The Stack

Still on the last map. I’ve definitely spent by far the majority of my time on this game toward the end. Fortunately, that isn’t just because there’s an impossible end boss. It’s because the end is where the correct strategy becomes non-obvious, and therefore the game becomes both more difficult and more interesting than in the previous parts. It would probably have been better for the game’s reputation if the developers had front-loaded this more — as it is, I doubt most reviewers played it this far before reviewing it. Which is fair, because most players won’t either. But it does mean that the game as a whole is probably underestimated.

Even my own judgment so far, that the original Majesty was better, is probably at least partly based on overly-sunny memories. The one thing that I can point to as definitely changed is the lack of randomized layouts in Majesty 2, but in a way, the final level brings that back. The whole level is based around a demon who alternately smashes your city and disappears to the far unexplored reaches of the map. It takes a few play-throughs to figure what he’s doing out there, but he’s creating new monster lairs, ones that spawn elementals. If you let him just keep on creating them indefinitely, the elementals become too numerous to fight. So you have to find them by exploring, just like with every single lair in the original Majesty.