As predicted at the conclusion of this game's Intro blog, I'm nowhere close to completing World of Xeen. I'm not even close to completing Clouds of Xeen, the first "half" of the game. That isn't to say that I won't (temporarily) leave the game in an encouraging state: my party is level 15 now, getting closer to the max for training (on Cloudside at least), and have most of the dungeons cleared out. Taking the advice of some veterans of the game, I've been careful to build a nest egg at the local bank for when levelling costs get truly exorbitant, and the number of locations I've left to explore are starting to dwindle. If I had another couple of days, I'm sure I'd be wrapping this game up, but a week per game is all I allow for this feature given I still have a stack of retro games left to evaluate.

Might and Magic has a particular rhythm to it that is common to older CRPG franchises of a more open structure that are nonetheless beholden to an invisible set of boundaries that take the player's party's relative strength level into regard, turning it into something that almost operates as a puzzle game where you have to determine the right order of places to go. Ever play Mamono Sweeper? It more or less breaks down this classic CRPG paradigm into a variant of Minesweeper: a cute and oddly compelling game where its greatest contribution to game academia is how it works as a symbolic microcosm of a specific genre model. Like The Elder Scrolls, you get a few beginner areas to wet your whistle before being shown the door to a wide world of possibilities and little other direction. You'll probably soon pick up the game's "main" quest - recover the Sixth Mirror artifact for the local King and defeat the Skeletor-esque Lord Xeen, in Clouds of Xeen's case - but the route to get there isn't as direct or transparent as you might hope. Rather, you have to eke out your own path to glory by completing secondary quests, exploring the map for valuables, dungeons, and other points of interest, solve a town's problems so that you can use their facilities, figure out how to traverse difficult terrain like lava or deep ocean, continue to find and replace your old equipment with incrementally better gear, and finally get to the point where your party is well-levelled, well-equipped, and otherwise well-prepared for whatever the final dungeon has to throw at you. A lot of that requires poking into new dungeons and areas, gauging its level of difficulty - usually by how quickly you die - and then making a mental (and perhaps actual) note to come back later at a future stage of your party's development. As game cycles go, it's appealing as its own thing independent from the mostly linear stories and dungeons you follow in JRPGs of a similar vintage.

Clouds of Xeen is designed in such a way that you're initially boxed in by mountains and rivers. After liberating a few towns and accessing their magic guilds, or finding NPCs willing to teach you the valuable skills of mountaineering and swimming, your world suddenly expands to a significant degree. Your next barriers then become deserts to the northwest, arctic tundra to the southwest, and the volcano to the northeast: these are filled with tough wandering monsters and their own traversal difficulties to overcome. During this time, you're "lawnmowering" the accessible spaces for things like monster spawners - removing these eliminates the wandering monsters as well as netting a decent reward of treasure and XP - dungeons, towns, shrines and wells for huge if temporary buffs, and NPCs in these stripéd circus tents that send you off on any number of fetch or monster eradication quests (or, as often happens, they throw gifts and XP at you for something you've already found or done).

The dungeons are where the game's been the most engaging so far, though perhaps not always in the positive sense of the term. This game, and the Might and Magics before it, loooooves traps. Traps that will poison you, or turn you insane, or curse you, or infect you with disease, or age you unnaturally, or straight up maim or kill you. You have to keep your wits about you, but a lot of the time you have no idea a trap is coming or will have a specific effect, and so you learn to be "cautious" in the slightly more scummy save-reload sense. The dungeons have puzzles too: there's been a few Dungeon Master/Legend of Grimrock puzzle dungeons so far, like one full of golems that tasks you to complete various goals in each themed section - stone, wood, iron, and diamond - or a sphinx where you have to find hieroglyphics (which need an acquired skill to read) that reveal the sphinx's name in a series of "a letter in this word, but not this word" word puzzles. These have been fun, but you really need to keep your wits about you: far too often I've wandered into a trap I knew was there, just because I was too impatient to move through. Spells like Teleport - which warps you a number of spaces in the direction you're facing - or Lloyd's Beacon and Town Portal - which allow the entire party to warp halfway across the world - become as paramount to your survival as all the heals, buffs, and offensive spells. The strongest spells in the game require a secondary resource - gems - that are also spent at specific NPCs to boost stats and learn new spells, creating this sort of highly valuable secondary currency that, if this game was released in the present, would probably need to be bought with real money.

I'm glad I took the chance on this game. I've always been a little intimidated by particularly old CRPGs, with their byzantine systems/interfaces and a general absence of any hand-holding or user-friendliness, but World of Xeen is on the right side of comprehensible. More than that, it's been both fun and fascinating to varying levels, and even as I walk back and forth from a dungeon to the local town every time a character falls unconscious and has all their armor break, I don't feel like the game's wasting my time too much. If I didn't want all my shit broken, maybe I could git gud and not let that character get knocked out in the first place. I'll be popping back in whenever I have a spare moment this month: I've been told that Darkside is where the game starts getting really good, and I hope to see some of it.

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