The Top Shelf: The Second Round 020: Champions of Norrath

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrowing our laser focus to one game per week (at least). Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!

Extra Note: We've entered Shelftember! In this much-vaunted month, we will be processing one of the second round entries every day. I'll be spending one hour apiece with each game - inspired by DanielKempster's backlog-clearing series "An Hour With..." - and determining its fate from there.

In retrospect, I'm not sure why I pencilled Champions of Norrath in for a revisit. Actually, I suppose I do: I wanted to revisit the second game, Champions: Return to Arms, and figured I ought to replay this one so I can better compare the two. The reason I probably didn't need to spend much time with Norrath is that it's exactly how I remember it: a perfectly acceptable Diablo clone with EverQuest lore and trappings. You run through areas with up to four human players (online, even, which wasn't common for PS2), cutting down hordes of similar enemies while picking up random equipment that might but probably isn't better than what you're already wearing. Snowblind Studios had settled into a niche at this point, adapting the action-RPG engine they created for Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance for these two Champions games, fine-tuning the skill trees and loot grind cycle that games of this particular sub-genre thrive on. Of course, these days they're part of the Monolith Productions team, working on yet another fantasy license with a lot of hack-and-slash gameplay and far too much loot, though this time in the microtransactional sense.

The hour I spent with Champions of Norrath was enough to get me through the introductory missions, which involved a lot of goblins, and it's remarkable how close Champions hews to the Diablo 2 model in particular, throwing lots of incidental mini-dungeons and dead ends at the player just in case they aren't quite confident enough for the next boss fight and needed a little bit of grinding and farming, or were just fans of exploring off the beaten path (or, if you're like me, a little of column A and a little of column B). The game presents five different classes with their distaff variants: barbarian (tank), wood elf (ranged), high elf (healer), "erudite" (wizard), and dark elf ("shadowknight", a melee/magic all-rounder). I was rocking a barbarian because I'd already beaten the game with a ranged guy and I'm useless with managing magic, and the game proved a little more challenging than I remembered because of how much easier it is for melee characters to get overwhelmed without careful kiting and pulling. The game has some generous checkpointing though - one of the few Diablo clones to have actual checkpoints you can save at - and the game's equivalent to town portal scrolls are cheap and plentiful right from the offset. There's no inventory Tetris needed either, possibly because it'd be annoying as hell without mouse controls: instead, the game relies on weight allowance for your tipping "gotta head back to the vendor" point. Unusually, it makes the choice to give arrows and potions weight, so you can't just stock up on near-infinite amounts of both to power your way through the game's encounters.

There's not really a whole lot else to say about Champions of Norrath. Much of the EverQuest namedrops are lost on me, as someone who avoids MMOs like the plague, and it's smart enough to realize what worked and what didn't in what was already a well-established "loot RPG" blueprint by 2004. Along with the Dark Alliance games and the X-Men Legends RPGs, as well as no doubt several others I'm forgetting, it was a genre that was represented well enough for consoles if not quite to the insane level of depth as Blizzard's trendsetter. I had plenty of fun with Champions of Norrath the first time around, but perhaps an hour-long refresher is all I need on this occasion. (I say that, but I'll playing another game that's a lot like it very soon...)

Result: Progresses to the Third Round.

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