The Stack

In an adventure game, the player’s focus is on figuring things out. Once you’ve solved a puzzle, it’s effectively solved, not just for that session, but for any session thereafter, even if you have to start over from scratch: you may have to go through the motions in the game again, but the figuring-out only has to be done once. (And sometimes you don’t even have to go through the motions, if the only reward for solving a puzzle is information useful elsewhere in the game. Myst took this to an extreme, letting players with the right knowledge skip most of the game’s content.)

In a CRPG, the player’s focus is on going through the motions. There may be puzzles to solve and tactics to figure out, but these are usually stuck into a context of grinding. Progress in one of these games doesn’t necessarily present any challenge at all to the player beyond investment of time. You lose that investment if you start over, or even just go back to an earlier save.

So it says something about which aspect of Quest for Glory V is dominant that I started over without really needing to. I had managed to reach the point in the plot where Magnum Opus gets murdered a couple of days before I was scheduled to duel him in the arena, thus cheating myself out of the five points (out of a maximum 1000) that I would have gotten for trouncing him. I’ve been saving the game at the start of every in-game day, and thus could have figured out what the last point was that I could have salvaged this, but nah, that’s too much effort. Better to start over.

And, having started over, I’m doing things much more efficiently. A lot of the puzzle content can be taken care of on day 1 if you know what you’re doing, freeing up the rest of your time for maxing your stats — and, in fact, maxing your stats doesn’t take all that long either, so at this point I’m basically just marking time until I fight Magnum Opus. Eventually I’ll have to start the Rite of Rulership, and with it, the rest of the plot. But until I pull that trigger, the game seems to be in a plot-development-free zone. Whether this lasts forever or not, I don’t yet know. I was told at the beginning that my associates had paid my rent at the inn for a month, so that may be the point at which things come crashing down. On the other hand, the looming threat — the gradual destruction of the anti-dragon wards — seems to be dependent on plot events that only occur during the Rite, so I don’t know how the doom of the city would occur before then. Maybe it’s those invading mercenaries; maybe if I go and sleep at the inn for another couple of weeks without driving them off as part of the Rite, they’ll finally storm the city. But I doubt it.

If I were any kind of real hero, I wouldn’t enter the Rite at all. Let the city stay in its starting state indefinitely, with the defenses intact and no additional murders. So what if they don’t have a king? These guys are pseudo-ancient-Greeks; they should be capable of inventing democracy.

If I had to describe the overall style of the Quest for Glory series in one word, that word would be “goofy”. It’s got a mixture of heavy-handed drama and a twelve-year-old’s idea of what’s cool, topped off with a love of puns. Ye gods, the puns. There are a few characters who seem to exist mainly as agents of pun delivery, and even if you avoid those characters, the narrator sometimes indulges in them (chiefly in descriptions of scenery objects).

But the puns are just surface goofiness — Xanth it ain’t. The chief goofiness is the world itself, populated by caricatures and anachronisms. I said that each game is based on folklore from a different part of the world, but that’s only true on a very rough scale. QfG1 put a centaur and a minotaur in a fantasy-pseudo-medieval setting, as well as small dinosaurs and flying manta rays. And consider the four NPCs vying for the throne of QfG5‘s pseudo-Greece:

• Kokeeno Pookameeso, member of the city guard, always seen wearing one of those Grecian helmets with the brush-like crest. The only local in the running.
• Elsa von Spielburg, a baron’s daughter from QfG1. When last we saw her, she was a damsel under a curse. Now, she’s a duelist in thigh-high boots and revealing armor. ¹Actually, it’s not any more revealing than the getup worn by Kokeeno Pookameeso or Magnum Opus. But, y’know, double standard.
• Magnum Opus, a Roman gladiator with a very high opinion of himself. Roman? Well, he mentions “Nova Roma” at one point, so maybe it’s fantasy-pseudo-Rome. But we’ve had intrusion of real history into the fantasy world before, as when Haroun al Rashid showed up in QfG2. Anyway, Magnum Opus is an exaggeratedly one dimensional character, prone to saying things like “I, Magnum Opus, the valiant, peerless spearman of the Roman Empire, shall prove the superiority of my skills” regardless of the topic of discussion.
• Gort, a Frankenstein-like construct created by mad-scientists (in 19th-century attire) on an artificial island. Although Gort is probably the strongest fighter, it’s questionable how effective a king he’d be, seeing how he can’t talk.

So, not something you can take too seriously, despite aforementioned ham-fisted drama. But while I call the style goofy, I will not call it cheesy. The difference? It’s really all down to the authorial voice. When the author gives the impression of being stupid or incompetent, we naturally make a mockery of both the author and the work. But however goofy QfG gets, I get the impression that the author is just having fun with it. Things like Gort are so extremely out-of-place that they pull you out of the fiction for a moment, like Tezuka’s gourd. And it isn’t ironic detachment, either: once the author and player have acknowledged the absurdity, the characters in the world have to take Gort seriously. It’s their world, after all. And since the player is controlling one of the characters, it is to some degree your world too.

My goodness it’s been a while since I posted anything. I blame the spring weather. (In February? Yes. Apparently that’s when Spring comes in San Francisco.) But also I blame the poll experiment. One of the central things that keeps games enjoyable for me is that they’re one of the few things that no one wants me to do. There are no external obligations, just the obligation to the game itself. The Oath works against this a little, but I was careful to set that up so that I was never actually obliged to play anything — just to blog about it if I do. Letting other people choose what I play is another thing altogether, and so I don’t think I’ll repeat it.

Now, as to where we left off: By now, I’m pretty well into the swing of QfG5, having achieved about 40% of the maximum score. This is the sort of game that has an accelerated realtime day/night cycle (sped up by a factor of something like 30, or faster on the overland map), with some things refreshing themselves with new content each day. It’s important in this sort of game to get into a daily routine, something that lets you patrol all the major areas for daily developments, but still allows you some free time every day for questing.

The Quest for Glory series has varied a lot on the matter of timed plot events. QfG1 basically didn’t have any at all — you could spend as long as you wanted grinding for better stats and take care of the story when you felt you were ready. QfG2 went to the opposite extreme: most of the game, from the very beginning, consisted of a series of looming emergencies that would end the game if not handled in time. The rest of the games, as near as I can remember, try to strike some kind of balance. In QfG5, once you enter the Rite of Rulership, it imposes a certain amount of urgency on your actions. The Rite is basically a series of competitive quests, and if you don’t complete them quickly enough, one of the other candidates will beat you out. But if that happens, it’s not the end of the world — and more importantly, it’s not the end of the game. I’ve been taking care to win every event (it isn’t all that hard), but I have to wonder what happens if you just throw them all. Does the final save-Silmaria-from-ultimate-destruction event count for more than the rest of the events put together, like last-minute house points for Gryffindor? Or can you be a hero and still not become king?

It’s interesting to compare this to the last competitive quest in the series. At one point in QfG3 (the one in the pseudo-African setting), the hero has to prove his worth as a warrior by engaging in a sequence of challenges against another warrior candidate. One of the challenges is a footrace. The opponent stumbles and falls during the race, and if the player has a choice: stop to help him, or take advantage of his misfortune to win the race? The right solution is, of course, the former, which nets you more points and more Honor (key if you want to become a Paladin). If you just keep running, the opponent straightens up and overtakes you anyway. The message there is pretty clear: competition is all very well, but doing the right thing is more important.

So how does that notion fit into the present game? Here, I’m awarded extra points for putting the competition above more important concerns like finding out who poisoned the king. Arguably, the rite is more important than those mere sporting events in QfG3 — the organizers are pragmatic enough to turn the first two tests into repel-the-invading-mercenaries competitions. But that line of argument merely suggests that the hero should be participating, not necessarily that he should be playing to win. Will there be a showdown where the hero has to make the same decision as back in Pseudo-Africa, a choice between going for the win and doing the right thing? Or has that moral just been tossed to the wind? I can’t yet say.

I’m a bit late with this post, but: the latest trading opportunity was foiled by defective cabling.

That is all.

Every episode in the Quest for Glory series starts by giving the player a choice of three character classes: Fighter, Mage, and Thief. (From episode 3 onward, there’s a fourth character class, Paladin, but you can’t choose it at the beginning of the game. Paladinhood must be earned.) You choice of class affects not only how you deal with monsters, but how you can solve certain puzzles. There’s also class-specific content: guilds with their own tests, houses for the Thief to burglarize. All in all, it’s one of the most effective replay-value mechanisms I’ve seen. And yes, I have played through episodes 1 through 4 with every class. ¹I have to admit, though, that part of the reason I played the first couple of games with every class is that I was just a kid then, without a Stack of 300+ games, and thus was more motivated to milk every drop of gameplay I could from those games I owned. Really, this whole blog is a holdover from that now-obsolete mindset.

Generally speaking, the Fighter is the simplest class to play: whenever a puzzle has class-specific solutions, the Fighter’s solution is to break it. For that reason, I’ve been playing QfG5 as a Fighter so far. If I get completely stuck, I’ll give one of the other classes a whirl, and probably learn something to help the Fighter in the process. But that hasn’t happened yet.

Playing the Fighter means I have to use the new combat system a great deal, and it has some problems. See, combat is realtime — in a sense, the game isn’t just an adventure/RPG hybrid, it’s an adventure/RPG/fighting game hybrid. You can do simple maneuvers with the mouse, Diablo-style, but if you want to use more than one kind of blow, or dodge sideways when your opponent strikes and counterattack, or even just block with your shield, you need to use the keyboard. The problem is that the game frequently drops keyboard events. I wouldn’t even mind this so much if it just dropped key presses, but it often fails to recognize key releases, leaving me endlessly dodging in a circle or whatever until I mash the key that triggered it a few times. So I’m pretty much stuck with the mouse. The fighter can pretty much just bash through things without fancy footwork, given enough healing items (and healing items are really cheap in this game), but there are some monsters that are patently designed to be handled with more finesse. The Goons, for example: big green guys with huge mallets. ²There was a Goon in QfG1. There, it was an invincible guard, something that ended the game abruptly without a combat sequence if it caught you. The fact that the hero is taking on whole packs of them now is a pretty clear sign to the fans of the series of how far he’s come. They hit hard, but their blows are kind of slow, and I could use that against them if I had access to the moves I’m supposed to have.

I wonder if the other classes will have it better or worse in that regard? On the one hand, in close combat, they’d be more reliant on dodging. On the other hand, they’re also more geared toward avoiding close combat.

I haven’t put in a lot of time on this game yet, so just a few comments on how it begins. Quest for Glory IV ended with the hero yanked away from the scene of victory by mysterious forces. Said forces turn out to be a wizard you met in the first game, who wants you to do some heroing over in Silmaria. It’s pretty well established by this time that every major region in this fantasy world is based on some piece of real geography and/or folklore. Silmaria is loosely based on ancient Greece and its mythology.

I’ve been spending most of my time so far just talking to NPCs in the main city, picking up plot threads and quests for later reference. It seems like the majority of the inhabitants of Silmaria are characters from the previous games, who seem to have just somehow coincidentally converged on this one spot from all around the globe while the hero was wandering. It’s the Mediterranean weather, no doubt. Even the owner of the bank turns out to have been a beggar from QfG1. Also, a substantial fraction of the NPCs are furries of one kind or another.

Playing this game years after the first four probably diminishes the impact of re-meeting these half-forgotten characters. And really, that was the case on its initial release, too, given how much it was delayed. But I suppose it’s all supposed to bring things full circle and summarize the entire five-game arc. It also lets you see how much the hero improved everyone’s lives. Some of them even help you in return. One of the first assignments you get in the game is to provide 1000 drachmas as an entry fee into the Rites of Rulership, the contest that will determine the next king of Silmaria. Well, a couple of NPCs from previous games front you half of that just for showing up. This sort of thing is usually unheard of in RPGs, but then, this isn’t exactly an RPG.

Anyway, talking to everyone about every possible conversation topic sometimes yields Experience Points. The thing is, I don’t know what Experience Points are for. They can’t be for gaining levels, as there are are no experience levels; as with the rest of the series, each individual skill and attribute is improved independently through practice. The manual seems to indicate that experience points in this game are just a measure of how much improvement you’ve made, but if so, how did I manage to get 160 XP while only raising one stat by one point? The game also has an adventure-game score, called “puzzle points”. The manual states that there’s a maximum of 1000 puzzle points in the game, but it doesn’t mention a limit for XP. I think I’ll be paying more attention to the score that’s completable.

The poll results are as follows:

• Genre: Adventure, with RPG a close second.
• Release date: 1986-2002, due to a tie.
• Middling obscurity. Adventures skew obscure, so this essentially means the least obscure titles I have left.
• No strong expectations as to quality.

Dragon Fire seems like it fits the bill pretty well. It’s the final episode of a prominent series of adventure/RPG hybrids from Sierra. It’s also one of the final generation of Sierra games, when they tried to stave off the reaper with experiments in 3D. Unlike their 2D games (ironically designated “3D animated adventures”), Sierra’s 3D adventures all seem to have had different engines and user interfaces: King’s Quest 8 was kind of Tomb Raider-like. Gabriel Knight 3 seems to be a first-person clue-hunting game reminiscent of the Tex Murphy games. Quest for Glory V is actually pretty close to the traditional 2D games; it uses 3D models for the characters, but it’s otherwise basically a point-and-click adventure game.

The Quest for Glory series was originally planned as a four-part story, with a system of correspondences to the elements and the cardinal directions and so forth, although the authors broke this by inserting an unplanned episode after the second. After episode 4, the series was cancelled, leaving the story without its planned ending. I was disappointed at this development at the time, but I got over it. So over it, in fact, that when they decided, years later, to do the fifth game after all, I didn’t have the same enthusiasm for the series. I bought it in due course, and tried it out just enough to be put off by the voice acting and the need to learn a new and non-obvious UI, and now here it is almost ten years later. This kind of thing is the reason I have the Stack in the first place.

There were some installation problems: the Quicktime 3 cutscenes didn’t work until I installed a fan-made patch. Thank goodness for fans who care enough to make patches! Even then, I had some problems with the sound popping, as if the software was breaking the audio data into pieces and then starting each piece a fraction of a second too soon. A forum suggested adjusting my sound card’s acceleration, and that worked. I’ll have to remember that solution; I have other old games that have the same problem. The graphics have the rough look of early 3D, the days of 640×480 software mode with no antialiasing. Distant objects are noticably distorted by the size of their pixels, but I’ll get used to it.

More on plot and gameplay tomorrow.

Not only have I triumphed over my xyloid adversary, I managed it on my first attempt and with no casualties. Honestly, X-Death (and his ghastly chimeric alternate form, Neo X-Death) isn’t the toughest boss in the game. There are several optional bosses as extra challenges for those who want them. The toughest of them all is Shinryu, a dragon found inside a chest near the end of the final dungeon. The first time I opened that box, Shinryu wiped out my entire party with a single tidal wave; the second time, I was prepared for that, but only lasted slightly longer. But after some more spectacular failures, I managed to defeat Shinryu by exploiting Mimes.

The Mime job is the last one acquired in the game, and is itself optional. Like many things in the game, it’s not obvious at first glance why it’s worthwhile: its sole special ability is the Mime command, which just repeats the action of another player character in combat. So it quite specifically doesn’t let you do anything new. Its big advantage is that miming costs no mana, even when it duplicates spell effects. So, I made a party entirely out of Mimes. By combining Red Mage and Summoner abilities, one of them could summon Bahamut, the strongest summonable in the game, twice in one turn. This was a very expensive cast, but once it was cast once, everyone just passed it along, resulting in eight Bahamut summons in every magically-accelerated combat round. Even facing this much damage, Shinryu managed to wipe out half my party before dying. There may well have been more efficient ways to win that fight, but this was my way, and it worked. It also worked beautifully on X-Death, who barely managed to scratch me at all before deresolving.

Let this be the epitaph of he who would dare control the terrible power of the Void: “Here Lies X-Death, Slaughtered by Mimes. He was a tree.” Not that there would be a grave to inscribe this on or anything. We can’t even put up a commemorative plaque at his place of death, as the fight took place in an extradimensional void.

After victory comes the longest ending sequence since The Return of the King. First there’s the denouement: the the party is escorted out of the Void by the spirits of the Dawn Warriors (“Your work is not yet finished…”), and there are assorted scenes of the world restoring itself, the crystals reforming, the various towns and castles that X-Death cast into the Void during chapter 3 reappearing, and so forth. Then there’s an epilogue set a year later, wherein we learn what the player characters have been doing, and get sepia-toned replays of scenes from the game. Apparently any party members who died in the last battle and were left behind in the Void get resurrected at this point, just in time to ride chocobos around behind the triumphant credits. When the credits are over, the final stats of each player character are displayed one by one, with a scrolling list of all the job abilities they learned. And when that’s finished scrolling, there’s another montage, presumably added for the Playstation version: it consists of scenes from the game re-created as pre-rendered FMV, using 3D models of the characters that look nothing at all like they do in the actual game.

In fact, they look a lot like the original concept art by Yoshitaka Amano, which also doesn’t look much like what’s in the game. There’s a phenomenon here that I don’t really understand. Amano, the chief character designer for the Final Fantasy series from its inception, does all these vaguely-Pre-Raphaelite-influenced ink-brush drawings of slender people with delicate facial features and elaborate costumes, and then someone has to try to squash that design into a pixellated super-deformed version that fits inside a single map tile. The first six installments of the series were like this, so it’s not as if he didn’t know what was going to happen.

Anyway, I’m done with it all now, and I’m glad I played it, even though I’ll probably have the battle theme going through my head for weeks. It’s definitely one of the best games in the series (of those I’ve played), and it’s all due to the story not strangling the gameplay for once. Tomorrow, Portal! I suspect that it will not take quite as long.

[23 January] Did I say “tomorrow”? Obviously I meant “next week”.

I’ll be brief. No, I haven’t finished the game. I’ve reached X-Death’s hideout in the void, where, confronted, he transforms back into his original form: a tree. Yes, a tree. No, this wasn’t a surprise. This gets into the pre-backstory: long ago, someone sealed another evil sorcerer’s soul in this tree, and over the centuries it corrupted and transformed it into the baddie we know. I’ve mentioned how the Dawn Warriors seemed to be the previous generation’s iteration of the same quest the player characters are on, but it seems that variations on the cycle have been going on for a long time. I expect that the final cutscene will contain hints that the evil still isn’t gone for good, and that future generations will face their own version of the story, making the title ironic in a new way.

Anyway, the reason I haven’t plunged ahead into the final battle (or, I suspect, final uninterrupted series of battles) is that it’s so tempting to just keep mastering jobs. It’s so easy now! New job levels come so fast in the end zone. In fact, I was so keen on getting job experience that I didn’t even notice that the encounters in this area don’t yield any normal experience points at all: if you enter with a party of level 50 characters, they’ll still be level 50 after they’ve mastered every job in the game. This strikes me as a clever compromise. In a well-balanced CRPG, it takes about as long to get through the story as it takes to get enough XP for the final battle. But there’s always some danger that the player will decide to spend more time on that treadmill, rendering the mid-game boring and the endgame too easy. Extra character experience comes at the price of a diminished player experience. My singleminded pursuit of job mastery could have easily led me down that road, but for this XP-free zone. Mastering all the jobs in the game mainly just makes your characters more versatile, not more powerful.

Except that versatility yields power. Some job skills allow for extremely potent combos. Give the Ninja’s dual-wield capability to the Berserker, and you get a character who can hold a warhammer in each hand.

I honestly thought I would reach the end of the game this weekend, but the last bits have been taking longer than I expected, largely due to a whole slew of trick bosses. Generally speaking, there’s an approach that makes each boss easy to beat, but it’s different for each boss. Maybe it’s vulnerable to a particular kind of elemental damage; maybe it’s invulnerable to spells and has to be taken down entirely through melee attacks, or vice versa; maybe it has an attack that can wipe out your entire party in one round if you’re not prepared with specific defensive magic. The number of possible gimmicks increases as your capabilities increase over the course of the game.

The scariest boss I’ve encountered so far is definitely Atomos, the final guardian of that force field generator back in world 2. This is one of those monsters that’s so freakish it doesn’t even look like a monster. It looks like a gateway to the swirling void, its frame irregularly decorated with spikes and fins and things. Its modus operandi is to bombard you with the Comet spell more or less constantly until someone dies, at which point it starts slowly drawing the corpse toward itself. Things don’t usually move around during combat, so it took me a while to notice that this was happening, and to convince myself that I wasn’t imagining it. When I did, I freaked out. The natural reaction here is to immediately resurrect the fallen as they fall, lest they disappear into Atomos’ inky maw. It’s also exactly the wrong thing to do. As long as Atomos is drawing someone in, it isn’t attacking. If you just concentrate on doing damage to Atomos, you can kill it before your comrade disappears, or, if that doesn’t work, distract it by deliberately killing another party member before resurrecting the guy who’s about to disappear.

The most unusual gimmick boss is Gogo, a jester-like entity who guards the crystal shard from which you learn the Mime job. Gogo insists that he’ll only step aside for a master of mimicry like himself. In combat mode, Gogo waits for you to do something, and then replies in kind: if you hit him, he hits you back for 9999 damage, and if you cast a spell — even a defensive or healing spell — he casts some heavy-duty attack spell. The key here is to take what he says seriously: he wants you to prove that you’re a master of mimicry. If you don’t attack him, he stands there and does nothing, so you have to do the same. After a minute or so of just standing there, he declares that you imitated him perfectly and leaves. This strikes me as very much a late-game gimmick — the designers’ way of saying “OK, so, by now you’ve proved that you can fight. So let’s try something else.” (I understand that some people actually have managed to kill Gogo by conventional means, but that would take more insanity than I can spare.)

Most of the summonables in this game are bosses first, and become summonable when you defeat them. In fact, this game is fairly explicit about the idea that things become summonable by dying. There are two dragons in the game who are friendly with the party, die plot-related deaths, and become summonables in the process; one of them sacrifices its life specifically for that reason. Even weirder, there’s a couple of bosses in this game who show up as summonables in later games. Atomos is one, although I haven’t yet played the games where you can summon it. The other is Gilgamesh, X-Death’s incompetent right-hand man, who runs away from the first few battles (making him the first boss in the series that you have to fight multiple times) and ultimately gets banished to the Void by X-Death. I first saw Gilgamesh in FF8, and was baffled: he just showed up out of the blue, replacing Odin as the guy who randomly appears and ends battles for you. But at least Odin looked like the Norse god; what did this guy in the ridiculous puffy red outfit have to do with the hero of Sumeria? I’m pleased to now know where he really came from.

Now, the endgame is basically a very long dungeon with a boss fight approximately every other room, and sometimes multiple boss fights in the same room. Most of them aren’t too gimmicky, and can be finished with general-purpose equipment and job assignments, but still, any boss fight I’m not expecting has the potential for an instant TPK. This makes for nervous exploration. I find myself running back to the save points a lot. But that’s okay, because that just means more ordinary random encounters, and in this area, ordinary random encounters yield grossly disproportionate amounts of job experience. This is the last chance to master jobs for the final battle, so the designers help the player along a little.