I'm expecting it to be a huge pain in the ass.
It was. The fun kind, thankfully.
I wasn't expecting to finish the game already. That wasn't anywhere near the most difficult area, combat-wise. Still, a worthy final dungeon.
There's a lot of stuff I haven't done, but I'm going to accept this victory, because I think I've had my fill of this game for now.
Overall, this was a very enjoyable game. Sceptic really hit the nail on the head when he said that it works as an amalgam of the best CRPG franchises of the 80s. At its best it succeeds perfectly in combining the apparent vastness of the overworld exploration of Ultima, with the spelunking of Wizardry and its ilk. Its biggest strength by far is the quality of exploration; every zone and every dungeon feels distinctive and contains something unique. A lot of credit has to go to the compartmentalization of the world into fixed-size 16x16 grids, which made it easy to tell when I'd missed something, and at least in me seemed to encourage a kind of completionist collect-'em-all attitude, via the fact that zones could be more or less "completed." It's very gamey and very fun. The dungeons were decently large and varied, and though I would have appreciated some properly devilish mapping challenges (or maybe they were there, and I just missed them), most were fun to go through. I was also surprised by the number of sidequests, both given directly in the form of the Lords' quests and in the form of riddles scattered about the gameworld -- I expected something a lot more bare-bones.
Also impressive was the character system. I was expecting another half-baked AD&D knockoff: useless stats, useless thief, useless spells, you know the drill. But the classes are all unique and play differently. The only slightly boring class was the Paladin, who was just a straightforward Knight/Cleric, in contrast to the Archer, who in addition to being a Knight/Sorcerer also has the ability to use missile weapons in melee. My Robber ended up being fairly useless in combat, unfortunately, but that may have been a result of my rolling crappy stats for him. However, he was invaluable when it came to opening doors and treasure chests, of which there were a lot. I don't know if the disarm chance depends on class, or if it depends exclusively on the Luck stat, but I'm happy with the way things turned out. The spell lists were also good, with a decent variety of buffs both in and out of combat, as well as utility spells like Fly and Surface. I would have liked some more exciting offensive spells, though, as the best course of action for my Sorcerer in combat was usually to spam the best available direct damage spell, while my Cleric was on permanent healing duty. As for the stats, they all seemed to make an appreciable difference, and finding stat-raising locations felt like a big deal. I do wish I had bothered to roll for more than 5 END on my sorcerer, who ended the game at level 13, with 33 HP. I got a lot of use out of Raise Dead throughout the later stages of the game.
Now for the not so good stuff. The balance is completely out of whack from the beginning all the way through to the mid-game. There were several occasions where I entered an area, got wrecked, and decided to avoid it for a while, only to come back later and realize that I'd merely been screwed by the RNG, and I could have tackled the zone sooner. This ties in with the fact that enemies' abilities rarely vary, and the only real difference between them is how much damage they deal, and whether or not they have AoE attacks. There are some clever designs, like the wasps and exploding spores, which have low hitpoints and low damage, but can be counted on to kill any unconscious characters with their constant AoE spam. Mostly, however, it's the usual spamming direct damage, focus-firing the low-HP enemies. The debuffs were, on the whole, very underwhelming, both when I used them myself and when I had them used on me. The exception was Sleep, which was very handy in the early game, but lost its luster fairly quickly after leaving Sorpigal. Maybe I'm asking too much of the game, but some more incentive to vary my tactics would have been welcome. Then there's the resource management, which is all but non-existent. "But," you might say, "that's true for every RPG ever!" While that is true, the restricted saving, combined with the food mechanic and the gem costs for casting, seems to me to represent a real effort towards creating a well integrated resource management model. This makes it all the more frustrating when the game fails to make any of this matter beyond the very early game. A real missed opportunity.
Nonetheless, I had a lot of fun with this. I feel compelled to compare it to Proving Grounds, as they're both the first entries of what are arguably THE two series of western dungeon crawlers. This was a cool game, but overall I prefer Wizardry, which is a tighter, more focussed and more balanced experience. This is probably the more underrated of the two, though. Anyway, I'm planning on taking on the sequel, but I'll hold off for a while, because I feel sure that I would burn out if I were to play it right away.
TL;DR: Good gaem, thumbs up.
. What's more, Divine Intervention seems not to work when she slips from her starting alignment of Good. Same goes for the Turn Undead spells. Resetting alignment is a pain-free affair, though, so that's not a big issue. It's still a neat feature, because I didn't think alignment mattered at all.
I am a big fan of MM6 - 8 2d sprites + 3d levels. Why oh why did they have to waste time on making a new engine that looks worse than the old one.
Just kidding, we all know we won't get M&M XI, sadly.
