May Maturity 07: The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate (Outro)

We did it, guys. We've reached the end of May and I managed to play seven old video games, six of which I actually completed. Not all heroes wear capes.

The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate, the Intro blog for which can be found yonder, pretty much continued as it began after I stopped writing yesterday. The heroine Zanthia pokes around a few screens for items, shares a few lines of dialogue with NPCs (with the occasional furtive hint), makes a potion or two with ingredients sourced locally, and then inexplicably gets launched into the next part of the game with her inventory emptied and a whole new set of screens to explore. The game definitely moves at a clip too, spending very little time in each of its set-piece areas. Zanthia's a busy woman and doesn't have time to wait around and smell the flowers, darn it.

Speaking of whom, I really enjoyed the Zanthia characterization in this game. I spoke about her new protagonist role last time and how it tied into the role of unhelpful NPC she played in the previous game; as one of the Mystics, a council of high-powered magic-users, she's rather indomitable and doesn't suffer fools gladly. She's also unusually dexterous, with a lot of animation frames given to her climbing around or leaping across chasms or fighting off foes. Westwood had a talented art division, as evinced by the game's many wonderful backdrops, so I'm guessing they wanted to make this one a little more animated. It certainly fits in well with the cartoon logic that drives the series: whether you're solving puzzles based on wordplay and puns, or being a dick to NPCs because they were a dick to you first, Kyrandia 2 manages to match the irreverence of peers like Simon the Sorcerer and Discworld. I like my fantasy adventure games with a bit of sass and self-awareness; otherwise, you get a lot of stoic performances about honor and virtue in these patently ridiculous fairytale worlds. I certainly got my fill of that from Ultima Underworld and Menzoberranzan with their serious demeanors.

What I will levy against the game as a complaint is how incoherent it could get. The player spends very little time in any one area, and only Zanthia really knows where she's going, so you'll bounce from region to region in a chaotic manner often solving multiple puzzles or just one big stupid one before moving on again. The game also loses points by making its last two sequences a damn Tower of Hanoi puzzle and a trial-and-error "click the right part of the screen to win" boss fight. Especially towards the end of the game, areas got smaller and smaller with fewer screens and less puzzles to solve, to the point where you'd only have about four objects to find and figuring out what potion you were trying to make became significantly easier. It felt like the game was in a hurry to finish, and while I was certainly speeding along myself in order to get this blog up before today is officially over I'd have preferred if the game took its time in the later chapters. There's a huge difference in difficulty and size from that initial swamp area to the relatively tiny final three or four areas, and it's rare to find an adventure game with a reverse difficulty curve (though it can be surprisingly common in RPGs, now I think about it).

Overall, I probably liked Kyrandia 2 a little more than the original. The puzzles were generally more entertaining to solve and the game's many partitions and regular flushing of inventory made it less confusing about what may or may not be necessary, the potion-making was a far better utilized magic system than Brandon's gems, and Zanthia is just more compelling as an acrobatic, no-nonsense, sardonic, genuine badass heroine than the whiny King-to-be. I've certainly forgiven her for that silver statuette/magic fountain nonsense she had me do in the first game. As stated last time, Kyrandia 2 also addresses some but not all of the shortcomings of the first Kyrandia, so it was also a superior game from a purely mechanical standpoint. That really just leaves us with one remaining question: is the third game even better? I suppose I'll have to wait until next year to find out...

And so we draw May Maturity to a close. What did you duders think of the new format? Do I go back to the "endurance blogging"-style daily updates in 2018, or persist with this relaxed form for a fewer number of more thought-out appraisals? Should I stick with the 90s games, or go back to mixing it up with both old and new? (Kyrandia 3 is definitely on the cards either way, if I don't break down and play it before May 2018.) I generally analyze the state of my PC gaming backlog and build the May features around areas that need the most work, but I've no idea what I might impulse purchase between today and next year. I'll think of something.

At any rate, thanks for sticking with May Maturity this year, everyone, and I'll leave you all with this heads-up: go boot up Photoshop (or MS Paint, my preferred canvas) and enter that E3 banner contest! We'd love to see a whole bunch of goofy ones this time around. Remember, all the mods are judging that contest, and at least one of them likes awful puns. Just putting that out there into the ether.

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