#spell out your intentions clearly from the outset

[chaoticbooklesbian]

We have reached the "over-analyzing innocuous interactions" part of the crush, everybody cheer!

A few weeks ago, they told me what they do for work, and I called it sexy in a way that could be interpreted as either flirting or friendly ribbing. (It was both, really.) Any time they've mentioned their job since, they've called it their sexy job, and we arrive at the bit that I'm over-analyzing: Are they flirting back or are they engaging with the friendly ribbing part????? Damn my compulsive plausible deniability! Damn it to hell!

[gunnerpalace]

Why do you antis use Orihime's jealousy of Rukia & Ichigo’s bond to justify the legitimacy of their ship? They say things like "even Orihime can see why Ichigo and Rukia are the real deal", as if it's not perfectly normal for a teenage girl to feel insecure and to have preconceived notions. I could be talking to some random guy and people might assume we're together. Never mind if he was one of my closest friends. People jump to wrong conclusions all the time. Why can't Orihime?

Like the problem with this argument is that people tend to ignore the context around it, which is the depression Orihime was experiencing during the arrancar arc.

She was feeling useless, insecure, and left behind. She didn’t think she contributed enough in the SS arc, and then she failed to protect Tatsuki and Chad against the espada on top of that. And so, her feelings of inadequacy towards Rukia were not a single, isolated incident (if they were, that would have given a lot more weight to this argument). Instead, it was just one thing on a long, collective list.

It’s important to remember that she was in a dark place mentally at this point, and felt inadequate and worthless in virtually every aspect of life—making all of her self-perceived shortcomings seem magnified, to the point that she focuses on things that *gasp* aren’t actually there, or anywhere near as bad as they may seem to be to her.

Because her being useless isn’t a fact. Her not being able to measure up to Rukia isn’t a fact. All of these things don’t exist as actual concrete truths in the manga; they exist only in her mind. They are insecurities that she has made up in her head.

How do we know this? Because Kubo immediately reassures her/the reader that she has no reason to feel the way she does every single time she expresses these feelings of inadequacy aloud. When she worries that she can’t contribute enough and only ever gets in the way, Rukia refutes that and reassures Orihime that her role in the SS arc was vital and important. When she expresses jealousy towards Rukia, Rangiku refutes that and reassures Orihime that she is special to Ichigo in her own way.

Clearly, Kubo was not trying to tell us “yeah, Orihime’s right, she really is fuckin useless and can’t measure up to Rukia.” This is basic storytelling. He set up how Orihime’s lack of self-worth is affecting the way she perceives things, and then he’s spelling it out through his characters that what she is perceiving is all in her head and not actually true.

Honestly, it’s funny that people even try to use her jealousy as proof of an IR romance when it’s immediately followed up with Rangiku basically saying, “silly girl, you have no reason to feel this way.” Do you see how that blows a massive hole in this argument? That it’s immediately struck down via Kubo speaking through Rangiku?

Again, it’s not really not surprising that Orihime would feel that way given the context of the arc—her growth arc. Her feelings of jealousy were not a testament of an IR romance, they were a testament of how negatively Orihime was feeling about herself at the time. Kubo did not write this to prove that Orihime really is useless and could never measure up to Rukia in Ichigo’s eyes; he wrote it as a stepping stone for Orihime’s development, to show how she was once at a low point and developed

The thing is, when she expresses the jealousy towards Rukia, her fear is that she would never be able to affect Ichigo the way Rukia can, or “get him out of his funks” the way she did….And then she does just that in the HM arc. When Ichigo’s not fighting like his usual self and is about to be defeated by Grimmjow, Orihime calls out to him and completely rejuvenates him with just a few short words. That’s the effect she has on him. And it proves her insecurities totally false.

Immediately, I don’t appreciate being used as some random scratching post for opinions I have never expressed. I am not the representative leader of “you antis,” nor have I ever claimed to be. So I’m not impressed by this from the outset.

I am further unimpressed by it being done anonymously, rather than some effort being made to have some kind of real dialogue.

With that said, I am unaware of anyone having advanced the argument that Orihime is inferior to Rukia simply on the basis of not being able to handle pressure. She is, when all is said and done, indeed merely a 16-year-old. I am also unaware that anyone has advanced Orihime’s breakdown to Rangiku as being the sole substantiation of Orihime’s understanding of Ichigo and Rukia’s relationship. If anyone has, their understanding is very limited.

However, so is yours.

First, Orihime’s feelings of jealousy were not a product of her state of mind during the Arrancar arc. She clearly demonstrated her knowledge of Ichigo and Rukia’s importance to one another when she tried to dissuade Ichigo from going to Soul Society. She also clearly knew and said aloud that Rukia was important to Ichigo during Soul Society. This is a matter of record, and puts paid your notion that her feeling of jealousy arose from “depression.” She was already possessed of it long before.

While I would agree that it was probably a complex of feeling inadequate and feeling jealous that lead to her so-called “depression” (really more of a funk) by the Arrancar arc, you have the chain of causality wrong. Her jealousy did not arise then, it had clearly crystallized by then.

Second, just because Rangiku (or any character) says something, doesn’t make it true, valid, or reflective of authorial intent. Yammy calls Orihime trash. Kubo wrote that. Does it mean Kubo is speaking through Yammy and telling us that Orihime is trash? No. You would call that absurd, and it is. But it’s exactly what you’re doing with Rangiku’s dialogue. The words belong to her, and her alone, and she is a character with her own biases and incomplete knowledge. Claiming that Rangiku’s speech is “special” and privileged over all others is ridiculous.

Third, Rukia is also possessed of incomplete information. She does not seem to know that Orihime went to Soul Society “to protect Kurosaki-kun,” and not to rescue her. This is substantiated by Rukia’s point of view after being grievously injured by Aaroniero. Rukia is a kind enough person that even if she did know, she likely wouldn’t hold it against Orihime, but there is no reason for we, the readers, to agree with that.

Fourth, just because you’re sad and in a funk doesn’t justify getting into a situation where all your friends would’ve died if not for a convenient plot twist, which is precisely what Orihime did in going along with Ulquiorra to Hueco Mundo. Everyone would have died had the Captains not arrived, which she had no way of knowing would happen. Everyone went on a suicide mission because of her and her choices (and further, they all played into Aizen’s hands.) Either she would’ve watched Ichigo get chopped up by Tesla or he would’ve gone Full Hollow then and there instead, with who knows what outcome.

It could be argued that, again, she’s a 16-year-old, and couldn’t have foreseen this chain of events. However, ignorance is no defense before the law, and it isn’t a particularly strong defense of character either.

Fifth, she was also questioning whether Ichigo was a monster and was frightened of him, until Nel basically told her that something was wrong with her and she should cheer for Ichigo no matter what. So if she “rejuvenated” Ichigo, she was herself only “rejuvenated” by Nel. Really then, isn’t it Nel who perked Ichigo up? This is in turn solidified by the events above the dome of Las Noches, where Orihime utterly fails to inspire, which is repeated again and again later in the manga.

Anyway, to my knowledge, nobody really uses any of this to substantiate IR. They use it as an indictment of Orihime. The two are correlated, but separate, and do not particularly rely on one another.

So my answer to your question of “Why…” is that nobody does that. Nobody substantiates IR on the basis of Orihime’s views. However, you have an incomplete understand of Orihime’s views yourself, and even a full accounting of her mental context does not justify what she does and the risk she puts everyone in. That risk is part of the main body of anti-Orihime sentiment, but there need be no connection between being anti-Orihime and pro-IR. Someone who stanned Uryuu or Chad or Renji could be just as mad about it, because she screwed all of them just as hard.

The reason why that risk is viewed as an indictment of Orihime is precisely because she does not grow from these events.

She says she has in the Xcution and Thousand-Year Blood War arcs, but each time she fails yet again. She cannot overcome Tsukishima’s fake memories (and neither can Chad, whereas Byakuya can—Byakuya’s trust in and love of Ichigo is clearly greater than either of theirs), and her shield doesn’t work in Yhwach’s throne room after her long mental speech about catching up to Ichigo.

When the chips are truly down, as they were when Numb Chandelier was threatening to mind-control their classmates into raping Tatsuki until she committed suicide, Orihime never again rises to the occasion.

That she had already done so in Tatsuki’s case (and seemed ready to do so again for Uryuu against Moeh) is what brings her repeated failures in Ichigo’s case into stark relief.

Kubo was indeed saying something through basic storytelling with this repeating motif, I would agree. But it’s not something you would like to hear.

Anyway, if you want to debate this point further, you can do it with this post. I’m not interested in receiving more messages like these in my inbox.

[xseedgames]

Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection - Localization Blog #4

Can you hear it? A voice, booming and boisterous, blowing in upon the cool winds of autumn. A voice that beckons you to come sit a spell and play a good ol’ videogame. “They don’t make ‘em like this no more,” it says. “Well...most don’t. That’s why we need to sell a bunch’a copies, so they’ll get right to making Zwei 3! Yes siree, with Falcom’s storied lineage of action RPGs, it’d be a slam dunk! Ghahahaha!” That voice...is my voice, broad as the sea and hearty as a meal that consists solely of potatoes and slabs of meat.

That’s right, true believers, it’s Nick, here once again to share with you the myriad fascinations of working in videogame localization. If you’ve been keeping up, this is the fourth blog I’ve written about the upcoming release of Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection. The first entry gave a basic rundown of what the game is like and what you can expect from it, while the second entry went into more depth about the localization work and the nuances of character writing. The third entry was a progress report, detailing where we were in the QA cycle and why we’d be missing our summer release date.

Today, I’d like to tell you a story: the tale of how Zwei: II ended up with the expanded English voice acting it now boasts. Although this news has been known ever since we officially announced the game, I haven’t seen much discussion surrounding it, but the process of how “let’s add voice acting” went from pie-in-the-sky thought to reality is one I think you’ll find fascinating.

See, the interesting thing isn’t that we added English dubbing to Zwei: II. We weren’t able to secure the rights for the original Japanese voices, so it was pretty much a given we were going to do a dub. No, the most interesting part is that the dub adds a LOT more voicework than was present in the original. Why did we do that? How did we decide what to dub? And how much more is there, exactly? This and more I shall unfold for you, dear reader!

Zwei: II was designed without voice acting in its story scenes, and it holds up perfectly well that way, as classic RPGs do. But, that said, Zwei’s story is very driven by its outsized personalities. The characters really sell the scenes, and while I wrote for each of the characters in such a way as to accomplish that without the need for voice acting, their sometimes-cartoonish gusto and theatricality seemed like they’d be even more colorful when brought to life by VAs. I talked with the big boss, Ken, about the prospect, and he told me to put together a script so we could have the studio price out how much it would cost us.

To be honest, I’m still kind of surprised Ken was open to it. After all, Zwei: II isn’t a console release of a modern title – it’s a PC release of an older title. Maybe that goes to show how well-received Japanese games have been on PC in the last several years. Personally, I think a well-received game like Cold Steel leading the charge as far as “adding additional voice acting to a PC port” did a lot to open the door for a more modest title like Zwei to get a significant bump in voice acting. But success here provided my first challenge: putting together a script.

Now that adding more voice acting was on the table, the question then became, “Okay, so what do we actually voice?” All the battle stuff was covered at a bare minimum due to the fact that it was in the Japanese voice script, so the natural answer was, “Let’s just voice all the main story.” That’s a reasonable target, and not exceedingly difficult to pull from the full game script, since many of the main story scenes are positioned just before and after the game’s major boss battles. I began to assemble a “story scenes” voice script with all the scenes I thought most essential to conveying the game’s narrative, breaking it down scene by scene. After handing off a first draft to the studio and getting their estimate, I was given the green light, since it had apparently come in under what we were expecting.

But of course, ever being one to press my luck, I said, “Wellllll...actually there are a couple more scenes I COULD include!” And with a resigned sigh from Ken, I went back in and added a few scenes I had opted to leave on the cutting room floor during my first draft. As things stand, the new voice script’s coverage of story events isn’t perfect – there’s still one boss battle that has its before/after scenes unvoiced (I chose that one to drop because I felt that what was expressed there is also expressed in other voiced scenes well enough), but such are the choices one has to make at the crossroads of idealism and budgetary limitations.

The whole “voicing scenes before and after boss battles” approach worked well because it set up a good amount of consistency as to when players could expect to hear something voiced. It also, by the very nature of the scenes chosen, is really good at building the personalities of the game’s antagonists – which is helpful since they do a lot to spur Ragna and Alwen’s growth.

The unfortunate downside to my scene-selecting methodology is that I didn’t get to include many scenes outside of those. There are only two voiced scenes that aren’t tied to before/after boss encounters – one in which Ragna talks about his past (which I thought gave good insight into his character), and a key one at the very start of the game in which Ragna discovers that Alwen is, in fact, a vampire, and they have their first long discussion about their blood contract and how Ragna wants to be equal partners. That’s such a defining scene that sets up both protagonists perfectly for everything that is to come that there was never any doubt in my mind that I wanted that one voiced.

At this point, let’s stop for a moment and examine the script. The original Japanese script was 808 lines. The number of lines in the new voice script, however, clocked in at 2807. That’s basically 2000 newly voiced lines, all story. And while it may not seem gigantic in light of a game like Trails of Cold Steel, you’ll certainly be able to feel the presence of the voice acting as you play through the game. Ragna and Alwen in particular saw massive increases: from 88 and 89 to 724 and 548, respectively. We even picked up an entirely new character who had no lines in the original Japanese voice script but did factor into several of the story scenes I had selected!

When casting, I conferred with both Tom and Kris to get their general impressions, and to solicit suggestions in cases where I didn’t have any particular VA in mind. Zwei: II is a game that wears its heart on its sleeve, so I was casting with an ear toward a “Saturday Morning Cartoon” feel – expressive voices that have a touch of exaggeration in them. It was a different feel than we’d chased when casting for Trails of Cold Steel, but it got us the sound we were looking for.

Recording took six days, with a stream of VAs coming in to lend us their talent. John accompanied me for the first couple days, while Tom helped in the latter half, both lending some much-welcomed aid by helping me keep track of any changes we made to lines during recording while I was focusing on the line deliveries. To level with you a bit here, I’ve never been the most organized person, so the voice recording process, with its focus on having everything triple-checked and accounted for, has always felt pretty daunting to me. After all, there’s always that cold dread that you’ll have an actor in the booth and suddenly, some problem with the script files will pop up, costing you precious time when every minute has value. Thankfully, there were no complications with Zwei’s recording – it was actually a pretty smooth, pleasant time (though very busy). Some of our VAs I had worked with before, so seeing them again and trying them in different-sounding roles was fun. Other VAs I was meeting for the first time, and I enjoyed getting to see them at work, as well as seeing what kind of vocal ranges they could pull off (always helpful when we’re brainstorming voice casts for future projects).

Our voice director was someone I’d met before, and in fact someone I requested by name after discerning how deep his knowledge ran concerning things of the nerdy persuasion. For Zwei, I didn’t want to take a chance on a director that only had a surface-level understanding of anime – I wanted to be able to throw out oddly specific requests like “Play it more like X from the series Y!” and have them understand the voicing intent behind that and translate it into instructions the VAs could make sense of.

Talking with him over the course of the project was a mile-a-minute ride, but among all the really nerdy stuff we talked about, one common thread that really stuck with me is his identification of Zwei as a “pulp story.” Before then, I’d approached Zwei in my mind from that anime-centric perspective it so clearly embodies, but our conversations got me wondering how, as a fan of pulp-style stuff, I’d never consciously made that connection before. In another universe where Zwei wasn’t a Japanese videogame, it feels like it’d be a natural fit as a weekly radio serial. The character influences I mentioned in my second blog post all led to “pulp” too, when I followed the strings back.

Back at work, I reviewed all the voice files and marked the ones that needed filters applied, as you do when, for instance, someone is talking to a character telepathically or is possessed by a demon (y’know, your general RPG happenings), and we got them into the game. There’s something of a sense of trepidation that comes when you finally drop all those voices into the game proper. You hold your breath, thinking, “That was so much work... I reeeeeeally hope this sounds good!” Fortunately, our VAs didn’t disappoint, and hearing some of my favorite scenes brought to life through performance really helped sell the emotion of the scenes, just as I’d hoped at the outset.

Now, maybe you’re not fond of dubs. Or maybe you’re a purist, wanting to experience the game without the addition of a bunch of voice acting that wasn’t in the original. Believe me, I totally understand you. Thankfully, the voice volume is on a separate slider, so you can crank it down and read through at your own pace, with the voices you imagine the characters to have. That kind of experience is fun too, I think, and I’m interested in what those of you who play it both ways think about the ways in which the dub shapes how one perceives the story and characters.

Of course, for you fans of RPG dubs, I’m also interested to discover which characters will become fan-favorites and which lines will be the most entertaining and memorable. Our programmer, Sara, has even gone above and beyond with filled-out lip flap for the dubbed scenes! In the original game, there’s a brief lip-flap that’s tied to the scroll-out speed of text in a character’s text box. What that means in practice is that their mouths move for about a second while the text is displaying, then once it’s all there on screen, their mouth doesn’t move anymore. It’s a perfectly sensible setup for a game without voiced story lines, but in the cases where lines were voiced, I wanted the lip flap to continue as long as the voiced line was still playing. From the sound of it, it took some real doing, but the lip flap does indeed now track to the length of the voice clip in cases where story lines are voiced. It might seem to be a minor detail, but I think it’s details like this that help make the experience feel well integrated and authentic.

In any case, you won’t have to wonder too much longer what the game sounds like, because it’s finally out in less than a week, with a Trueblood vampire-approved release date of October 31st. I hope you’ll enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed working on it. After all...everyone could use a little more PASSION in their souls!

[ciathyzareposts]

Game 335: Prophecy of the Shadow (1992)

               Prophecy of the Shadow

United States

Strategic Simulations, Inc. (developer and publisher)

Released in 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 24 June 2019               SSI began as a wargame company, and their best games–principally the Gold Box series and the Wizard’s Crown series–have always reflected those roots. Nonetheless, by 1992, the company seemed to be on a mission to dominate, or at least compete in, every RPG sub-genre. Eye of the Beholder and its sequel were their answers to the first-person, real-time category, while Shadow Sorcerer took inspiration from British axonometric titles. Neverwinter Nights had virtually no competition online, and they were entering the console realm with Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun. The company’s streak of 22 published RPGs between 1991 and 1994 has never been broken on the personal computer. 

Prophecy of the Shadow is so blatantly the company’s answer to the Ultima VI that it’s a wonder they didn’t license the “look and feel” from Lord British the way they did for Questron. It’s got the same mostly-top-down-but-slightly-oblique perspective, the same row of icons with keyboard backups (even most of the icon symbols are the same), the same targeting of enemies and objects with a cursor, the same keyword-based NPC dialogue, and the same continuous scrolling movement through a landscape that desperately wants you to think it’s not just tiles but really is.            

Character creation even has some Ultima IV-style questions.

          But just like Ultima clones from independent developers with a lot fewer resources, Prophecy of the Shadow lacks a lot of Ultima’s complexity. To start, you control only one character. The box puts an exclamation point after the game’s single-character nature, as if that by itself is a good thing, as if other developers were sitting around thinking, “Gee, it never occurred to us to allow the player to control just one guy.” It also greatly simplifies the inventory–the protagonist can wield one object at a time and can wear nothing at all–and it runs dialogue by feeding the keywords to you. (In many ways, it’s more like Origin’s Times of Lore, which used an early version of the U6 interface, than Ultima VI.) Whether by intention or limitation, it’s clearly geared towards the RPG novice.            

The game map shows a small world. I already explored the northwest island.

            None of this means that it’s a bad game. There’s always a place for an easy, familiar title telling a new story. Here, the story is probably the game’s best feature. It calls upon familiar tropes without being overly cliched or obviously based on a single source. Told mostly in the form of the naive protagonist’s journals, the backstory casts the character as an apprentice mage in a world where magic is outlawed. In infancy, he washed ashore on the island of Bannerwick, which I gather is part of the larger kingdom of Ylowinn. This is a world in decline. Every season, the crops get smaller and plants go extinct. Mines are exhausted of ore. Civilization itself seems to be coming apart at the seams; when the local ferry to the mainland breaks down, no one bothers to repair it. A princess named Elspeth was supposed to take charge on her 18th birthday, but she mysteriously disappeared, leaving the land in the hands of the regent Cam Tethe, who blames a conspiracy of mages for the disappearance and spends more time hunting them than searching for Elspeth.             

An NPC delivers part of the backstory.

         The townsfolk distrusted a baby who managed to survive the sea unscathed, so it was left to the local healer, Larkin–himself regarded with suspicion–to raise and tutor the child. The child of course becomes you. You’ve had so little contact with the outside world all your life that when you head into town at the beginning of the game, no one knows who you are.           

“Yeah! I hope you find . . . him!”

         In the game’s opening moments–so sudden as to be comical, particularly with the accompanying scream–Larkin is assassinated by a thrown dagger, leaving the protagonist to bury him in the back yard. With his dying breath, Larkin tells his ward to “get the text of the prophecy from Berrin,” as “it must go to the council in Silverdale,” which is on the mainland.           

The main character’s master dies in the opening scenes.

                   In these opening moments and almost all the NPC dialogues that follow, we see that Prophecy of the Shadow was on the cutting edge of what would become the early- and mid-1990’s worst trend: the use of full-motion video (FMV) instead of computer animation (or just static graphics). Naturally, the subjects of these animations were whoever was sitting around the developers’ offices and not actual actors. Blessedly, it only seems to have been about five years before developers realized this was not the wave of the future, and I don’t remember seeing FMV after about 1998, though of course there are a lot of titles I haven’t played.           

A little FMV upon entering the inn.

         Character creation is a simple process of giving your name and sex. A few role-playing questions set your initial values for health, magic, and agility. Health and magic are both attributes and pools of points, and the maximum goes up with successful actions (swinging weapons and casting spells), which is a bit different than the Ultima titles. These attributes automatically regenerate, albeit slowly, as long as you have food. If you run out of magic points, you can still cast spells, but they draw directly from your health.

A row of icons–all, blessedly, with keyboard equivalents–defines how you interact with the world: look, attack, cast a spell, enter, drop, search, use, give, and rest. “Search” on Larkin’s door mat revealed an iron key to his house, but all I can do there is spend the night.              

Using the L)ook command–and learning a new piece of vocabulary.

           As I began the game, the passages through the forest around Larkin’s house naturally guided me to his neighbor, Berrin, who related that rumors have already spread that I killed Larkin. He gave me the key to Larkin’s workshop but otherwise wouldn’t help me (including giving me the prophecy) until I could prove my innocence. Behind Berrin’s house, incidentally, are two gravestones–his wife and son–both “killed by guardsmen.” I wonder if that bit of backstory will later come out.

Larkin’s workshop was accessed through an underground hatch near the house. There, I found a book of spells and a “lead catalyst.” You have to be holding a catalyst in your hands to cast a spell, and I guess lead is the lowest-level catalyst. The book had four spells: “Incendiere” is a basic fire blast that strikes one target; “Curare” is a healing spell; and “Memoria” and “Repetere” are a pair of mark/recall spells that let you designate a point and later warp back to it.

Using the game map as a guide, I eventually made my way to town, where I found about half a dozen NPCs, including some generic “peasants.” You converse by selecting keywords on the left side of the screen. As the NPCs respond, more keywords appear. Today, the local news was that the sheriff had caught Robin One-Eye, a famed bandit whose gang lives in the woods north of town. I was able to visit Robin One-Eye in jail but he just taunted me.          

Getting lore from a local. Where did a bunch of programmers get access to so many actors who look like unwashed peasants with bad facial hair?

        I also heard some talk of Larf the Terrible, a gnome wizard who lives in a tower to the east. There was a note in Larkin’s workshop that a circle of mages expelled Larf for necromancy. I suspect that either Robin or Larf is responsible for Larkin’s death, and I’ll somehow need to prove it to get off the island.

The local shop had some weapons and other items that were outside my price range, although the innkeeper was willing to pay me 10 silver for odd jobs. I repeated this option about 8 times before he finally said he had nothing more for me to do. I bought a sling and a torch but spent most of my money on food.

Outside of town, I started encountering bandits. Attacking is a matter of hitting “A” (or the attack button) and then moving the cursor to your foe. If you have a melee weapon equipped, you can only target the 8 squares around you. (Well, technically you can target your own square, but the game just admonishes you not to attack yourself.) If you have a missile weapon, you can aim anywhere in the visible window. Missile weapons are tricky because enemies will typically move out of the square before the missile reaches them, meaning that you really want to attack the square in the direction they’re going. It strikes me that missile weapons are going to be mostly useless in this game. There simply isn’t enough distance in the view window, and enemies close the gap too fast.

You can cast a spell instead of attacking by using the spell catalyst–or, if it’s already equipped, hitting the M)agic button. At the outset, I only had “Incendiere,” which kills most enemies in a couple of castings, but two castings cost 20 magic points out of the 45 I started with.

If you choose to fight with a weapon, your health occasionally goes up a point. If you cast spells, your magic pool occasionally goes up a point. This is the game’s approach to “character development.”          

My health increases as I kill a bandit.

         Slowly, I explored the rest of the island. It turned out there were two major indoor areas to explore: the bandit camp and Larf’s tower. You need a rope from the former to access the latter. I needed a password to enter the bandit camp, which required me to trudge back to town and buy Robin One-Eye a bottle of white zinfandel before he would tell it to me: ZINFANDEL.            

Why does zinfandel have such a bad reputation? I rather like it.

         The bandit camp was one small level and one large level. I had to kill a bunch of bandits. I rather like the game’s search function. If you wander over to a chest, a dead body, or just an interesting area, you hit S)earch, and the game tells you what you find. It’s rather tolerant in its distance allowance, so you don’t have to hit the command every step. A lot of what you find are notes, journals, and other writings that flesh out the game’s lore.

The bandit camp held a few healing potions, a rope, a rapier (better than the starting dirk), a magic potion, and several black potions. The black potions are acid that damage you when you drink them, so I’m not sure what good they do. Late in the dungeon, I fought and killed a “mage killer,” who was carrying a “death warrant” for Larkin.              

The “T,” of course, probably stands for “Tethe.”

            A book called The Joy of Pies held a treasure map that directed me to a specific square from one of the stone heads on the island. There, I found a chest with several pieces of jewelry.

By now, I was running up against the inventory limit, which dogged me the rest of the session. It became clear that you want to drop most items as soon as their utility is done, including keys and notes. Actually, a better idea is probably selling them to the general store, because the store keeps sold items in their inventory and will re-sell them to you in case you made a mistake. The problem is that you constantly have to leave locations and trudge back to the general store. I ended up selling most of the black potions because I couldn’t find any use for them and they were preventing me from picking up other things. I also sold all the jewelry I found, assuming it was for that purpose.              

A few too many things in my backpack.

           Showing the death warrant to the sheriff cleared my name, and showing it to Berrin prompted him to give me the prophecy on a vellum scroll. I read the prophecy. Larkin’s notes indicted that “most of it has already come to pass.”            

And it shall come to pass that in the day, the end of all days, a Shadow will come forth from the wilderness. The Lord of the Shadows, the Bringer of Darkness, the Master of Death. At his hand, Evil will arise anew. Green fields will wither, and a plague will smite the land. Cry mothers for your children, for when you see these things, know ye that the fate of the world hangs in the Balance.

              It’s probably going to turn out that Cam Tethe is the Lord of the Shadows, but it would be nice if the game had some kind of twist on the standard template, like maybe it’s me (I did kind-of come out of the wilderness). Either way, I had to get off the island. Since the ferry was broken, I turned to the only place I hadn’t explored: Larf’s tower. It sits in a ruined heap on the coast, near a graveyard where a ghost wanders. I tried talking to him, but it didn’t work.           

Maybe later, I’ll find a “Seance” spell.

         A rope gets you into the basement of the tower, which turned out to consist of five levels. Every one is dark, so you need a light source. The game keeps track of torches as a statistic, along with food and silver, rather than as inventory items, but you need a flint and steel in your inventory to light them. An alternative is to purchase a lamp and lamp oil, the latter of which is also tracked as a statistic. It would be a waste of inventory space, I gather, to have both a lamp and flint and steel.           

Arriving in the dungeon.

         The levels of Larf’s tower were full of evidence of Larf’s macabre experiments, including zombies that I had to kill. His notes indicated that he was more than a necromancer: he was a serial killer, having captured living subjects for many of his rituals. These notes also said that he eventually created an undead butler to serve him, but the creature went insane, stole something called a “translocation rod,” and hid it in a lower level of the tower. Larf was apparently making plans to destroy the creature when it attacked him in his bed at night, killing him and leaving his severed head behind.            

Later, I killed the butler, Jeffers, with fireballs.

          This scene is graphically illustrated, and it’s worth making a note that the graphics are detailed enough that they can show rather than just tell evocative stories like this. This hasn’t been true of many games up until now, but it’s good to see it becoming more common. We’ll of course see another murder scene with the same level of gruesome detail in the upcoming Ultima VII.         

The gruesome scene.

         I eventually killed the butler–the hardest creature in the game so far–with a few “Incendiere” spells. I recovered the rod, which allows transportation to the mainland when used between a couple of stones northwest of the tower. I also had the option to take Larf’s head. I have it for now, but I ‘m not sure if there’s any long-term use for it. Other treasure included a better catalyst (platinum), a magic weapon called a “Dirk of Sharpness,” and a scroll that gave me the “Inlustare” (light) spell.             

Now I guess I can eschew both lamps and torches.

          I used the rod in the right location and found myself transported to the mainland. I explored a while before concluding that I was in the northern part of the map, near the town of Glade. Larkin insisted that the prophecy had to get to Silverdale, to my southeast, but I’m tempted to go to the northern tip to the town of Malice and work my way systematically down to Silverdale.

So far, it’s been an inoffensive little game, but I wonder if there was really much of a market for a “lite” RPG. Were there legions of gamers in 1992 thinking, “I’d really like to play role-playing games, but they’re just too complicated“? I guess we’ll see when we check the reviews. I can’t imagine this one will take more than three entries, but perhaps it has some tricks up its sleeve.

Time so far: 4 hours

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-335-prophecy-of-the-shadow-1992/