Might and Magic

Delivered like a delirious monkey with an infinite set of those colourful fridge-magnet letters and a huge fridge...This is it. The play-through of the Might and Magic six pack, and my immediate feedback regarding it. It’s the very freshest The Encounter With Dracula Is Terminated! If you didn’t catch the build up to this crazy ride, you can do so right here.

Book I.

A little background reading told me that, upon its release, the first entry in the Might and Magic series, ‘Might and Magic Book One: The Secret of the Inner Sanctum’, was extremely well received by critics. Things like the scope, freedom of game play and character choices (three things which are still buzzwords for many RPGs) were main reasons for the heaping of praise. My skillful preparation had luckily numbed me to how ridiculous the name was, so instead of writing ‘lol, gay’ at this point, I took an open minded approach while still bearing in mind the age of the thing.

When it comes down to brass tacks, though, might and magic I is rubbish. Unless you have some nostalgia for this kind of thing, it’s absurd. Instead of boxes popping up to tell you interesting things that the graphics don’t let on, when you walk face first into what is clearly a brick wall you get told ‘SOLID!’, while details like why you’re there or what you’re doing are left purely to your inference. Also you don’t need the 1990’s to have come and gone to realise that names like ‘Crag the Hack’ and ‘Swifty Sarg’ are just ridiculous. All you ever see of the characters is the names, too. While NES era J-RPG final fantasy had sprites for your characters, the battles in Might and Magic I are solely a text based affair. Couple that with dos box running it a bit too fast on my system, and you get convoluted lines of text about how Swifty has fired at a skeleton with a bow flashing up at the screen and leaving it so fast that it’s like having a very boring, nerdy seizure. It was about here I adopted my ‘play until I get killed’ reviewing strategy.

If this ever was playable, there is literally no point in doing so now. I wasn’t too disillusioned by this, though. I knew the very first was going to be a bumpy ride, but after a couple of hours I could take no more and decided to concentrate on the next entry in the series: Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World! It better contain at least one gate to a considerably different world.

Book II

The second I start Might and Magic II I am met with what looks like an elongated white jawa declaring himself a spirit of someone who wasn’t important enough for me to remember, and going on to say how I face battles innumerable. This upset me. I was really hoping for a more ‘battles easily numerable’ themed comment after the last game. Anyway so this game is a touch more palatable. If you’re at all interested in really classic might and magic for some strange reason, then this is the one to go for. It feels like the first and works in much the same way, except there’s a lot more visual, audible, and textual prompts. Seen as it has the same problem of the first in that places use repeating animations, it’s hard to tell this wall from that wall or this door from that door in the expansive bits, but luckily a compass is added in the form of ‘Face = N’. Nice. The graphical differences do a lot for the experience. There is a tangible day/night change, and seeing the adversary rendered poorly stops the text-battles from triggering a ‘too long; did not listen’ response. For a little. Sorry, what? Oh right, moving on…

Hypnobeetlehypnobeetlehypnobeetlehypnobeetlehypnobeetle!!

One of the more positive differences is the increase in environmental feedback. While it’s still pitiful, it’s less so. A lot of doors you go through will have a brief description of what you’re facing in front of you, with a sprinkling of Y/N choices. This definitely does a far better job of breaking up the monotony of a game which has very little diversity to offer. While it is a much preferable offering to Book I, book II isn’t oceans away. It still retains the same core mechanics. The battles are still unanimated, the environment is still lackluster and repetitive, and the dialogue is so poor it’s unacceptable. The plus side of that is that it keeps it mildly entertaining. However, by the time I received this proposal…

The enormous gladiator Spartacus will mercilessly beat you for 500 gold. You will be stronger. Pay the brute (y/n)?

…I was about sick of it, and hitting ‘N’, I strode out of the city, only to be met with a big box saying ‘DEATH STRIKES!’ and something to the effect of ‘A volcano has erupted and killed you’. Obviously if the volcano was graphically represented I may have had a shot at avoiding that one. With the only evidence of the eruption being the black box with the solemn news in it, I just took their word for it. As had happened once before, I’d been slain, and it was time to call it a day. At this point I’m at the end of day three, and my feelings towards the might and magic marathon I’d embarked on were no longer what they were. I was looking out the window longingly at couples walking, laughing with each other. I truly felt like a Might and Magic player. Tomorrow would be book three, and the mammoth task of keeping my boredom and vitriol from biasing my thoughts on it. Perhaps this will be just the breath of fresh air I need, I hoped.

Y. Y. Y!!

III: Isles of Terra

Might and Magic III was the first Might and Magic game of the 1990s. It was a less tedious experience than the prior two because of various improvements. One of the most noticeable is the Doom-style addition of party character’s faces along the bottom instead of the representations of the prior games: their names in white text. It really does make a difference to the ‘role playing’ thing to know you’re not just a few white letters. The expressions on your party character’s faces reflect their condition, and clicking on them brings up statistics nobody cares about. ‘Crag Hack’ has reinvented himself by dropping the ‘the’ from the middle of his name. Good to see him back. The battles take place differently too, with enemies visible in the world rather than the world freezing for a battle to take place. Battles take place much in the same turn-based fashion, but mouse-clicks of icons replace keyboard commands for things like attacking. Plot wise, you’re after some baddie called Sheltem. He was also the bad guy in 2 and continues to be a pain throughout the series. These really aren’t strong on story. I didn’t bother explaining for 1 and 2, so I won’t start now. A final strong point I will mention is the music. It’s got some basic polyphony going on, so it makes it…very funny.

The game is still atrocious by today’s standards, and unfortunately there was little to giggle at in this one. Judging in context I’d say this one is passable if you are a dwarf in purgatory. If not, keep on avoiding. Time for four!

IV – V

Four and five come together in some dual pack, as apparently installing both gave you the full experience. A bit of a PokeMôn blue/red type thing going on, I reckon. Anyhow, I think it is IMPERATIVE everyone watches the introduction to clouds of Xeen.

It is depressingly obvious by IV that there will be no surprises in this game collection. Each is just a face-lifted and revamped version the previous. At least with IV-V, you are dealing with the best of the bunch. The intro music alone sounds like it is lifted straight off the best prog-rock album that never happened. Truth be told, there’s not much more that needs to be written after viewing the intro movie, so I’ll keep it brief. What I will reiterate is that the 4/5 combo is much more tolerable to play than the previous titles and a semblance to fun games like Morrowind is clear. The added animation is welcome, and the spoken sound bytes from shopkeepers and such like aren’t too annoying and add some immersion, though the blue woman who sells you spells sounds thoroughly synthesised. Synth-women are the best you can hope for from this series, though. A drawback is the then-popular manual-based ‘look at line 5, word 3. What is the word?’ copy protection that pops up. Bit irritating, as now it’s enshrined in PDF rather than a tangible manual. Another thing that is annoying is the high pitched key press noise. Every time you press any key (including, and particularly problematic to the movement keys) a high pitch is emitted. You don’t walk continuously, oh no. You move forward in set distances as in all previous games. As you can imagine, after 5 presses or so you’re annoyed with the noise. God knows how furious I was with it when I gave up on this heap. Why? Just WHY? This is also a problem for….

Might and Magic: Swords of Xeen

I didn’t realise, but this collection included a seventh game (heavens preserve me. I can’t take anymore). This game apparently came from the mod community, and wasn’t true Might and Magic canon. It tries to plug a few bits of the V plot here and there, but isn’t really story driven. It’s entirely on the V engine, so more of the same here.

The bees, the bees. Oh god, the bees.

I was sat alone in the dark at the time I gave up on Swords of Xeen. I was sitting staring at thousands of words about this. I couldn’t take it any more, but one of the biggest entries in the series yet was still ahead of me. Now, I’m not a man of faith, but there are moments in everyone’s life when you think ‘hang on, that seems a bit too convenient’. I was at my lowest point, and, as I was firing up Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven, I was to experience one of those moments.

I couldn’t get it to work on my system. I was free. It was all over.

In more than the obvious way, I was quite happy not to have been able to play what could have been the diamond in the rough. It leaves me with room to say maybe, just maybe, it was all worth it to get to this point. If I knew how bad that point was, I might well throw myself into the aforementioned magic monster pit.

Looking back on the experience, it really was fearful. I had practically no human contact apart from IRC while doing this. I don’t feel right. I will not recommend this to someone who isn’t buying it for nostalgia, or really has exhausted every other experience known to humanity. It is tough, unrelenting, unrewarding, stupid, ugly, and has all the other unlisted qualities of Maggie Thatcher as well. Still, it has been, above all else, interesting. Seeing the difference between ‘then and now’ in what players would accept from a video game RPG experience was interesting in the way that old farming equipment is. People genuinely were happy to put up with this in those days. The influence of statistic based development is still clear in games like Fable 2, but the difference is nowadays they are used as part of an experience to pace it, whereas in the Might and Magic series it does feel like the statistics are the game.

For the price, though, I cannot write it off as uniquely dreadful, as anyone interested in a bit of RPG history and evolution can’t really go far wrong. If you’re nostalgic about these games, which I assume (by the critical reception of the time and Youtube speed runs) that many people are, then you’ve struck gold. For the rest of us, this isn’t quite the same joyous trove. I’d like to propose that if you are considering putting yourself through this for fun, you should instead take a dice and roll against an imaginary rat. If he rolls higher, you die, or vice versa. Move on to a crocodile, then god. If you win these rolls successfully, pretend you’re the king of the universe and be satisfied with your RPG experience. Please, don’t put yourself through what I have. There is, nowadays, simply no need to climb this mountain.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 18th, 2009 at 11:09 pm and is filed under News, The Encounter With Dracula. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Might and Magic”

1. Ian:

   § October 19th, 2009 at 4:03 pm

   Fantastic article – love it Malakian.

2. Paul:

   § October 19th, 2009 at 4:55 pm

   Best thing ever.

3. Paul:

   § October 19th, 2009 at 4:56 pm

   I’m still enjoying the fact that your avatar is a monkey with a gun.

4. Mellzor:

   § October 20th, 2009 at 9:02 pm

   hehehe

   “Hypnobeetlehypnobeetlehypnobeetlehypnobeetlehypnobeetle!!”

   Is that akin to saying Hastur’s name 3 times??

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