Quest for Glory: So You Want To Be a Hero? - 18/52

    I feel like I spend an exorbitant amount of time talking about eras of gaming that I missed.  It’s the unfortunate combo of getting into gaming in the late 90s as well as being obsessed with nothing but Pokemon until about 2002.  As well, I just like to give some context as to my own history of gaming so these things don’t just read like glorified reviews. The PC point and click adventure game era is no exception to my massive blind spots.  In fact, I was completely unaware of most of this era of gaming until roughly seven years ago when I discovered one PushingUpRoses on YouTube and started getting into her Let’s Plays of all of these old adventure games.  And let me tell you, I was pretty much instantly hooked. These games looked super fun, had a lot of good humor and references in them and, while the puzzles could dip into the insane every once in a while, for the most part, they were really well thought out and took a lot of environmental awareness as well as problem-solving skills.  But, because I’m awful, I never chose to seek out these games until a couple years ago when they popped up in a Humble Bundle and I snatched it up. And because I’m doubly awful, I didn’t get around to playing any of them until just this past week. But boy did the Cookie give me a good place to start. This is, Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero?

    The Quest for Glory series is a fascinating bit of gaming that deserves far more in the way of recognition than it gets.  It’s an incredibly ambitious series of games, a multi-part fantasy epic taking you through a series of vastly different worlds based on various different folklore and mythology and allowing you to keep the same player-created character throughout the series.  It’s not the first of its kind by any means, that honor appears to belong to the first three entries in the Wizardry series from what my research has gathered. But it’s still noteworthy with not only the scope of the series but also the time period these came out in.  Nowadays it’s fairly common in role-playing games, especially role-playing games developed by American developers, for you to import your own character across several games, but in the early 90s, I have to imagine this was a potentially problematic feature to implement. I mentioned in my previous entry on Shantae: Risky’s Revenge that I intend on starting at the beginning of a series and working my way through as many of them at either later dates or subsequent 52s.  Quest for Glory may have been the reason for that decision. Annually going back to my created character and taking him on a new adventure. So without further ado, let us start on the adventures of August the spellcaster in his first adventure.

    The original Quest for Glory puts you through what may be the most basic fantasy setting ever.  You enter the town of Spielberg, a small little chunk of civilization in the middle of a vast forest, as a novice adventurer seeking fame and fortune.  Spielberg has had a wealth of bad luck as of late, with the local Baron who lives in the castle to the north having lost both of his children, bands of brigands and goblins having taken up residence in the southern forests and the eastern forest having recently been chosen as the current home of the traveling witch Baba Yaga.  So of course, since no fantasy story would be complete without everyone placing literally every problem on the shoulders of a complete and total stranger, it is up to our young spellslinger August to solve everyone’s problems. At least he gets wealth, power and a title out of it. And knowing the time period, maybe the Baron will even throw in his daughter as an added bonus.  It’s not like you’re going to immediately leave for the desert with a pair of Romani cat people and an Aladdin wannabe or anything.

    As mentioned before, the Quest for Glory series tends to be based around various folklore and mythology from around the world.  The first game is really the least clear about this but a little mining and paying attention to detail can tell you that this game is based on Grimm fairy tales.  This creates a very generic fantasy setting overall which I initially held a distaste for but as I played more I saw it as more of a necessity. It’s easy to say the setting is boring nowadays when this kind of Grimm fairytale setting is burned into our minds forever, but I can see the logic of introducing something familiar at the beginning of a new series to entice players in before going with the more unique stuff like Arabic folklore, Slavic mythology or African fairy tales.  As well, it gives a certain early Dungeons and Dragons campaign vibe, seeing as you’re immediately thrown into this small town after character creation and immediately see mainstays in role-playing games like the magic shop, the guild, the inn and, of course, the Tavern. So many adventurers meet in Taverns in fantasy that there might as well be an epic fantasy adventure about overcoming alcoholism.

From left to right, warrior, mage, thief.

   Quest for Glory is a surprisingly deep game despite its relatively small size.  There are, as with most video game RPGs, three classes to choose from and not only are your default stats vastly different depending on which class you choose, but the solution to many of the game’s puzzles are changed considerably as well.  As I chose a magic user, for instance, a lot of my solutions to puzzles were based on spell adeptness. I had to individually level my skills throughout to complete certain objectives, such as using my retrieval spell ‘Fetch’ to grab a magic seed from mid-air or using my unlocking spell ‘Open’ to get into the brigands' hideout.  But if I were playing a thief, for instance, all of my solutions would be vastly different, relying on timing and cunning rather than adeptness and mana. The amount of depth and meaning to the character creation aspect is refreshing as I know certain modern games with perfect review scores whose names rhyme with ‘Sly Kim’ that basically use their class system as just a different combat skin that has no deeper meaning to your gameplay otherwise.

     There’s a lot of great atmosphere in this game as well.  A lot of the game is wandering through the forest trying to find your way between a number of locations hidden amongst the various nooks and crannies.  And the game replicates the feeling of wandering aimless and lost through a forest pretty perfectly. The ambiance in this game is top-notch, with most of your time being spent accompanied by the sounds of birds chirping and water running.  This also makes the game’s soundtrack pop more, as you spend most of the game in relative silence. None of the songs in the game are especially great or memorable on their own, but with the context, they all come across as little gifts whenever they do pop up. This constant contrast between silence and music really helps immersion a lot, I was surprisingly sucked into to the goings on in Spielberg and the surrounding forest.

Do you mean the African or European answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?

     Do you like references?  Because this game is full of references.  Admittedly, I’m not the biggest fan of references, especially considering at the time of writing this, it’s only been a month since Ready Player One and I was constantly reminded for a month and a half leading up to it about the nightmare of a reference ball that thing was.  But for the most part, Quest for Glory is sparing with them. A majority of the references involved in the game are really just in one section, the Wizard’s Tower area. That area starts with a Monty Python and the Holy Grail reference that splinters off into a bunch of other references to various British comedies, like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Black Adder, then once you get into the tower you’re immediately greeted by a room full of various different fantasy references, most egregious a rodent in a wizard’s hat.  This area isn’t required by any means so you can easily avoid the bulk of the references, but if you want to get all the spells as the wizard it’s a detour you have to make. Otherwise, the game just peppers in references every once and a while and usually they manage a smile.

    So the combat in this game is terrible.  I originally didn’t understand what was going on at first with the combat of this game and that was admittedly my bad.  There are two menus in the combat for this game, the spell menu and the attack menu, at least for my class. And for some reason the game doesn’t start you on the menu you can actually attack on, so it’s easy early on to lose a lot of battles before you have any spells.  But even once you figure out what’s going on, it’s still not fun combat. It’s a lot of imprecise telegraphing and mashing the attack button because the game will either not read your attack or it’ll just completely miss the enemy. It’s the least fun part of the game and it’s, unfortunately, a requirement if you want to better your character at any point in this game.  But hey. At least you get a lot of coin out of it.

    Quest for Glory is another old-school fantasy video game that is systematically unhelpful.  At this point, you can just call me a dirty lazy millennial gamer and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with you there.  And to the game’s credit, it does include a hint system if you manage to scrape up the coin for it. The issue is that there’s a variety of different places hidden throughout the forest in this game and other than a single overturned log to use as a landmark to let you know you’re close to the town entrance, almost every part of the forest looks the same.  It’s surprisingly easy to get lost in there and have trouble finding your way out and then it turning to night and you get murdered by a troll, losing any progress made since your last save and just generally feeling discouraged.

    The last major point I wish to bring up likely has nothing to do with the game but I feel is an important issue to talk about nonetheless.  I had fairly frequent issues running this game. I played off the Steam release which is basically just loading up your choice of the original EGA release, which plays more akin to a text-based adventure, or the VGA release, which is a point-and-click, in the DOSBox emulator.  For some reason, I couldn’t really play this game for more than 40-70 minutes at a time before the game would start being swallowed by an overwhelming white light, causing all the graphics in the game to go screwy and basically forcing me to quit and reload the game several times before completion.  My playthrough in total couldn’t have taken me more than 7 hours, but the recording I captured so I could pull screenshots is in 13 parts. If you are opting to play this game, I’d keep this in mind. It’s more a minor inconvenience than anything, though.

    Despite all my issues with Quest for Glory, I really enjoyed my time with it.  It was a very engaging and immersive RPG that validated all my hopes from watching the aforementioned PushingUpRoses LP that I would really enjoy this.  For the sake of what I want to do with the 52, i.e. make it an annual series, I’m going to hold off my desire to immediately rejoin August the novice mage until next year.  But for all of you, I highly recommend playing through the series if you haven’t already. Next time we’ll be finally moving away from the world of retro fantasy games and taking a look into the wonderful world of memes, as we take a look at Octodad: Dadliest Catch.

Ethan's backlog: https://www.backloggery.com/edzoologist