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[bobson]

Game has a lot of extras on FTP (including archive), but the review two posts above looks a bit too short.

[calenth]

Originally Posted by bobson

Game has a lot of extras on FTP (including archive), but the review two posts above looks a bit too short.

"I suppose you're adventurers? I suppose to qualify, you have to fog a mirror." -- a butler at a Knights of Legend mansion, whose dialogue I still remember twenty years later.

Oh, this was one of my favorites in the days of my youth. It was put out by Origin during its Pre-Electronic-Arts-Buyout heyday, but the planned sequels were never made and it got generally forgotten.The setting was fairly lighthearted generic fantasy -- elves and dwarves, with the addition of one flying race, the Kelden.

The main strengths were that it had a fairly large, fairly realistic game world, filled with a lot of unique and amusing characters and rich detail, and a deeply complex combat system. It also had a fair bit of amusing dialogue and conversation options (although the only one I still remember clearly I've put at the head of this above). There were ~40 or so character class/race combinations, most of them specialized in one role or another; the game also had a "prejudice" system, where different shopkeepers and townsfolk would refuse to talk to different types of PCs (Bartenders tended to hate Dwarves, for example).

The combat system was incredibly sophisticated for an RPG at the time -- for example, you didn't just choose to dodge, you chose to dodge by jumping up, ducking, or leaping to the side, and you could correspondingly swing your weapon high, low, or from side to side. It had fatigue and blood loss, specific hit locations (get your arm too damaged and you couldn't use that two handed sword any more; lose a leg and your movement was limited, etc), different armor on different parts of the body, etc. Combat was round-to-round, and every round you'd pick an action -- if you picked "attack" for that character, you'd then choose a direction, a type of attack (hack, slash, etc), then a body part to aim at, and finally a defense to adopt. Armor was sized for different characters, and fatigued your character based on its weight and actions performed -- so a tiny Dwarf could berserk all day long in full plate mail, but a giant Kelden might be able to only barely fly if he wore anything heavier than leather.

There were random wilderness encounters and set-piece quest location battles that I spent hours running my characters through. There were ~30 or so monster types, including orcs, elementals, giants, goblins, and undead. The quest maps were large-scale, unique maps, usually fortress compounds or tunnel complexes.

The main problem with the game is that because the planned expansions never came out, it's often impossible (without editing your character files, which are in hexadecimal) to train certain weapons to "max" values -- for example, you can get a magical Greatsword fairly early on in the game, but can never train the skill above about halfway because there's no 'midrange" trainer for it (just a high-level trainer and a low-level one).

You can also only save at an Inn, which got me into a lot of trouble as a kid ("I can't right now, mom, I have to finish this quest" and the quests could take several hours); it can also be a problem if you have a bad random encounter right after finishing a major quest, and have to restart from scratch.

I've still got the 140-odd-page manual for this game lying around (in fact I think I have two copies, somehow). It's comparable to a player's handbook for a paper RPG in depth and detail, with 40+ pages of game-world history and unique stories giving background on each individual character class. If you're the sort of person who finds reading a 140-page game manual to be highly entertaining, you'll probably love this game. If you want something speedier this won't be your thing. It was pretty clearly designed by a paper-and-pencil gamer who saw the computer as a way to up the complexity of combat simulation, not a way to make paper & pencil gaming take less time.

But for abandonware RPG nerds who like complexity and detail, or who cut their teeth on paper & pencil gaming, this game might be a new favorite. It sure was for me back in the day.