Maaaan. No beating around the bush this time: the first The Legend of Kyrandia game just isn't all that great. I can appreciate what the developers were trying to do, sitting on the divide between the likes of King's Quest and other Sierra adventure games and the more accommodating Secret of Monkey Island, but the game's plagued with so many bad choices that, in all fairness, may have seemed like bad choices at the time.

If you recall from the Intro, The Legend of Kyrandia follows the neophyte mage and master-level weenie Brandon as he seeks the advice of various Mystics - wizards, in other words - in order to defeat the deranged, regicidal jester Malcolm and save the kingdoms of man and nature alike from his destructive jollies. The game takes a lot of innovative steps forward for the genre - chiefly, it reduces the amount of confusion a player might feel by completely eliminating any sort of parser system, either in the form of a text parser or a list of contextual verbs. Rather, the player simply presses on a hotspot and Brandon will interact with it in the way that makes the most sense: he'll talk to people, pick up objects, press buttons, etc. In addition, the game gradually introduces four spells that are required for some puzzle solutions, at least two times per spell. This is a precursor to the excellent magic systems found in Jolly Rover and Death Gate, among others.

I'll talk about the music, visuals and voice acting in just a moment, just so we can turn this into a compliment sandwich. The game's problems lie largely in excess. Each discrete "zone" of the game includes about five or six hotspots of any note and more than a dozen screens of complete nothing to separate them. The idea being, one assumes, to give the player some amateur cartography to do with a notepad and pen or an open copy of Excel with which to start drawing boxes and marking the areas that actually serve any kind of purpose. This comes to a grisly head in the cavern section in the middle of the game, where the player must light their way forward with combustible "fireberries". The player can make four screen transitions before the berries vanish into the ether, and if they're not near another fireberry bush by then, they are surrounded in complete darkness and get eaten by some non-copyright-infringing variation of Zork's grues. This was the point I realized that I'd have to jot out a quick map while saving regularly at bushes in order to proceed. I won't spoil much, but you essentially need to take five rocks to counteract the weight trap that locks you inside the cave, another object that you need to procure the next spell (via a few steps), and a final object that I'll come back to in just a moment. That's around eight or nine points of interest, not including the entrance and exit. The cavern has eighty screens total - most of which are mirror copies of each other. I know, because I drew the entire complex out on the leaf of an A5 pad.

You might suggest that the developers figured the whole "mazes and maps" aspect was part of the experience, and I suppose you could make that argument. It didn't fly back when Secret of Evermore broke up its excellent RPG areas with endless forest mazes, but it could just be that I personally don't care for getting lost in mazes when I'm trying to get somewhere. However, Kyrandia can also be obtuse as hell in other ways on top of this. I got stymied right after the above cave section when the alchemist who was helping me suddenly disappeared before she could teach me how to brew potions. In order to brew a potion, you need to take a flower of a primary color (say, the yellow tulips back at the start of the game) and a gemstone of the same color (say, the topazes at the start of the game). At no point does the game actually deign to tell you this: if you add either a plant or a gemstone to the alchemist's cauldron, it turns a pale shade of that color. You need both to complete the brew, and then a flask to put them in (the hut at least provides for this part with an endless amount of them), which means hoofing it back to the start of the game where all the gemstones are. You then need to find a magical crystal formation in the woods - another maze, I should point out - which can take two primary colored potions and mixes them into their resulting subtractive color: red and blue for purple, red and yellow for orange, and blue and yellow for green. You need the purple potion and the orange potion at very specific parts of the forest maze to proceed. The green potion? Well that one just instantly kills you, thanks for playing.

Worst of all is that, once you reach the final part of the game, you are no longer able to backtrack. This is the first point in the game in which this is the case - passing through the caves is easier once you have the spell that you learned in there, and you can effectively walk from the location that brings you to the island (the screenshot above) all the way back to Brandon's hut at the start of the game, if you have ten minutes to spare to watch all those screen transitions. However, at the final location the road back is gone and so is any chance of returning for any items you may have left behind. Three of which, including that one I mentioned just above when discussing the cave system, are absolutely necessary and the game cannot be completed without them. I'll also reiterate here that there's a hard inventory limit for the game - ten items, and that's your lot. You almost wonder how a design decision like that passed QA.

But hey, the game looks great. Crisp, detailed pixel graphics tend to age better than most folk might've assumed at the time, certainly more than tiny, scratchy FMV windows or vaguely humanoid polygons that make Colin's Bear Animation look like ILM's latest digital opus. The MIDI tunes are catchy too, even if they're meant to fade into the background. The full voice acting is... well, it's charming. Kind of a loaded compliment, but it works in an era when that sort of luxury was still uncommon. Whoever voiced Malcolm was clearly having a lot of fun, and most of the characters got a good barb or two at Brandon's expense. Brandon himself has a number of opinions to offer in any given part of the game if you click on him, 90% of which are complaints about being hungry and tired. And as much as I don't appreciate deaths in adventure games if there's no instant "rewind to before I clicked that" option, at least some of them were funny in how utterly arbitrary they were.

I will say that the game didn't completely douse my enthusiasm for the rest of the series. It didn't quite hit the high notes like I was hoping, but there's clearly a lot of room for improvement and I'm optimistic the game's two follow-ups will make good on its potential. For the time being, we'll be switching back to another CRPG for the next item on the May Maturity agenda. The sort of CRPG with lots and lots of guns. See you soon.

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