Summary
: I spend 20 minutes backtracking all the way from Oriana’s house to Terminor. We want to go to the inn here to get our final party member.
: I should mention that this update got delayed because the “A” key on the cheap mechanical keyboard I had died. I blame this game, since that keyboard got me through the entirety of Baldur’s Gate without dying.
: If you didn’t take Rheda, she’ll be here now. This is the first point where you can get rid of Rheda if you took her. We’re going to take this guy who’s twice the size of Alaron instead.
: Baird is one of the best party members in the game, even if his stats are a little off.
: Like Becan, he’s nocturnal. He also has 30 intelligence despite the fact that he can’t learn Wizard. We can fix this up pretty quickly.
: He makes up for it by being as good as Abrecan at hitting things, and he can learn Thief on top of that.
: One of the rooms in the back has this guy in it, who is another potential party member. His name is Donovan, and he’s effectively Replacement Keelin if she dies.
: Like Brenna and Keelin, Donovan can’t use a shield and is intended to be a thief-wizard hybrid.
: I spend some time navigating back to where Shamsuk’s tower was. You can warp here from the forest if you use the portal from the start of the game.
: Because I want to get Baird some EXP, I head to this area just north of the tower. This is Elisheva’s Tomb, and I think it was originally intended to be a full dungeon before it got cut.
: This screen is the entire tomb.
: There’s lore on the side coffins that does not matter so I’m not going to bother transcribing it.
: The last room has a fight against a wraith and a couple of zombies in it.
: The Heart of Elisheva is kind of pointless. Crushing Death is a damage spell that can’t be learned normally, and will therefore do less damage than ones you can.
: The other corner has Elisheva’s Scythe in it. It’s a garbage weapon.
: Going directly south from Shamsuk’s tower leads us to the desert. This is one of two ways to get to the endgame: you can also head south from Terminor instead of coming all the way out here, but I wanted to get some EXP for Baird.
: This is roughly the spot where we have a cutscene with Farris. I transcribed the entire thing into an optional update.
: There’s a thin path to the right of the beach that will take us where we need to go.
: This area is a great example of why a game like this can’t work on the N64. I mean, look at it. It’s a featureless grey polygon with four trees on it.
: Morrowind (which came out a year after this game did) had an area that was intentionally like this, but that area at least had art direction and personality beyond being just a featureless grey polygon.
: A few minutes later, we arrive at this gate, which is the roadblock stopping us from getting here before killing Shamsuk.
: This is an obvious reference to Who Wants to be a Millionaire, which started airing in 1999. If you say yes, you get a cutscene where Alaron uses the amulet Pandara gave him to summon her and she’s very horny again and.. yeah no.
: If you’re looking at this from a modern game design perspective, an option like the top one almost always means “I’m missing a key item or piece of dialog and need to go get it.”
: Let’s answer wrong and see what happens.
: If you answer wrong, you fight four elementals. They’re not tough, and provide roughly 15,000 experience per fight. It’s about on par with the wolves in Talewok.
: So anyway, that first response? The one that seemingly says “I don’t have a key item?” That’s the correct response.
: We need to pick the third option.
: And then the second one.
: And finally the third option. I don’t know why they make you go through this shit.
: This is like something out of a badly written kids book. The kind of thing you’d see in the section for tweens but that even they’d find cringy.
: What he’s saying is that it’s his life. It’s now or never. He’s not gonna live forever, especially given that plans for a sequel were thrown in the trash.
: I have Salty Vanilla working on something for a final update where I’m going to try and give the Bar Rescue treatment to a sequel that never existed.
: This feels like someone who read Paulo Cohelo’s “The Alchemist” and decided they needed to make a game out of it.
: Once we enter the desert proper, we get the third Farris cutscene in twenty minutes of him failing to control the undead.
: If you head southeast through the big, empty desert, you eventually find Dark Uluru. This is Ugarit, the final town in the game.
: Ugarit has the same gimmick that Terminor does, where most of the shops are only open during the day. It’s really odd that they programmed this for the final two towns but not the first three.
: It’s shaped like a C and has three levels. The shop on the first level is day-only, while most of the shops on the second floor are night-only.
: This uh.. ladder warehouse? I guess it’s a ladder warehouse. It has an NPC in it who can train Thief to 10.
: I get six levels of thief on Baird, and now he’s surpassed Abrecan.
: The other side of the first floor has the inn, which is where you can recruit a character that no one ever bothers to because she’s glitched.
: Sholeh is a deep backup option who can only join your party if you’ve made it all the way here with an empty slot. She won’t give you the option to take her if you already have a full group the way Baird or Donovan do.
: She’s another Brenna or Keelin, and sucks because she starts with 30 intelligence and a bunch of spells but once you save the game her intelligence gets reset to 3.
: Outside the inn is the stairs to the second level. I have no idea how you’re supposed to tell that they’re stairs.
: This merchant (located on the right side) is only open at night and sells Belts of Teleport. Don’t ever buy these. They’re laughably useless, and I’ll show what they do in a bit.
: And now here’s the third level. We need to head to the palace for another 10+ minute cutscene.
: Zaratas refuses to name Alaron, and tells him that he needs to see Rooughah (who is apparently still alive) to get named.
: What’s weird is that I could’ve sworn they mentioned earlier in the plot (I think during the first cutscene with Pandara) that only humans have true names.
: To see Rooughah, we need a magic horn that is located in a barrow on the other side of the desert.
: He also tells us to avoid a place called Maxxen. We’re going to ignore him because that’s horrible advice.
: I’ve just condensed 82 textboxes down to maybe five.
: To get to Maxxen, we first head northwest to this giant monster skeleton and then head north.
: Let me show you what the Teleport spell does. Teleport lets you teleport.. to anywhere you could normally move to. Does it give you any kind of bonus? No.
: This area is full of armies of copypasted zombies, which take forever to kill but don’t present an actual threat.
: Maxxen is at the bottom of this big hole in the ground.
: If you’re lucky, you can go straight through the door at the end of the hall (the one Alaron is facing) and end this in maybe three minutes.
: I’m told that sometimes, this door bugs out and lets you through without the key. I have no such luck. Instead, we need to turn right and head into one of the side halls.
: This gets us the key we need.
: It’s hard to convey in screenshots, but this ghost is in an animation loop where it ascends offscreen and then teleports back into position. It’s very distracting.
: This gets us Lodin’s Sword. Lodin’s Sword is the only direct upgrade to the sword we got off Kitarak a few hours into the game. We also need this to kill a boss in the barrows.
: With this party, we have no choice but to put it on Brenna. Baird and Becan can’t use it and we can’t swap it for the Mace of Glory (which has the same stats) because Brenna can’t learn Hafted.
: To find the barrows, we need to go almost all the way back to the Dr. Who gate.
: I run into some sand worms, which are potentially the only thing deadlier than hellhounds. They have a ranged attack that hits for around 20 damage.
: The good news is I’ve been maxing health on everyone except Baird because they really don’t have anything else to level up. Even Brenna is over 100 HP now.
: The barrows are remarkably similar to the barrows dungeon in Runescape, which released in 2005. I wonder if whoever at Jagex designed it took inspiration from this game.
: It’s not at all obvious what we’re supposed to do here, and the game isn’t going to give us any hints.
: You see that red mark next to Alaron? There are seven of those in this area. One of them will randomly activate if you hit A on it.
: The game is at least nice enough to give us an indication that we’ve activated one by levitating a rock next to it.
: Once we’ve successfully activated a symbol, we can get into the dungeon itself using these holes that barely stand out.
: Let me explain why this sucks. There are respawning enemy groups both outside and inside the dungeon.
: These include shit like Plague Zombies and Giant Golems, which can eat two full rounds of attacks to the back before going down and hit for upwards of 30 damage.
: There are seven coffins in the dungeon, each with a symbol matching one outside. The correct one will slide open when you go near it.
: Each coffin spawns a cutscene with a wight. I’m only going to show the last one, because they’re pretty much all the same thing.
: The seventh cutscene starts with placeholder text left in and a scripting error causing the model for the wight to either not spawn or spawn in the wrong place.
: Because the model doesn’t load properly, the rest of the cutscene is pretty broken.
: I like to think none of these wraiths exist and this is one of those A Beautiful Mind situations where the party is sitting around watching Alaron talk to a wall.
: We get dialog choices, and only the last one does anything - the others weren’t programmed in properly.
: We kill him in one hit. Now we get to the really shitty part of this dungeon.
: It’s hard to describe exactly where they are, but there are two holes on the lower part of the mound that lead to this room instead of to the cave with the coffins.
: There are seven of these doors with symbols in front of them. We have to touch each one and sacrifice the seven items we got from the enemies here.
: It’s funny that this is basically the end of Dead Money in Fallout New Vegas. Supposedly, there’s a bug where if you have the items equipped to someone when you sacrifice them, the game will get confused and let you keep some of them. I could not get that to work.
: Once you’ve gotten rid of all those items, this door in the cavern area opens up. This is where we need Lodin’s sword.
: Pretty much as soon as we go through the door, we run into Lugash. His gimmick is capitalizing random words.
: Here’s the thing about this fight. I have no idea (outside of using a guide) how you’re supposed to know what to do here.
: Lugash can only be damaged by Lodin’s sword, but there’s no clear indication of that if you don’t have it. There’s also nothing pointing you to a random ruin in the desert.
: With the sword, Lugash is a pushover who dies in three hits.
: We get the Staff of Lugash off him, which is probably good if you use casters. For this party, it’s vendor trash.
: If you come in here before sacrificing the seven items, this room will be barred off and Lugash won’t be here.
: There are three chests in here, and only one of them is really worth it.
: The Spellbreaker Axe does less damage than a Chaos Maul, but resists magic and gives you the mirror spell and extra willpower (which also boosts spell resist). I think I’ll give this to Baird.
: The bow is probably okay if you have someone with Missile, but why would you do that?
: We also get another useless Charm Zombie scroll.
: Here’s another annoying bit. Even though we’ve beaten Lugash, we don’t have the item we came here for. It’s located through a tiny crevice in the wall.
: And now we get to backtrack all the way to Ugarit. There are a few cutscenes along the way and I’m going to summarize most of them.
: We also run into our third scene of Farris failing to control a zombie.
: A Chaos Slayer comes over and demands the staff.
: We then have to fight a group of Chaos Slayers, who at this point are a non-issue.
: I am going to skip all of Zaratas’s dialog because we are about to run into some truly infuriating bullshit.
: The gist of it is that Zaratas was allied with Rabisat against the humans, only on the day they were supposed to finally win, someone sounded a victory signal on the Horn of Kynon and Rooughah never showed up.
: So where is Rooughah, anyway?
: Surely the Jundar have a portal to Erromon somewhere.. right? Right?
: No they don’t. In fact, we can’t head right there because there’s a plot flag we need to set first. Remember that spirit that keeps following Alaron around? We need to find it.
: Fortunately, the spirit spawns right outside the Jundar Gate.
: It’s hard to convey in screenshots, but this cave or tunnel or whatever is collapsing as the camera moves through it.
: I think these people might just be really constipated.
: Don’t ask me what’s going on in this cutscene. I have no idea.
: Defeating Alaron’s shadow gets him an extra 3 points in Endurance and Intelligence, which can push him over 30 in each stat if they’re already maxed.
: It also gets Alaron a free 10 levels in wizard, which is why there’s not much of a point leveling it normally.
: Finally, we get ten levels in all of the “Versus” spells and Spirit Shield.
: We’ll meet Rooughah next update. Before I go, I want to mention what the shortest route back to Erromon is.
: The shortest route is to go through the Jundar Gate back to Shamsuk’s tower, and then use the portal to warp to the forest. Then you walk to Gwernia and use the portal in the castle basement to warp to Erromon.
: I timed it walking at 1x speed, and it takes just over 40 minutes to get there assuming you only fight unavoidable battles and do the battle parts on fast forward.