Monday, May 13, 2019 Dark Stone Ritual: Won! (with Summary and Rating)
Magic Tower I: Dark Stone Ritual
Germany
Motelsoft (developer and publisher)
Released in 1992 for Atari ST
Date Started: 9 April 2019
Date Finished: 12 May 2019
Total Hours: 29
Difficulty: Easy (2/5) Final Rating: 27 Ranking at time of posting: 154/327 (47%) Summary:
The prolific but amateurish Motelsoft levels up in this entry, with mechanics heavily inspired by Might and Magic III and IV.
A pre-defined party (you had to pay extra for a character editor)
explores a large world in a somewhat linear manner, piecing together
clues, solving puzzles, and ultimately defeating the tyrant Xoon.
Top-down outdoor exploration contrasts with first-person town and
dungeon exploration. Unfortunately, the combats are too easy, the
puzzles too simple, and the story too threadbare to make effective use
of the character classes, skills system, variety of spells, and variety
of equipment that the game largely copies from Might and Magic. A better game engine than a game.
****
Dark Stone Ritual ended up being larger and longer than I
expected. When you begin playing, the game does such a good job
confining the world that it seems smaller than it is. Hemmed in by
impassable terrain, water, and walls, the party must slowly acquire
passwords and items necessary to make incremental progress around the
world's major areas. Eventually, the party finds some teleporters that
make navigation easier, as do the "Townportal" and "Caveportal" spells.
As you slowly acquire the skills necessary to navigate in forests and
swamps, climb mountains, and swim, the full world opens up to you, and
you can explore every square for the items and clues necessary to reach
the end of the game.
Ritual is far more linear than I expected at the beginning. Most
of what I thought were "side-quests" turned out to be steps along the
main quest, all funneling into one or two key items or pieces of
information. For example, to win the game you must first find the Dark
Stone, which is in the dungeon of Lunos. To pass a certain point in
Lunos, at least one of your party members must be a member of the Dark
Stone Sect, which you can join by visiting a hut on a section of land to
the southwest. To get to this area, you have to use a teleporter in a
section of land to the southeast, which in turn requires using a
teleporter in a small compound on the starting continent. To enter this
compound, you have to find a password (RUHE) by interpreting four
messages in the dungeon Zappos. To enter the dungeon Zappos, you need an
invitation, and that's as far as I can trace it back because I forgot
where I got the invitation. But you get the idea.
Combat remained easy throughout the game, which discouraged spell
experimentation (rarely did spells do more damage than a physical
attack) and trivialized all the time I spent analyzing inventory. Only
thrice did I have to fine-tune my attacks in "strategic" combat, and
none gave me any trouble once I made that decision.
The nature of enemy encounters was odd throughout. You find enemies at
fixed locations on the overland map and very rarely at fixed locations
in dungeons. There is also a fixed number of enemies wandering each town
map. Some dungeons have no combats, and those that do never have more
than one or two. This paucity of combat makes the dungeons feel rather
empty, and the very light navigation puzzles (a few switches, hidden
doors, teleporters, and pits that you have to cast "Jump" to get over)
don't do much to fill them.
Nothing really evolves in the way of a "story," just a succession of
NPCs and enemies that you meet and defeat on the way to the final
confrontation with Xoon. Because of these weaknesses, I ended up liking
the game less towards the end than towards the beginning. In my first
entry on Ritual, I was clearly impressed by the mechanics. I
still am, to some degree, but the developers made a somewhat boring,
basic game with those mechanics. A lot of it feels unfinished--in
particular, more than half the skills are unused, and the dungeons and
towns are filled with locked doors that can never be unlocked.
Nonetheless, it is an improvement from Sandor and Seven Horror's, and thus bodes well for the many Motelsoft titles we will encounter in the future.
A few things that I otherwise didn't get a chance to cover along the way:
The game culminated on a small compound on a northern island. A guardian demanded a password. What she really wanted was a pass phrase, compiled from five words given by residents in little huts in exchange for certain rare stones. The stones, in turn, came from other residents to whom I brought "stone plates" found scattered about the island. The full phrase, for posterity's sake, is BRENUM BRANUM KANUM LUZE LEI. (Thanks again to Buck for helping with this.)
This allowed me access to Xoon's dungeon, which is called "Dark Stone Verlies." I verified later that the "Caveportal" spell will take you there if you just know the name, meaning that a second-time player could skip a lot of stuff and just warp to the endgame.
The dungeon is the only one that has multiple levels (three) and the only one that doesn't remember your progress if you leave and return. There was only one combat, early in the first level, with a guardian of Xoon's named Morok (I'm sure that name was in previous Motelsoft titles). It was one of the battles that I had to fight in "strategic" mode to win. In "strategic" mode, you can position your characters around individual enemies and target them, ensuring that you can reduce their numbers faster. ("Quick" combat targets enemies randomly.) You also get more attacks per round. Between the advantages of strategic combat and the "Full Heal" spell that I'd recently acquired, the battle was quite easy.
The dungeon's second level is one of the largest in the game, full of secret doors, teleporters, traps, and a bunch of pits to jump. Eventually, you find your way to the third level and the mystifyingly anti-climactic encounter with Xoon, if it is Xoon. I'm not sure I haven't mistranslated or misunderstood something. The climax begins with a black-faced man, flanked by two women, saying: "Ihr wollt meinen kopf, ich weiss. Nun gut wenn ihr unbedingt haben müsst. Ha ha ha. Dann sollt ihr Xoons kopf auch bekommen."
The scene then dissolves away, the party is teleported back near to the entrance, and in their inventory is Xoon's head. I translate his text as, "You want my head, I know. Well, if you have to have it, you should also get Xoon's head," suggesting that he himself is not Xoon. It's worth noting that the game uses the same portrait for the master of the Dark Stone sect earlier in the game (although it also re-uses a lot of portraits). I wondered if joining the Dark Stone sect and finding the Dark Stone itself are optional, and that doing so leads to an "easy" ending where the master kills Xoon for you. This is partly suggested by an item in the game's hint file that says, "If you have the Dark Stone, the rest is a children's game!" I tested this theory by loading a saved game from before I had the Dark Stone and using "Caveportal" to go directly to the dungeon. (I had to buff with fountains to win the first-level battle.) But no, the same thing happens even if you don't have the Dark Stone.
Whatever the case, the game ends when you return Xoon's head to the Game Master back in the dungeon Glorys. The Game Master expresses astonishment that you managed to kill Xoon, who was supposed to have nine lives, and then suggests you save your game for Part 2.
In a GIMLET, the game earns:
That gives us a final score of 27. Motelsoft is making better, more complex games in 1992, and letting itself be influenced by the right titles from bigger developers, but it still lacks a certain sense of balance and polish. Despite the promised sequel, it doesn't look like there was ever a Magic Tower II. We'll see them again this year with Arcan unless I happen to pick up Projekt Terra (1991) or Sandor II (1991) on my "old" list first. © and test by Chester Bolingbroke. Link: to the original report of The CRPG Addict back to the beginning back to the Cover Stories Copyright Info |