going to be telling this analogy for a while, so here's the game's take on a giant cat.

    
Reeling backwards, you head for the nearest wall, intending to mangle your "opponent"--though you can't yet bring yourself to call him that---between its stones and your armor. Anticipating the satisfaction of the resulting crunch, you smile. But moments before you strike, he leaps away and into the shadows. With no way to check your momentum, you slam against the granite wall. The impact jars your armor and helm and you see stars. Shaking your head to clear it, you look around. The goblin is nowhere to be seen.

Well, at least he's--. Your thought is cut off as you abruptly notice a lack of weight on your belt. In panic you grab at your waist with your gauntleted hand. It comes up empty, confirming the worst. The Amulet of Yendor is gone. In the distance, you hear a goblin laughing. You have to be f&#*#@$ kidding me. You cast one last plaintive look towards the exit before heading back into the dungeon's shadows, girding yourself for a quest that's clearly going to take a lot longer than it should.

Legends is the CRPG equivalent of that goblin. That it's a TI-99 game meant that it was never going to be great, but it could have at least been fast. It didn't have to completely halt my momentum. It could have let me swat it out of the way with one entry. I would have been complimentary. I probably would have called it the "most complete RPG for the TI-99." I might not have been able to resist saying something like, "which is a little like being the best blues player in Millinocket, Maine." Adamantyr would have offered a spirited defense of the platform, and we would have been polite to him but no one would have really felt sincere about it. Then this entire entry would have gone completely unread until 2026, when Millinocket finally gets Internet access, and someone would feel it necessary to comment that old George Eastman strums a six-string down at the Blue Ox on Saturdays and is "not half bad."

But no. Legends has to be hard--and not in a satisfying, tactical way, but in the way where the dice rolls never go your way and you have to grind forever. My first foray out of the starting city, I got eaten by 5 "giant cats" without even once hitting them. Combats are so frequent and merciless that it was more than an hour before I could exit the city, win a single battle, and return to the city despite the city being only one square away from the battle.
       

An all-too-common message in the early game.

      
If you had a TI-99 in the 1980s and were interested in adventure games or RPGs at all, you probably knew about Asgard Software. The company sprang up in the years after Texas Instruments discontinued and disavowed its own machine. TI had famously discouraged third-party development for the platform during its life (1979-1984); afterwards, they didn't seem to care, but no major developer was interested in writing for a discontinued platform. The Maryland-based Asgard stepped in and satisfied the niche demand for TI-99 titles. Chief among these was the Tunnels of Doom Editor, written by Chicago Police Officer John Behnke, who spent untold hours decoding the 1982 game. The Editor allowed the creation of new modules, and Asgard published some of the best of these as Doom Games I (1987), II (1988), and III (1989). They also ported most of Infocom's text adventures to the TI-99 and offered a small portfolio of their own adventure titles.
       

This is the quality of graphic on the manual cover.

      
Legends (1987) and its sequel, Legends II (1989; subtitled The Sequel in case you're confused) are the only RPGs in Asgard's portfolio, although there's a sort of proto-action RPG called Old Dark Caves (1986?), written by Legends' author, Donn Granros. Granros is famous among TI-99 aficionados the way you'd be famous if you were the only competent RPG author for a cult platform.

Oh, there I go again. I'm trying my best to be polite about this, mostly because one of my oldest commenters, Adamantyr, is an enthusiastic TI-99 fan and he's helped me immeasurably on every TI-99 game I've ever played. (He has his own valuable summary of Legends and a bunch of TI-99 titles.) But for all its importance to this particular platform, Asgard was a low-rent company that sold minor games with no production values via catalog for a discontinued computer. We're not going to find genius here. We don't even find originality: Legends is a limited knockoff of Phantasie. That it begins with an unavoidable grind-fest is particularly unforgivable.

The backstory pioneers no new ground: The kingdom of Edonland (a portmanteau of "Ed" and "Donn," the two authors) used to be peaceful, but some wizard named Ashtar Creel (read: Nikademus) has stolen a spellbook and the Azure Amulet and used them to open a portal to the Land of the Dead, letting monsters roam freely. He has also created a group of Dark Knights (read: Black Knights) who terrorize the land. It is up to a party of four adventurers to stop them all.
    

As in Phantasie, you can encounter the Dark Knights wandering the landscape.

     
You have no choice but to play a party of four adventurers with fixed classes--a fighter, a ranger, a cleric, and a wizard--so during character creation, the only options are the characters' names and random rolls (1 to 20) for strength, intelligence, dexterity, constitution, charisma, hit points, and magic points. You start with a set of equipment sensible for your class.
   

A wizard's character sheet after a couple of levels.

     
Something odd happened to my characters. I originally created my own party, which you see in some of these screenshots led by "1 Stab" the fighter. But at some point, I must have accidentally restored the default party and not noticed. By the time I realized the names I was playing with weren't the ones I chose, I'd gained a couple of levels and didn't feel like starting over.

The game begins in Wizard's Rock, where the Adventurers' Guild offers various character utilities, including training, and you can sleep in the inn, visit a tavern for rumors, or buy potions in an alchemist's shop. (There's no standard equipment shop.)
      

Finally returning to the opening city after a successful expedition.

     
Whenever you leave Wizard's Rock, the game asks you to set a difficulty level between 1 and 6. The first time, I naively set it to 3 and got slaughtered. I soon learned that at the beginning, you want to leave it set at 1, maybe 2 if you want a gamble. The difficulty level does not affect the types of monsters you encounter, but it does affect their hit points, attack skill, and damage--as well as the experience and gold that you get from them.
    

A successful early combat.

     
Combat is relentless. If you don't immediately start moving (with the unintuitive ESDX cluster), you'll get attacked within a few seconds of leaving town. Running essentially never works. After combat, you have to be quick on the draw with the keyboard, because dithering around will almost certainly result in another attack within a few seconds. And the keyboard isn't very responsive, either. I don't know if this is an original problem or an emulator problem, but the game indicates that it's ready for you to start moving a second or two before it will actually register your keystrokes. So you pound away at "D," trying to move east, and nothing happens. You sit back and wonder what's wrong and within another couple of seconds, you're in combat again.

The types of enemies you encounter differ based on terrain. Relatively easy thugs, rats, "kobalds," and giant flies occupy the grassland near the city, for instance, while forests are likely to serve up more difficult foes like "mystical bears," stone golems, and dragons. The game suckered me with this, because I spent about 3 hours grinding on the grassland until my party made it to Level 3 and stopped dying all the time. I assumed they were finally ready to start exploring the larger world, headed briskly away from Wizard's Rock, and got slaughtered by three "plains dragons" the moment I entered my first forest square.
     

Compared to the grassland, the forest is full of terrors.

      
Combat begins with options to fight, threaten, greet, surrender, run, or change the party formation. Again, most of these are drawn from Phantasie. As I mentioned above, running hardly ever works. I also haven't had any success (at low levels) with threaten and greet, both of which give the monsters a free round of attacks when they fail.
      

Wouldn't regular bears have been difficult enough?

      
In combat, you have options to make a regular attack (which gets you multiple hits depending on level), put everything into a powerful but less-accurate "lunge," parry, or cast a spell. Again, these options are adapted from Phantasie, as is the little jumping animation that accompanies your attack. That's about all that the developers copied. Gone are any consideration of ranks, positions, or priority: characters can only attack one enemy at a time, everyone is in melee range, and there are no mass-damage spells.
     

Whatever kind of weapon he's holding, it doesn't look very efficient.

     
Even the spell list is mostly plagiarized from Phantasie, but greatly reduced. Wizards, rangers, and clerics each have a separate spell progression table, with selections like "Strength," "Dispel Magic," and "Turn Undead." A few spells, like "Firestorm" and "Healing" occur in multiple levels: "Firestorm1," "Firestorm2," and "Firestorm3," for instance. There are only 8 wizard spells, 8 cleric spells, and 6 ranger spells (most of them duplicated within the three lists), and you get a new one at every level. To cast them, you specify the spell number, so you have to memorize the spell reference card or have it close at hand. As in Phantasie, spell points deplete fast, and each caster might only be able to cast 5 or 6 useful spells between rests.

As for equipment, I assume I get upgrades at some point in the game. Maybe I have to find them in dungeons. None of the enemies I've fought so far have dropped weapons or armor, just gold.
       

A spell is successful against a "thug."

     
The problem with combat isn't just its difficulty. It lasts a long time. A simple fight against an easy enemy, like three "huge flies," can easily stretch to 5 minutes as both sides mostly miss and you have to sit and watch all the attack messages. Without streaming television to watch at the same time, I'd find this title horrendously boring.

Adamantyr's site indicates that the game world comprises 15 screens. You start in the far northeast and have to walk to the various dungeons, fighting untold hordes of enemies in between. Although there are scattered inns (just as in Phantasie) where you can rest and recharge, only Wizard's Rock has a temple and a full complement of services, making its far-flung location particularly annoying. Even worse is the fact that while you can save anywhere, saving outside Wizard's Rock forces you to quit after saving, and when you reload the party is back in Wizard's Rock. That means that each expedition away from town has to be made with no saving until you're ready to return.
      

This inn is located in a part of the landscape that there's no reason to visit.

     
In about 5 hours of gameplay, I haven't even been able to get to the point where I can survive a trip to a dungeon, let alone explore its interior. I suspect I'll have to grind around Wizard's Rock until everyone's Level 8 and has all their spells before I can survive an extended expedition. Complicating things is the fact that, just like Phantasie, your characters are always under-funded for training. Everyone's ready to move to Level 4 at this point, but I don't have enough money for even one of them. This discourages me from purchasing potions, including a useful "Stealth" potion that temporarily eliminates enemy encounters.
       

The first level wasn't so bad, but costs more than double between levels.

      
Training is otherwise quite useful, increasing hit points, spell points, and combat skill. The results are palpable. They just take a long time to arrive. I might have to grind for another 5 hours before I can even leave the starting area.
      

A rumor at the tavern. I never would have suspected!

     
At this point the only thing I'm really holding out hope for is that the dungeons are interesting. Judging by what Adamantyr says on his site, the game seems to have adopted Phantasie's encounter system in dungeons, by which interesting things pop up as you peek into rooms. I'll give it long enough to explore at least one dungeon. But seriously, 1987 games need to start sitting down, shutting up, and stop fouling my momentum.

Time so far: 5 hours

****

Sorry for having three active games at the same time. I'm getting some help from German readers on Die Drachen von Laas, but they need time to play, and I need time to analyze, compile, and comment on their experiences.