The Black Gate: The Road Not Taken

Happy?

         

So here's what's supposed to happen, picking up from the party's victory at Skara Brae: I get the answer to the question of Life and Death (or, at least, enough of one) from the Tortured One and return to Alagner. Alagner lets me borrow his book. I have to solve a bunch of annoying navigation puzzles in his lab to get it, and while I'm doing so, Alagner is murdered by Hook and Forkris, an event I'm able to witness in the crystal ball on his table, since it records what happened in the previous 24 hours.

 

Alagner's notebook satisfies the wisp, who tells me that the Time Lord wants to speak to me, but he's trapped in the Shrine of Spirituality. I can reach him by using my Orb of Moons directly to the northwest, even though this has never worked before. The wisp goes on to explain that Britannia is under attack from the Guardian, who is vain, greedy, egocentric, and malevolent. He has conquered numerous worlds, and his followers--the leaders of the Fellowship--are building a black moongate to allow him to enter and conquer Britannia. The wisp warns us to prevent this, as in Britannia, the Guardian will be unstoppable. Most of this is stuff we already know.

In his prison in the Shrine of Spirituality, the Time Lord confirms that it was he who sent the red moongate to bring me to Britannia. He is being held in his prison by the spherical generator in the dungeon Despise, which he bids the Avatar to destroy. The Avatar has to journey all the way there, get blocked by the red moongate, and return to the Time Lord to hear the Time Lord's solution to the barrier: get Nicodemus's hourglass.
       

The Time Lord ruins the fan theory that he was Hawkwind in Ultima IV.

        
Nicdoemus tells you that he sold the hourglass to an antique store in Paws. You can buy it or steal it there, but Nicodemus needs to enchant it for it to be useful. If the ether is still messed up, he can't do that, so the Avatar has to return to the Time Lord and get the clue to visit Penumbra as a first step to destroying the tetrahedron generator. Afterwards (or if the Avatar has already done this), Nicodemus can cast the necessary spell.

The enchanted hourglass somehow provides protection from the barrier, allowing the Avatar to enter and destroy the generator as I did by accident. More important, by double-clicking on the hourglass, the Avatar can contact the Time Lord later on.

To destroy the cube generator legitimately, you must use the hourglass to contact the Time Lord, who suggests that its defense can be countered with a special metal called Caddellite. I had already picked up Caddellite ore on a premature visit to Ambrosia, but if I hadn't, the Time Lord would tell me to ask Brion at the Moonglow observatory. Brion tells you that Caddellite only comes from meteors, and the last one to strike Britannia landed in the "northeast sea." It is also Brion who recommends that you take the ore to Zorn in Minoc to have helmets fashioned from it. Zorn's helmets protect from the cube generator's attacks, allowing the party to access it and get the cube prism.
        

Zorn forges faster than the player character in Skyrim.

      
By bumbling prematurely into the sphere generator, I destroyed some of this questline, but less than I thought. As we've seen, I could still contact the wisps and get the hints to visit Alagner, and from Alagner the quest to visit the Tortured One, and I could have continued through Alagner's murder.

Unfortunately, I couldn't visit the Time Lord in his original prison, since I'd already freed him and then broke the Orb of Moons. This meant that I never asked him about a way to get through the red moongate, which means he never gave me the HOURGLASS keyword to feed to Nicodemus. However, I discovered that if I obtained the hourglass from Paws, Nicodemus still had the ENCHANT keyword that would allow me to pick up from there.
          

That was the past, Time Lord.

        
When I used it, the Time Lord addressed me as if speaking to me for the first time, using dialogue that I would have received if I'd visited him in his prison, but I also had keywords from later in the questline, so it was a weird conversation, mixing dialogue that suggested he was still entrapped with dialogue that I was meant to get after freeing him. Either way, he directed me to Brion and the Caddellite helms the way he was supposed to, allowing me to pick up from there.

Truth be told, I had already obtained the cube prism by dismissing my party, sucking up the damage that the generator dealt with my enhanced hit points, solving the puzzle, and re-enlisting my party members. But I still went to Brion, got the hint, went to Minoc, and got Zorn to make me eight Caddellite helmets.
         

Spark puts one on.

         
I declined to finish the Alagner questline because it would have gotten him needlessly killed, and I no longer needed the wisps' hints about reaching the Time Lord. Thus, we pick up this narrative as my Avatar arrives at the Meditation Retreat for the second time. Whether it's the Caddellite helm that protects the Avatar or the extra hit points he gained from Forge of Virtue, he ends up in the generator (as he does with all the generators) alone.
        

Thank the gods. Trying to move my party through this area would be a nightmare.

          

If the phrase "fiendish without being particularly clever" makes any sense, it applies to the little cube generator maze. The cube is in the center of a series of concentric squares. The Avatar can walk around the squares, but there are invisible walls blocking him at various points. Stepping on some points sets off traps, while stepping on others creates little bridges between the outer and inner squares. You basically have to walk around the whole thing multiple times, doing your best to avoid fireballs and gouts of flame, reloading if you suddenly wake up at the Fellowship shelter in Paws.
         

Maneuvering my way around the area.

          

The voice of the Guardian taunts you throughout this process, sometimes laughing, sometimes saying, "Yes, that is the proper direction to travel, Avatar." Either way, you ignore him until you finally reach the center and take the cube. As usual, this destroys the generator.

Afterwards, the Time Lord speaks unbidden:
         

Avatar! The Astronomical Alignment is almost at hand! Time is running out! The Guardian must be prevented from coming through the Black Gate! The cube will help thee find the location of the Black Gate. With it in thy possession, those under the influence of the Guardian will be more receptive to speaking the truth to thee. Go to Buccaneer's Den. Search for the one called "Hook." Talk to the so-called Fellowship. Thou shouldst have no trouble ascertaining his whereabouts there. I am sure that thou wilt eventually find the location of the Black Gate. Good luck!

         
Gorn has no new dialogue on the way out; his "god" is somehow still able to speak to him, so he and the Avatar still part with animosity. 
   
Having already visited Buccaneer's Den (and, of course, having already gotten to it twice), I already know that the Black Gate will be found on the Isle of the Avatar, but the prospect of using a lie detector on Fellowship members is too good to pass up. I spend a while flying everywhere with a Fellowship hall, re-engaging various members in dialogue. They often begin with their "old" dialogue, but then the cube vibrates and they have additional dialogue in which they're forced to speak the truth. Here are some highlights:
         

• Klog in Trinsic not only knew about the Fellowship's role in Christopher's murder; he instigated it. When Christopher refused to help with the Black Gate project despite having been paid, Klog confronted him and Christopher shoved him out of his smithy. Klog called for the assassins, and Hook and Forskis arrived in The Crown Jewel to take care of the deed. Inamo was in the wrong place at the wrong time after all.

• Batlin casts a spell and disappears the moment he sees that you have the cube.

• Patterson has no new dialogue. He's not being influenced by the Guardian; he's just a jackass.

           

The Avatar looks at the cube in confusion, shakes it, checks the battery compartment.

           

• Elynor in Minoc knows full well that Hook and Forskis committed the murders of Frederico and Tania. She attributes the Fellowship candelabra left at the scene to their carelessness.

• Danag, the branch leader in Buccaneer's Den, has the most to offer. He spills the beans on Hook, who is the Fellowship's chief executioner, having been trained to the role by his predecessor, de Snel. Danag doesn't like the Fellowship leaders. He calls Elizabeth a "royal she-bitch" who "will murder thee at a moment's notice," and he says that Abraham cheats at cards. He also says explicitly that the Black Gate is being built on the Isle of the Avatar, in case it wasn't clear from the materials in Hook's chambers, and that Hook has a key. He confirms that Buccaneer's Den and its pirates are completely controlled by the Fellowship, and that most of the organization's profits come from there.

            

The cube basically vibrates continually as Danag talks.

          

• Gordy, the game master, confirms Fellowship owner of the casino and says that the guard Sintag has the key to the back areas.

• Sintag willingly hands over the key if asked. This is how players were supposed to get in without the "Telekinesis" spell.

• None of the NPCs in the Baths have any new dialogue. I guess maybe they really are volunteers.

• The game specifically notes that the cube had no effect on some Fellowship members, meaning they were honestly suckered. This is true of Feridwyn in Paws and Quan in Terfin.

• Mistress Mandy, the tavernkeeper in Buccaneer's Den, causes the cube to vibrate "a little," but tells me nothing she didn't when I didn't have the cube. The game notes that "somehow you know that Mandy would have told you the truth without it."

Lord British has no new dialogue, neither from the cube nor any of the things we've discovered the whole game.

                  
Apropos of nothing, in the sea between Buccaneer's Den and Serpent's Hold is a ship floating by itself with no crew. I didn't check it out (it would require my own ship), but I wonder what's in the hold.
        

The Crown Jewel at last!

          
Thus we made our way once again to the old dungeon Hythloth, built into the mountains west of the old Shrine of the Codex, and we use the key from Hook's chambers--conveniently forgotten by the loyal Fellowship assassin--to open the front door.
 
Immediately inside the door, we're startled to see a giant stone throne, clearly built for the Guardian. It's not so much the presence of the throne that startles us, but its specific location. Did the Guardian really want to sit so immediately in front of the main door, in a dungeon with a dirt floor, looking out on the Shrine of the Codex through iron bars?
           

This is more where you'd put the receptionist's desk than the throne of your leader and conqueror.

          
There are living and dining quarters for Fellowship staff--all of whom we kill--immediately south of the throne room. The dungeon continues to the north, opened by a switch found behind a hidden door.

The area beyond has a jail with three doors. A switch puzzle opens the doors; one must enter the third one, where the body of a well-dressed woman lies dead on the floor. She has a necessary key.

The next area has a variety of switches and walls opened by those switches. We got through by figuring out the pattern. The next chamber we explore has dozens of bodies and skeletons, almost all of them wearing Fellowship medallions. As we move west, we see that the chamber is occupied by a dragon, which we kill without much trouble. There's an enormous pile of treasure, including gems and multiple stacks of gold pieces, at the southern end. We pick up a few final enchanted armor pieces, but it would take a moron to bother to pick up all that treasure.
        

The dragon's useless treasure hoard. Shamino gets a magic choker, at least.

           
The rest of the dungeon is weird. If the other Fellowship members have to travel through it to get to where they're constructing the Black Gate, they must constantly put their lives in their hands. There are numerous hidden passages (and I hate how this game does hidden passages) and one succession of areas in which you get teleported every time you sit on a throne, only to an identical chamber so you don't realize you've been teleported. There are some false teleporters that dump you back to the beginning. There aren't a lot of enemies, but a lich nonsensically blocks the way to the final area.
        

The lich killed Dupre, so I have to resurrect him.

         
The penultimate area is a large Fellowship hall, where we defeat about half a dozen members of various classes. A hidden hallway behind the altar leads to a final teleporter, which in turn leads, at last, to the chamber of the Black Gate. Knowing what's coming, we arrive with "Mass Might" and "Protect All" having been cast.
        

This place would make more sense for the throne.

        
The chamber is a long north-south room with the Black Gate on a triangular platform at the north end. Each corner of the platform has a pedestal with a receptacle for each of the three prisms. The room is occupied by five people: Batlin, Elizabeth, Abraham, Hook, and Forskis. As we enter, the Guardian's voice booms: "Stop the Avatar! I will come through the Black Gate now!"
  
Each of the Fellowship members has some dialogue. Batlin demands that we stop and questions our sanity. He says the Guardian will crush us "like an insect." He says if we bow down to the Guardian, "perhaps he shall give thee a place at his side."
     

How is it "mad" to stop a tyrannical, otherworldly being from coming through a portal?

    
Hook isn't interested in bribing us with power. Neither is his henchman, Forskis.
      

To be fair, Hook and I are in agreement.

Forskis is like a parody of gargoyles.

   
Abraham and Elizabeth both join in the calls to kill us:
          

These two names have loomed so large throughout the entire game, and yet these lines are the entirety of the Avatar's interactions with these characters.

    
Outvoted, Batlin changes his tune:
 

Batlin, you're the craftiest guy I know. But you're the only one in this room who doesn't realize that I decided to kill you five minutes ago.

       
I saved a lot of resources for this battle, including several Potions of Sleep. Immediately after the battle begins, I administer them to each of the Fellowship members.
           

Batlin flights with spells while his companions sleep.

         
Only Batlin is immune, and it doesn't take the rest of the party long to defeat him. He has a little speech:
           

Dost thou imagine thyself an immortal? The Guardian is far more. Return to your precious Earth and rest. Sleep, that he may visit your dreams with countless visions of death in the belly of the Great Sea Serpent. As for me, I shall begone! Thou shalt never find me! Farewell, Avatar!

             
And with that, Batlin teleports away, leaving me to wonder what he meant about the "Great Sea Serpent." We spend a grim few minutes executing coups-de-grâce on the rest of the Fellowship. After the sordid business is over, I remember that we've been carrying around about a dozen glass swords that I had intended to use in this final battle. Ah, well. An Ultima glass sword wouldn't be an Ultima glass sword if it was actually used.
 
One by one, I place the cube, tetrahedron, and sphere prisms in their receptacle. The last one lowers the protective barrier around the Black Gate. As I insert the objects, a few questions occur to me, such as how a gateway can be constructed of solid material, and why the Fellowship members built a fail-safe into their protective barrier that involved the three generator prisms.
          

I'm also a little confused about the blue light on the wall behind the gate.

           
Regardless of the answers, as the barrier collapses, the Guardian once more invades my thoughts:
     

So, Avatar! The moment of truth has come. You can destroy the Black Gate, but you will never return to your beloved Earth. Or you can come through now and go home! It is your choice!

 
If I didn't already know that it works, I'd be thinking now that the Guardian is trying to trick me. How can this portal go both to the Guardian's realm and to Earth? I'm grateful Lord British isn't here, as he'd probably shove me bodily into the portal before the Guardian finished speaking.
  
Instead, I point Rudyom's wand at the Black Gate and the endgame cinematic commences. It shows the Guardian struggling to come through just as the portal explodes.

It's not my fault that your followers made it so small. How were you planning to get your legs through?

I don't think it's going to stretch.

I feel like this should have killed him.

            
"Avatar!" calls the Guardian. "You think you have won? Think again! You are unable to leave Britannia, whereas I am free to enter other worlds! Hmmm . . . perhaps your puny Earth shall be my NEXT target!" I want to remind him that I've just beaten him in about two weeks in a world of 100 people with medieval technology, and he's talking about trying to conquer a planet of 5.4 billion people with fighter jets and nuclear weapons. And it's not like Earth is likely to be flim-flammed by a secretive, seemingly-benevolent organization led by an oily figurehead. But the game gives me no chance to respond. Instead, we get the endgame text:
    

In the months following the climactic battle at The Black Gate, Britannia is set upon the long road to recovery from its various plights. Upon your return to Britain, Lord British decreed that the Fellowship be outlawed, and all of its branches were soon destroyed. The frustration you feel at having been stranded in Britannia is somewhat alleviated by the satisfaction that you solved the gruesome murders committed by the Fellowship and even avenged the death of Spark's father. And although you are, at the moment, helpless to do anything about the Guardian's final threat, another thought nags at you . . . what became of Batlin, the fiend who got away? That is another story . . . one that will take you to a place called The Serpent Isle . . . 

           
And then the "congratulations" screen at the top of this entry. Several things occur to me as the credits roll:
     

• This is the first game I can remember in which "credits roll" at the end. They last a while, too.

• Any player who didn't take Spark into his party way back in Trinsic would probably be confused at the mention of avenging the death of "Spark's father."

• Rather than outlawing and destroying the Fellowship, a better solution would have been to have the Avatar take it over, using its infrastructure to promote a return to the eight virtues and a rebuilding of each city around them.

• There were times where the Guardian's communications with the Avatar seemed to be helping him. Was that just to sow confusion, or was the original intent to make the Guardian a more ambiguous figure?

• The Astronomical Alignment was a silly and needless addition. The game has no time limit whatsoever, and the planets (as viewed with the orrery viewer, in any event) are never in anything but random positions, even when the alignment is supposed to be "imminent."

       

Oh, give me a break.

     

• The series has now completed the severing of the Avatar from the player. The brilliance of the Avatar concept as introduced in Ultima IV has been disassembled. The Avatar is no longer the player's literal "avatar" within the realm of Britannia but just a character of that name that the player controls.

      
For the final reason above, it's not surprising to me that many fans consider The Black Gate to be the "end" of the Ultima series, the next three games notwithstanding. To many players, remaining in Britannia would hardly be a punishment. You are a powerful fight and mage, famous, the right arm of the king, adored by most of the population. It's a worthy reward for between four and ten world-saving quests. But the severance does bring it all to an end. When we pick up again, whether it's with Ultima Underworld II or The Serpent Isle, the game no longer will begin with the player being pulled from the "real" world and inhabiting his avatar in Britannia. If you don't get why that matters, you and I have never played the same Ultimas.
  
Actual final time: 74 hours

  

Miracle Warriors: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

I don't know; it was 50/50 for a while.

        

Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord

Japan

Kogado Studios (developer and Japanese publisher); SEGA of America (U.S. publisher)

Released in 1986 for PC-88, FM-7, and Sharp X; 1987 for NES and Sega Master System

Date Started: 16 July 2020

Date Ended: 29 July 2020

Total Hours: 10

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 26

Ranking at Time of Posting: 175/379 (46%)

Ranking at Game #556: 288/556 (52%)

      

Summary:

Probably the first Japanese console RPG released in America, and the first for the Sega platform, Miracle Warriors is a boring, grindy game in which the player must assemble a team of four characters, collect a series of artifacts, and do battle against a great evil to recover the titular seal and thus save the world from an influx of monsters. As with many console RPGs of the period, real game content lasts only a few hours; the rest of the length is required for grinding for experience, gold, and a few rare magic items. The game features simple mechanics to go with simple controls, including a combat system with virtually no tactics, limited character development and inventory development, and only a thin veneer of lore.
      

*****

     

A lot of you warned me that it wouldn't be time well-spent, but I finished Miracle Warriors anyway, mostly to avoid having the loss count against my statistics. One of these days, I'm going to have to have a frank discussion with myself about how many sunk hours that "won" statistic is really worth. My time is probably only half of what it would take to win it on era-accurate hardware; I made liberal use of the emulator's "fast forward" option to speed through combat pauses and animation (I can't help but wish DosBox offered a similar option after all those combats in Amberstar).

     

Miracle Warriors mostly serves to make better console games like Final Fantasy seem all the more impressive. Final Fantasy required some grinding, but at least what happened after the grinding was interesting. Even the grinding itself was a little interesting, in the sense that it offers actual combat tactics. There's none of that in Warriors, just blunt attacks and the occasional use of a magic item.

          

Getting the fourth companion.

       

Winning the game involves running around from continent to continent, hitting towns, dungeons, caves, and castles, first to assemble the team of four Miracle Warriors, then to equip them with a variety of sword, shield, and armor artifacts. By the time you head for the final battle, all four warriors have a full suite of special items, which the game allocates automatically to particular warriors without your input.

    

There are a few chokepoints that keep Warriors from being a truly open world game. First, you can't explore the sea until you pay 30,000 guilders for a ship. Even then, you can only explore the calm, eastern seas. You need to get a second ship elsewhere to explore the rougher oceans around the final continent. (There is no graphic for either ship; you just walk on water once you have it in your inventory.) There is at least one companion who can't join the party until you find a particular piece of armor. There are some items of equipment that you can't pick up, and areas you can't enter, until you have particular companions. Whenever I ran into such an issue, I just circled around to different areas and returned later. There was always plenty to do.

           

Getting the second ship.

          

Some of the equipment is found in treasure chests in small dungeons that you have to explore, but other times you just have to fight one boss enemy the moment you enter.

        

Finding an equipment upgrade in a dungeon.

         

There's no sense of team combat. The four warriors are more like four individuals who just walk around together. In combat, only one character can attack at a time, and only he gets experience for attacking. Enemies generally only attack the character who attacks them (in any given round), although some are capable of mass-damage spells.

          

The party is pretty low on hit points.

         

There are a few items that can help in combat. Sacred Nuts, found after combat in a few wooded areas, cause damage when thrown. Staffs of Earthquakes can be purchased for 10,000 guilders in a town on the southern part of the map. And on an island in the southeast, you can purchase Stones of Protection (which block enemy spells for one full combat, if they work, which is only about 50% of the time) for 50 fangs. All of these items have maximums, so you can't carry an infinite number.

When you face a particularly tough enemy, there's only one series of actions. First, use a Stone of Protection so that the enemy can't cast mass-damage spells. (Sometimes you have to use multiple stones until one works.) Then, exhaust your Staffs of Earthquakes and Sacred Nuts, both of which can be used without retaliation from the enemy. Next, have the first character "attack" until his hit points are almost gone. Move on to the second character, then the third, and finally the fourth. If he's not dead by the time the fourth character's hit points are exhausted, you need to reload and spend more time grinding before trying the combat again.

          

One of the boss-level enemies.

          

One particular annoyance is that you can't use healing herbs in combat. Late in the game, however, you obtain some Potions of Resurrection (which, despite their name, are basically just full-healing potions) from Sea Serpents. These add an intermediate step in tough combats, giving you a few more hit point bars to exhaust before the battle is over. I've seen people recently making fun of Phantasy Star for offering a cake shop in a cave; if Warriors was better known, "sea serpents drop healing potions" might become the same sort of meme.

         

There are only ever three "spells" in the game, and none of them are usable in combat. They just rouse your companions and allow you access to certain areas.

          

The game's three spells. "Come, Iason" is necessary to enter some endgame areas.

      

The game generally does a decent job of updating the latest NPC hints to help you with the next stage of the game. I still needed to look up a hint online for the final area, however. The endgame takes place on the southwestern continent, Areos, but many of the locations you need to enter are hidden. I never got a hint about the fact that they were hidden nor where they were hidden, so I needed a walkthrough to bail me out. After that, it was just a matter of finding three keys and then heading to the final dungeon, which for some reason is called Gelkis.

       

One of three keys needed for the endgame.

          

The final dungeon has three small levels, but with extra staircases that lead you astray into the game's other dungeons. If you find the right path, you confront the demon/dark lord/general Terarin at a staircase on the third level. She is presented topless (the way she is on the original Japanese box cover), which I find surprising for a North American console release of the period. Anyway, if you've leveled enough and follow the combat strategy above, you win; otherwise, it's back to the grindstone for a while. Grinding takes a long time at higher levels, even with "fast forward" enabled in the emulator.

           

This is so anatomically improbable, I'm not even sure I'd call it "nudity."

          

After the final battle, the game has more endings than The Return of the King. First, you get some messages on the combat screen. Note the inconsistent tense:

        

Chet defeated Terarin, the dark general, in mortal combat! Entering the depths of the shrine, Chet finds a chest. Within lay man's last hope, the Seal of the Dark Lord!

                    

It's funnier if you imagine that we found a marine seal.

         

Then, there's a scrolling message:

        

Chet and his companions came to fulfill Iason's prophecy and the people of the Five Lands, weary from despair, rejoiced. The elders led the Miracle Warriors to evil's gate. After a raging battle of sword and sorcery, the evil Terarin was defeated. Chet took the Seal of the Dark Lord and used it to once again shut the Pandora Passage, returning peace to the Five Lands.

       

Then a bunch of portraits appear to give thanks. I guess maybe they were some of the NPCs we met along the way, but none of them were memorable enough that I can put name to portrait. 

           

Thank you, random stranger.

         

Then we have some images of the king congratulating the party: "Brave Chet! I knew thee surely would be triumphant! Thy feats will become legend in the land for all eternity."

         

What king are you, again?

          

Finally, the other three companions each offers his or her own message of congratulations. After that, it's finally back to the title screen.

         

My fellow party members, looking like apostles.

        

During my career, I've attended a lot of office parties for departing co-workers. Some of them have even been for me. There's a weird vibe at some of those parties. People who barely spoke to each other are suddenly hugging. The departing co-worker is lauded for doing a much better job than he or she actually did. Statements assure him or her that he or she will be missed much more than he or she actually will. Some high-level manager you've never even met is there to hand out an award or gift card. It's all smiles and support, all cake and cocktails, and the next day you're already struggling to remember the co-worker's face and wondering what the hell that was all about. The end of Miracle Warriors felt like one of those parties. The game simply hadn't engaged me enough with its story and lore for the end to be worth all that fuss.

    

Here's my GIMLET:

    

• 3 points for the game world. Warriors tells a fairly standard backstory and offers a boilerplate quest. Someone went through a lot of trouble in annotating the map not only with the names of the continents but also the various sections of the continents, deserts, forests, towns, and so forth, but none of it amounts to anything. These places have no particular character. Towns are all interchangeable.

• 2 points for character creation and development. Creation consists only of a name. Development takes place by earning experience and occasionally seeing the bar roll over, which increases maximum hit points. 

          

The full party.

        

• 3 points for NPC interaction. You get one-line clues from wandering traders and a few NPCs in towns. They're important to the game but don't offer the same depth of lore as, say, Final Fantasy.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. The game's menagerie of weirdly-named monsters is amazingly unmemorable. Some of them have special attacks, but since there are no tactics in combat, there's really no reason to memorize those attacks.

• 2 points for magic and combat. As outlined above, there simply aren't enough choices to make.

• 3 points for equipment. You have a base set of gear that you can buy and a prestige set that you can find, plus a few usable items in combat.

         

The game's inventory screen.

          

• 4 points for the economy. Between healing, purchasing staffs, paying the armorer in Hierax to upgrade your swords, and other purchases, the economy remains relevant through most of the game.

• 2 points for a main quest with no side quests, no choices, and no alternate outcomes.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are decent. Some of the monster portraits are creative and fun. The sound effects aren't interesting enough to deal with the constant, repetitive music, and I thus played with the sound off. The simple mechanics make serviceable use of the simple controller, but there were a lot of ancillary interface issues that wipe out any points I would otherwise give it. It was too hard to distinguish health and experience bars, for instance, and scrolling through menu options doesn't wrap around when you get to the top or bottom.

          

There are some weird monsters in this game.

         

• 2 points for gameplay. It gets some credit for limited nonlinearity, and the total game time wasn't so bad. But the game is otherwise far too grindy, and there would be no reason to replay it unless you just completely forgot what it was about.

          

That gives us a final score of 26. It perfectly exemplifies what a game in the mid-20s means: it's an RPG; you can play it; it doesn't do anything outrageous; you might be glad you had it if you were in prison and had nothing else to do. I watched old episodes of Arrow while I played it. If I had it only for the console, it would be too boring and slow to keep my attention fixed on the television with nothing else to keep me occupied. Maybe if the television had picture-in-picture. What happened to that? I don't even think my brand-new Roku television offers that option.

         

I'm not sure Sega had the best ideas when it came to box covers.

          

Contemporary reviews were very low. The best categorized on MobyGames is from the March 1989 Power Play at 63/100 (March 1989); from there, they drop into the 40s. Almost all reviews, contemporary and current, note the repetitive, slow combat and grinding, which really says something given that these elements were common to console games of the era. Typical is the December 1988 The Games Machine: "Endless repetition of combat, inflexible interaction, and monotonous predictability kills this shallow attempt at an RPG."
     

In contrast, there are a curious number of modern reviews that seek to rehabilitate the game. For instance, if you've ever wondered what kind of gamer could actually be aroused by the endgame graphic of Terarin and her grotesque bosom, check out this coked-up review at HonestGamers.com; the author has won it at least four times. My colleague Zenic Reverie also found some value in the game in a 2012 series of entries (starting here) at The RPG Consoler (and if you're looking for more detail than I provided, his is definitely the series to read), although he was also relatively grounded and ultimately rated the game at 33%.

Kurt Kalata took an interesting look at Miracle Warriors in a 2007 article on HardcoreGaming101. Although he was critical of the Sega version, his worst comments were reserved for the PC-88 and MSX versions that the Sega edition was based on. Neither of the original versions feature any kind of in-game map, meaning you absolutely had to use the accompanying paper map to have any chance of figuring out where you were. The fairy companion actually talks to the party in the PC versions, and the towns are just menu towns. The Japanese NES version is closer to the Sega, although with (in Kalata's opinion) inferior graphics.

        

The final battle from the PC-88 version, courtesy of HardcoreGaming101.

           

I rated Miracle Warriors higher than I rated Kogado's Cosmic Soldier: Psychic War (1987). Although the two games are quite different, they have similar flaws, including boring combat, limited character development, and weird use of multiple characters in the party. It feels like the developers at Kogado didn't really "get" RPGs the way those at Square did (or at Nihon Falcom, for that matter). I don't know if they ever got better at RPGs—and I'll probably never know, because the company seems to have given up completely on western releases of its products after Miracle Warriors. None of its future RPGs—including Mashō Denki: La Valeur (1989), Mōryō Senki Madara: Daikongō Rinhen (1993), Record of Lodoss War (1994), Kisō Louga II: The Ends of Shangrila (1995), and Magical Squadron (1996)—have North American releases or English translations.

   

If my experience with Final Fantasy served to emphasize that not all console RPGs of the era are bad, even if played on a PC, my experience with Miracle Warriors perhaps emphasizes that if they are bad, it isn't necessarily because of the "console" part. I don't know how many more console tangents I'll allow myself—at least one to check out the first handheld RPG, I think—but overall it's been an instructive experience.

Amberstar: Won!

The final screen sets up the sequel.

        
The solution to the final pieces of the Amberstar seemed to be found in actually asking NPCs about the AMBERSTAR. I don't know why that didn't occur to me earlier. If I'd made it standard practice from the beginning, who knows how it would have changed the order in which I did the quests. Thank you to everyone who helped with hints as to specific NPCs.
 
Of the three pieces I still needed, two were relatively easy. One was, despite my side comment in the last entry, in a chest in the underworld, to which you are directed by giving an herb packet to the old thief Atacar. Getting to and from the area was harder than actually getting the Amberstar piece. I thought it would probably be easier to arrive via the whirlpool (which is closer to Ship's End) and leave via the castle (which is the only way to leave that I know about). But there were no more ships to buy in Crystal, so just one entry since I openly wondered why anyone would ever need to buy a ship at the Shipyard of the Far Isle, I bought a ship at the Shipyard of the Far Isle.
 
Once through the whirlpool, it was a simple matter of walking to Ship's End, finding Atacar, and giving him the herb packet. He directed me to a tree in the city's cemetery where I found a treasure "map." I put that in quotes because the map was described to me in text: the northernmost of three piles of ash surrounding a volcano. It didn't take me long to find it. It was in a chest with some potions and a magic globe that casts "Light 3."
         

The treasure location.

        
It took me longer to get out of the area, mostly because I was so paranoid about having to fight octopuses that I did everything I could think of to get around them. I also had trouble remembering the specific route through the castle. I eventually found it, though, and arrived back on the continent at the windgate hub.
  
For the second piece, I got a clue from the very first NPC I talked to, Annorel, the head of the rangers' guild. She said that the current rangers' guild was a recent incarnation, and that I might find a piece in the ruins of the old rangers' guild, which is on some islands east of Crystal. She gave me a Staff of Opening for when I found it. We flew there on that eagle and spied an island with a ship's dock but no clear use. I landed there, used the staff, and found the opening.
         

Finding the hidden entrance.

           
The old guild was small and quick. I battled through a few parties of bloodsuckers (basically stirges) and soon found the chest with the Amberstar piece. It also had a bunch of gems. I ran out of reasons for money long before the last entry, and that didn't change in this one.
 
I suspected the third piece would be in the dwarf mine, for which I still hadn't found the password. I had a decent idea where to ask, though: Bothor, the otherwise-useless dwarf in Illien. When asked about the AMBERSTAR, he volunteered that his uncle Donner in Gemstone knew where to find a piece, and he gave us a letter of introduction. I scouted around and didn't find Donner, but I did find a dwarf named Andamael who said Donner was living in a mountain to the northwest.

Donner's house was at the end of a short dungeon with rats. When we found him and gave him his nephew's letter, he related that the dwarves of old embedded their Amberstar piece into a crown, which must have been left in Dora's Mine when the dwarves were forced to abandon it. Unfortunately, he didn't remember the password to the mine and thus sent me back to Bothor, with another letter in my backpack, which seemed like unnecessary padding. Bothor said the answer was to say the name of the mine backwards.
        

This episode has a Tolkienesque quality.

          
It still took me a while to get in, first because I had misinterpreted the runes and thought it was called Bora's mine. Second, I didn't imagine the possessive was part of what I had to say backwards. So I tried AROB, then took another look at the sign and realized my mistake, then tried AROD, then got really annoyed for a while before realizing it was SAROD.
          

It takes longer than it should have.

        
The mine was an annoying three levels, populated by hundreds of giant rats (not even swamp rats, just regular ones) and spiders. The battles weren't hard, but it was easily the most combat-heavy dungeon in the game, which wasn't something I enjoyed in the final hours.

We found the crown relatively quickly: a trap near the entrance dumped us down to Level 3, near a hole back up to Level 2, where a chest contained the crown. The difficult part was getting out of the dungeon, which was a maze of stairs, spinners, hidden doors, and teleporters. There was a final battle with probably the weirdest enemy in the game: a giant rock with a demonic face. I guess that's what drove the dwarves out of the mine. Anyway, we finally made it and took the crown back to Donner so he could remove the Amberstar piece.
        

I think the graphics department could have spent a little more time on this one.

       
With the 13 pieces finally in hand, we flew to the altar that I had previously discovered. There, we encountered a relatively difficult lore puzzle. The altar indicated that each piece of the Amberstar was associated with one of the major powers (gods and demons) of Lyramion: Mork, Nut, Geb, Harachte, Sobek, Sansri, Tarbos, Bralkur, Marmion, Gala, Bala, and Talmit. The altar gave us descriptors of each entity and we had to choose the appropriate piece. A wrong choice was instant death for the selected character.
       

That seems an awfully harsh punishment for not paying attention in Western Civ.

         
I had paid attention to the game's lore but I hadn't written down most of it. I shuffled through a lot of past screenshots as I tried to figure out the right associations, but some of them were pretty obscure. I was pretty sure I'd never heard of "Talmit" at all. I had to reload about half a dozen times before I got them all right. Here is the list of descriptors:
          

• Knowledge: In my last entry, I made fun of the monk who described Mork as the "god of wisdom." That seemed close enough, and I got it right.

• The Ally: Ally of who? It seemed to me that Marmion, Bralkur, and Sansri were all allies of each other. After dying when I tried Marmion, I got it with Bralkur.

           

"I don't even know him!"

         

• Master of the Sea: I guessed right that it was Sobek. My reasoning was that the temple at Ship's End was to Sobek.

• Mother of Life: One of the first things I looked at in the game was a statue to Gala, goddess of life.

• Falsehood: I died twice trying Marmion and Tarbos. The answer was Sansri. I had her pegged more as the goddess of snakes, but I suppose there's a longstanding snake-falsehood link in Christian mythology.

• Friend of the Eagles: I had no idea, but I got it right with my first guess, which was Nut. 

• Evil: That had to be Tarbos or Marmion. I guessed Tarbos first and got it right.

• Power of the Earth: Again, I had no idea. I died guessing Harachte, then again guessing Talmit. It was Geb.

• Mother of Death: The second thing I looked at in the game was a statue to Bala, goddess of death.

• Fire: Harachte was the answer, which I guessed right based on the "Globe of Harachte" that I was carrying, which acts as a torch. 

• Traitor: Between the two I had left, that was Marmion, easy.

• What is Coming: I guess Talmit is the god of the future or prophecy or something. I'd like to know where that was mentioned in the game.

    
The altar's voice told us the Amberstar was reunited. At first, I freaked out a bit because it didn't appear in my inventory, but I soon realized it was part of the interface.

Now, suddenly, we're in a big hurry.

I went through a final round of leveling up. My final levels were between 18 and 28, with Drobanir the fighter getting the highest level and my wizards getting the lowest. Most of the characters reached maximums in their primary skills, and I had thus been dumping their most recent allocations of skill points into useless secondary skills. But my two paladins had their focus split between combat and magic and never maxed out in either skill set.

With the Amberstar in hand, I hoped that the final castle would be quick. I was hoping that the door would open to one big main chamber and a final battle. But of course I wasn't so lucky: it was a multi-leveled nightmare with multiple battles with "yellowslimes," capable of causing disease and paralysis. Sometimes they attacked with large Sasquatch-like creatures whose names I didn't catch.

There were about two dozen of these.

        
In some chest, I finally found the Gray Wizard spell "Magic Sphere," which casts all of the game's enhancement and protection spells at once, at their highest levels. I think this is probably the only place you can find it. It would have been helpful a long time ago.
     
After what seemed like forever, I finally encountered the demon Bralkur. He threatened me and attacked. I had received that scroll from Sansri that I was supposed to destroy in Bralkur's presence, banishing him from the realm. The problem was, it didn't work. The scroll cast a spell called "Banish Demon," but Bralkur resisted it every time. I thus had to kill him the old fashioned way, which wasn't as hard as it perhaps should have been.
        

Bralkur manages to resist a scroll that's supposed to kill him exclusively.

       
A Staff of Runes found behind Bralkur opened the way to the final battle. I arrived in the final chamber just as Marmion and a circle of black wizards were completing the ritual to return Tarbos from the moon.
    

Keep in mind, they've been at this the entire game. This was a long ritual.

Marmion needs to work on his smack talk.

    

The resulting combat was perhaps the most enemy-heavy combat in the game: six Level 8 wizards, six Level 12 wizards, and Marmion. They somehow wiped away all my buffing spells (Weapons Power 3, Anti-Magic 3, Armour Protection 3) just as combat began. I soon ascertained that the wizards were completely immune to magic. None of Trasric's damage spells did anything to any of them, whether I targeted individuals, groups, or the entire field. Thus, he was relatively useless. Satine spent a few rounds getting our buffing spells, plus "Mass Haste," back online. Everything else came down to physical combat.
         

Trasric realizes he can sit this one out.

          
The wizards themselves focused on group damage spells, which suck but are recoverable with healing, scrolls, and potions. I'd much rather face damage spells than spells like "Stun," "Stone," "Sleep," and so forth, none of which they seemed to have. We basically just had to whittle away at them round after round.

Marmion himself was invulnerable to most of my weapons. I noticed this with a few other enemies, and I don't understand how the game decides how powerful a weapon has to be to damage a particular opponent. My thief's Assassin's Blade, one paladin's Icebiter, and my fighter's Firebasher all did nothing. The only thing that would damage him was Sansri's Whip. It's a good thing I kept that.

It was a long combat, but I won it on the first try. Afterwards, I walked up to the portal, thrust the Amberstar into it, and prevented Tarbos's return.
        

I'm glad it was instinctive because otherwise we might not have done the only thing we could have possibly done.

        
Shandra's voice (the wizard from Twinlake) spoke to us at this point, bidding us to enter the teleporter he'd just opened for us. We did, and the endgame sequence commenced. It consisted of Lord Karwain (ruler of Twinlake) praising us in an audience and then announcing a feast in our honor. He invited us onto his balcony to look out over Lyramion, where a dragon flew by accompanied by an eagle. But we noticed that Lyramion's third moon had started to glow ominously red, setting up the second game in the intended trilogy, Ambermoon.
       

The lack of capital letters in this paragraph bothers me.

This is the game's equivalent to "the eagle flies with the dove."

        
I was impatient for most of this final session, and I feel like the final dungeon, in particular, could have hustled it along a bit. I wish the final battle had been harder but had made better use of all the characters. But I liked the lore puzzle, as poorly as I did, and I thought the final game sequence was suitably rewarding.

This is a pretty short entry, but Amberstar has given us enough material to deserve a separate "Summary and Rating," so look for that coming up. After that, we finally get to move on to a new game (on the official list) for the first time in a month.
  
Final time: 50 hours