Final Phantasie

One dungeon left, and it's only a short swim away from the starting town of Pelnor, which I teleported to, after swapping Lenny back into the lead.

I went into the castle, protected from its fear curse by Zeus's rune.

Predictably, black knights guarded the gate. Predictably, I beat them easily.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of black knights guard the rooms here. They aren't much of a threat to an appropriately leveled party with good HP management, but you need magic to kill them efficiently, and this took its toll on my once-substantial potion supply as I explored the castle. Spirits, though less common, proved costlier, often needing multiple casts of the expensive Quadruple Mindblast to kill most of them.

A devil guard

New enemy - Dragon King! He's a wimp, but sits on good treasure.

Never seen that before, but he goes down in round 2 without needing magic.

A dead-end.

But the next one, also guarded by water elemental, teleports me to the southeast corner!

More dead-ends with water elementals.

Checking out the other side, just to be sure.

 

Before taking the teleporter, I left and returned to Pelnor one last time to heal, save, and level up Minmax, who finally learned Quadruple Quickness, though as of late I had not been relying on Quickness spells very much, preferring to save MP for direct damage spells on monsters resistant to physical harm. The run's loot, sadly, had been nothing but pointless gold and gems, and only four magic potions remained.

I returned and took the teleporter, and advanced through the stone passage it took me to. An entrance to the throne room was at the end of it.

Yup, more black knights!

 

Three chairs sat at the north end.

I smashed the center one, and walked through the secret passage to the north, where The Black Lord fired a warning shot.

"That tickles!" - Minmax

I kept going, and he fired a few more lightning bolts at premarked spots through the corridor, until I caught up with him at the end of it.

Obviously, I picked option 1 here.

 

I went north first, after the wand. The ground trembled again.

I waved it, and found myself teleported.

A scroll sits on a pedestal in one corner. An old man sits in the other.

Of course I want to fight!

He awaits at the end of the fissure.

And like a palooka, he goes down in round one from a mere two castings of Quadruple Fireflash. Doesn't even get a chance to hurt us.

 

We are magically whisked away to Olympus.

I have to fight a few more orcs and trolls to get back to town, where the gifts are a gold fox, gold ox, and gold box.

I wasn't kidding.

The scroll I picked up is nowhere to be seen, but as for the "divine spell," everyone in the party has a unnamed new spell; #60. I cannot determine what it does.

But I was able to retrieve the scroll - and the wand too - by returning to the final dungeon, where the dungeon state had not been committed to disk, repeating the ending sequence up to the point of finding the scroll and then leaving when given the chance.

The game doesn't stop, but for all intents and purposes, it's over. If Phantasie has any remaining secrets worth discovering, then by all means let me know, but otherwise I'm done.

I think, in retrospect, that priests are the best class in the game. With MP reserves as high as wizards, access to powerful healing magic, as well as the most powerful direct damage spell, and okay melee combat, not to mention an array of debuff spells, why use anything else? Okay, so you need to have transport magic too - a monk or a wizard can fill that role. A thief might also be necessary - I never had the opportunity to see if my monk's thieving skills were adequate, and backstabbing is a nice perk. But if I were to replay, I'd try a team of five priests and a monk.

 

GAB rating: Average. Phantasie is mechanically fine and decently paced, if a bit simplistic and sometimes flawed. It is probably the most casually accessible RPG I've covered yet - it isn't brutally unforgiving like Wizardry, and gameplay is more streamlined than Ultima. In some ways it feels like a lost missing link between those games and Final Fantasy. But it's ultimately too shallow to really merit much of a recommendation.

The best aspect, by far, are the dungeons, which are dense with special encounters, events, and puzzles, and are attractively designed, feeling like they could be actual game world locations rather than the abstract mazes seen in Wizardry, Ultima, or the majority of RPGs out there, really. I don't think I've seen this sort of mimetic design in any game I've covered yet except the Temple of Apshai series, which were a lot more primitive, and the room descriptions in the manual did a lot of heavy lifting there.

But the connective tissue, which borrows heavily from both Ultima and Wizardry, doesn't do anything as well as either. Combat in particular just doesn't offer the sort of tactical depth it ought to; even though it seems to have more options than Wizardry, most of the spells are either useless or clearly inferior to other spells, and they cannot target specific monster groups, robbing the game of a whole tactical dimension. Of the five melee options, I got by on "slash" most of the time, followed by "thrust" against monsters that were difficult to hit. "Lunge," the most tactically interesting option, was only useful once in the entire game. I don't think this is just because of how overpowered my party became either; with weaker characters I'd have done the same things, and just needed to go back to town more often. Gear is nothing but a one-dimensional numbers game - banded plate rated 8 beats ring mail rated 7 provided you have enough strength to equip it, and there are no other properties to consider.

The Ultima-style overworld doesn't quite capture the joy of Ultima-style exploration either. Other than finding the dungeon entrances, the three magic pools, and the one-time trip to Olympus, there's nothing to discover here except for eleven identical towns and some featureless inns. The sluggish movement speed (on Apple II anyway) and constant interruptions for random combat encounters not only made exploration a tedious chore, but even made walking short distances to known landmarks a tedious chore. Ultima could be tedious too, but its world had always been ambitious, and by Ultima III it offered a grandiose world dense with meaningful content. Phantasie just doesn't reach for the stars like that.

Phantasie is overall functional, and mostly inoffensive, but we've seen better.

Phantasie: Temple of the evil Dosnebian clerics

Having passed the trials of Zeus and been granted the boon of courage, the castle of Nikademus is the logical next step and presumably the final dungeon, but one other dungeon - which by process of elimination, I must assume to be the Dosnebian Temple, remains unvisited. And I feel I owe it to the game - and to my completionist tendencies - to delve into it.

Previously, I could not enter.

 

An anonymous commenter said I would need a specific "monster" party member at some point, and I'm pretty sure this is it.

Two approaches presented. I could roll myself a bunch of minotaur fighters, train them up a bit, and take them to the three magic fountains to boost their stats before selecting the best one. Or, I could roll a throwaway minotaur character and just wing it.

Given that you can't actually select "minotaur" as a race for a new character - you just pick "random creature" and hope it gets selected, and that my party had been pretty overpowered thus so far, I went with the latter option.

It took me 23 tries to get any minotaur at all - I immediately discarded the 22 others - and I had him join, replacing Lenny. I trained him a little bit - a single combat in this area got him to level four, and another three to level six. Level seven is reached in one more brief session, but this is as far as I bothered.

Evdomos, technically leading this party, was indeed judged worthy.

 

The gate issued a challenge:

 

One of the scrolls in Lord Wood's castle had the password - and a clue on what to do later.

Just past the gate

I soon encountered a side chapel with an "enormous statue" and a prompt to deface it, which I disregarded. Another had a "black knight," another "wall paintings," another a set of ten small, trapped caskets lining the walls, one of which had a golden key.

Evdomos, though worthy to enter, was not especially valuable in combat.

 

The only slightly troublesome combats in the main temple area were spirits - invulnerable to axes and blades, but destroyed with strong magic. I fought enough that I had to gulp some magic potions.

Emerging from the casket room, the preceding chapel had a "small" minotaur statue, which I opted to deface as per the scroll's instructions.

 

Further inward, past a door unlocked by the golden key, I fought my first ever titan. It shrugged off the majority of my hits, and dealt out nasty magic spells, but succumbed to my own magic.

I kept exploring.

Dining room: I ruin a dinner party for orcs, kobolds, and great trolls.

A jail with three cells. Two are unpickable.

Finally - Lord Wood!

The second cell magically opens after freeing Wood.

The third cell opens next, and I rescue my first damsel in distress.

Now the jail is completely flooded with water.

The kitchen: Even a temple of elemental evil needs one.

North of the kitchen was the display room, where I found the last two rings of power in a jewelry case. After taking them, guards attacked!

This was the toughest fight yet - wizards in the second row can perform massively damaging spells, making me wish I had Lenny available to help thin them out with a few well-placed lunge attacks. Alas, I had to cut my way through the rank of warriors in front of them first, though Dennis was able to backstab one in the meantime.

We survived, but needed several potions to recover from that one.

True to the damsel in distress's word, a secret passage was found in here, leading outside.

But I went back and kept exploring. I had to fight few more guards leaving the cell, including a titan, but nothing we couldn't handle.

During this time, I had the opportunity to try out "summon elemental" - to do this, you must first "add" an elemental of choice to your party from the guild, and found it to be rather impressive. I had picked a fire elemental, and for the cost of only 4MP, you summon a spellcaster with 20MP of his own. And while there doesn't seem to be a way to query the spells available, Quadruple Fireflash is one of those available to the fire elemental. On top of that, it has 100 MP, and tends to get hit by melee instead of Minmax.

The big downside - the fire elemental must be re-summoned in subsequent fights, and whatever MP it spent doesn't come back. The only way you can get it back is by returning to town, saving, and restarting the computer!

 

Priests' chambers: A "great deal of gold" is found in a chest here.

But only a great deal of annoying debuff-casters are found here.

Orcs and great trolls lurk at the end of a long, winding side-passage.

Sounding the temple gong brings predictable results.

Southeast tunnels: What the crap is that?

Magic armor is found at the end of the waste tunnels.

I left, reasonably satisfied that I'd seen everything here or close to it, and trekked back to town.

The spoils, in addition to far more gold than my already overfull bank accounts could hold, included:

• The last two magic rings
• One new scroll
• Ring mail +2
• Leather armor +2
• Enough experience to level Evdomos three times, to level 10
  

The scroll:

My party:

• Mystic-rated party score of 79 - "You are ready to visit the gods."
• Air rune, earth rune, fire rune, water rune, and god rune
  
• Nine rings of power
• Lenny - Level 13 dwarf fighter
• Needs 257,000xp to level
• 220 HP, 5 MP
  
• 22/10/20 combat stats (God knife, plate mail, god shield)
• Slash can hit up to four times per round without magic buffs
  
• Knows one spell - Monster Evaluation.
  
• Lambert - Level 12 dwarf ranger
• Needs 290,000xp to level
• 169 HP, 18MP
• 19/9/18 combat stats (Halberd +4, banded mail, giant shield +2)
  
• Useful spells include Quadruple Healing and Awaken
  
• Claude - Level 13 human priest
• Needs 167,000xp to level
• 154 HP, 20 MP
• 19/8/16 combat stats (Sword +10, splint mail, giant shield)
  
• Useful spells include Quadruple Healing, Quadruple Fireflash, Quadruple Confusion, Triple flamebolt, and Awaken.
• Untested spells include Triple Protection, Triple Weakness, Quadruple Binding, Teleportation, and Resurrection.
  
• Rasputin - Level 12 halfling monk
• Needs 236,000xp to level
• 144 HP, 13 MP
  
• 19/7/13 combat stats (Sword +10, ring mail +2, large shield +1)
  
• Useful spells include Quadruple Fireflash, Double Ninja, and Transportation
  
• One untested spell - summon elemental
• Dennis - Level 14 sprite thief
• Needs 296,000xp to level
• 138 HP, 8 MP
• 18/7/12 combat stats (Halberd +3, ring mail +2, large shield)
  
• Generally excellent thieving skills, with a so far 100% success rate at lockpicking and trap disarmament
  
• Age 33, which is starting to push it for an exotic race.
  
• Minmax - Level 12 elf wizard
• Needs 50,000xp to level
• 92 HP, 17 MP
• 8/5/4 combat stats (Flail +1, Leather +2, small shield)
  
• Useful spells include Quadruple Fireflash, Triple Quickness, Quadruple Mindblast, Triple Flamebolt, Double Ninja, Summon Elemental, Awaken, and Transportation.
• Untested spells include Triple Strength, and Fear.