Quest for Glory II: Final Rating

 

Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire

Sierra On-Line (developer and publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS and Amiga, remade in 2008 for Windows

Date Started: 14 July 2014
Date Ended: 3 August 2014

Total Hours: 26 (four wins)

Difficulty: Easy (2/5)
Final Rating: 50
Ranking at Time of Posting: 134/152 (88%)

Like its predecessor, Quest for Glory II is a fun game, full of wit and humor as it covers a relatively serious and interesting main plot. Also like its predecessor, it isn't a great RPG specifically, but it does deftly blend RPG elements into an adventure-game template. I continue to enjoy its character development system, even if it seemed like (in this game) all that development was mostly unnecessary. That I liked it overall is evidenced by my having played through it four times--something I haven't come close to doing with any other game on my list.

The fourth win was one I did on a lark after the third. I wanted to see how fast I could do it and how low a score I could get. Using a mage character, without engaging in a second of grinding, without speaking to a single NPC except to buy things, without even visiting the Adventurer's Guild, without solving the Julanar-tree quest, without getting the griffin's feather, without even entering the desert or fighting a single monster, I managed to win in about an hour, achieving a score of 323. I think it might be possible to get a lower score with one of the other classes. The mage still has to join WIT to get the "Reversal" spell, but the other classes could eschew their class-specific side quests.

"Congratulations" is hardly the right term.

But my ability to win so quickly and with so little effort speaks a bit to the game's performance as an RPG. The first game also minimized the importance of combat, but at least you still had to kill a cheetaur and a troll for a perfect score. More important, you regularly encountered monsters in the wilderness as you moved from one area to another. Trial by Fire puts all of the combats in a side-desert and makes them completely avoidable. The apothecary buys scorpion and ghoul components but you don't get points for them. Even if you do the desert quests (Julanar, the griffin, the Dervish, and the caged beast), chances are reasonably good that you can hit all of the locations without encountering a wandering monster.

This is a non-sequitur, but trying to harm the tree in the desert breaks your monitor and immediately ends the game. YouTuber MrWhitman has compiled a video of all the creative ways to die in the game.

Thus, without looking at my final rating for Hero's Quest first, I'm going to guess that the sequel will come in slightly under on the GIMLET. I could be wrong, though. I liked the plot and setting better in this game, and while the overall game was still pretty easy, I found its puzzles a little more challenging than its predecessor. Let's see.

1. Game World. I loved the quasi-Arabian setting and the creative way the developers used common themes from the mythology of Arabia, Persia, and North Africa--everything from One Thousand and One Nights to twentieth-century film. Hardly any RPGs use this setting (so far, only Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves comes to mind). The geography and plot hold together reasonably well, though I think key elements of the game's lore (Iblis and Suleiman, specifically) could have been better-integrated into the game and dialogue; miss one paragraph in the manual, and you're a bit lost.

I also like how the game world responds to the actions of the player, with various NPCs acknowledging your deeds and various plot elements tied to player actions, up to the point where the end game dialogue differs depending on the choices the player made. Overall, a very strong part of the game. Score: 7.

It would have been easy to miss the significance of this.

2. Character Creation and Development. The Quest for Glory series continues to be one of the few in which the choice of character class really matters, offering fairly different experiences for mages, thieves, and fighters--far more so than the first game. The "Honor" statistic and the invisible paladin meter add a fun spin to the proceedings, and there are several places in which the player can make an honest role-playing choice, although I wish there had been more of them.

I remain unhappy with the fact that the only choice for the character is the same goofy, yellow-haired guy, but I understand why the creators were limited in this regard.

I continue to admire the character development system, although I was disappointed how little effect it had in this game. The process of building skills and attributes--with a variety of mechanisms for training--is fun and rewarding, but the problem is there's absolutely no need to do it. In my fourth playing, I made it all the way to the end with basically the character's starting attributes. I also missed training features like the climbing tree and the archery target from the first game. Score: 6.

It was always fun to watch my attributes increase, even if they had little effect on gameplay.

3. NPC Interaction. This game does some great stuff with NPCs, and I don't think I highlighted everything that I liked in the postings. Unlike most RPGs, the NPCs here are conceived with the care you might give to characters in a novel or film--everyone has his own back story, attitude, desires, and character traits, and from Aziza's insistence on politeness to Issur's refusal to bargain, the player has to navigate these personality quirks.

Everyone's got an attitude.

The NPCs also keep a schedule, and while it's not quite as complex as Ultima V, it's still reasonably so, with various NPCs appearing in different positions depending on both the time of day and day of week. Of course, like any good RPG, you learn about the game world and your quest from NPC dialogue, and I love that this game used the flexible dialogue system seen in Hero's Quest, offering both ASK ABOUT and TELL ABOUT options. I don't think I hit upon half the possibilities with these two commands, which is a good thing. I lament that Quest for Glory III will jettison these for point-and-click dialogue choices.

Another great thing is all the background NPCs that wander in and out of the frame, including guards and villagers. They give a strong sense of a living world, and while you don't get much interaction with them, they help avoid the empty, depopulated feeling that you get in many RPG cities. I can't remember any other game that has generic "background" NPCs so far in my chronology.

I was disappointed that we still don't get any romances and that so many of the late-game NPC interactions are scripted, with little chance to have flexible dialogue. Overall, I have to save a perfect score for games with more NPCs, especially those where you have more role-playing opportunities in talking with them, but Quest for Glory II is one of the best so far on my list. Score: 7.

4. Encounters and Foes. The puzzle encounters in Trial by Fire are probably better than the first game. There are more of them, first off, and they're a bit harder. They also offer occasional role-playing opportunities, by both class and (unlike the first game) alignment. The timed nature of many of the encounters lends an urgency that the first game didn't have.

I didn't find the foes quite as original or as much fun as the first game, but they did offer some special attacks (the scorpion's sting, the ghoul's strength-drain) and varied approaches to combat that were welcome. Score: 5.

The consequences of not taking a poison cure pill before fighting the scorpion.

5. Magic and Combat. On one hand, I appreciated that there were more combat options and that the engine offered more opportunity to anticipate and defend against attacks. On the other, it stopped being remotely challenging too early in the game. More important, combat is almost entirely optional: with the exception of the fighter, no quests depend on it, and the monsters are all segregated in an essentially optional area.

The magic system expanded here with a few new spells, but the system remains flawed. Even mage characters who grind offensive spells up to impressive levels cannot fully rely on spells. The game offers little opportunity to nail approaching enemies with multiple spells and thrown objects. And the puzzle-based spells are used so rarely (and work at such low levels) that there's hardly any reason to grind them. I found no difference between a score of 25 and a score of 200 on spells like "Calm," "Open," "Levitate," and "Fetch." Overall, an under-emphasized part of the game. Score: 3.

6. Equipment. Also not up to RPG standards--even less so than the first game. For the fighter, there was a chance to get one weapon upgrade. For the other classes, no one could do any better than the weapons and armor they brought from Hero's Quest. With the exception of the health, mana, and vigor pills (replacing potions), all of the inventory items are puzzle items. Score: 2.

My thief's inventory towards the end. Encumbrance issues dogged me until I ground my strength up to Herculean levels.

7. Economy. You know the economy is bad when your big problem, for almost the entirety of the game, is that your funds are weighing you down. As I discovered with my fourth playing, an imported character with a decent amount of Spielburgian gold never has to earn a cent in the sequel. Characters who start in this game might have to gather a few scorpion tails if they want to buy extra pills, but in general, the starting funds and the reward funds for slaying the elementals are more than enough to buy everything you need to buy. A disappointing part of the game. Score: 2.

8. Quests. We're back to a strong category here. The game has a fun, compelling main quest that proceeds in multiple steps and has different choices for the different classes. Although the primary outcome is the same, various elements of the endgame (who speaks for you, how many points you have, whether you become a paladin) differ in satisfying ways. I liked that each class had a primary side-quest and that there were a few side quests that all classes could perform. Score: 7.

The time limits lent a sense of urgency but weren't overly difficult.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. If this ends up ranking different from Hero's Quest, something is wrong with my GIMLET. It's fundamentally the same interface. It makes as good a use of the EGA graphics as possible (slightly better than the first game), and while the sound effects continue to be a little sparse, I love the leitmotifs that accompany various characters and settings--this is one of the few games so far in my chronology that I think does music well, using it for accent and mood rather than just constant background noise. I continue to like the text parser, although there were a few places in which it misbehaved, and in general I don't think the developers spent quite as much time on synonyms as they did in Hero's Quest. BASH DOOR produces no results where SMASH DOOR does, for instance. LOOK IN CABINET fails to reveal an object that SEARCH CABINET reveals.

I also didn't care for the targeting system. In Hero's Quest, casting a spell or throwing an object would always automatically target the obvious (or only) legitimate target on the screen. This, among other things, made it possible to huck a few daggers at an approaching enemy. In this game, the auto-targeting is replaced with a manual target. While I agree that this makes more sense, it didn't work well for me to have to type THROW KNIFE, hit ENTER, and then quickly move my right hand off the keyboard to the mouse so I could get the target in the right place and click. It's a minor part of gameplay, but it bugged me a little. Score: 5.

10. Gameplay. The overall gameplay was far more linear than in the first game, but in a way that still offered lots of padding. Players can do many things in whatever order they choose in between the scripted plot events. The different classes and side-quests make the game extremely replayable (as we saw by my doing it four times!).

On the negative side, I thought the pacing was poor, and the game too linear, during the Raseir portion. And just like its predecessor, Quest for Glory II also remains a bit too easy. Score: 6.

Add 'em up and we get a final score of 50, which turns out to be (as I suspected) just shy of the 53 I gave to Hero's Quest. It's still a reasonably high score--the fourth highest so far in 1990, as it happens. Do remember that I'm rating it as an RPG specifically. I wouldn't be surprised if Trickster over at The Adventurer Gamer ended up scoring it higher than the first game, because I do think it performs better as an adventure game than the first Quest for Glory.

(While I'm linking to other blogs, I just discovered that Andy Panthro recently completed a summary of the game, including his quest to get 200 points in every skill. It's a good summary if you find my nine posts on the game a little too much to digest.)

The back of the box shows a griffin attacking during a cut-scene and the PC fighting Uhura on a regular combat screen. I'm reasonably sure that neither occurs in the actual game.

  
Given modern admiration for the game, I was surprised to find how few contemporary reviews offered any praise for it. Scorpia's curiously breezy review/walkthrough in the February 1991 Computer Gaming World is probably the most positive, particularly regarding the ending, which she calls "one of the better game endings anywhere." I agree. She bemoans (but not seriously) the bad jokes and puns and notes the game is a trifle harder than its predecessor. Overall, though, the review seems more interested in delivering spoilers than telling readers whether they should buy the game, and I'm having trouble discerning her overall opinion.

The review in the July 1991 issue of Advanced Computer Entertainment, written by Chris Jenkins, may be the first review I've read that actively enrages me. It illustrates everything I can't stand about Amiga-philes, so in love with their graphics and sound that they frankly didn't deserve RPGs with complex mechanics, plots, and encounters. The poncy little crumpet-stuffer said he "lost interest" during the "obligatory boring maze" and quit. This can only refer to the streets of Shapeir, which aren't that hard in the first place and stop being difficult at all once you get the map, meaning he must've played about six minutes of it.
 
After characterizing the music as "grating," the graphics as "coloured with all the subtlety of a four-year-old's fingerpainting," and the sense of humor as one that "only Americans could find funny," the review concludes with the advice to "steer clear of adventure games written by husband-and-wife teams called Lori and Corey." I'm two gimlets away from tracking down this Chris Jenkins and challenging him to a fist fight.

Because only Americans find Monty Python references funny.

  
European Amiga journals tended to rate it average. The only wildly positive review I see is from the October 1991 Dragon, which gave it 5/5 stars. (The review is worth reading for comments by Lori and Corey.) This would be more meaningful if the average Dragon review wasn't also 5/5 stars.

Incidentally, the Dragon review promises that both Quest for Glory and its sequel would get VGA upgrades in the coming year, but as we know now, that only happened with the first game. The third game was developed natively in VGA, so for decades Trial by Fire was left hanging as the only EGA entry in the series. This changed in 2008, when AGD Interactive remade the game using an open-source development tool called Adventure Game Studio. AGD offers it for free on its web site, along with remakes of the first three King's Quest games.

The welcome screen of AGD Interactive's remake.

I downloaded and played a bit of the game in Shapeir. I think it does a very good job mimicking what Quest for Glory II would have looked like using the SCI1.1 interpreter while still allowing the option to use the old text parser for dialogue.

The Adventurer's Guild in the remake. They even got the moose.

I played it with the point-and-click interpreter just to see what dialogue options I'd missed. Most of them were minor--descriptions of the wares sold by various shops, usually--but among them, I realized I missed Uhura's entire back story in the regular version of the game. She is a Simbani warrior, but a "Simbani woman cannot be [a] wife and [a] warrior," so she came to Shapeir to find a husband and still retain her warrior status. One of the Sultan's guards is the father of Simba. I don't know what keyword should have delivered this information in the regular edition, but neither PEOPLE nor SIMBANI (the keyword given in the remake) works.

Combat is more complex, involving jumping, ducking, and moving backwards and forwards as well as just dodging and parrying; I'm not sure if this is taken from Quest for Glory III or is unique to this remake. Uhura gives you a nice tutorial in everything.

Uhura explains how to fight.

Speaking of Quest for Glory III, it looks like I'll have to burn through two years' worth of games before I can get to it. As we now know, the subtitle of the next game was not, as announced on the closing screen of II, Shadows of Darkness. Rather, in Wages of War, the Hero will follow Rakeesh and Uhura to the land of Fricana, where African and Indian influences blend to create perhaps the most unique game world we'll have seen by then. Having the game already installed on my computer creates near-irresistible temptation, and I can't promise I won't play a bit of the game on my "off-time" before I get to it officially.

I've had an enormous amount of fun with Quest for Glory II, and I lingered on it for a while because I remain completely unexcited about the next game coming up on the 1990 list: Captive. No escaping it now, though.

Quest for Glory II: Won!

One of three winning screens I've achieved while someone was still messing around with the Earth Elemental. "Without peer" indeed.

My last post ended with my character trapped in the tomb of Iblis, from which Ad Avis had just made his escape with a statue containing the djinn. He had announced his plan to perform a ritual on the statue, release the evil djinn, and use him to take over the world.

But all was not lost. Wandering around, I found a magic ring on one of the stalagmites. Picking it up released a genie--presumably one of those who had aided Suleiman in trapping Iblis in the first place.

The developers didn't even program a response for MORE WISHES. Come on, Corey. That was bush league.

The genie offered me three wishes, but clarified that they were limited to "health, prowess, or teleporting you to Iblis." After some experimentation, I found that I could wish for any skill or attribute (agility, vitality, stealth, throwing), and the genie would increase my score by 50. The exception is honor, which "you must earn yourself." I forgot to check whether this would apply to skills I didn't have in the first place; if so, it could be a way for characters who start as fighters or mages to get all classes' skills.

For all characters, I wished for increases in their lowest useful skills. You can burn all three wishes on these boosts, but it ends the game immediately.

For the third wish, I chose to TELEPORT back to Raseir, where Ad Avis was in the midst of his summoning ritual. The closest the genie could get me was to the exterior of the palace.

Here, for my thief and mage, Sharaf reappeared and told me of the Kattas' plans to attack the palace "to provide some distraction." I didn't notice that this really did anything for either of the characters.

At this point, the experiences of the classes diverged considerably, but there were two things common to all of them. First, if I dithered around too much in any area, Ad Avis finished his ritual and Iblis escaped to destroy the world.

I'm not entirely sure what Ad Avis gets out of all of this.

Second, the freaking genie wouldn't shut his trap for three seconds. Between constantly telling me how to solve the puzzles and just generally telling me that I was running out of time, he was the most annoying character in the game, constantly popping up and interrupting whatever I was in the middle of doing.

Thanks. It wouldn't have occurred to me to just walk over to the only available exit. Glad you're here.

The palace was guarded by two soldiers and a eunuch walking along the upper balcony. The first task was to get past them and get into the palace. I'm sure there were multiple ways for each class to accomplish this. For my mage character, I killed the eunuch with a "Flame Dart," then "Dazzled" my way past the guards and opened the door. My fighter took out the eunuch with a thrown dagger and then, predictably, just charged in swinging and defeated the guards in combat (one of only two combats post-Shapeir; the other characters got none). The thief had to wait for the eunuch to pass by, then shimmy up his magic rope on the far left, where a scarf was tied (as Zayishah's handmaiden had promised).

Targeting the eunuch at the front gates.

This meant that the thief entered a different part of the palace than the fighter and mage. For the fighter and mage, the genie led me to an antechamber outside Ad Avis's ritual chamber. Khaveen was on guard.

Someone's going to be sorry he said that.

The mage solution was to cast "Calm," which caused Khaveen to forget what he was doing and wander out of the room. The fighter jumped down from the balcony and engaged Khaveen in combat. At one point during the combat, Khaveen drops his sword, and you have the option whether to kill him or allow him to pick it back up; the latter is necessary for achieving paladin status at the end of the game. The result was the same either way.

I then had to burst through the magically-guarded door to Ad Avis's summoning chamber. The door had some kind of damage spell on it, but my mage set it off with a "Trigger" and the fighter just sucked up the damage.

On the other side, Ad Avis was engaged in some ritual involving lighting candles in a hexagram. Some stone guardian was protecting him and attacked as I came through. Through trial and error, I found that "Trigger" caused him to just collapse, but the fighter had to ESCAPE combat with him because he wouldn't die from my regular attacks.

Next, I had to disrupt the ritual by either stealing ("Fetch" did the trick for the mage) or throwing a dagger to knock over one of the candles.

Stop trying to make fetch happen.

Ad Avis noticed me at this point. For my mage character, he immediately fired off a spell to turn me into an animal. Fortunately, I had been warned by Al Scurva to have "Reversal" active when I entered the room, and the spell bounced off me and hit Khaveen, who was coming through the left door. Al Scurva had specifically said that if the spell hit me, I would be "transformed into a creature most resembling your soul," and sure enough, Khaveen turned into a snake.

Now, here's the offensive thing. After I won, I played the encounter again without casting "Reversal" first, and guess what I turned into?

A saurus?! What the hell?! I could see why the Emir became a saurus: he was described as somewhat simple, kind, and skittish. But why am I not a lion or a bear or something?

But I digress. Ad Avis also had a "Reversal" spell active, so hitting him with "Flame Dart" or "Force Bolt" just caused the spell to go careening around the chamber. The key to defeating him was the realization that "Reversal" only protects the caster when directly targeted. What I needed to do was bounce a spell off something else and hit him. This took a long time and multiple reloads as I screwed around trying to first find the optimal position from which to cast the spell and second find the optimal surface off which to bounce it--all while dodging his own ricocheting spells at the same time. Eventually, I found the right place to bounce "Force Bolt" so that it knocked over the brazier and sent Ad Avis tumbling out of the window in flames.

Now that's a Disney villain death.

The fighter had a much easier time. Ad Avis didn't bother with any transmogrification spells; he just started casting flame darts. I just had to charge the guy and knock him out the window.

The thief had a very different endgame experience. Since he entered the palace by climbing up on the balcony, he started in a different room--specifically, the harem. Zayishah had said that the women of the palace would help me, and they did, first by hiding me from the suspicious eunuch.

Wait, did the previous emir have a harem and eunuchs? Because I'm not sure why I'm helping him, then.

There followed a sequence in which I had to hide and crawl around to avoid detection, but it was all overly-scripted and didn't offer many options for making mistakes. If I tried to go the wrong way, the genie would pop up and stop me.

The sequence ended with me on a balcony behind Ad Avis's summoning area, with his back to me. First, I had to cross over to him with my magic rope.

Good thing I practiced all that tightrope walking.

But I couldn't get through the pillars; there was some kind of force field preventing me. Instead, I had to throw a dagger to knock over the candle, then slowly approach Ad Avis while frequently typing DUCK (clued by the genie) to avoid his spells. A thrown dagger finally sent him to his doom.

Will you, for god's sake, SHUT UP?!

I guess if the thief shows up for the endgame without some extra daggers or rocks, he's in trouble. Incidentally, there was no opportunity to use "Reversal" for the thief, even if he learned it (as mine did), since there was no place to safely cast it after the palace entrance, and its effects don't last long enough to see the character all the way through the palace encounters.

So Ad Avis was dead, and at that point, the game became roughly the same for every character. I have to say, I really enjoyed the endgame sequence. Not enough games offer a solid denouement for the hero; a lot of them simply give you one end-game screen and drop you to the prompt. Here, we have a rewarding five-minute epilogue. First, the genie recites the prophecy under which Ad Avis was operating, noting that the real prophecy did leave open the possibility that the Hero would forestall Iblis's return.

The genie then takes Iblis's statue back to the tomb for another 1,001 years. The Hero, meanwhile, finds Emir Ali hiding in his bedroom and "persuades" him to take charge of the city and proclaim "the evil rule of Ad Avis and Khaveen to be over."

The Hero then restores Raseir's magic fountain with the Water Elemental. I have to confess, I'm not really sure how that works, or why the Water Elemental doesn't just destroy the city the way he was going to do before I captured him in the waterskin in the first place.

Whatever. It sounds good and has nice symmetry.

Abdulla and Shameen show up on the magic carpet to bear the Hero back to Shapeir.

Somehow, the elemental even made the cracks in the pavement disappear.

There, in the Palace of the Sultan, Sultan Harun al-Rashid is revealed to be the same person as the poet Omar, which explains why Omar was always handing me reward money. In a little ceremony, the various NPCs recount the Hero's deeds, with different NPCs speaking depending on what the Hero did during the course of the game. Shameen and Shema go first and recount the Hero's deeds in the first game.

Ha! But the Katta were driven from Raseir only a year ago, and in Quest for Glory, Shameen says they've been in Spielburg for three years! Why am I so hung up on this?

If the Hero freed the spirit of Julanar from the tree, Aziza recounts that. All my characters did this side quest, but I think it's possible to win without having done it, since you don't absolutely need to free Al Scurva.

Zayishah, Emir Ali's daughter, follows up by explaining how the Hero helped her escape Raseir. Somewhere in there, the EOF member, Walid, explains that the Hero spared his life, if the character was a fighter and chose that option. Then the Emir-saurus (the transmogrified previous emir, Zayishah's uncle and Ali's brother) shows up with his own contribution.

The Hero chooses this moment to administer a "Dispel" potion, "specifically prepared by Harik for the occasion" on him. I'd be pretty annoyed if I were him. I'd have expected them to use "Dispel" on me pretty much as soon as the potion was brewed. Either way:

Dude, I rode around the desert on your back.

Finally, the Sultan speaks: "I am Harun al-Rashid, Sultan of the land of Shapeir / I am the Poet Omar, teller of tales for all to hear / By the words which have been spoken / By the deeds that have been done / I proclaim this man a Hero / I now call this man my son."

Cool! Is there an inheritance involved?

There's one final sequence if the character obtained enough hidden "paladin points" and achieved a high enough "honor" score throughout the game. Rakeesh shows up and speaks of the Hero's courage, honesty, mercy, and compassion, proclaims him a paladin, and bestows upon him his sword, "Soulforge."

This comes with another 50 points and advances the maximum to 550. Only my mage (my first character) achieved a 100% score, and he wasn't proclaimed a paladin because he lost points disturbing (and killing) the griffon. My fighter ended with 517/550 and my thief ended with 472/500. In both cases, I just carelessly overlooked certain things.

The game ends with a credit sequence in which witty in-jokes are made about the development team members and their roles:

Followed by a preview of the next Quest for Glory game.

I, for one, can't wait. On to the GIMLET!

Quest for Glory II: Round Up the Usual Suspects

I suppose that was inevitable.

 
The rest of Quest for Glory II ended up being very linear, plot-heavy, and essentially pure adventure game, with almost no combat, very little NPC dialogue, and no need for all the money I'd accumulated. In this, the final third was a little disappointing, even as I enjoyed the plot revelations and endgame sequences, as well as the ways some of the skill-building paid off for the various characters.

In my series of posts so far, I've discussed the experiences of the mage, fighter, and thief in Shapeir. All classes end up automatically departing for Raseir in a caravan on Day 17. As I talk about these end-game sequences, I'll let you know when the experiences of the classes diverged. Otherwise, you can think of the narrative as applying to a universal character.

On the day of departure, Shema gave me some supplies and food, and the Sultan personally gifted me with a new saurus. After a nice animation showing my character and his new mount admiring the sunrise, I joined up with the caravan.

If nothing else, my character knows how to strike a heroic pose.

After a few screens of walking, I got a message that "the caravan comes under siege from hundreds of nomadic brigands" and that "the situation looks grim." I geared up for what I thought might be a long series of combats in which my weapon- and skill- grinding would pay off, but it was just an excuse for the game to be goofy. I got this screen:

Right-clicking on the items actually brings up descriptions of the popcorn and soda.

Followed by this one, depicting my triumphant character atop a pile of brigand and saurus corpses:

I don't think it was nice that we killed the sauruses.

Cute, but since there weren't any other major combats in the game, it would have been fun if I could have actually played out this encounter.

Before long, my vastly-reduced caravan arrived in Raseir, where I was accosted at the gates by guards. Khaveen, the guard captain, appeared and warned me that Raseir didn't "need any stinking heroes," but personally handed me a visa anyway.

Your third line needed to be "Well, lend me your ear."

Nearby was the Blue Parrot Inn, where the creators had a lot of fun blending allusions to both Casablanca (1942) and The Maltese Falcon (1941), which starred many of the same actors. The bartender is named Wilmer, after a character in Falcon, while Signor Ferrari (after Sydney Greenstreet's character in Casablanca) sits at a table, swatting flies with a little whisk. Later, the player is introduced to Ferrari's associate, "Ugarte" (after Peter Lorre's Casablanca character), who runs a black market selling water. Though their names (and the name of the bar) are lifted from Casablanca, their relationship (and association with Wilmer) are more in tune with The Maltese Falcon, where Lorre plays a character named Joel Cairo and Greenstreet is Kasper Gutman.

Anyway, I had a drink with Ferrari, who told me they'd reserve a room for me at the Parrot, and I should return in the evening to talk with him more. This left me several hours to wander aimlessly around the city, noting that its fountain had gone dry, its tiles were cracked and dirty, many passageways were boarded up, signs in the passageways reminded that "rules must be obeyed," and guards enforced a nightly curfew. All of this, plus the expulsion of the Kattas, lent another angle to the Casablanca/Nazi allusions.

As time goes by, I wander around the city and check out its state of dilapidation.

Back at the Blue Parrot in the evening, Ferrari gave me some more information about Raseir and introduced me to Ugarte who, for a 5 dinar fee (the last time I spent money in the game), told me that Khaveen was having me watched at all times and that "someone is very interested in my actions." (Again, this parallels similar lines about Victor Laszlo in Casablanca.) When questioned by Ferrari, Ugarte mentioned a "prophecy to be fulfilled" and that I "may be the one."

The character is clearly modeled on Sydney Greenstreet, only meaner-looking.

There wasn't anything else to do but go to bed, and the next day nothing to do but wander around the city some more. It was a bit eerie, as there didn't seem to be any other people except guards. Eventually, I came upon a scene in which Khaveen arrested Ugarte for selling black market water--a direct parallel of the scene in which Ugarte gets arrested in Casablanca. He even begged for my help.

I stick my neck out for nobody...also, the game didn't really give me an option to help him.

Lacking any idea what to do after this scene, I headed back to the Blue Parrot, but I was intercepted along the way by a woman who poked her head out of an alleyway and demanded that I follow her. She led me to the house of Zayishah, the Emir's daughter (I was never sure whether she was the daughter of the deposed Emir or the new one, his brother).

Quest for Glory II suddenly becomes a very different sort of game.

Zayishah explained that the Emir was going to force her to marry Captain Khaveen, and she wanted to flee before that could happen. She demanded that I change clothes with her, but it turns out Shema packed me a second set, so I gave those to her instead. She ran behind her curtain and changed, somehow acquiring a wig in the process.

I'd like to think my facial features are a little more chiseled and manlier than yours, but it's hard to tell on EGA graphics.

Finally, she demanded my visa, which I gave to her, trapping me in Raseir. In return, she gave me a mirror and said that if I showed it to any woman within the palace, she would help me.

After that was a lot of wandering around waiting for night to fall so I could go back to the inn and sleep. (Unlike the inn in Shapeir, it wouldn't let me go to bed during the day.) Here, the thief character diverges from the fighter and magic user, as Ferrari has a special job for the thief to do.

And where does the falcon come from, pray tell?

He directed me to a window overlooking the fountain plaza, where I could use my magic rope (or "Levitate") to climb in. I'm not sure why this wasn't possible with all of the open windows in Shapeir.

The house turned out to belong to Khaveen, the guard captain, and there were lots of ways to die there, such as failing to let the sleeping woman return to her slumber after a board squeaked, failing to oil the hinges on the cabinet containing the falcon, and trying to attack the guard or wander into the hallway outside the bedroom.

Given later plot developments, I suspect that Khaveen was soon executed by Ad Avis.

  
After a few such accidents, I was able to grab the falcon and complete the mission.

The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of.

A reasonably funny joke when I returned with my loot to Ferrari:

Just as in the film (spoilers, I guess, but it's 73 years old), the falcon turned out to be a fake. Given that he'd been searching for it for 17 years, Ferrari took the news pretty well. Before departing for points unknown, he held out hope for a future association.

Hey, I kept that "Honor" score as low as I could.

The other classes had none of this, and after wandering around pointlessly for a day following Ugarte's arrest, they simply returned to the inn and went to sleep. The next morning, as I left the inn, a group of guards showed up and arrested me (all classes):

What's annoying is the game didn't give me a chance to go with the "force" option. I could have wiped the tiles with these guards.

The next screen found me in a locked cell, my equipment piled on a table outside, with a Katta for my cellmate. He refused to say anything at first, but he opened up when I showed him the pin the Katta merchant had given me as a reward for defeating all the elementals. He revealed himself as a member of the Katta underground, and he said if we escaped the cell, he could open a secret passage to take us to safety.

Or I had 500 dinars, since that's what the Katta was selling it for.

At least, this happened with my magic user and thief. My fighter had forgotten to stop by and pick up the pin, so he had to find the exit on his own.

Getting out of the cell was a simple matter of casting "Open" on the cell door (mage), using the pin as a makeshift lockpick (thief), or simply forcing it open (fighter). I'm not sure what happens if you're a thief and you didn't get the pin, but I suspect any class can force the door with a high enough strength. After that, I had only a few moments to grab my equipment and CRAWL into the secret exit that Sharaf opened (or, in the case of the fighter, that I had to find myself).

Seriously, have they heard of "magic" in Raseir?

The Katta led me back out into the streets of Raseir and indicated that the Underground planned to attack the palace the next night and overthrow the Emir.

Wondering what to do next, I began walking, but no sooner had I gone about 15 feet when the evil wizard, Ad Avis, popped out of an alleyway, froze me in place, and hit me with a Jedi mind trick. For my third character, I tried having "Reversal" active for this scene, but it didn't do any good.

The beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Over the next few screens, the main plot of the game became clear. Ad Avis wanted to take over the world by releasing and controlling the spirit of Iblis, an ancient and evil djinn, from his tomb beneath the Forbidden City. Unfortunately, prophecy stated that only a Hero could enter Iblis's tomb on a specific night every 1001 years. Thus, Ad Avis overthrew the Emir, expelled the Katta, and sent his elementals to threaten Shapeir in hopes that it would lure a Hero to the area. Having accomplished that, he let me goof around until the appointed night, then mind-whammied me to convince me to help him open Iblis's tomb, claiming we needed the statue of Iblis to break the magic spell on the Emir-saurus.

Ad Avis whisked me out into the desert to the Forbidden City but threw a fit when he was unable to open the door to Iblis's tomb. The prophecy had said that the door would open when "the moonlight shines between the Dragon's jaws and is caught and held there by the Scorpion's claws," referring to images of the two animals on the tomb door. Unfortunately, the moon that night had risen in the wrong part of the sky. Ad Avis took it out on me.

But I showed him. I whipped Zayishah's mirror out of my pack and reflected the moon's light on the door, and it opened. Ad Avis demanded that I enter and come out with the statue of Iblis.

What followed were a series of adventure-style navigation puzzles that called upon my various skills, spells, and items. First, I had to light my magic Fire Elemental lamp to see. Then there was a river where I had to time a jump across a log. I spent a lot of time accidentally falling into the river.

Note my head disappearing at the bottom.

On the other side of the river was a wind tunnel that tried to suck me down its hole. I escaped it and went up the stairs, but I couldn't make any progress on the next screen because I kept getting sucked backwards. After some experimentation, I found that a few castings of "Force Bolt" loosened the rocks enough to collapse them and seal off the tunnel. (The fighter's solution was just to whack the rocks. I'm not sure what the thief is supposed to do. My thief had "Force Bolt," so I just used that for him.)

Next came a lava room where I had to thread my way carefully past some lava vents and avoid falling into the magma.

Do those little cones exist in real life? If so, what are they called? I tried to Google it but couldn't find anything.

The path on the next screen ended at a little cliff, and I guess my mage was supposed to "Levitate" down, but I got a little too close and ended up taking a different option.

I also took this option for the fighter, as I didn't know what else to do. My thief was able to get down with his magic rope.

The puzzles culminated in a door where I got a riddle: "None shall enter, none shall pass, but he who speaks the name of Power." This stumped me for a long time. IBLIS seemed obvious, but it didn't work. I tried a host of NPCs to no avail. Finally, I went back to my screenshots and found the answer among Ad Avis's ravings:

I could have also found the answer through a re-read of the game manual, which recounts how a thousand years ago, Sultan Suleiman bin Daoud defeated Iblis with an army of djinn and bound his spirit into the very statue that Ad Avis wanted me to recover.

SULEIMAN opened the door, beyond which was a passage through a treasure room. Trying to take any of the treasure led to unpleasant consequences.

Beyond another door, at last, was the statue.

Just as I was about to take it, Ad Avis teleported in (hey, why didn't WIT teach me that spell?) and snatched it from my grasp. He called me a fool and announced his plan to summon Iblis, "the greatest destructive power ever known." Perhaps more important was this little plot exposition:

Is the "Dark Master" just a generic term for evil, or is there really such a being with that name? If so, Ad Avis's next line suggested that he was done being a servant:

Instead of killing me, which would have been the sensible thing to do, he dubbed me "He Who Waits Behind" and force-bolted the rocks above the door, causing them to collapse into a heap, blocking the door. He then disappeared, leaving me alone in a cold, dark, inescapable tomb.

But wait!

Next post, we'll wrap it up.