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.
: 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.
: The strategy guide says the chef’s name is Gabrion, which I think is also in the manual.
: Meet our protagonist. Alaron is this game’s Johnny Garland. He is an idiot.
: This is Abrecan. Abrecan is an all-but-mandatory party member and is this game’s equivalent of Eve from Mother 1.
: 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.
: 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.
: The game has official portraits for each character, but I won’t use them.
: 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…”
: “How be you this day, pup?”
: 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.
: 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..
: Has anyone done an LP of Stranger of Paradise? That’s probably a much better game than this is.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
: I hope you’re ready for some absolutely riveting dialogue.
: “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.
: “Which witch?”
: “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.
: “All healers grow flowers. I also collect herbs. How else can wounds be stopped? Shall I quit collecting herbs for people?”
: “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.”
: “Oriana.”
: “My name is Oriana.”
: “I think it suits me. We still don’t know who you are.”
: “Think nothing of it. Nothing at all.. young…”
: 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?”
: “A hat?”
: Metal Gear?!
: “What woman?!”
: I’m going to cut it, but just imagine this goblin and the weird eye creature saying “KILL” in all caps between every line.
: It is fucking uncanny how much this entire exchange is like something out of Massacre Princess.
: Her monster form even looks like the Massacre Princess.
: “I watched your face. You saw outside this place.”
: “More a vision. Did it frighten you?”
: “Well, it frightened me. You were awake the whole time.”
: "Did the attacking goblins cast an enchantment on you? Or something worse?
: “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.
: 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.
: Metal Gear?!
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.