Ambermoon: Summary and Rating

 

As if we needed more fodder for our harp/lyre nitpicking: The instrument in this image has the strings in the wrong direction.

        

Ambermoon

Germany

Thalion Software (developer and publisher) 

Released 1993 for Amiga

Date Started: 28 March 2023

Date Ended: 1 November 2023
Total Hours: 82

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)

Final Rating: 51

Ranking at Time of Posting: 477/508 (94%)

     

Summary:

   

A quality sequel to a quality game, Ambermoon takes place on the same world as Amberstar after a cataclysm has shattered the planet. As society rebuilds, a new threat emerges. At first, it seems to involve the same demon/wizard whose imminent return drove the plot of the first game, but the party eventually determines that the true threat is lizard-like alien invaders intent on stealing the world's water. Their quest to stop the invaders takes them to the planet's two moons and beyond. The party begins with a single character--the Amberstar hero's grandchild--but expands to six as the party encounters PCs willing to join.

 

Like its predecessor, Ambermoon combines top-down locations with first-person locations, with influences from Ultima and Dungeon Master. Combat is turn-based and takes place on a quasi-tactical grid, but with players and enemies limited to their respective sides, and I suspect the original inspiration was either Phantasie or the Phantasie-inspired Legend of Faerghail. The RPG mechanics, including character development, NPC interaction, inventory, are all solid, and there are a number of satisfying puzzles. The world is open by geography, if not by plot. The only major negatives are the lack of sound effects and a continuously-scrolling interface that is technically innovative but also slow and cumbersome. Overall, Ambermoon is one of the few games of the 1990s that feels like it has all of the key elements of a modern CRPG. If none of those elements are the best that the era offers, neither are any of them very bad.

     

****

        

It would be irresponsible to wrap up my coverage without covering some of the content that I missed by taking my shortcut through the Thalion offices. (That's a "first," right? We've had developer Easter eggs in games before, but an entire dungeon based on the developers' offices? Can anyone think of any antecedents?) I didn't re-play any of it, but from what I understand from both your comments and videos that I watched:

    

• I only explored three of the palaces belonging to members of Morag's ruling council: S'Riel (the one who tried to help me), S'Orel (the one I killed on Lyramion), and S'Arin. The others belong to S'Endar, S'Trog, S'Kat, and S'Lorwin, and the owners are home in all the other palaces and must be defeated to get their keys.

        

This screenshot suggests I killed S'Arin, but I don't remember the math puzzle in S'Arin's palace, so I'm not sure what happened.

      

• S'Arin's palace features some math puzzles based on eight crystal balls that you find behind secret doors, each with a number on its surface. There are two magic mouths with riddles based on the balls. One of them asks  "What is all together?", looking for the sum of the numbers. The other asks, "What is all together when there are balls below a line and columns after a cross?" You somehow have to interpret this as: (The sum of the numbers on the balls) / (the count of the number of balls) * (the number of columns on the map). I agree with commenter Buck that the language is ridiculous. I'm almost sorry that I cheated you out of the rant it would have provoked.

• S'Trog's palace has a bunch of traps that must be deactivated with levers. S'Endar's palace has a bunch of traps, some of which are illusory, and you have to apparently rely on luck or reloading to figure out which ones are safe to walk through.

• S'Lorwin's palace is surrounded by a moat. You find plans for a sandboat in S'Kat's palace and have to take them back to S'Goldar in S'Angrila to build one.

• Somewhere on Morag's surface is a shop that sells riding lizards, making overland navigation faster.

• There's a random tower on Morag's surface in which you find a dying Moranian named S'Krel. If you give him the ¤6,000 water bottle from the shop in S'Angrila, he rewards you with a yellow orb and enough experience points to boost characters to their maximum levels. This would have made me mad, too. I'm glad I didn't find him.

• The yellow orb is what Valdyn needs to go home. He'll refuse to abandon the party if you try to take him back to the world teleporter, but the endgame text changes from what I experienced to reflect that he's able to use the yellow orb instead of waiting for scholars to manufacture one for him.

      

The text that a "completionist" got.

      

• There was an aspect to the interface that I completely missed until I read about it in Wikipedia: the 3D perspective changes slightly based on the height of the active character. This isn't really worth much beyond a "huh!," though.

      

My Thalion shortcut is, incidentally, the key to a speedrun for the game. This player did it in 10 minutes: Grab the staff from grandfather's house, run to the Thalion offices in Spannenberg, get all the Level 50 employees to join you, pick up every mandatory item that you need (principally the whistle that summons the giant eagle and the harp), fly to the temple, play the harp, run past the magic guardians and Morag dragons, and defeat the machine.     

     

I ignored this message.

      

There's a delightful exchange between Ambermoon author Karsten Köper and frequent CRPG Addict commenter sucinum on the Dungeon Master forum website. It's over 22 years old, and sucinum comes across as the 13-year-old fanboy he must have been. From his perspective, Ambermoon has "the best ending you can imagine for a computer game." When Köper responds, sucinum gushes that he has a script for a third game, Ambersun, already prepared. Köper says that he planned to call the third game Amberworlds before (apparently) ghosting sucinum. Perhaps sucinum will let us know what the plot to Ambersun would have been.

    

As for the plot to Amberworlds, I haven't found anything that offers any detail, but it almost certainly would have involved the world-teleporting technology revealed in the last act of Ambermoon, perhaps connecting the worlds of Ambermoon, Dragon Flight, and Lionheart in a way that goes beyond the simple Easter eggs of this game. It might have somehow involved the book in an unknown language that we found in the mines of Dol Kiredon. I suspect it would have revealed some previous advanced civilization that occupied all of the planets.

    

But it must be said that Ambermoon, unlike its predecessor, does not demand a sequel. There are some mysteries by the end of the two games, but no major dangling threads. In fact, Amberstar and Ambermoon together feel something like a trilogy already, since Ambermoon has an obvious break point. (The fact that I took a long break at precisely that point enhances the feeling for me.) A better-paced series might have ended Ambermoon with the invasion of the Temple of the Brotherhood and the discovery of the nature of the true threat; the third game would have involved voyaging to other worlds, with perhaps a bit more content than in the existing game.

     

That said, Ambermoon is a solid game. That I wanted to skip a bit of the end doesn't change that fact. It turns out I didn't skip very much, and honestly when I did it, I was only momentarily annoyed with how long the game was taking, not absolutely bone-weary to the point of hostility the way I was with Serpent Isle. It has good mechanics for character development, combat, equipment, magic, NPCs, and just about everything else I love about RPGs. "Good" is hardly a superlative, I realize, and I chose it carefully. Almost nowhere does the game achieve, or even stray towards, brilliance. But it is almost uniformly not bad. The one asterisk is in the interface: There wasn't a moment of gameplay in which I didn't wish that the authors had stuck with tiled movement. Other than that, it mirrors its predecessor--and exceeds just about every other game of the era--in getting essentially nothing wrong. I expect 4s, 5s, and 6s across the board in the GIMLET. For 1993, that's a superlative in itself.

      

I award the game:

    

• 6 points for the game world. It has a nice backstory, a heap of lore, and a few interesting plot twists that put it above the typical CRPG. It makes good use of its predecessor while telling its own original story. The connections with other Thalion games were fun. I just wish the game responded more to the characters' actions, particularly in respect to some NPCs.

      

I still think the authors must have been influenced by V.

     

• 5 points for character creation and development. It's good but uneven. The biggest negative is having little creation at all and forcing the main character to play a fixed class. I don't see how it would have required much tweaking to give that choice to the player. While character leveling is consistently rewarding, skill development is extremely front-loaded, and characters earn far more training points than they can spend. Spell learning points continue to remain valuable.

        

The main character at the end of the game.

     

• 6 points for NPCs. Those that can't join have a healthy amount of keyword-based dialogue. A satisfying number can join, and a replay might someday be fun with different class choices. I don't think I gave the original much credit for offering the ability to prompt dialogue by showing or giving an inventory item.

• 5 points for encounters and foes. Like its predecessor, it comes with an original monster list. They have a generally satisfying number of strengths and weaknesses, though not quite as extensive as any D&D game. The better "encounters" were the many puzzles that were both fair (exception above) and well-integrated with the plot. Still no role-playing choices, alas. 

• 5 points for magic and combat. The Phantasie-inspired combat works pretty well. Not as well as it would have worked on an open tactical grid, but well. I would have liked to see a few more options for melee characters, but the variety of spells is excellent, as is the mechanism for using items in combat. I would have liked to see a way to speed up combat. The "fast combat" option should have disabled enemy animations at the very least. 

    

I never got sick of this spell.

     

• 7 points for equipment, an excellent category that would have been boosted only with item descriptions and more randomization. Everything else is positive: the number of slots, the clarity of the datasheets, the uses of "Identify," and the variety and utility of items. I love the way that items become part of the interface. I suppose there's one other minor negative: the copious number of scrolls. I never came close to using them all.

       

Just when I'd reduced my scrolls to a manageable number.

       

• 4 points for the economy. There are useful things to buy, but the rewards are a bit too generous, and the economy is thus hopelessly broken about a third of the way into the game. Some services (repair) are under-utilized, and anyone who actually buys a potion (except attribute-boosting potions) or scroll is a fool.

• 4 points for quests. I would love to see a game in this engine with actual side quests. Here, there's at best a few side-areas. There are no choices or alternate endings except for the text changes involving Valdyn.

• 3 points for graphics, sound and interface. The graphics are improved from Amberstar, but I don't know how you seriously field a game in 1993 without any sound effects. The interface could have benefited from simple keyboard commands rather than the cumbersome use of the mouse and numberpad, and the 3D movement was never anything but infuriating. The developers there were clearly enchanted by a technology "advancement" that needed more time in the womb.

• 6 points for gameplay. Positive qualities are a relatively open world, a modest difficulty (tending slightly too easy), and a small amount of replayability. It's too long, but only at the end did I get to the point where I stopped looking forward to a session.

    

The final score of 50 is exactly what I gave Amberstar. I didn't engineer that, but I agree they're about even in quality--which is another point to the series, since sequels so rarely equal the originals. The categories aren't all even between the two games, but they vary only by a couple of points. [Ed. I was persuaded after this initially published that I was too harsh on graphics, sound, and interface, and thus increased the final score to 51.]

    

The company was a little too modest with this ad. They probably could have removed at least one of those qualifiers.

    

Given the lack of an official English release (I've been playing an unreleased version), it's no surprise that American magazines skipped Ambermoon. British magazines received preview versions in English, which explains this insulting, enraging review by Rich Pelley, who thinks all top-down interfaces owe their lineage to Zelda, all first-person interfaces are copying Eye of the Beholder, and "consoley" is a compliment. He rates it a 30% after only 4 hours, complaining about the simplicity of early-game combat. The review is full of idiotic jokes and non-sequiturs that any good editor should have hacked out. Any Brits who supported this magazine have a lot to answer for.

    

Fortunately, other European Amiga magazines were more discerning, with reviews ranging from a low of 79% (Amiga Format) to 93% (Play Time). Reviews were almost unanimous in praising the graphics (including the monster animation), music, story, and size of the game, but lamenting mostly the absence of sound effects. The continuously-scrolling 3D seems to have been received well by contemporary reviewers, which I understand. I think many of them would agree with me 30 years later that it hasn't aged well.

    

The reception was not enough to save Thalion from dissolution in 1994. Many of its employees made their way to Blue Byte Software, another German developer. These employees include producer Erik Simon, programmer Michael Bittner, composer Matthias Steinwachs, and graphic artist Thorsten Mutschall. Blue Byte's Albion (1995) clearly draws a lot from the Ambermoon interface and engine, and Mutschall's graphics would be noticeable anywhere despite the shift to a science fiction setting. The inventory system, character development system, and automap seem almost identical. I look forward to it, but it alas seems to be Blue Byte's only RPG.

         

A screen shot from Albion (1995) shows advancements in the interface but a similar art style.

       

Karsten Köper, the creator of the series, did not follow his colleagues to Blue Byte. Interviews with Thalion's former employees suggest that he was on the way out the door even before Ambermoon was finished, suggesting that there may not have been a third game even if Thalion had remained intact. (I listened to a podcast interview with Erik Simon and Jurie Horneman in which they indicate they were sick of high fantasy tropes and wouldn't have pursued a fantasy game on their own.) I'm not sure exactly what happened to Köper after that. He appears in the quality assurance credits of a few German games in the late 1990s and early 2000s (including one from Blue Byte), but it doesn't sound like full-time employment. As far as I can tell, he's never been interviewed in English. I'd love to fill that gap, but I'm afraid he might have been soured in the CRPG Addict during his one brief appearance.

   

In 2022, retro game designer Pyrdacor announced both Ambermoon Advanced and Ambermoon.net. My understanding is that the former is an ongoing expansion to the original game and the latter is a full rewrite, but I'm confused as to whether .net includes the Advanced material or whether they're separate projects. Both releases seem to offer interface improvements, including keyboard shortcuts and the ability to increase combat speed, but I'm curious to hear what else they offer--particularly in terms of new content--from anyone who has tried them. A trailer for Advanced promises new areas to explore, new monsters, new items, and new quests.

    

My rating of 50 puts Ambermoon at about the 93% mark on the ratings sheet. It is a rare game to achieve that position almost entirely on the strength of individual ratings of 6 or below. But as I'm often reminded with my students, co-workers, and employees, simple competence in everything almost always outranks genius in just one thing.

Phantasy Star: Banallure

  

Me when I'm awakened at 03:00 by a crash in the dining room.

     

When I wrapped up last time, Alis had assembled her team and was trying to act on Noah's recommendation to find Dr. Luveno in the Gothic Forest. He had directed us to a manhole in the Palma spaceport, which took us to a dungeon, which took us to another continent. We found our way to a partly-ruined city which was called, groan, "Gothic"; hence, the Gothic Forest. All right, people, in the comments we have to come up with a term for when an RPG name originally sounds intriguing but turns out to be boringly literal. Examples: The Lords of Midnight takes place in a land called "Midnight." Perihelion takes place on a planet called "Perihelion." The Gothic Forest is a forest around the city of Gothic. I propose banallure or banalluring, but I'm open to other suggestions.

    

I started to explore a dungeon that an NPC later told me was called the Tower of Medusa. It's a bit too hard, and since I don't have any reason to be here in the first place (Luveno is supposedly in a prison called Triada), I give it up after a while.

    

Triada is south of Gothic, so I poke around the mountains until I find another facility. A robotcop takes my Roadpass shortly after I enter. The dungeon has no enemies, just NPCs in individual cells, some of which I have to open with my dungeon key. Some of them want cola to talk to me, just like the citizens of Gothic. What is with the cola shortage around here?

    

• "The tower deep in the Gothic Mountains is known as Medusa's Tower." I guess that's why she disappeared from the cave where I found Odin.

• "Spider monsters are actually very intelligent." I guess maybe I should try chatting with them in combat. More importantly, this clue sets up:

• "Polymeteral will dissolve all materials except for Laconia." This is spoken by a giant spider, no special spell needed or anything.

     

Why do your brethren just attack me?

     

• "I've got a friend in Bortevo. He's probably having a hard time because of the lava. Why not visit him?" Because of the lava, maybe?

• "On the far side of the mountain lies a pool of molten lava created by a volcanic eruption."

• "Do you know the robot Hapsby?" NO. "It's a robot made of Laconia, but it has been abandoned somewhere as being useless."

    

We find Luveno in one of the cells. "If you've come for help, you had best forget it. Leave!" he shouts. I leave, but I accidentally re-enter his chamber immediately because I'm always forgetting that the game doesn't spin the party around to face the other direction when it exits an encounter. In this case, it's fortunate, because he has something else to say on my second visit: "You want me to build a spaceship for you? Not a chance! I can't accept such responsibility." I actually did not know that I wanted him to build a spaceship. I guess it would help.

      

But for a subsequent mistake, my journey may have ended here.

    

On a third visit, he agrees to help: "I will go to Gothic Village nearby to make preparations. Come then. Do not waste worry on me." Isn't he in prison because he blew up Gothic Village? How can he just leave? Is imprisonment voluntary in this universe?

     

Back in the village, Dr. Luveno wants us to fetch his assistant, "likely hiding in the underground passage." We found him last time; he just told us to go away. We visit him and he agrees to help Dr. Luveno without any problems.

   

Now Dr. Luveno wants 1,200 mesetas to build the spaceship that we didn't explicitly ask him for in the first place. Still, it's less money than my last sword cost, so I guess it's worth it. He tells us it's going to "take time" to build, but we're wise to that trick by now. We just return to his house multiple times until he tells us The Luveno (I would think that I get to name it) is ready.

    

Joke's on you. We would have paid triple that figure.

     

"But you cannot fly a spaceship!" he drops on us. "You must find a robot named Hapsby. He can fly a spaceship." In the prison, we learned that Hapsby had been junked. I have no idea where to find him. I check around Gothic again, but there's no sign of him.

    

I start exploring the surrounding area. There's no way to go north. A southern route, ignoring the mountains, leads to the coast, which bends west and then north. We come to a large field of red, which is the pool of lava we heard about in Triada. I wonder how I'm supposed to get through it, and it turns out (unless I missed something) that the answer is: just walk through it. We take some damage, but not as much as we ought to take from lava. I don't even have to heal.

    

Let's just wade right into it.

       

The lava field spits us out near a dilapidated town and a cave. An NPC tells us that we're in Bortevo. The volcanic eruption has clearly had an influence on the place, as the buildings all look burned and crumbling, and the NPCs are all wrapped in shrouds. Many of the buildings have piles of metal in them, and one of the NPCs tells me: "In this pile of junk, somewhere, there is s'pposed to be a usable robot, but you know how rumors be." 

      

You should have built little round metal domes, like we do on Palma.

       

I find nothing else, so I try the cave. It turns out to be a passage to the northern continent. An NPC in the middle of it tells us: "Polymeteral is for sale in Abion." (Are they going for "metal" or "material"?) An NPC in Triada told us that polymeteral dissolves everything except Laconia, and someone else told us that the robot is made of Laconia, so I assume I'm supposed to find polymeteral and use it on one of those piles of junk to reveal the robot. It feels like a good prybar should have gotten us there, too.

    

I should perhaps note that all of these wanderings have been accompanied by copious battles, many of them with nicely-drawn and animated monsters like skeletons, ghouls, sphinxes, vampires, shellfish, octopuses, and giants. I've stopped really even noticing them, partly because none of them have any special attacks. I just pound the primary attack button, which by default selects "attack," and watch episodes of Bosch in another window while the combat executes. (Occasionally, I have to heal a character, more often because a chest is trapped than because the enemies hit very hard.) It's just so repetitive and boring and frequent that I can't imagine any player really takes the time to invest in "tactics." 

   

One of the tougher monsters in this area.

    

I hit a few dead ends trying to find a way out of here. Eventually, I notice a break in a rock wall and sidle through it. The coastline eventually leads us to another city, but it's not Albion; it's some place called Loar. Here:

   

• An armory sells heat guns, an upgrade from Odin's needlegun, and silver fangs, an upgrade from Myau's iron fang.

• "Do you know about Laerma trees?" NO. "They grow on the altiplano plateau on the planet Dezoris." Noted.

    

Let me guess. It's named after a guy named Bob Altiplano.

    

• "There is a village called Abion on the western edge on this island." Yes, that's what I'm looking for.

• "Have you heard of a gem called 'The Amber Eye'? Some say the Casba Dragon has one." Again, noted. I can't wait to find out what the Casba Dragon is. 

• "You are going to try to kill Lassic, I hear. That's great!" Does everyone know about our secret mission?

• "I have heard that a certain crystal will block evil magic." The Amber Eye, maybe? 

      

We're pretty low on health, so we welcome the presence of a hospital, even though we don't usually pay for healing.

   

Northwest of Loar is Abion. There:

   

• The second-hand store sells magic lamps (which I already have) and magic hats, which supposedly let us understand the language of monsters. That's the third thing the game offers to talk to monsters, yet it hasn't worked for me once so far.

• The food store, of all places, sells polymeteral for 1,600 mesetas.

    

We probably don't want to mix it up with cola.

    

• The armory sells laser shields. Alis, Odin, and Noah can equip them. I don't have enough money for all three.

• "Some cats, if they eat a certain type of nut, they become huge and can fly. It's really very weird." I agree.

    

Some people, when they eat a certain type of nut, think they see giant flying cats.

    

• "A strange man came to this town. He seems to be performing animal experiments. He brought a large pot or something."

• "I'd like to travel in outer space."

   

The town has a cave in it, so we check it out. It takes us to an island in the center of the town. The island has a building. We enter, and a guy in a weird suit immediately says, "Hey, bring that cat over here!" For some reason, I say, "Yes." The game immediately reports the result: "Myau died." The man, apparently not realizing that he's already killed Myau, gloats, "Oohh, ha, ha! The cat will die!"

      

At least it spared us a graphic depiction.

   

We then launch into combat with "Dr. Mad," who kills the rest of us.

    

I probably do not need to do what I do next, which is spend about an hour grinding for both money and experience. I think that with the right combination of spells, I could have defeated him the first time. Plus, I had no particular reason to kill any "Dr. Mad." But this place is so out of the way that I didn't want to have to go through the trouble of returning, either to kill this guy or to buy laser shields. So I fight enemies until I can do the latter.

    

I actually saved up enough for three laser shields and diamond armor.

    

I take this time to experiment with the new spells I've been earning along the way. Each character has a different selection of spells that they learn in a different order (Odin doesn't learn any). Here's my report:

     

• HEAL (A/2): Heals for 20 hit points, both in and out of combat. All healing spells are useful.

• BYE (A/2): Ends combat. Would be useful for no-win situations, but it's too easy to save and reload to worry about escaping individual battles.

• CHAT (A/2): Supposedly talks to monsters. I said above that I had never gotten it to work, but late in this session, I did get it to work on a tarantula. He gave me this hint:

   

Well, we're a spacefaring race.

      

• TRAP (M/3): Disarms traps? You don't really have a chance to cast it after battle, so I'm not sure how it works.

• FIRE (AN/4): Shoots two fireballs; each does about 8 damage. They sometimes hit one enemy, sometimes two different ones. A physical attack usually does more.

    

Alis's FIRE spell nails a tree that is apparently already dead.

    

• EXIT (MN/4): Exits the dungeon. I should have been using this more often instead of finding my way out.

• OPEN (N/4): Unlocks magically-locked doors. I haven't found any yet.  

• ROPE (A/4): Ties an enemy up for at least a round. Enemy has a chance of escaping it each round. I've found it very useful when I'm only facing one enemy. 

• TELE (N/4): Also supposedly lets you talk to monsters. I'm not sure what the difference is between it and CHAT.

• TERR (M/4): Terrifies an enemy and makes it ineffective. Useful, I think it fails a lot.

• CURE (MN/6): Heals for 80 points, both in and out of combat. Invaluable.

• FLY (A/8):  Takes you back to the last church you visited. I wish it always just took you back to Camineet instead. Not useful if you don't remember where you last visited a church.

• HELP (M/10): The only buffing spell, it raises an ally's combat effectiveness.

• PROT (N/10): Protection. I'm not sure how it differs from WALL.

• WALL (M/10): Creates a magic wall.  See above.

• RISE (N/12): Resurrects an ally. I didn't realize I even had this until recently.  

• WIND (N/12): An offensive spell that strikes three times.

• THUN (N/16). Shoots a lightning bolt that does around 30 points of damage to all enemies.

      

I still have some experimenting to do, but when I returned to Dr. Mad with my new shields and a better understanding of spells, I was able to defeat him without much trouble. (I said no to his demand for Myau, but he attacked anyway.) I had Alis freeze him each round with a ROPE, enhanced Odin with a HELP, and deflected his attacks with either PROT or WALL.

      

Wasn't this an Inspector Gadget villain?

   

From him, we looted a Laconian pot. I don't know whether that's the same one I sold earlier in the game. It sure gets around. 

    

We made the long walk back to Bortevo. I started searching buildings and using the polymeteral on each pile of junk. The fourth attempt produced a result: Hapsby emerged from the pile and offered to fly The Luveno. 

     

How do you know the name of the ship?

   

All I had to do now was find it. It turns out there's a western exit from Gothic that leads to a field where the ship is parked, but I go all the way back to the spaceport first before I search the city again and find the exit. They aren't happy with me at the spaceport. They confiscate my passport. I guess I won't be flying commercial anymore.

   

All right, everyone. Who has ideas for a new name?

     

The ship will go from Gothic to either Uzo or Skure. I've experienced neither of these places, so I try Uzo first. Uzo turns out to be on Motavia, the same planet as Paseo, where I still have to buy some diamond armor. An animation shows The Luveno take off, fly through space, and land just to the east of the city, which judging from the manual map is south of Paseo and on the other side of the impassable wall of ant lions. For fun, I take a quick trip to the northeast, to see if there really is one enormous ant lion in the middle of the pack, as the map depicts, but I don't find it.

      

"Gothic Uzo Skure" would make a good band name.

       

All there is, then, is to explore Uzo. Keep in mind that at this point, I have no specific goal except to find Lassic and kill him. There's been no intelligence about where he is or where the capital of the empire is.

    

• "There is a town called Casba to the south of here." And dragons from there must be Casba Dragons. Goddamn it, they got me again.

• "There are dragons living in the Casba Cave. These dragons have gems in their heads!" I was about to say it would have been cooler if they were zombies, but I guess the song wasn't out yet.

• "Have you heard about mantles made of frad fibers? They are light, but provide great protection." I'm beginning to think that the game is just making up words. 

• "Have you heard about the soothing flute?" I have! From a sphinx! "It's a secret, but I buried one on the outskirts of the town of Gothic on Palma. Don't tell anyone." No, I'll just go take it.

• "If you use a vehicle called the land rover, the ant lion will not be able to harm you." Just the price of gas.

The armory sells a light saber! I suppose if you're going to blend science fiction and fantasy, that's the first thing you'd want to include. Only Alis and Odin can use it. I'm not sure if I should buy one for Odin, since he's the only character who can use guns (which hit all enemies). The manual indicates that the best weapon for Odin is an axe, so I guess I can't keep him with guns forever. I buy two light sabers.

      

We head outside and go south, looking for Casba and this cave. We fight scores of crawlers, tarantulas, and other creatures on the way. We're in pretty bad shape when we find the city to the southwest of Uzo, then groan to see it ringed by mountains. Apparently, we'll have to go through the cave to get there.

      

Some kind of hovercraft would sure come in handy.

    

The caves are quite long, with multiple sections of multiple levels, but they're also quite linear, so I don't have to map it. Enemies are quite easy, about the same difficulty as the forest back on Palma—until I run into a blue dragon. I have to defeat him mostly without spells, as I need to save the few spell points I have left for CURE. Even then, he's not that hard. In his treasure chest, we find an Amber Eye.

       

When do consoles become capable of using more than eight characters?

      

The cave emerges in Casba, which thankfully has a hospital, which heals health as well as magic. Elsewhere:

    

• "Have you heard of the vehicle called the hovercraft?" NO. "It's a good thing to have. It moves across water." That would be a good thing to have, but we have to find a land rover first. Later, while checking the same building, I meet the same NPC and say YES. "I bought it in Scion on Palma but it seemed broken so I abandoned it in Bortevo. It probably can still be used, though."

• "There are legends of a mystic shield in a village surrounded by mist. It is the shield Perseus used in days to conquer magic beasts." I don't know if the game is talking about the Greek hero Perseus or a different character in its universe.

      

Yes, but why?

     

• "There is poison gas above the sea to the west. No one can go near there without some protection." I keep thinking maybe the game is coming towards an end, but every NPC I talk to increases its size by another 10%.  

• "Fierce dragons live in the cave near here, and I'm scared of them." I think I explored exhaustively, and I only encountered one dragon. You don't need to be scared of it anymore.

• "Don't believe your own eyes in the depth of the dungeons." I have no idea how to operationalize that.

          

Both churches and healers use crosses. I don't think that would be allowed in an NES game.

     

The land rover is for sale in the second-hand shop! I figured there was going to be some big puzzle associated with it. Somehow it sits in our inventory, but when we use it, the party icon changes to a vehicle. It doesn't stop us from meeting random encounters.

    

We take the land rover across the ant lion mounds to Paseo, where I buy the diamond armor I've been saving for. I discover that Alis and Odin can both equip it, but I only have enough money for one. I'll have to come back. 

   

Eat my treads, ant lions.

      

I also confirm with the land rover that the world wraps, which is ridiculous—it's far too small to represent an entire planet.

    

We take the ship back to Gothic, where I try the "Search" command at an obvious place at the end of a road and find the flute. I guess I'll go on to the third planet next. It would be nice to think the game is coming to an end. I feel like I've basically experienced it at this point. I have all the spells listed in the manual. Many more hours would feel superfluous.

   

Time so far: 13 hours

Amberstar: Summary and Rating

A well-designed cover that actually makes sense in context (a varied party, a giant eagle, the Amberstar itself) decorates a game with the same type of attention to detail.

      

Amberstar

Germany

Thalion Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1992 for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS

Date Started: 20 June 2020

Date Ended: 29 July 2020

Total Hours: 50

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: 50

Ranking at Time of Posting: 348/379 (92%)
   
Summary:
Amberstar is an engaging German game with roots in Ultima and other U.S. titles. The plot, about an evil demon-wizard threatening to return to the world of Lyramion, is less interesting than the individual quests necessary to reassemble the ancient artifact (the titular Amberstar) that will stop him. The game features interesting towns, dungeons, and other areas with a variety of lengths and difficulties. The player starts with a player-created character and from there slowly assembles a party of six from about ten potential companions. First-person and top-down sections alternate effectively, and the game has relatively strong (if not superlative) mechanics for inventory, commerce, NPC dialogue, and combat. A lack of sound, a sometimes-difficult interface, and an excess of long combats at times threatens the player's experience, but ultimately a strong base and an attention to small details and innovations makes this one a winner.

*****
      
Amberstar is a better game than the summary above suggests (minus the final line) because of small things. It doesn't announce itself as an evolutionary step forward with SVGA graphics, masterful use of sound, or innovations in combat AI. It is not "next generation" anything. If you only read the manual or watched a few minutes of video, you would see little to distinguish it from other, largely-derivative European titles of the period--or indeed from its own antecedents.
          

This is just a random shot of the party flying over various landscape features on an eagle.

         
Instead, it improves upon its predecessors with slight tweaks and adjustments, ultimately making for a more interesting, more satisfying game. Its innovations are less fully-formed than nudges towards what CRPGs would ultimately become, while still largely using the mechanics of what went before. Some examples of what I mean:
   

• It improves NPC interactivity and the depth of lore conveyed by NPCs. Mechanically, it has barely improved upon the keyword system used by Ultimas IV-VI, but it gives its NPCs more text and more character than the usual RPG, and it keeps things interesting by giving the player some keywords but forcing the player to seek out (and figure out) others.

• It's a rare game to offer a truly open world. And just like good modern games with open worlds, it lets the player figure things out for himself. If a dungeon is too hard, he can turn around and try again, or keep throwing himself against it until he overcomes it through sheer force of will. There are gates to some areas, of course, but they feel natural rather than artificial. 

• It has a lot of lore, but it doesn't require that the player find and absorb all of it to succeed in the game. It is possible to figure out most of the puzzles without the associated hints from NPCs, and the player can literally stumble upon some of the Amberstar pieces. I never found anyone on the surface world who had anything to say about the Realm of Manyeye, for instance; I just found it by seeing what happened when I sailed into a whirlpool.

• It anticipates later games in which the player creates one character (with a backstory and personal connection to the quest) and then recruits his party from a variety of NPCs. Those NPCs have no dialogue once they join the party, and a couple are unforgivably hard to find, but it's still an interesting divergence from the player creating his entire party.

• To make up for limited graphics, the game does a particularly good job with textual descriptions as you wander the dungeons.

          

This not only adds some flavor to what would otherwise be a pile of bones, it makes sense in context of the dungeon.

           

• I loved the mix between hand-crafted top-down areas and first-person textured areas. It was a good way to vary the nature of exploration, encounters, and puzzles, using the relative strengths of the two interfaces.

• This is far from the first game to offer an automap, but it is one of the few games up to its time to offer a truly useful automap, including annotating doors, chests, teleporters, and other navigational elements. 

• The translators did a good job. There are some weird spellings, but overall I see less of the awkwardness of phrasing that I see in many translated games.

        
What I admire most, however, is the wonderful sense of variety that goes into finding the Amberstar pieces. I know I've said this before, but when the game started, I was absolutely sure that finding each piece would involve 13 quests of similar length and difficulty, making the game extraordinarily monotonous. Instead, a few of the pieces are obtained with just a few minutes of questing, a few are at the ends of long and difficult dungeons, and a few are in between. And the dungeons themselves all have their own themes and character; they're not just featureless corridors.
 
Few of these features are wholly original to Amberstar, but it's still rare to find so many positive elements assembled in a single game. The result is a title that doesn't look much like Ultima VI, or Wizardry, or Pool of Radiance, but which nonetheless managed to bring together the things that worked best in those previous titles, as if it had cloned their souls rather than just their faces.
          

The developers perhaps could have spent some time varying the graphics for statues.

       
Not everything worked. I struggled with the interface all the way to the game's final hours. Too many of the skills were never called into play. You have to carefully step over a few walking dead scenarios, and only having one save slot doesn't help with that. The inability to speed up the combat animations was a near-fatal flaw, and overall the game lasted just a smidge too long; I don't care how interesting and varied the quests are, 13 pieces is just too many.
 
If my GIMLET does things right, it should put Amberstar right around 50--higher than other German contenders, not quite as high as the most innovative games from North America. Tweaks and nudges get you into the top fifth, sure, but not the top. Let's see.
  
1. Game World. The backstory is a relatively banal account of an evil wizard trying to return from exile and take over the world. (Just once, I want to read a story in which the evil wizard or demon, having been freed from a thousand years in prison, has no interest in re-embarking on the same path that got him imprisoned in the first place, and now wants nothing more than a good meal and a stiff drink.) I groaned at the "Disassembulet of Yendor" main quest. But the game world is otherwise well-realized, with different geographic areas under the control of different factions, and an interesting pantheon of gods. The game also enjoys an Ultima-like relationship between the game and the game manual, avoiding the problem inherent in so many other titles in which the manual just tells a framing story and seems to have been written by a different person. Score: 5.

2. Character Creation and Development. The big problem here is that the player doesn't have immediate or even early access to many of the game's guilds. I got lucky in finding the paladine guild early, but otherwise a first-time player is forced to choose between becoming a thief or a warrior. Those aren't bad choices, I suppose, but it still bothers me that I didn't find some guilds until the last quarter of the game. You do have to give quite a bit of thought to party composition, which I liked. You make a real sacrifice in front-line power with any pure wizard class. Trying to mitigate this with the hybrid classes creates its own problems, and in some ways I like that paladines, rangers, and monks are balanced between warriors and spellcasters instead of having the full power of both.

Leveling was satisfying and rewarding, if a bit annoying to have to visit so many guilds. But the skills were a bit problematic. About half of them (Listen, Find Traps, Disarm Traps, Swimming) are called into play so rarely, and with so little consequence if you don't have the skill, that it doesn't make sense to invest points in them. I'm not even sure that "Search" really did much, although I suppose you wouldn't know if you didn't find things that would have otherwise been found with the skill. Different races, and their associated languages, were a minor part of gameplay that could have been better-developed. Score: 5.

3. NPC Interaction. I'm still waiting for the first game that offers true "dialogue options," but Amberstar otherwise takes keyword-based dialogue about as far as it can go. You have to pay attention to NPCs and seek keywords based on their statements, or type in your own. There are different types of NPCs found in both interfaces, and obviously a fair number of them can join the party. Score: 5.
           

NPCs may not be as memorable as in, say, Ultima VII, but they're close.

         
4. Encounters and Foes. The game's bestiary uses similar creatures as other fantasy RPGs, but they're not entirely the same. One thing I liked (although I can see how other players might dislike this) is that different areas heavily feature just one or two types of creature, usually starting with small numbers and slowly building as you explore. This gives you time to become an expert on the enemy's strengths, weaknesses, and special attacks. Blunt force rarely saves you even if it serves you at the beginning of an area.

Most of the encounters in the game are fixed; finding random encounters and thus grinding is possible but not easy. I thought this was fine. It keeps the system from being completely closed, but it also means you can generally walk between two cities without having to fight six combats. I also liked the variety of special encounters with boss-level enemies in many of the dungeons.
 
Aside from the magic mouths--most notably in the Tower of Riddles--there weren't a lot of non-combat encounters, though, nor any strong opportunities for role-playing. Score: 5. (By now, you're suspecting I'm engineering all the scores to be 5s. I promise I'm not.)
           

Even the finding of treasure is often presented as a contextual encounter, with a little narrative to accompany the loot.

         
5. Magic and Combat. The game does a decent job adapting the tactical combat process of games like Wizardry, where you assign individual actions for each character and then watch them execute all at once, threaded with NPC actions. There are associated considerations of character formation, whether to concentrate or spread out attacks, and of course when to use spells. It isn't as tactical as the Gold Box series, but it is more so than the Ultima and Interplay titles with which the developers must have been familiar.
      
I thought the magic system worked well, too. Even late in the game, you don't have so much spellpower that you can just cast your most devastating spells on every enemy party. Like most good RPGs, you have to balance success in a single combat with success over an accumulation of combats. There was also a manageable number of spells, and some nice variety among the classes. Not having a competent white wizard meant that I had to miss out on a large variety of enemy-effect spells, for instance.

But the number and length of combats is a problem that goes beyond the couple of points in the "gameplay" category where I would normally rate it. The game really needed a "quick combat" option or at least some option to auto-assign every character's attack to the closest enemy. And it needed to get rid of enemy combat animations, which kept the built-in "fast forward" button from doing what it was meant to do. Score: 5.
          

Combat is never bad, exactly--just a little too slow sometimes.

        
6. Equipment. The six characters have slots for weapons, armor, shields, necklaces, helms, rings, and boots, and there is a nice variety of items to buy and find, many restricted to particular classes, races, or genders. I also liked the large variety of usable items--wands, potions, herbs, scrolls, and weapons with special attacks, all of which could provide an edge in combat. I liked that most statistics for the items are clear by looking at them, and that the "Identification" spell (or sage) reveals the rest. I particularly liked the selection of items that slowly improve the interface (e.g., watch, compass, location finder, etc.) Score: 6.
          

Statistics show me exactly what the amulet does, and who can wear it.

         
7. Economy. The economy is relevant throughout the game, but you have an overabundance of wealth in the latter half, and the associated effects on encumbrance means that you end up dropping most of it. I ended the game with thousands of gold pieces and dozens of uncashed gems. If the guilds had replenished their stocks of scrolls, that would have provided a good "money sink" for the game's final hours. But the game deserves some credit for its first half, when money is scarce and the party has to make some tough decisions. Score: 5.

8. Quests. The main quest is fine, and as I've said, I like the variety in its stages and the way that the player can assemble the 13 Amberstar pieces in almost any order. Unfortunately, there are no choices or alternate routes in the main quest. As for side quests, there are fewer than it first appears. Most of them end up being steps towards one of the Amberstar pieces. But there are some, and their presence enhances the game even if they don't allow a lot of role-playing options. Score: 4.
            

One of the game's few side-quests.

        
9. Graphics, Sound, and Input. Alas, a less rosy category. The graphics aren't bad, but to me they were generally too small. (My colorblindness is often an issue with small graphics, which may have made them look worse to me.) The developers put a lot of detail in the top-down areas, which was often then ruined by the inability to tell one object from another. I often couldn't even distinguish humanoids from animals. The textures in the first-person interface were fine, and there were some decent cut-scene graphics.

As for sound, there isn't any except for the music, which I consider a crazy oversight. I know a lot of people like game music, but to focus on it exclusively and offer no sound effects is not a choice most developers would make. Music fans will bump up this category a couple of points for the sheer variety of quality compositions (although a fair number appear to have been at least partly plagiarized) that play in different situations.

Finally, while the use of screen real estate was fine, the controls never worked well for me. It remained awkward throughout the game to explore the iconographic areas, and I was always trying to move when the control panel was locked on the "action" side. Beyond that, I liked that you had to earn some elements of the interface, and as I said earlier, the automap works very well. Score: 3. 
    
10. Gameplay. We end on a high note. Amberstar is impressively non-linear and modestly replayable when you consider different party compositions, a different class for the main character, and a different order to the quests. I found its difficulty just right, and while I thought it lasted a little too long, it was just a little. Score: 7.

All the 5s make this one easy to sum up, and the final score is exactly 50. I promise I didn't engineer that outcome, but I agree with the result. It gets it just into the top 10% of titles I've played, and it beats the next-highest German offerings, Spirit of Adventure and Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny by 6 points. (I would stress, though, that Arkania had some individual categories that out-performed Amberstar.) Perhaps more notably, it beat Thalion's previous Dragonflight by a full 16 points. Although some influence of Dragonflight can be seen in Amberstar, clearly some of the new additions to the team (including designer Karsten Köper and programmer Jurie Horneman) made a crucial difference.

I was hoping that designer Karsten Köper would appear during this series of entries. He showed up briefly to comment on his one known previous game, Mythos, but only to address the Axis/eagle thing. This is what I always fear: that a developer will visit and get turned away by one of the more stupid or offensive parts of our discussion (and I freely admit I started that one by making fun of the publisher's name). Anyway, he's given most of the credit for the Amber series, having apparently brought a strong experience with both computer and tabletop RPGs to Thalion. But he disappears almost as fast as he arrives, with design credits on Amberstar and Ambermoon and quality assurance on Trex Warrior: 22nd Century Gladiator (1991). Much later, he has testing credits on two other German games: Stephen King's F13: Ctrl, Alt, . . . Shiver (1999), which has to be the most awkward game title of all time, and K. Hawk: Survival Instinct (2002).   

          
Despite the game's North American release, most American computer magazines seem to have missed it, including Computer Gaming World. Thus, most reviews are found in German and British magazines, where the result was extremely varied. The best score (92/100) comes from the British ST Action in March 1993, but the magazine just offers a quick blurb: "Tasty German RPG with a huge play area, several varying quests and exceedingly smooth scrolling. An immediate purchase!" The worst was from the German PC Player in January 1993, which found it "a rather frustrating program only for freaks who [like to] struggle with every [role-playing game] regardless of controls, graphics, and sound." To be fair, "controls, graphics, and sound" are exactly where this game falls apart, and thus you're likely to rate it low if that's your primary orientation. This explains a large number of ratings in the 60s and 70s, particularly from Amiga magazines, although a few saw through these flaws. The October 1992 Amiga Action faulted those features but otherwise recommended that you dump your girlfriend so you'll have more time to finish it; they gave a 91/100. The German Power Play wasn't far behind, with ratings of 85 for the Amiga and Atari ST versions and 83 for DOS.
   
The sequel, Ambermoon (1993) looks to have addressed many of these concerns. The third-person sections are zoomed in more, to better distinguish features and creatures, and also angled to be more axonometric. The first-person sections show even more color and detail, as do the NPC and monster graphics. More important, the first person sections seem to offer continuously-scrolling movement, along the lines of Ultima Underworld, which was a major change to have implemented in only a year. Unfortunately, the videos I watched suggest that the game still didn't offer any sound effects, and the toggled control pad is still there.
          

 A shot from Ambermoon, courtesy of MobyGames.

         
The series was reportedly intended as a trilogy, but poor sales forced Thalion to close in 1994 before the third game was produced. I can't speak about Ambermoon, but I can say that Amberstar doesn't really require a sequel, so unless Ambermoon ends on a cliffhanger, a couplet rather than a trilogy will probably be just fine. Many former Thalion personnel ended up at Blue Byte Software, and I've heard that Blue Byte's Albion (1995) is seen by some as a "spiritual sequel" to Amberstar.

It won't be long before we check out Ambermoon, but for now it's time to roll the dice on a new title, for the first time in a long time. The result is Quest for Kings (1990). I tried to play it over a year ago, got stuck with some error messages, and put it back into the rotation for later. In the meantime, I got some assistance from the author, Howard Feldman, who also happens to be the owner of the Museum of Computer Adventure Gaming History. It's long past time I gave it another try. In the short-term, however, we're going to look at an obscure Atari 800 title called Abraxas Adventure #1: Assault on the Astral Rift (1984).