Summary
: Welcome to Virtual Hydlide 64 Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage. It is not a good game, but we will be playing it anyway.
: The first thing we need to do is name our character. The default name is Alaron, so that’s what I’ll go with.
: He looks more like a “Fuckface” or a “Dipshit”.
: Or a “Disappointment”.
: You know your game is quality when it opens with the first two panels of Loss over seven years before Loss was even a thing.
: This guy has definitely been on an episode of To Catch a Predator.
: I was going to say he looks like his day job is an evil clown.
: The strategy guide says the chef’s name is Gabrion, which I think is also in the manual.
: “I’m a cook, not a ranger! Alaron! Alaron! Alaron!!!”
: What is it with these late 90s-early 00s WRPGs and referencing Star Trek?
: Meet our protagonist. Alaron is this game’s Johnny Garland. He is an idiot.
: “Yes, all that happened yesterday. But…”
: This is Abrecan. Abrecan is an all-but-mandatory party member and is this game’s equivalent of Eve from Mother 1.
: “I don’t know, Sir Abrecan!”
: “He’s run off again, hasn’t he?”
: “I don’t know, Sir Abrecan!”
: “Who can depend on this squire!”
: “Sir, I often depend on him.”
: For what? He doesn’t look like he’d be very good as a soup pot.
: “Naturally… but you’re a cook.. not a knight of the realm.”
: One more Star Trek reference and I’m pulling this LP over and turning around.
: It’s hard to see, but Abrecan’s sword has a glow on it.
: “Arrogant squire! Do you know how many swords he’s ruined? And now he disappears into thin air!!!”
: “Alaron! Come out, immediately!”
: “Alaron! Alaron! Alaron!!! Anything strange with him lately? Nothing odd in the kitchen? Any strangers coming around?”
: “Not that I’ve noticed. No, sir.”
: “Then why should he run away?! Where do you think he is?”
: I’d say about to be murdered by goblins.
: They’re probably trying to figure out how he welds his hair on.
: “And send someone into the library. Have a maid check the observatory. And another should look by the pool…”
: “And question the magicians.”
: “But Sir Abrecan…”
: “Just find him!”
: This is Rheda. Rheda is a possible party member, but most people don’t use her because of limited party slots and because there’s a better option.
: “Complain? About what, mistress Rheda?”
: I like her.
: “Hmmm. Not with Abrecan, not with Bowden, not with Godric or Rheda.. of course! He’s been in his room all along!”
: “Prince Sheridan!”
: “The forest? Why on earth would he go there?”
: “Alone?”
: The game has official portraits for each character, but I won’t use them.
: “Kendall? He must be out here somewhere… Kendall? It’s me.. Alaron…”
: “I spoke to your wife.. she’s worried. She hasn’t seen you all morning. Come on out, Kendall. Come out here now! Did you hear me? Hello?”
: We now have control of Alaron. Let’s take a look at how this game’s mechanics work.
: Alaron starts with some basic gear and an alternate melee weapon. The club is technically better than his short sword, but Alaron’s skill in clubs is lower.
: We can see that Alaron is taking a -3 penalty to Dexterity. This is due to his armor and shield.
: Dexterity is the most important stat because it how often your character’s turn comes up. It’s also one of the major determining factors for hitting in melee.
: Each character also has a pool of skills they can learn. Alaron has a few useless ones; Troubador and Stealth both do nothing.
: They’re the benign sort of useless. There are two spells (that I know of) which crash the game if you use them.
: You may have noticed a chest in the bottom-left corner of that last screenshot. Let’s open it.
: Healing Potions are the only way to heal outside of the Healer skill, which uses herbs for a chance to restore HP or stat damage.
: We take maybe two steps before running into a cutscene trigger.
: “Goblins roam the wood and trouble there has been…”
: Did they glue those beards on?
: “Yes, so have I heard! What is it? Alaron?”
: They have to keep lookout in case the village idiot shows up.
: “How be you this day, pup?”
: “Well are you?”
: “I am happy and I am well.”
: The writing wasn’t this game’s strong suit, was it?
: This game doesn’t have a strong suit. There’s this whole community who are really into it and have made hard mode mods and stuff, but it’s not a good game.
: I’m going to cut this absolutely riveting conversation a bit short. The Mirari warn Alaron that there are goblins around.
: Alaron demonstrates that he doesn’t know where the next town over is.
: The Mirari then try to sell Alaron some magic spice to placate the king, but Alaron doesn’t have enough money because again, he is a dipshit.
: Continuing on, we reach a clearing in the forest.
: We get into a battle here. Battles are fixed and only spawn once, except for a couple of designated grinding spots and if you camp on the world map.
: Each character in the fight has a circle that they can move in. If you come close enough to an enemy, you can attack them.
: This game handles stats and skills in a kind of bizarre fashion. Leveling up stats and skills costs EXP, but you need a trainer in order to spend it on skills or spells.
: The Prima guide has a map of this area with all the treasure chests in it. H2O followed the Turok 2 school of map design where everything is a maze made of exactly three textures.
: If we go straight ahead, we get a cutscene where Alaron sees a ghost and wonders if it’s Kendall. The ghost is hard to see even if you’re playing in full screen.
: Right behind the ghost is an ambiguous brown lump. This is Kendall’s hat.
: Stealth is a useless stat, so we throw this on Alaron to make him look even dumber than he already does.
: Don’t ask me what any of the armor stats in this game do. I have no idea, and I don’t think anyone else does either.
: Turning the corner brings us to this thing, which looks like it was ripped out of Perfect Dark. This is a teleporter. They work like the cauldrons in Banjo-Kazooie, where each one is linked to one other teleporter.
: There’s three chests down here we want to get for later. We’re going to need some seed money.
: The non-descript yellow thing is in fact a pile of gold.
: We can see a goblin off in the distance. This leads to Gwernia, but we don’t want to go there yet because it will initiate a cutscene.
: Instead, we go down here, toward THE BROWN ZONE.
: One of the little rock outcroppings has more gold on it.
: Welcome to THE BROWN ZONE.
: Did Ohio’s tourism board sponsor this game?
: “He’s a bold one to be wandering alone!”
: “Good day, Mirari. I’m happy to see friendly faces here.”
: “Gotzone and Zurene being happy to meet you here. And we are surprised to see you, pup.”
: “Alaron, is it not? Why so far from the castle? You know of the trouble in these woods. Is this another one of your impulsive adventures? Or are you lost?”
: “Lost? I know this forest like a book.”
: Does he even know what a book is?
: “Then you know there are spirits and strange creatures here. You might be startled at any moment. We Mirari are protected by our magic, but you…”
: I just want to chime in here for a second to say this is a bold-faced lie. Alaron does not know any spells.
: Oh no..
: Does this mean we’re here to kill Chaos?
: Has anyone done an LP of Stranger of Paradise? That’s probably a much better game than this is.
: “Indeed.. but the forces against us grow stronger every day… more and more, we hear reports of monsters.”
: “And the goblins! It will take much more than few spells (sic) to match them nowadays.”
: It’s because he’s the only squire.
: “Not according to Sir Abrecan. He tells me you are learning well, but not as quickly as he would like.”
: This whole conversation is really weird if you think about it. Alaron apparently has no idea who these people are, but they’re intricately familiar with the inner workings of the castle.
: “With all due respect, Sir Abrecan is never happy with anyone.”
: “Sir Abrecan rarely misjudges any of the King’s squires. If he finds you lacking, there must be cause.”
: “He just doesn’t like orphans.”
: I’m going to cut this conversation short because it doesn’t really get any more interesting or tell us anything we don’t already know.
: The Brown Zone has some chests in it and eventually leads to this hut.
: There’s a little pond behind the hut that has an herb patch nearby. This will also be seed capital for something we’ll do later.
: I grab the remaining chests on the map (all gold and healing potions) and keep going.
: “A goblin!”
: If you didn’t run into the goblins by the teleporter, you run into them here.
: The goblins tell us, in far too many lines, that they’ve taken over the forest and killed Kendall. I seriously cut like 20 lines of dialog here.
: We get into a fight with four goblin poisoners. This fight is entirely scripted.
: This is the best squire they’ve got? The guy who goes down after taking one hit?
: I hope you’re ready for some absolutely riveting dialogue.
: “Where am I?”
: “Safe and sound.. and well-hidden! I found you in the woods. What you were doing there I can’t guess.”
: “It wasn’t easy dragging you back to my hut, you know.”
: This dialogue was written with the expectation that you encounter the goblins near Kendall’s hat and not past Oriana’s house.
: It’s much funnier if you realize she was probably watching the goblins kick Alaron’s ass from her front porch and then dragged him the ten steps inside.
: “You’re her! You’re the witch!”
: “Which witch?”
: “What am I doing here?! What are you up to?!”
: “Your fears make you the fool, boy.”
: This whole “Witch is actually a healer” thing was an overused fantasy cliche probably twenty years before this game released.
: “I know about you. We’ve all heard the stories..”
: “But you.. you gather herbs! And this room.. it’s full of spices and flowers. They say…”
: For her fried chicken recipe, I bet.
: “All healers grow flowers. I also collect herbs. How else can wounds be stopped? Shall I quit collecting herbs for people?”
: “No…”
: “Oh? Then shall I send you back outside? Believe me, you’ve slept helplessly for hours. If evil was my intention, I’ve had several opportunities.”
: “But, lady…”
: “Oriana.”
: “What’s Oriana?”
: “My name is Oriana.”
: “That’s one of the old names.”
: “I think it suits me. We still don’t know who you are.”
: “Me? I’m Alaron. Thank you for helping me.”
: “Think nothing of it. Nothing at all.. young…”
: "Alaron!’
: Some absolutely riveting dialog right here. There’s a Reddit page for this game and someone on there sent an email to one of the writers for this game, who said it was one of their favorite things they’ve ever written.
: “All right, all right. I’ll try to remember. Now what were you doing in the clearing?”
: “I was walking.. I remember that. I went from the castle.. I ran into the forest.. I saw the hat..”
: “A hat?”
: Metal Gear?!
: “What woman?!”
: “There were goblins.. and something hit me… I’m feeling dizzy…”
: “Where are you?”
: “Who are you?”
: “A friend…”
: I’m going to cut it, but just imagine this goblin and the weird eye creature saying “KILL” in all caps between every line.
: “I’m looking for someone.”
: “Pay no attention to them. They’re perfectly harmless. They’re just trying to show they like you..”
: “You say you’re looking for someone?”
: “Yes. A friend.”
: “You’re sure? One of the village farmers? You think he left his house? You think maybe he came this way? Be honest, squire. Since when do farmers leave their homes? Are you sure that’s what you’re looking for?”
: Don’t they.. have to leave their homes? To take care of the animals and plant the crops?
: I think the writer has farmers confused with shut-ins. Easy mistake to make, happens all the time.
: “Tell me what you want here, squire. You can trust us… why chase after farmers while your own dreams sparkle just within reach?”
: “I have to help him.”
: “Forget the farmer. He’s unimportant. But you..”
: It is fucking uncanny how much this entire exchange is like something out of Massacre Princess.
: “Where’s my friend?!”
: “Stay here. With us…”
: Her monster form even looks like the Massacre Princess.
: METEOR STRIIIIIIIIII-
: “One moment we were talking and the next…”
: “I watched your face. You saw outside this place.”
: “You mean a dream?”
: “More a vision. Did it frighten you?”
: “A little.”
: “Well, it frightened me. You were awake the whole time.”
: “You’re sure that’s what it was?”
: He’s beyond help alright.
: "Did the attacking goblins cast an enchantment on you? Or something worse?
: “We fought, I lost. That’s all there was to it.”
: “Maybe you should go back to the King. The wizards at the castle might be able to do something.”
: This is the developers outright admitting that they know their level design sucks. The forest is probably twice as large as it needed to be.
: Oriana then offers to train Alaron in a number of skills and spells. Let me review what each one does.
: Healer gives you a chance of healing using only herbs rather than a potion. It’s useless because of a game-breaking design oversight that we’ll probably see next update.
: Wizard boosts spells somehow (I’m not really sure how) and serves as a gate mechanic for getting higher level spells. It’s the core skill for magic the way Warrior is for martials.
: Sword and Thrown are both weapon skills, which can be learned in combat rather than from a trainer.
: Finally, we have Air Shield (gives 1 point of protection per spell level) and Strength (adds 2 points of strength per spell level). Most guides will tell you to buy Air Shield here, so I do.
: You don’t want to buy Strength here because we can get it for free later.
: The game highlights the route out of the forest for us. If you haven’t picked up everything yet, you can do it now.
: On the way out, we bump into another cutscene in which the Mirari are weirdly secretive about Oriana. This conversation is actually a tutorial for the teleporter we saw earlier.
: Following the lights takes us out of the forest.
: At this point, I start speeding up combat and let me explain why. See how the second rat in that screenshot is behind the first one and not trying to attack Alaron?
: This game has really bad pathfinding. The enemy AI is programmed to target the weakest character first, and what happens is that the enemies will get stuck on each other. When this happens, the game stops for a minute to try to pathfind around it before giving up and ending its turn.
: The rats can potentially get two turns each to Alaron’s one, and this can make for a lot of waiting for the game to give up on pathfinding.
: There’s not much else here, just a path and a single bag of gold in a corner.
: We cross a bridge and then get into another short cutscene.
: “He knows I was gone?”
: I’m also going to skip this cutscene because it tells us nothing we didn’t already know.
: From here, we continue down the path fighting the occasional giant rat.
: A minute or so later, we run into this house. This is Kendall’s house, but his wife isn’t home right now.
: North of the house is a random lady standing in a field surrounded by giant rats. The giant rats don’t seem to bother her, which means this lady is probably levels of magnitude stronger than Alaron is.
: This chest has more herbs and spices in it, which makes me wonder if the healing potions aren’t just fried chicken.
: At the end of the path is the bridge to Gwernia. There’s going to be a long sequence once we go to the castle, so we’ll do that next update.
: To the left, there’s an L-shaped house that has some stuff we want.
: You have to search the barrels, which you can’t see while in the same room as them.
: Curing potions are stronger versions of the regular healing potion. Inferno flasks are bombs, and stealth potions are vendor trash.
: To the left of the town square is another house we can visit.
: This house has a working ladder, which is odd because most things in the environment can’t be interacted with outside of bags of gold and treasure chests.
: This box has an area map and 50 gold in it. Let’s move on to the castle, because it’s time to start breaking the game.
: The castle has a long road leading up to it, and Alaron moves at a really slow pace.
: “We were just ready to set out again. Weren’t we, Sir Abrecan?”
: “Set out?”
: Metal Gear?!
: “The king is beside himself.”
: “The farmers say there are goblins in the forest. Is it true? And monsters? We’ve heard all kinds of rumors.”
: I’m going to skip the rest of this cutscene because it’s Alaron recounting the story about the goblins a third time in under half an hour.
: It’s also really awkward because Sheridan just kinda sits there listening in.
: Now we can go into the castle, which is a maze.
: Inside the castle, the compass is replaced with a minimap. The minimap is useless.
: If we head outside, we can meet Alaron’s friend Brenna, who is definitely not at all heavily inspired/ripped off from Imoen in Baldur’s Gate.
: She doesn’t have anything interesting to say, probably because she’s Imoen from Baldur’s Gate.
: The castle is obnoxiously large and has a lot of empty rooms in it. This was that era where devs would make things huge just to show that they could do it.
: I didn’t screencap it, but you can go all the way to the roof. Is there anything up there? Nope!
: There’s one room on the second floor where you can find a Dispel Necro scroll. It looks like every other room in the castle, so good luck finding it.
: By following the carpet, we can eventually reach the throne room.
: “Yes, sir.”
: “Alaron.. you are a good and loyal squire, but the world can be dangerous, as you have discovered. After consulting with my advisors, I have decided that this poison, however slow it may be, is beyond the skills of Gwernia’s healers.”
: “You must journey to Erromon. You will find a Mirari healer there. Their king has long been a friend and ally to this land. I have written a letter to tell him who you are and why you need his aid.”
: If you’re an idiot medieval failson and your king has just given you a quest like this, he’s trying to kill you.
: “Thank you, sir.”
: “The road to Erromon is easily followed, but you should have companions on this trip. Therefore I have ordered Sir Abrecan to be at your disposal..”
: “However.. the goblins have been rising in the forests and I cannot spare more than two companions at this time.”
: “You may take your friend Brenna. She is quite resourceful in her own way and seems to be able to move well in difficult places.”
: This part’s a lie. We’re actually forced to take Brenna. She’s useful for a few things early on, but most people kill her off eventually.
: Have I mentioned this game has permadeath? If any of your party members hit 0 HP, they permanently die.
: “And Master Bowden has agreed to let you take his apprentice, Rheda… she is quite involved these days with her own experiments, but she may be persuaded to seek more exotic herbs and ingredients along the road. I am sure she will be a great spellcaster one day.”
: Rheda is an okay fourth party member. She’s one of the only mages in the game, but has to jump through a lot more hoops to do damage than the martials do.
: “He is a bit strange, but he could prove useful and his knowledge will help you immensely. Everyone else must stay here at the castle, I’m afraid. I need to discover all I can about the goblins.”
: We’re taking Godric instead. Godric is the source of an infinite money/potions farm that can give you a pretty big boost early on.
: Godric starts with the alchemy skill, and has enough points in it to make curing potions. The shops in Gwernia buy curing potions for more than the cost of the ingredients.
: “And do not hesitate to seek the advice of your teachers and friends. Be sure to see Trahern as he will have some equipment for you, I’m sure.”
: “Yes, sir.”
: “You are too generous, your majesty.”
: “On the contrary, Sir Abrecan. I am quite sorry to see this boy go. Now.. there are a few more obligations you should attend to on your way.”
: “As you leave Gwernia, be sure to pay your respects to Gabrion for the attentions he has shown you over the years. Be sure to visit the farms. Find Kendall’s family and tell them what has happened. Use all your sensitivities as you give them this news.”
: “I will be sure to do that, sir.”
: “I fear that this is as much as I can help you. As you know, I had always hoped that you would finish your training and one day be pledged as a knight.”
: “I have decided that should you succeed on this quest, you will be made knight.”
: “Your majesty!”
: “Make HIM a knight?!”
: “Thank you, sir!”
: “Now you are TOO generous, sir! TOO GENEROUS BY FAR!!!”
: The cutscene kind of bugs out after this. This is a camera glitch that happens even on original hardware, and yes I actually did check that.
: Next time, we’ll leverage a complicated chain of potion arbitrage to become rich. We’ll also recruit our party, escape from the castle, and do some side stuff.
