Spirit of Excalibur: Final Rating

This picture is dramatic, but I don't really know what's supposed to be going on.

Spirit of Excalibur

United States

Synergistic Software (developer); Virgin Mastertronic (publisher)

Released 1990 for Amiga, Macintosh, Atari ST, and DOS; 1991 for Apple IIgs and Commodore CDTV

Date Started: 29 January 2014
Date Ended: 1 February 2014

Total Hours: 14
Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 33
Ranking at Time of Posting: 83/137 (61%)

Ranking at Game #456: 312/456 (68%)

Most games, even mediocre ones, have at least a few strong game mechanics--some element that keeps you playing and that may even prove legitimately addictive. I just finished Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, and while I felt the game was far too long and horribly-plotted, I couldn't get enough of the mechanics of climbing buildings, jumping across rooftops, and collecting flags. Knights of Legend was a mediocre game with an epic, tension-filled combat system. In Hillsfar, I disliked almost everything except picking locks. It was fun to mine in Starflight long after I lost the need for money.

Spirit of Excalibur, on the other hand, underwhelms me in just about all of its areas. It manages to combine three genres--adventure, RPG, and strategy--without being good at any of them. The battles are too scripted, with not enough tactics or logistics, to be a good strategy game; there aren't enough puzzles to be a good adventure game; and there isn't enough character development to be a good RPG. The game really has only one narrative line, and the player has to figure out how to best adhere to it, rather than make his own role-playing choices and crafting his own path to the end.

Let's see how it does on a GIMLET:

1. Game World. This is perhaps the game's best element. It's not only one of the few RPGs to draw its story from Arthurian literature, but it creatively uses traditional themes to craft an original game world. I admire that the developers didn't do the obvious thing and set the game during Arthur's time, with Arthur himself as an NPC.

I had some fun in the posts noting the game's deviations from Arthurian tradition, and I still can't reconcile myself to its treatment of the Grail, but for the most part the deviations were within the spirit of the Arthurian legends. Even though the world develops and changes on a railroad track, it's fun to watch the slow and steady reunification of Britain. Score: 6.

2. Character Creation and Development. In this vital category for a traditional RPG, this game mostly falls flat. You don't get to create or define any of the characters; the most you can do is choose which heroes you'll field from a list. The only "development" is through the slow accumulation of combat points, nobility points, and faith points, and I don't even think these things really matter much in the game; most of the really tough battles are fought with objects and spells, not raw combat prowess. Score: 2.

3. NPC Interaction. The various lords, villagers, hags, maidens, and other figures that you find in the towns and keeps provide both bits of lore and clues as to the various quests. There's not much depth to the interactions, no dialogue options except the choice to accept or deny some quests. There is some intrigue in how you charm or bribe them. The dialogue is well-written, and a few of the villains are well-characterized, making it satisfying to defeat them. Score: 5.

The party gets some intel about Merlin's location from a townsman.

4. Encounters and Foes. The enemies in this game are mostly other knights plus various demonic hellspawn. Too many of the latter are defeated only through specific magic items rather than prowess in combat. There are a few light role-playing choices centered around the decision whether to rescue a maiden or continue your primary quest, or whether to accept a knight's challenge or risk a loss of nobility. None of them amount to much (usually, the choice is quite obvious), but they do have some effect on whether you end the game in charge of all Britain or just a part of it. Almost all encounters are scripted, with the exception of the randomly-roaming bandits and demons in the third and fifth scenarios, and you can't really do much with them anyway. Despite an adventure game feel to many of the screens, there aren't really any "puzzles" in the game. Score: 4.

This isn't much of a role-playing choice unless your idea of "role-playing" is simply "not being a complete jerk."

5. Magic and Combat. There's a fair amount of both, but they all feel more like semi-scripted events in an adventure game rather than the tactical battles of an RPG. Most of the combats, whether involving individuals or armies, are won or lost before they begin. In the case of individual battles, this means choosing strong knights (almost always Lancelot) with magic equipment; in the case of army battles, this means having the right forces in place when the battle commences. In either case, there are almost no tactics that can help you once the battle has begun. Despite options available on both screens ("attack," "defend," "flank," "engage"), the outcomes of the battles rarely vary no matter what you choose.

Lancelot takes care of a beast with a quest item.

In the case of magic, it's even worse. There are almost no spells that you can cast at will to influence the tide of battle; all of them are instead used to overcome specific obstacles or to effect permanent boosts to one knight's statistics. The "healing spell" and the "charm spell" (which make it more likely that NPCs will impart valuable information or give you stuff) are two exceptions. This is the second game in recent memory--the other was Elvira--in which spells are limited by the availability of reagents, and you have to be very careful not to expend them in the wrong place. Score: 3.

6. Equipment. Very little in a traditional RPG sense. Scattered about the kingdom are a couple of special swords, a handful of pieces of magical armor, spell reagents, and a few potions. These generally feel like quest items rather than a flexible inventory used to improve the character. There are no shops or random loot available from combats. The game's mechanism by which once you equip an item, it permanently grafts to the character and can't be traded, is a little inexcusable. Score: 2.

Nineve's late-game inventory of spell items.

7. Economy. You mostly need money to bribe herbsellers for reagents and a few townsfolk for information. There's more than enough money for this at the outset of the game (carried on individual knights or kept in the treasury at Camelot), so it becomes a simple matter of making sure that the right character has enough money at the right time. You can loot a few gold pieces from a small number of slain enemies, but for the most part, the economy is a minor part of the game. Score: 1.

8. Quests. The game has a main quest line, divided into five scenarios, and its full nature only becomes clear after you've played a few times. Like the back story and game world, the quests are reasonably interesting, though I found Morgan le Fay a little cartoonish as the villain. There are some limited side-quests having to do with whether you've rescued all the kidnapped maidens and princes and such, and disenchanted all the stoned rulers, with the results affecting how much territory you control at the end of each scenario and at the end of the game overall. Score: 5.

I did well. The walkthrough helped.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. I thought the graphics for both scenes and monsters were relatively well-composed. The DOS version had no sound except annoyingly repetitive music. I felt the interface was rather poor. Although it offers the option for a mouse/keyboard hybrid, I found it too easy to hit the wrong option or click on the wrong thing. The process of transferring items from one character to another was needlessly cumbersome, as was the process of combining and splitting parties. In the end, it gets points only for the graphics. Score: 2.

A pretty shot of Lancelot and Nineve coming upon Merlin's cave.

  
10. Gameplay. I hold a special contempt for games that seem nonlinear but actually expect you to follow a precise path. What starts as "Wow! I can go anywhere in Britain!" Soon becomes "Wow! If I don't hit these towns in this precise order, there's no way to defeat the Saxon armies!" For this reason, although I acknowledge that I might be missing some potential avenues, I can't really see the game as "replayable," either. Its difficulty is pitched about right--a little easy, even--once you know the path, and I suppose its one virtue is that it doesn't take that long. If it had gone on for two or three more scenarios, I probably would have abandoned it. Score: 3.

With its highest scores in the "game world," "NPC interaction," and "quests" categories, we have a game that's relatively strong in narrative but weak in mechanics. The final score of 33 puts it slightly below my "recommended" threshold. Despite what sounds like a lot of pessimism, I'm glad I played it--but mostly for the plot alone. I enjoyed reviving my long-dormant interest in Arthuriana.

Computer Gaming World reviewed the game in the May 1991 issue. Todd Threadgill praised the graphics, which were state-of-the-art at the time, but this paragraph encapsulates a lot of my frustration with the game:

Unfortunately, the second observation that new players will make is that the documentation seems appropriate in terms of recreating an era when most of the population was illiterate . . . There is a thorough description of how to do things (via the game's icon-driven interface), as well as interesting historical background and account of the myths of King Arthur. Once one has mastered the simplest mechanics of the game, all this material proves of little use in enlightening the player as to what to do.

Threadgill also criticized aspects of the interface and the need to do so much wandering around to figure out the objectives of each scenario.

I'm glad I had a chance to play Robert Clardy's early games before arriving at Spirit of Excalibur. Although the game is far-removed graphically from Wilderness Campaign, Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure, and Apventure to Atlantis, it bears several elements of Clardy's modus operandi, including frequent shifts from the campaign level to the individual level, a variety of game mechanics, and a reluctance to adhere to the conventions of a single genre. While I admire this eclectic nature, you eventually have to incorporate the more sophisticated aspects of at least one genre to have a solid gaming experience. When I wrote my reviews of the Campaign series, I was forgiving--even admiring--of the limited combat mechanics, the extremely light puzzle solving, and the half-implemented RPG elements. It was early in the history of computer games, and there weren't many templates. But by 1990, there were plenty of examples of excellent role-playing, adventure, and strategy games, and Excalibur doesn't draw from any of them. If a game merged Sword of Aragon's gameplay mechanics with Spirit of Excalibur's graphics and story, it would be a fantastic game.

I'd like to see some evolution in this game's sequel, Vengeance of Excalibur (1991), but I've looked at the screenshots online, and it appears to use the exact same engine. It also appears to take place on the Iberian Peninsula, so at least I can look forward to seeing how the game manages to weave Spain and Portugal into the Arthurian legends.
 

It's worth noting, as a final nod to both legend and history, where the game leaves Britain in its happy ending. Constantine may have unified the island under the peace of the Round Table, but it won't last. It's maybe 550 at the game's end; by 600, the Saxons will have returned and effectively conquered and divided the island. One wonders, in the grand scheme of things, what Arthur, even in legend, managed to accomplish.

During my period of Arthurian studies, I read some histories that doubted Arthur ever existed at all, and others that were happy to completely invent the circumstances of his existence. The best that the latter sources were ever able to say was that he held off the Saxon advance for a time and preserved Roman traditions in Britain long enough that when the Saxons returned, they couldn't completely obliterate them. In the most optimistic sources, there's always some suggestion that the Saxons of Arthur's age were savages who would have ravaged the island had they won, but by the time they returned at the end of the Arthurian period, they were no longer the same barbarians, and the "conquest" was more gradual and peaceful. The same Saxons who are the villains of Geoffrey of Monmouth are, after all, the heroes of Ivanhoe.

The other popular thought is that even if Arthur's Britain didn't last, the example he set did, through story and song. As Arthur himself says in Tennyson's account:

I was the first of all the kings who drew
The knighthood-errant of this realm and all
The realms together under me, their head,
In that fair order of my Table Round
A glorious company, the flower of men,
To serve as a model for the mighty world

It is this impulse that informs so much modern Arthurian literature, including T. H. White's inclusion of an episode in which Arthur sends a young page named Thomas--anachronistically presented as Thomas Malory himself--away from the final battle to spread the tale of Camelot. This was adapted into the Broadway play as the final song:

Ask every person if he's heard the story
And tell it strong and clear if he has not
That once there was a fleeting wisp of glory
Called Camelot

But where the "saved us from the Saxons" story doesn't hold up to history, the "stuff of future memory" hypothesis doesn't hold up to the original legends. In the modern era, the "Knights of the Round Table" might be synonymous with slaying beasts, rescuing maidens, righting wrongs, and meting justice, but this is all a fanciful distillation of the Arthurian legends. In most of them, these noble deeds are the purview of the hero of the story--Lancelot, Erec, Perceval, Yder--and his actions are contrasted with the majority of the Round Table knights, who happily maraud, rape, murder, and engage in petty familial feuds. Arthur doesn't establish the Round Table as a place where "all men are equal, even the king" (as the dreadful First Knight has it); he inherits the thing from his father, or father-in-law, and membership is earned by winning tournaments, not being pure of heart. In more than one story, Arthur himself begets a son by raping a maiden, and when he hears about Mordred's birth, he tries to defeat prophecy by killing every baby of Mordred's age. The early legends simply do not emphasize the great mercy and justice of Arthur's Britain in the way that we think of it through modern lenses, nor do they always establish Arthur as a ruler to be emulated.

When you study the Arthurian legends, you eventually learn that the memory of Arthur persists not because of his historical significance or the nobility of his cause, but for one simple reason: the stories are fantastic. The Arthurian saga rose in an era in which the standard work of fiction had all the narrative sophistication of a kindergarten play. Then suddenly, within a century, we have a saga of epic struggles for kingdoms, love triangles, a sword in a stone, incest, filial betrayal, and a Holy Grail. The weight of the legend was such that nothing could resist its pull. Tristan and Isolde, originally a completely separate legend, got wrapped up in the intrigues of the Round Table. So did Geraint and Enid. Arthur's story grew to subsume the great Celtic heroes and gods--Culhwch, Peredur, Bran the Blessed, Gwynn, Llyr of the Sea--as well as true historical figures. Urien and his son Owain, kings of Rheged near the turn of the seventh century, got sucked back a century to appear as Arthur's knights. Ambrosius Aurelianus became Arthur's uncle, the Byzantine Emperor Leo I became his vassal, and of course a minor sixth-century king of Dumnonia, Constantine, became his successor.

To say that once unleashed, the story "spread like wildfire" is, if anything, understating the case. The Arthurian saga reached, and received contributions back, from every corner of Europe. Geoffrey of Monmouth's history from around 1138 (and it's near-immediate French translation in Wace's Roman de Brut) was clearly chief among the sparks that lit this fire, but it was not the only one. The Welsh already had their lives of saints, triads, and (probably) the Mabinogion; a non-fantastical chronicle of Arthur's deeds appears in Brittany in 1019; and 700 miles away, in the ancient Italian city of Modena, a relief on the Porta della Pescheria, probably pre-dating Geoffrey's text, depicts the rescue of Guinevere from Caradoc by Arthur, Yder, Gawain, and Kay--a story that Geoffrey doesn't even recount. By 1230, less than a century after Geoffrey's text first met a scribe, we have hundreds of poems and prose romances from France, Germany, Italy, Iceland, Norway, Holland, and other regions. The number of texts that we have from this era is rendered all the more startling when you consider how much literature must have been lost.

The legends bled into authentic history. King Richard the Lionheart claimed to have Excalibur, and he presented it to his ally, Tancred of Sicily, as a gift in 1191. The same year, the monks at Glastonbury Abbey claimed to find Arthur and Guinevere's graves. In 1486, with the first printing of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur creating another spike of interest in the legends, King Henry VII bestowed the name of Arthur on his first son. If the prince hadn't died of an unknown illness when he was only 15, he would have reigned as Arthur II, and the world would have been spared a horrible Herman's Hermits song.

There is, in short, no other story like it--at least not in the western world. Robin Hood and Amadis of Gaul have not half the age; the Greek and Roman gods not half the texts. In a thousand years, no generation has been without its own crop of Arthurian texts, with the headliners of each age making their own contributions--names like Chaucer, Heywood, Spenser, Fielding, Scott, Wordsworth, Wagner, Tennyson, Twain, Steinbeck, and yes, even Tolkien. Movies were only a few years old when they took on an Arthurian subject (1904's Parsifal), and since then, neither television nor film have been able to leave the legends alone for long. It's only fitting that video games should contribute to the legend as well. The final word that I'll say about Spirit of Excalibur is that during my Arthurian studies in college, a period in which I read hundreds of Arthurian texts--some dealing with heroes, lands, and themes with only the most obscure and tangential relationships to Arthur--I never encountered a single one that cared to explore in detail what happened in Britain after the fall of Arthur's court. In most sources, Constantine's reign, the wars against Mordred's sons, and Lancelot's death are handled in a cursory, "wrap-up" manner. To that end, whatever I think of its gameplay, Spirit of Excalibur becomes part of a long and noble history of giving every Arthurian character his own geste. I'm happy I was able to write about it.

****

Further Reading: Check out the other games made with Synergistic's "World Builder" engine: War in Middle Earth (1988),  Vengeance of Excalibur (1991), and Conan: The Cimmerian (1991).

Game 348: Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny (1992)

             

Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny

Germany

Released in Germany as Das Schwarze Auge: Die Schicksalsklinge

attic Entertainment Software (developer); Fantasy Productions (German publisher); Sir-Tech (U.S. Publisher)

Released 1992 for DOS, 1993 for Amiga

Date Started: 13 November 2019

              

Where Britain and France mostly created their own styles of RPGs, and largely failed at it, German developers found more success analyzing and modifying the mechanics of the most popular U.S. releases. In the few years after Germany's RPG industry really got started in 1988, we saw games inspired by Ultima (Nippon, Die Dunkle Dimension), The Bard's Tale (Legend of Faerghail, Antares, Spirit of Adventure), Alternate Reality (Fate: Gates of Dawn), Dungeon Master (Dungeons of Avalon), and Demon's Winter (Sandor). Each of these games introduced its own innovations, to be sure; there are plenty of times, as in Fate and any of the Bard's Tale-inspired games, when the German adaptation exceeded the original.
           

Starting out in Arkania. The screen is nearly identical to Might and Magic III, although none of the gameplay is.

           
Realms of Arkania strikes me as the apex of this process of adaptation, drawing not from just one source (like most of the German titles) or two sources (as Faerghail did with both The Bard's Tale and Phantasie) but rather at least four. Building on the engine previously used in Spirit of Adventure (1991), attic has combined the basic exploration of The Bard's Tale with the main screen arrangement of Might and Magic III, the inventory interface of Dungeon Master (or perhaps, more directly, Eye of the Beholder), and a combat system inspired by the Gold Box while looking more graphically advanced.
         

The inventory interface recalls SSI's Eye of the Beholder.

         

Arkania is a licensed adaptation of the best-selling German tabletop RPG Das Schwarze Auge ("The Dark Eye," although I always have to remind myself that it's not "The Dark Age"). It started as a relatively obvious adaptation of Dungeons and Dragons (the developer, Schmidt Spiel & Freizeit, had first tried to get a license to publish D&D in German), but it got more innovative as the editions moved forward. In particular, I find that the inclusion of "negative traits" (introduced in the third edition) creates more memorable characters.

Arkania followed the by-now common 1990s tradition of telling one backstory in the game manual and another one—complementary but usually not identical—in the animated opening scenes. The opening is set in Thorwal, an ancient free settlement "populated with indomitable warriors and seafarers, rich in treasures from innumerable forays." Thorwal is surrounded by plains in which orc tribes roam freely and occasionally semi-organize into a threatening confederacy. This is currently the case, with a "great chief" gathering orcs on the steppes, planning "the utter conquest of Thorwal."
          

Evocative graphics introduce the setting.

        
Somehow this threat is going to involve a certain captain named Hetman Hyggelik who lived a couple centuries ago. He made a fortune pillaging the "hated slave trader towns of the south." After a particularly successful expedition, he had a magic sword forged in the Cyclops Islands, then took it with him into the orcish lands, where he and his band were slaughtered. I suspect that his sword is the titular Blade of Destiny, and that it will be needed to fend off the invasion.
           

If it was just left sticking out of a dirt mound, someone's probably taken it by now.

         

Either way, very little background is given regarding the party. Your group of six simply arrives in Thorwal seeking fortune and glory.
             

Character creation offers some good graphics for each of the classes.

         

Character creation is complex enough to tie in knots even an experienced CRPG player. There are 12 classes, which the system calls "archetypes": jester, hunter, warrior, rogue, Thorwalian, dwarf, warlock, druid, magician, green elf, ice elf, and sylvan elf. (Female versions have slightly different names in the manual, even when spectacularly unnecessary, as in "she-jester," "she-rogue," "dwarvess," and "magicienne.") Among them are five different magic systems. There are seven positive attributes (courage, wisdom, charisma, dexterity, agility, intuition) rolled on a scale of 8 to 13, seven negative attributes (superstition, acrophobia, claustrophobia, avarice, necrophobia, curiosity, and violent temper) rolled on a scale of 2 to 7.
           

Allocating numbers to attributes as they're rolled.

          
There are 52 skills, arranged into seven categories: combat, body, social, lore, craftsmanship, nature, and intuition. I have been jaded by a long string of Paragon games into suspecting that a lot of them will turn out to be useless. My money is on "Dance" and "Carouse," but I'm also suspicious of "Self Control," "Streetwise," "Human Nature," and "Tactics." "Ancient Tongues" sounds like a skill that will come in handy exactly once, but on that one occasion it will be pivotal.
            

Selecting skills to increase during character creation.

            
When creating a character, you can choose the class you want, but if you do, you only get the minimum attributes necessary for that class. The other method, which generally results in higher attributes, is to let the game roll the numbers and you allocate them to the attributes as they arrive. You could get unlucky and end up with worse than minimum statistics, but you can always start over. One positive of the character creation process is that you can take its steps in any order. You can wait until you see what kind of character you have before assigning name and sex, or you can start with those answers and then take whatever you roll.
      
After spending far too long studying the materials, I went with:
             

• Female Thorwalian
• Male dwarf
• Male druid
• Female green elf
• Female magicienne
• Male ice elf

             
My analysis was that if Realms is like similar fantasy games, spells will be more important than physical skills, and this configuration gives me the most spell options. I lack only the warlock/witch. I thought they had the smallest selection of spells, many of them sounding more like solutions to puzzles than typical RPG magic ("Witch's Eye," "Heal Animal," "Camouflage," "Fire's Bane"). It may turn out that I'll miss the position for just this reason.
              

Choosing my green elf's starting spell skills.

           
My primary angst is over the first two characters. I felt that for role-playing reasons, I ought to have a Thorwalian given the setting. I felt that the second character would need to be more of a rogue, but I didn't want to leave the party too weak in physical combat, as a rogue would be, and dwarves seem a bit like warrior/rogues. I'm happy to take recommendations, though, since I haven't gone very far into the game.
          

The city of Thorwal.

        
Gameplay begins at the Temple of Travia in Thorwal. In Arkania, it is at temples rather than inns where you can manage your party members. Thorwal is a 16 x 32 map with ocean to the south and west and rivers and ponds taking up some of the inner space. The buildings create irregular patterns in a way that goes back to the original Bard's Tale. Also adapted from that game is a tradition by which nearly every square of building can be entered, although many are houses occupied by offended Thorwalians who immediately tell you to leave. Sometimes, the residents give you a hint. Sometimes, the houses are locked and you have the option to break in.
           

This manual conditioned me to expect something else when I encountered a "Thorwalian."

         
There are numerous taverns, inns, inn/tavern combinations, armories, banks, supply shops, temples, and healers. (I bought some standard items like torches and rope at the supply shop.) These seem redundant, but each has its own unique name, and I suspect there will later be quests that require me to visit a particular location. I enjoy some of the location names, including the taverns "Drunken Emperor," "Boisterous Welsher," and "Red Morrow." There's also a temple called the "Temple of Tsa," which in the game's all-caps font makes it sound like it was founded by the one person who respects American airport security. The temples are all named after the names of their gods, which also seem to be the names of the setting's months.
        

I don't know how well I'm going to sleep tonight.

              
The taverns are quite odd. When you enter, you have options to order drinks or talk, but whatever you choose, events have a way of unfolding on their own. For instance, if you order drinks, you'll probably end up with a clue anyway, but if you choose to just start talking, some bartender will say, "Aren't you going to order anything?" Anyway, the "leave tavern" option seems to disappear a lot, so you get trapped in a loop of ordering round after round until your party members get drunk. (I guess this is governed by the "Carouse" statistic.) Also, if you have any talent in music, dancing, or acrobatics, you have options to engage in those activities for the amusement of the patrons, and thus have a little money thrown your way.
           

I don't want to know what kind of dancing Bramble was doing.

         
There are no combats on the game map, which distinguishes Arkania from most of its predecessors, including Spirit of Adventure. There are occasional random encounters in the street, such as traveling merchants, beggars who ask for a ducat, and a weird repeating encounter where a "small fellow" dances around a "table containing a mass of floral arrangements" and then falls down dead.
            

A random event. No, that is totally not "OK."

            
There are a number of unique buildings and oddities among the doorways on the map. These include:
            

• Three estates with multiple entrances, all blocked by guards who refuse entry. Two are called "otttaskins" and are owned by groups named the Stormriders and the Windrunners. I don't know what "ottaskin" means; a Google search suggests the game may have invented it.

           

Can you just tell me what it is?

           

• A large monolith at the end of the street that seems to have no entrance.

• A post office called the "Beilunk Riders." It was closed.

• Two "embassies," one from the "Central Empire," one from the "New Empire," both closed.

• A couple of closed towers.

           

Maybe this will become important later.

         

• A shipbuilder's where you can have your own ship made for way more money than I have.

• An academy of magic where you can purchase potions and get artifacts identified.

                 

I thought this harbor scene was particularly well-drawn.

          
There are four exits from the city, oddly placed. Only one is at an obvious point at the end of a road at the edge of the map. Two others are found in the harbor and a fourth in a random building in the northwest. Each exit seems to take you to a different option for moving forward on the overland map.
              

Each exit takes you to the outdoor map, but to different destinations on it.

           
As I mentioned, some of the random denizens offer a bit of intelligence when you open their doors. Everyone seems to be talking about the gathering orcs, and it's rumored that they've sacked a city called Phexcaer, but we also heard a little about other people and locations in the town.

Unfortunately, Arkania seems to have dropped Spirit of Adventure's keyword-based dialogue for more traditional dialogue options, some of which are either poorly translated or deliberately nonsensical.
           

Dialogue options allow us to insult the innkeeper for no reason.

            
During one visit to a tavern, a guard entered to announce that Hetman Tronde Torbensson, ruler of the city, is looking for heroes to take on a dangerous quest. We found our way to the Hetman's house at the west edge of town. There, Torbensson reiterated the danger posed by the orcs, united under a single chief, amassing in the Upper Bodir Valley.
            

The party learns of the main quest.

            
Noting that orcs are a superstitious lot, Torbensson suggested that their federation might collapse if a hero showed up wielding Hetman Hygellik's lost sword, called Grimring. "It is said that the sword put the fear of the gods into the orcs and their shamans or whatever they call their religious leaders," the Hetman recounted.

The sword is probably buried in Hygellik's tomb, and the Hetman suggested we start by visiting Hygellik's last surviving descendant, Isleif Olgardsson, in the city of Felsteyn. He gave us a writ allowing us to take a certain number of weapons from the city's armory. I always like it when a game has an answer to the common and obvious objection of forcing characters to fund their own adventures when the fate of the world is at stake.
            

The Hetman lays on the main quest. I love how my characters can say they have "just one question" when I have no idea what the question is.

           

There is one dungeon—the lower levels of an old fortress—accessible from Thorwal. The captain of the guard (or something like that) asked us to investigate the lower levels because someone keeps stealing supplies stored on the upper levels.

             

It took me a while to figure out how to light a torch. You can't just "use" the torch, nor can you use the tinder box. You have to pick up the torch, then right click on the tinder box and "use" it. This is annoyingly undocumented. 

            

Coming across a chest.

         

Anyway, the first dungeon level had a couple of combats and one chest. I'll write more about combats in the future, but for now suffice to say that it blends several systems. The screen uses the axonometric 45-degree rotation that feature heavily in British adventure games (Knightlore, Cadaver) and RPGs (HeroQuest, Legend) of the period. Characters move on discrete floor tiles, and action is turn-based, with the player selecting both movement and attack options from a menu. There's an auto-combat option called "Computer Fight" that puts your players under computer control, with or without magic. Overall, it plays a lot like the Gold Box games, and a "Guard" command (the player stands still until an enemy comes in range, then gets a free attack) particularly points to a Gold Box origin.

          

The combat interface.

         

I would finally note that the game has a decent automap, with walls, corridors, and doors clearly annotated by color. This helps make up for the fact that it's hard to see some doors when they're to the party's side rather than directly in front of you.

         

The automap alerts me to a couple of doors that I missed on my first loop.

         

Realms of Arkania is a thick game, meaning it has a lot of little elements that I may forget to talk about if they don't play a big role in my experience. When starting, it offers basic and advanced modes of gameplay; the primary difference seems to be that the computer controls your skill and spell leveling (and character creation) in basic mode. I've been playing on "advanced." Money is in gold ducats, silver crowns, and copper bits at a 1:10:10 ratio. At temples, you can donate and pray for miracles. There's a food and drink system by which you "feed" characters by picking up items and clicking on their mouths. You can split the team into two or more groups. An adventurer's log keeps track of major plot points. When camping, you assign various characters to guard duty for the hours of the day. Wounds, sickness, and poison can be treated with skills as well as spells. Armor and weapons degrade and must occasionally be repaired. You can pocket-pick shopkeepers. If I never mention any of these elements again, it means they weren't really important.

I thought Spirit of Adventure had a lot of promise, so I'm going to remain optimistic about Realms even though the first few hours have covered a lot of well-trod ground.

Time so far: 5 hours

    

****

    

For further reading: 

My coverage of attic Entertainment Software's other titles:

    

• Lords of Doom (1990) 
• Die Drachen von Laas (1991)
• Spirit of Adventure (1991) 
• Realms of Arkania: Star Trail (1994) 

04/28/2026

 

Spirit of Adventure: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

Is it just me, or does "Lamarge" sound like the name of a 1980s drag queen?

         

Spirit of Adventure

Germany

Attic Entertainment Software (developer); Starbyte (publisher)

Released in 1991 for DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST; 1992 for Commodore 64

Date Started: 12 December 2017

Date Ended: 29 December 2017
Total hours: 29

Difficulty: 3/5 (Moderate)

Final Rating: 44

Ranking at Time of Posting: 239/276 (87%)

Ranking at Game #573: 513/573 (90%)

      
Spirit of Adventure's roughness around the edges is illustrated in how much I left undone despite winning. After getting the final screen, I consulted some German message boards and found that I'd missed one entire dungeon (Segan's Tower) and one entire town (Turmalin), each with their own quests. I never finished Rialdo's Castle. I never found 3 of the 18 runes, which is fine because I only ever mixed 5 spells and cast an offensive spell in combat less than a dozen times. I never upgraded to the best equipment, never found out what some of my equipment was for, and only tried a few magic items in combat during the last battle of the game.

And despite all of this, I kept a fondness for the game until the end. It had some fun quests, a couple of interesting puzzles, a decent twist in the plot, and better combat tactics than I really found time to use. That I could miss a few areas means that it had genuine side-quests, something that remains rare in the early 1990s. It was a good foundation for Attic's later offerings.
        

The city of Elfrad. Major roads keep their names despite a couple of 90-degree turns.

     
Most of my hours since the last entry were spent mapping the city of Elfrad. Like Brataya, it had its own story that I had to piece together afterwards because I hit the key encounters in the order of my mapping, not in a logical plot order. The summary is that the mayor, Prior, wanted me to help him rid the town of evil by helping the "runemaster" unite the six "rune rings." I had collected two of the rings in Brataya and needed to get four more in Elfrad. The problem was that the ring owners had been mysteriously dying, so they were all in hiding.
       

You don't see the name "Olbrecht" enough in English-language RPGs.

      
I had to track them down in their various bolt holes. One needed my help fighting some demons, one was in the morgue and I had to get someone to let me into the morgue, that kind of thing. There were a couple more interleave puzzles that were again redundant because you solve most of the game's puzzles just by showing up at the right place.

Ultimately, I got all six of the rings and brought them to the runemaster. He rewarded me with six runes and a "demon skull." The nature of the evil in Elfrad and how the rune rings would destroy it was left a bit vague.
    

By the game's own logic, the "Resurrection" spell ought to be something like life-magic-body, but instead it just hammers away at "life."

      
After Elfrad, I returned to the overworld and explored it systematically, although I still managed to miss several locations. Besides another temple—where I created a couple of "fire blast" spells—the only other new location I found was a magic portal in the mountains. It offered transport to "Talusia" or "Garth." When I tried to go to Garth, I got a message that a mysterious force pushed me back. Talusia turned out to be the place I was already in (I guess the world is Lamarge but the island is Talusia? Or maybe the reverse? Also, "Talusia" is alternately spelled "Taslusia" on one screen). I figured this was something for an expansion and left it alone.

Lacking any other ideas, I returned to Rialdo's Castle and tried to finish it, but a corridor that had previously been open was now cut off and I couldn't figure out how to get it open again.

About this time, I remembered that Yakka Deepshaved, an NPC in Moon City, had offered to tell me the name of the leader of the Dreamers (the drug-pushing cult) if I could tell him the name of the mayor in Elfrad. Now that I knew the answer (PRIOR), I returned to Yakka. He told me that the Dreamers are led by someone named Tibuk, who is "somewhat out of this world because he appears to be everywhere at the same time." I knew that I had heard the name before, so I consulted my screenshots and found that he was the person that the demon-possessed Radin had been writing to from Brataya. The same screenshots also refreshed my memory that Radin had been possessed by a "Garthian" demon.

Things were coming together. I returned to the portal and this time, it allowed me to pass through to Garth, which took the form of a relatively nondescript dungeon. Early in my explorations, I found a stockpile of Opitar; clearly, the drug was being shipped to Lamarge/Talusia from another dimension by Tibuk, a Garthian demon.
      

And why can't my characters become dealers? Isn't this a "role-playing" game?

     
"Garth" ended up being a long maze of secret doors and multiple staircases up and down. There were only a few enemy types—"Guldrons," "Gorcerers," and "Garthians"—but each was capable of mental attacks that severely damaged my party. Even with mental shields on, and the "Booster" skill recharging mental damage, and running from as many fights as possible, my party was roughed up. I had a mental healing spell, but my healer was only capable of a few of these before her magic bar needed to recharge. Potions helped a little. A lot of the time, I left my characters standing idly in a corridor for 20 minutes, playing SpurguX in another window, as their bars slowly recharged.

Let me break off the narrative here to talk a little more about some of the game logistics. First, combat. It's reasonably tactical and yet invites you to be lazy. It starts with the magic skill that each character has active in the background. You can change these at any time, and some enemies respond better to certain skills. For any spellcasting enemy, for instance, you almost certainly want someone running "Sizzle." This also prevents you from casting your spells, but it's usually worth it.
        

Titania switches among her three healing abilities depending on what we most need.

     
Right away, the laziness factor comes into play. If I'm mapping a dungeon, I probably have "Compass" activated. Now combat comes along. Do I have the lead character switch her skill to something combat-oriented, then switch it back again when combat is over? Or do I avoid taking those extra 20 seconds and just plow through combat with the useless "Compass" remaining active?

The considerations continue as you set your actions for each combat round. Through experience, you learn whether enemies most often respond to mental attacks or physical attacks. You might be attacked by multiple groups of enemies with different strengths and weaknesses. Every combat round, you have to decide whether to micromanage the party and set everyone's attack type and target anew, or just keep pounding the "1" key and using the same set of attacks over and over. Yes, the option should be clear for any serious RPG fanatic, but the combats get boring, and if you're trying to alleviate the boredom by simultaneously watching the new season of Travelers, as I was, then it's easier to pound the "1" key and then pay to heal everyone later. Until Garth, no individual combat in the game is really that threatening. Garth changes things with a one-way door that keeps you trapped in the dimension until you find the exit, and suddenly every physical and mental hit point is precious.
    

Sometimes, a dungeon corridor offers this.

And sometimes this.

         
Partly enabling laziness is the fact that no enemy is completely immune to an attack type. There are some brainless enemies like ghouls that don't even have a mind to affect with mental attacks, and some non-corporeal enemies like ghosts that can't be hit with physical attacks. And yet each is still susceptible to critical (instant-kill) versions of both attacks, which come along maybe 1 out of every 12 hits. Thus, by just spamming one or the other, you will eventually kill everyone. This is all a good thing, I hasten to add. I like that the game rewards you for careful planning but also gives you an "out."

I'll also mention that throughout the game, the correlation between the difficulty of the battle and the experience and gold rewards is about 0. There are combats that last 30 rounds and leave you in tatters that deliver 30 experience points and 50 gold pieces, and others against single enemies that will leave you 150 experience points and 300 gold pieces richer. You learn to pick and choose your battles quite quickly. Dwarves are gold mines. So are bandits, but you don't want to fight too many bandits because they steal your stuff. You get the stuff back at the end of the battle, but you have to re-distribute and re-equip it, which is annoying. "Mage lords" are a good experience/gold balance. So are witches. It's almost never worth it to fight long battles against multiple parties; if you can't flee in the first round, you just have to keep trying.
       

The most frustrating message in the game.

      
Almost all the game's battles are random. There are fixed combats in less than half a dozen locations that I found. Thus, whether to fight at all, and particularly whether to continue fighting round after round, is almost always a player choice. Fleeing is a much more tactical, calculated decision here than in most games. If you fought every combat and never fled, you'd hit the max level within the game's first 8 hours, but you'd probably quit out of boredom before finishing the first city.

I'm sorry I never really got to experience the magic side of combat tactics. (If anyone has a link to a full list of spells, I'd be interested in seeing it.) I made the "fire blast" spells that the manual recommended, but I could only cast a few of those before all my magic points were gone, so it didn't seem worth the effort to experiment with higher-level spells. Healing spells helped a little, particularly in the final dungeon. Some spells I never mixed because I lacked the runes, some (like "Resurrection") because I lacked the power. "Awaken" would have been useful but I never found a second "Mind" rune needed for it. "Light" is a bit of a mystery (as are the associated skills and torches) because all the dungeons are perfectly lit. There's a seed of a good idea in the spell system, but to acquire all the runes and get strong enough to mix the most powerful spells, you'd have to artificially extend the life of the game.

I also ended the game well before I maximized my inventory options. Shops in Brataya and Elfrad sold high-level magic weapons and armor, but I never had enough money for them because I spent so much on healing. Another unexpected expense came when the game wouldn't let me leave the city I was in because my "map crystal" was out of charges. I had to pay over 3,000 gold to recharge it.
          

That's a lot of money for something I didn't even realize I would have to pay for.

       
Again, this is a good thing. It means the economy is strong enough that you never run out of financial aspirations. I could have grinded more for gold, or tried to economize better and spend less on healing. I'm not complaining.

Perhaps one complaint, though, is the mysterious nature of some of the inventory items. One of these days, I swear, we'll enter the era in which in every game, you can look at an inventory item and tell exactly who can wield it, what it does, and how it compares statistically with other items you have. There will be a clear distinction between quest items and other items. In Spirit of Adventure, I kept a bunch of gems throughout the game because it wasn't clear they were sale items and not quest items. I have a "skeleton key" that never came in handy, a "Radin's cape" that I can't wear, a "healer's ring" that I can't put on (seriously, what is that for?), torches that I don't need, and scrolls that tell me nothing about what they do. More important, I have no way to gauge the relative worth of items. How much better is an iron shield over a wooden shield? Why can't I wear both a "mystic cape" and armor, and if I have to choose between them, which is best?
         

No, why would you be able to equip a ring? That was stupid of me.

     
The final dungeon comes to an end when you encounter a Garthian behind a secret door. The positioning of the secret door ought not to be possible by the game's normal conventions in which there's 10 feet of wall space between corridors, but fortunately I was checking every wall. When I met the Garthian, named Gothaur, the first time, the game said it was "impossible to understand [his] tongue." I just had to brush past him and find a staircase back to the exit.

Fortunately, I knew where to acquire new languages (at 2,000 gold per lesson!) in Elfrad. I bought Garthian for one of my characters—I know of no reason to learn the five others—and returned to the dungeon. This time Gothaur had a lot to say.
         

Gothaur is like a DEA agent of his dimension.

     
Gothaur related that Tibuk was a fellow Garthian, using the portal to traffic Opitar to Lamarge and something called "Robiks" back to Garth. Tibuk was occupying a human body on our side. He gave me a horn that I could use to close the portal. I exited, returned to Talusia, and blew it.
          

Closing off inter-dimensional travel just to stop a drug problem seems short-sighted.

      
The question was then how to find Tibuk, but I had that figured out. Since the beginning of the game people had talked about how Rowena, head of the monastery in Moon City, had been different lately. I returned to her, and she immediately confirmed it, screaming that she had "hired [us] to fail." She put on her Garthian face and attacked.
       

Asked if he wanted to also transform the rest of his body, Tibuk looked down and said, "Nah, I'm good."

      
The battle was pretty pathetic—no single creature poses much danger in this game. To help, I employed a couple of magic items that I'd been saving for a tough battle, including Rialdo's Staff, which does up to 200 poison damage (a normal physical attack does less than 30). She soon died, her body turning to mist and fleeing to the vaults.

I pursued her and found an upright coffin with the paralyzed forms of Rowena and some guy who was never explained. Tibuk re-formed and attacked, killing us in a scripted way with no chance at defense.
      

What is the cat doing there?! Is the cat the real villain?

      
For a while, I though this might be the legitimate end of the game. I have some experience with German CRPGs, after all; among other things, I'm still not convinced Dungeons of Avalon was winnable.

But I decided to circle the city and see if any of the NPCs had anything to say in response to TIBUK. When I visited Yakka Deepshaved again, he had some new dialogue based on my possession of the horn. At the conclusion, he said, "You made it! Tibuk is destroyed and the Dreamers can't sell Opitar to humans any longer." What!? How did Tibuk get destroyed? I went to the monastery to confirm it and, no, Rowena wasn't destroyed. She turned into Tibuk and attacked again. But this time, after I defeated her the first time, the game let me fight Tibuk a second time in the vault. So I don't really know what happened there.
      

Tell me something I don't know, Ramirez.

     
Tibuk was no harder than the original Rowena battle, though. He soon died and I got the winning message above. It was a bit of an anticlimactic ending, but at least it wrapped up the plot. Since everyone had told me that the game was "unfinished," I half expected that to translate to the lack of a plot resolution.
   

That staff is a bit overpowered.

    
In a GIMLET, I give the game:

• 4 points for the game world. It isn't terribly well fleshed out—in particular, the different races don't seem to mean anything after character creation—but the drug plot is at least somewhat original, and the various locations hold together thematically.

         

The street names added a lot of flavor to the cities.

     

• 4 points for character creation and development. There aren't many choices during creation, but at least you're choosing from a fairly original selection of classes and races. Leveling up is rapid enough and feels suitably rewarding.

      

Orithia levels up while the developers leer at her.

     

• 5 points for NPC interaction. I wish the developers had offered more than three NPC portraits, but you'll never find me rating a keyword-based dialogue system poorly, especially when thoughtful use of those keywords can flesh out the lore and history of the game world. It's not Ultima-level quality, but it's still good. 

• 4 points for encounters and foes. Half the monsters come from a standard fantasy template, half are original to the game. What I like here is that the type of monster matters for more than just how hard they hit. Their various types of attacks, defenses, and special actions have you adjusting your own tactics accordingly. That's what a good RPG bestiary should do. I also like that you can pick your battles and engage in what you might call "tactical grinding." Non-combat encounters are less plentiful and less impressive and offer no real role-playing.

         

This guy looks a lot more difficult than he turns out to be.

     

• 5 points for magic and combat. See my comments above. Magic plays a lesser role here, but in some ways that creates a more balanced game. Most RPGs are so magic-heavy that regular combat actions are almost rendered superfluous at higher levels.

• 3 points for equipment, strengths and weaknesses already discussed. 

    

Titania: "Is it a trash can lid? A table top? What? Why are you looking at me like that?"

     

• 5 points for the economy. It could use more complexity, but it never gets to the point that it doesn't matter, which is the most important attribute.

• 4 points for quests, including a clear main quest and several side quests. No alternate endings or role-playing options, unfortunately.

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface, all of which are functional if not remarkable.

• 6 points for gameplay. I like its non-linear, open world; I just wish there was a little more in it. More locations, but smaller, would have been a better approach. Aside from the ease of the final battles, I thought that both the difficulty and length of play were both right on target.

          
That gives us a final score of 44, which as I suspected puts it between The Bard's Tale (34) and Might and Magic (60). It's much higher than I expected going in. Earlier this year, a commenter suggested that I would "rant" about the ending, and I'm not sure why. It wasn't great, but it wasn't the shaggy dog joke that, say, Fate: Gates of Dawn was. Another commenter mentioned that it "promises more than it can deliver." I think that's a bit extreme. It lacks polish, certainly, but it at least tells a complete game. If some of the areas aren't finished, I can hardly complain given that I didn't explore all the areas that were finished.
          

I have no idea what's happening in this box image. Neither, apparently, did any of the developers.

       
Like many European games, even with English releases, it doesn't appear that western media much noticed Spirit. Computer Gaming World described it only briefly in a larger column about foreign games. European reviews were all over the place. PC-Spiele '92 gave it a 60/100, complaining about the lack of an automap (seriously, that bothers me in 2017 reviews, let alone from a year barely out of the graph-paper era) and the difficulty of early combats, which suggests the reviewer didn't make much use of the "run" feature. Power Play (75/100) laments it as another Bard's Tale rehash. But ASM (80/100) called it a "strong adventure game" with a lot of positive features, and Joker Verlag (84/100) called it a "brilliant heroic epic in German."

Every review notes its Bard's Tale ancestry, and that isn't in question. But what Spirit of Adventure does better than The Bard's Tale—what Might and Magic does a lot better—is provide a much greater sense of variety. Offer uniformly-size map after map of trash mob battles culminating in maybe one special encounter, like all Bard's Tale games do, and you've got a recipe for frustration and boredom. Spirit offers locations of different shapes and sizes, with multiple special encounters, side-quests, and low-key enemies that don't have both sides playing quick-draw on a NUKE spell every combat. Like I've said, it's not perfect. It could have used less town and more dungeon, for instance. But it was well-balanced and it didn't drag on forever.
  
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have been a good experience for the developers. I get most of the story here from blogger Christian Genzel, who interviewed developer Guido Henkel in 2014. What I like about this article is that Genzel focused nearly exclusively on Spirit of Adventure rather than Henkel's more famous titles. In the interview, Henkel says that the game was supposed to have been subtitled The Dream Master as it was going to kick off an entire series under the Spirit of Adventure umbrella.

Henkel says he and co-developer Hans-Jürgen Brändle were influenced by The Bard's Tale, Wizardry, The Magic Candle, Might and Magic, and Tunnels & Trolls. It's tough to detect the influence of some of these, but they could have gotten their devotion to keyword-based dialogue from The Magic Candle.

What Genzel calls in the interview "red herrings"—the Thieves' Guild, the other languages, the port in Brataya, several objects—were all supposed to play a role in expansions and extensions. The team envisioned multiple modules spanning from a central core.
       

I'm sure glad I spent money on all those other languages!

      
Repeatedly, however, Henkel mentions friction between the development team and their publishers at Starbyte. The publisher insisted on rushing production, developed the box and other production materials with no input from the developers, and cheated the developers out of their fair share of the royalties. They commissioned a Commodore 64 version of the game (in German only) with no input from the original developers. I couldn't get it to run (it kept asking for a disk that didn't exist in the package I downloaded), but reportedly it uses a top-down interface rather than first-person, and I can verify that the graphics are awful.
      

Exhibit A.

      
Sick of "making other people rich," Henkel and his colleagues determined to publish future games under their own label. This unfortunately led to an abandonment of Talusia and Lamarge but gave us the three Realms of Arkania games (1992-1996), which use an update of Spirit's engine. Their success landed Henkel a job at Interplay, where he produced Planescape: Torment (1999) and Neverwinter Nights (2002). Since leaving Interplay, he has been involved in mobile gaming and novel-writing.

We'll be seeing the Arkania series quite soon, so I'm glad I got to see this precursor. Spirit of Adventure isn't quite a "forgotten masterpiece," but it does perform better than you'd have any reason to expect. That's a refreshing change from the other titles this year.

   

****

   

For further reading: 

My coverage of attic Entertainment Software's other titles:

    

• Lords of Doom (1990) 
• Die Drachen von Laas (1991)
• Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny (1992) 
• Realms of Arkania: Star Trail (1994) 

04/28/2026