Faery Tale Adventure: the Necromancer Wins

That sounds too dangerous for me.

    

Nope. Sorry, lads. I hate to disappoint you. But I've had it with this game. I gave it well over the six hour minimum, and I stand by my summary in the last posting: huge, empty, and boring. Since last night, I did make it to the capital city of Marheim, where I met the singularly unhelpful king: Between the king and some other people in town, I picked up a few clues. The king wants his children back. I need to seek two women--one good, one evil. I suspect the "evil" one is the witch who lives in the "dim forest of Grimwood," whose gaze is death and only the light of the sun can destroy her. Finally, I must seek my enemy on the Astral Plane. There were some apples in a couple of the houses that the game kindly allowed me to save for later bouts of hunger. I kept following the main road until it came to an end somewhere on the east coast. It was during this process that I decided the game and I weren't going to last together. It took about 20 minutes to walk from the city to the end of the line. On the map, this is about 1/5 the total width of the continent. I encountered nothing of consequence along the way. There were two castles that were completely empty. When I reached the peninsula at the end of the road, I did find a watchtower containing a seashell that, when blown on the water's edge, summoned a turtle. He kindly allowed me to ride on his back, with much improved speed. This isn't enough to save the game. I'm bored to tears with it. The thought of making my way to all these far corners of the map, even if I find faster transportation, fills me with dread. Nope, it's over. And the walkthrough makes me feel I've made the right decision. Yesterday, I promised a bit of video, so here it is. I purposefully die so you can see what happens.

From the walkthroughs, apparently finishing the game involves rescuing the princess, finding a series of statues to enter the invisible city of Azal, entering the Astral Plane, fighting a navigation puzzle, and killing the necromancer with a wand. You then get to marry the princess and live happily ever after. If you're really interested in seeing the end, a German guy named Elanarae has a whole series of "let's play" videos on the game. Here's the last one--only a minute.

It appears you get a magical swan at some point which cuts down on travel time, but honestly, I watched the last three of his videos and most of it was simply flying, flying, flying the swan from one place to another while he talked about what game he was going to play next. I feel like I played long enough for a GIMLET, especially since I viewed much of the rest, so here it is: 1. Game World. There are some nice physical features--forests, mountains, farms, and such--but there's not much in it. The back story is the standard necromancer-taking-over-the-world fare. The "three brothers" motif sounded interesting, but the game doesn't really do anything with it. Score: 4. 2. Character Creation & Development. Not much to speak of. Your "bravery" stat goes up as you kill creatures and your vitality stat goes up with it. Luck is influenced by talking to certain people. All the walkthroughs agree with me that your character becomes invincible way too fast. Score: 2. 3. NPC Interaction. Consists of talking to static NPCs and getting a single hint. And there aren't many NPCs. Score: 2. 4. Encounters & Foes. Repetitive and boring. You meet the same foes all over the land, most of which fall quickly to your sword. They do nothing interesting--just charge you en masse. They do re-spawn, so you can kill as many as you want. Score: 2. 5. Magic & Combat. Also repetitive and boring. There are no spells--magic is all through physical items. Combat consists of choosing a weapon--and there's not much choice--and hitting a single "attack" button. It's really hard to survive at first and, very quickly, far too easy. Score: 1. 6. Equipment. The various magic items, and how you have to discover their uses, are somewhat interesting. There are only a handful of weapons, though, and no armor. Score: 3. 7. Economy. You get gold in the game, but all you can use it for is to buy food and give it to beggars (unless I missed something). Score: 2. 8. Quests. One main quest with multiple parts. No side quests, no different outcomes. Score: 3. 9. Graphics, Sound, Inputs. The graphics are actually quite good and probably the best part of the game. Even in the DOS version, they're as attractive as an isometric game up to this point. The music is intolerable--thankfully, there is a "music off" command--but the sounds, while rare, are occasionally interesting. Controls are both mouse and keyboard and reasonably intuitive. Score: 6. 10. Gameplay. The game is fairly non-linear. I'll give it that. But the huge game world offers nothing valuable. It should have been contracted to 1/4 of its size. It's far too easy and offers no replayability. Score: 2. Final score: 27. Definitely one of the lower-ranked games on my blog. My apologies to those of you who disagree, but I just don't understand what you see in the game. The game manual brags that it features 17,000 screens. The developers should have put something in them. Next up: First Expedition, which some of you have said doesn't belong on the CRPG list. Let's find out.

Faery Tale Adventure: Back on the Quest

Yes, with the entire kingdom at stake, this is a good time to be cryptic

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Many more breaks like that, and I'll have to re-title my blog "The Occasional CRPG Enthusiast." It took me a while to get back into the swing of Faery Tale Adventure, but I fought the urge to move on to First Expedition and got back on the trail of the elusive main quest, with the help of maps offered by Acrin1 and Andy, and with a clue offered by Jason Dyer. Even before Jason spoke, the crypt had been nagging me. The first steps on the main quest are probably near the beginning town of Tambry, the graveyard is near Tambry, so what are the odds that nothing happens in the crypt? I figured I should visit at night, and sure enough I encountered a spectre who tasked me with retrieving the bones of the Ancient King in exchange for his help destroying the evil necromancer.

Although the pronoun is confusing, I assume he means he'll help me destroy the necromancer, not the Ancient King.

I had no idea where to find these bones, so I decided to adopt a plan of just following the road network using the "always choose the right path" system and seeing where it took me. The path from Tambry bent from the south to the west to the north, across a river, past the beggar mentioned in my previous posting, and to an inn where I found food and rest but no help. Back on the road, this time heading west for a long while. There is simply no excuse for the size of the game world. It takes a good 20 minutes of real time to walk between towns, and there's nothing interesting in between except the occasional battle or bit of treasure. It would be one thing if the enormous world was peppered with caves and ruins and such, like Morrowind, but Faery Tale Adventure is big just to be big. I encountered an old man on the side of the road who said, "Kind deeds could gain thee a friend from the sea." At length, I came across another inn, which I would have sworn was the same one I just left except I had been walking west for a quarter of an hour. I backtracked to the last branch in the path and, after another long trek, came to the Tombs of Hemsath. That sounded promising for my quest to retrieve a set of bones. This gave me my first look at a Faery Tale Adventure dungeon, and I'm sure I will surprise no one to report that it is huge and boring and empty, except for the same types of creatures I found outside. After almost half an hour in the tomb's interminable, featureless hallways, I began to reflect that Weevil and Logan have a lot more similarities than differences. This is because I was watching Veronica Mars on my other monitor. Friends, it's generally a bad sign when you feel compelled to watch TV in order to break the monotony of your game, although I'm not particularly disappointed because it turns out that Veronica Mars is a very cool show. After a maze of endless doors, in which I used most of my accumulated keys... ...I found a tomb containing my prize: a single bone. Returning it to the crypt, I was rewarded with a crystal shard. I assume this will help me win the game in some way, although it still leaves me a bit clueless as to how to continue the main quest. But with the maps provided by my commenters, I can see the location of some other towns to explore. Part of the adventure in this game is figuring out the uses for the various objects that you find. I have quite a few of them. The game is similar to Ultima II in which slaying various creatures rewarded you with skeleton keys and blue tassels and such. In this game, the various objects, with their associated uses, from left to right in the screenshot, are:

• Four types of weapons: daggers, maces, swords, and bows
• Arrows for the bow
• Blue stones. I have no idea what they do; the game won't let me use them.
• Green jewels. They create light when it's dark.
• Glass vials. Restore hit points.
• Crystal orbs. Not sure.
• Bird totems. They give you a map of the surrounding area and usually create a video corruption so bad I have to quit DOSBox and restart.
• Gold rings. Unknown.
• Jade skulls. They kill every enemy on the visible screen--sort of like the skull of Mondain but without losing eighths. Very handy.
• Keys of various colors. They open corresponding doors.

I got a hint about how to use the totems from a guy on the side of the road, so I suspect the orbs, blue stones, and gold rings will be subjects of similar hints. Aside from lacking much direction, my main problem now is a certain lack of challenge. My "bravery" is almost 350 and my vitality about a third of that, and it's been ages since I died. The game keeps throwing hosts of easily-defeated foes at me. Here's hoping I find some more clues and challenges in Marheim, my next stop. A lot of you seem to want me to finish this one, so I'll stick with it as long as I can. Thanks for your patience during my absence. As I said in my last post, I'm off from work until January 10, so I hope to provide a posting a day until then (excepting Christmas, perhaps). Video to come tomorrow.

A Quick Update

I offer the same excuse so often I should just copy-and-paste it, but here it is again: I had to go away on another business trip, I thought I'd have time to play and post in the evenings, but it's turned out that I'm busier than I thought. I apologize for this, especially since Google Analytics tells me I got a huge influx of new readers a few days ago.

The good news: when I return home on December 19, I will be facing three weeks of vacation--going nowhere, doing nothing in particular except pounding out the CRPGs. I am quite committed to reach Game 50 by the time my blog turns one year old in February.

I might still squeak in a post before I return, but don't count on it. Expect copious posts for the holidays instead.

Thanks for your continued readership.

Faery Tale Adventure: Clueless

I think I'm supposed to do more than just kill lots of people.

So my dying father, the Master at Arms, entrusted me with a quest to save the kingdom from an evil necromancer. And I really, really would like to do that. Real bad. But I just don't know how. This game world is huge, sparsely populated, and devoid of any clues except a few that have to do with the uses of various magic items. I've slaughtered countless ogres, goblins, skeletons, and phantoms, built up my bravery and vitality to epic levels, and yet I have no idea what to do next.

There are plenty of places that look like they ought to have stuff. For instance, the manual makes a big deal about how the land's champion, the Red Knight, has gone missing. In my wanderings, I came across the Red Knight's castle. Now if I was designing a CRPG--I'm just saying--I would have maybe put some clues in the castle about what happened to the Red Knight. The player could use the clues to go on some kind of mission--call it a "quest"--to find the missing hero and perhaps make the world a bit of a better place. I might even have these clues delivered by a computer-controlled character (call him an "NPC"; God, I'm on a roll) who could "talk" to the player. Is anyone writing this down?

"Hellooooooo!"

Instead, the Red Knight's castle is empty, and so I move on. But at least the castle isn't the only exciting location in the game! No, sir. Here's a "Great Stone Ring" in which nothing happens, as far as I can tell:

And here's a crypt in the middle of a graveyard. I had to unlock the door and everything! But, true to the game's form, there was nothing inside the crypt:

The towns are devoid of residents except for the occasional innkeeper. When I finally found this beggar on a bridge, I wanted to kiss him. But all he did was tell me what green jewels do (they create light). It's like I started the game too late, the evil necromancer has already won, and I'm one of the last five people alive.

Now, granted, I haven't explored every nook of the game yet. The world, as I said, is quite large--the game manual even brags about it--and I'm sure there are a lot more empty buildings to discover. But this game, like Dungeon Master, has a fondness for the first level of Maslow's hierarchy. First, you get hungry, several times per day, and you need to buy food to stave off starvation. As far as I can tell, there's no way to carry food with you--you have to buy it and eat it immediately.

The world of Holm has never heard of a "doggie bag."

Second, your character gets tired. If you happen to have a handy bed nearby, you can walk on to it and your tired PC will take a nap. But if you can't find a bed for a while, well, old Julian will just decide to drop down and go to sleep wherever he happens to be. Usually, this results in some ogres coming along and pounding him to death while he remains in what is essentially a coma. Unlike hunger, the game gives you no indication that your character is getting tired; he just suddenly faints in the middle of a field.

Both of these factors discourage wandering off over the horizon to seek adventure, because you want to ensure you're within reasonably proximity to the nearest bed and food supply.

On the good side, I've gotten really good at combat. On the bad side, combat simply involves wielding a weapon and frantically waving it at the closest enemy until it dies. No real tactics to it. Each kill builds your bravery, which makes the next kill easier. In a way, it's a predecessor of the "action RPG" genre like Diablo in which combat is based partly on statistics but partly on how fast you can click--only without the interesting variety of attacks or quality of animation that make modern action RPGs tolerable.

Julian on a field of slaughter. The odd lighting is from the green jewel.

As I mentioned in my last post, if you die--something that hasn't happened in a while--a little fairy comes along and decides whether to raise you. The odds of this happening are based on your luck statistic. If it fails, Julian is permanently dead, and his younger brother, Phillip, takes on the quest. I assume that if Phillip dies, Kevin is your last chance. I thus can't quite decide if it's "cheating" to reload after I die, but I don't feel like building up another character from scratch. Whether the other brothers ever get a role in the game should Julian survive, I have no idea.

Finally, the equipment selection is a little lame. There are, from what I can tell, four weapons: dirk, mace, sword, and bow. There is no armor. There are a handful of magic items and sundries--keys of different colors, magic skulls that kill all the enemies on the screen, vials that heal you, totems that show you an area map, and so on--that you get from various dead creatures, sort of like Ultima II. The uses of the magic items are something of a mystery, but as we've seen, the random NPCs give you clues, and I've figured out others by just messing with them.

My stockpile of goods.

I can't imagine any reason to keep playing this game except the vague hope that a story will start to coalesce and the game will turn out to do something unusual and interesting with the ol' necromancer-taking-over-the-kingdom plot. I'm going to give it a few more hours to see if I can stumble on anything that has to do with the game's main quest. Hints always welcome.

Does anyone know if this game originally came with a map? I tried to search for one, but I only looked at it briefly before I decided it was full of spoilers.

Game 34: The Faery Tale Adventure: Book 1 (1987)

Faery Tale Adventure is definitely not a famous CRPG. Barton doesn't mention it. It's Wikipedia entry is barely more than a stub. Its manual exists only as a text file on the Lemon Amiga site. And yet, after a few hours of play, I find it very promising. Its graphics and sound are quite good for the era; it features an original story; and it has a very intuitive top-down screen that (as Wikipedia notes) anticipates Ultima VII by several years.

And it has a cool storybook graphic.

The setup is as follows: The peaceful kingdom of Holm has fallen into dark times. Ogres and goblins maraud the land. A magic talisman is stolen from the village of Tambry by an evil sorcerer and his undead army; without its protection, the village comes under constant attack. The mayor sends the Master at Arms to beg the king's assistance, but the Master soon returns, fatally wounded, with the news that the king's daughter has been kidnapped, and the necromancer threatens to kill her unless the king submits to his will. The land's champion, the Red Knight, is missing and feared dead.

It's not all about your village, you know.

With his last gasp, the Master at Arms charges his three sons--the brave Julian, the cunning Phillip, and the bookish Kevin--to fulfill the prophecies of the seer Malbareth, find a series of magic artifacts, defeat the necromancer in his stronghold, and recover the village's talisman.

You start the game playing Julian, and frankly I don't know how and when you switch to the other brothers. In true CRPG fashion, I looted the houses of my fellow townsfolk, finding various magic items and sundries, before attempting to leave the town.

I never claimed to be a hero.

Gameplay is from a top-down perspective. The interface is smooth and continuously scrolling--the first isometric live-action game that I've played so far, which ought to give Faery Tale Adventure some bonus points. The game uses the mouse, although (unlike Dungeon Master) there are analogous keyboard commands to every mouse command, and I find the keyboard much more intuitive.


The lower left corner narrates your actions in the past-tense, as if it's part of a (very boring) story, in keeping with the "faery tale" theme. Under the narration are your vital statistics: bravery (battle skill), luck (affects chance of being resurrected after death by a "good fairy"), kindness (helps in communication), vitality (hit points), and wealth (gold).

After looting Tambry, I headed out the front gates and was promptly slain by a passing skeleton. As the manual promised might happen, a fairy glided along and resurrected me.

An inauspicious beginning.

My second trip out was a little more promising, as I quickly dispatched two ogres and looted their bodies. Combat is a little unexciting. Essentially, you wield a weapon (all I can afford right now is a dirk) and press the number pad key corresponding to the direction of your foe, repeatedly, until one of you dies.


I noticed that my "bravery" went up two points after defeating the ogres, so this is perhaps how your character develops. There's no other suggestion of levels or experience points in the game. I'm not yet sure how to develop luck, kindness, or (maximum) vitality.

As for other discoveries: it appears that there are chests sitting around in the wilderness to plunder; there are various magic items (totems, skulls, orbs) with various properties I have to figure out on my own; my vitality increases as I wait around; and when night falls in the game, the screen darkens.

Holm at night.

The biggest gameplay mysteries I have is if there's any way to rest or wait. The innkeeper/shopkeeper asks if I want to stay the night, but I can't figure out any command that lets me do that.

So far, The Faery Tale Adventure seems slight but intriguing. I'll give it a few more days and see how it develops.