Quest for Glory - RPG Retrospective

The Basics

Oh man.

When I was about six or seven years old, my parents bought a used Tandy 1000 along with a handful of games on these crazy things called disks. Old timey, right? I was fascinated by them. F-19 Stealth Fighter. Leisure Suit Larry 2. Sid Meier's Pirates! All of these would help gaming become a part of my life in a huge way, but none of them held a candle to one other little game from Sierra, the same company responsible for Larry Laffer and Roger Wilco, for Sonny Bonds and King Graham. Quest for Glory wasn't and isn't just a game to me - it forced me to learn. It opened my eyes to fantasy. It led me down the strange, sometimes miserable road that is my addiction to gaming. To this day, I love it. It brings me back to a good part of my childhood, the time I spent poring over dictionaries and learning basic sentence syntax in order to finish the game over and over and over again. It brings me back to the daydreams I'd have about Spielburg, about going to an old Spanish-styled library (now long since demolished) to begin that ardous journey of leaving behind childish books and becoming steeped in Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and T.H. White. It is, indirectly, what led me to become an English major, to continue my love affair with the written word.

And I'm about to tell you not to play it.

Fuck.

Originally released as a text-input game with the title of Hero's Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero, it was retitled to Quest for Glory after Milton Bradley got their panties in a bunch about the name coinciding with their incredibly shitty board game of the same name. Seriously, I own that too - and let me tell you, if you're ever desperate for a poor man's D&D and you look at that crap, just take out your cash and piss on it. It's a better investment. But back to the PC game. Hero's Quest, or Quest for Glory, featured a blonde haired, blue-and-black lovin' nameless hero. You could pick between a Fighter, Mage, or Thief. Your choice of class determined your base stats for a number of skills, such as strength, vitality, climbing, throwing, sneaking, or magic. You were also allocated a certain number of skill points to spend, so while a Fighter might not be able to use magic at the start, by investing some of your points into that skill, you could use it too. These stats would increase throughout the game the more you used them. By sparring with the castle's master-at-arms, you could increase your strength and vitality, for example, while a Thief would increase his stealth by sneaking.

Sounds like an RPG, right? And half of it really is. If you're planning to play the whole series through, investing the time in the first game to boost your stats is a great idea, because the game allowed you to transfer your character over to each new game. Yep, Quest for Glory was porting its main character long before Shepherd ever dragged his ass out of bed. Importing a character into the future games also allowed players to play as a Paladin class, which normally wouldn't be available.

But the skills and classes are only part of what the game was. It was also an adventure game - straight-up, old-school Sierra goodness. There were about eleventy billion ways to die. Sleep outside in the forest? Dead. Try to take on a dagger-tossing ruffian? Dead. Piss off the sheriff's tame ogre buddy? Dead. The game requires you to save constantly, as the trial-and-error difficulty of Sierra adventure games at that time were unkind, if not exactly brutal (they saved the brutality for King's Quest III). In the original version, you'd type in commands such as, "Look at centaur," "order dragon's breath," or "sneak."

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your nostalgia for these things), that's not the version I played for this review. When the world went all point-and-clicky, Sierra remade a couple of its adventure games with updated graphics and interfaces, including Quest for Glory. This version isn't inferior in any way, and in fact, if you're going to play one of the two and are younger than, say, twenty-seven or so and have no experience with text input games, go with the point-and-click version. It's easy to get running when installed straight from GOG.com (you can tweak some minor graphical options with a handy utility included with the games), and has shinier graphics in comparison to its older self.

The Story

Quest for Glory starts with the Hero coming into the valley of Speilburg after a narrowly avoiding an avalanche that has conveniently cut off the only route out of the valley. The Hero learns of Spielburg's many problems, including the missing Baronet and Baroness von Spielburg, the nuisance of the witch Baba Yaga, and an increasingly dangerous bandit problem. He also learns of various other smaller problems and opportunities in the valley, and comes to meet all sorts of various characters and villains throughout.

Wow. Put like that, the story of Quest for Glory sounds like Fantasy 101, and I guess it really is. Lori Cole, one half of the design team and a personal hero of mine, has openly stated that she hated the traditional adventure game elements and wanted to design a game with her husband that incorporated RPG elements. It's no surprise then that the game's plot sounds ripped straight out of something you might see in a D&D campaign or from one of the blossoming fantasy writers of the 80's.

While the generalities of the plot are relatively simple, the specifics remain delightful, even today. Baba Yaga is still menacing. Erasmus, the friendly odd wizard accompanied by his pet rat Fenrus, is still smarmy and a bit witty. And the game's best unseen character, Erana, is still eerie and intriguing. She's a long-deceased wizard of sorts, a powerful force for good whose presence still lingers in certain locations scattered throughout the games. The world is still supremely charming, too. The valley of Spielburg is inspired by German folklore, and most of the game's design focuses around that central theme. There are thatched roofs aplenty, so to speak.

This is, then, one part wherein my rose-tinted glasses aren't entirely wrong. Oh, sure, if you dig into your folklore books, you'll come across Baba Yaga and her chicken-legged house, but where the hell have you seen it in gaming before, hmmm?

The Graphical Style

Once upon a time, we used terms like EGA and VGA to describe games like these. Don't ask me what they fucking mean - I've had a cocktail or two and I'm feeling too goddamn lazy to get into the specifics (meaning I can't be bothered to go look them up). But put simply, EGA was uglier while VGA was shinier. Got it? No? Okay. Errr.... Put in movie terms, VGA was The Avengers or The Amazing Spider-Man, while EGA was the late-night Syfy-produced movie of the month. If you still don't get it, fuck off. I'm writing here.

The version I played for this Retrospective was the VGA version, the aforementioned point-and-click version. It was released in 1991, so obviously it's going to be a little aged no matter how much I try to defend it. To be honest, though, the graphics aren't all that terrible for a game produced in that era. Certainly it's on par with everything else Sierra produced, and I personally prefer it to the LucasArts game styles (Sierra's nearest competitor that you'd remember - there were a few other companies like Dynamix, but a graphical comparison between this and Willy Beamish would be one hell of a pointless endeavor).

But we're not talking about how it looked then, are we? We're talking about how it loks today. And as much as I hate to say it, it's just not that good looking anymore. It's like Dame Judi Dench - you look at her, and there's still a sparkle in her eyes, but her time for modeling in Playboy's a bit long gone.

It isn't fair to judge an old RPG by its graphics, but it is fair to judge a game by its graphical stylings and how well those have held up. There are some elements that are surprisingly good. I love the aforementioned Baba Yaga and her hut - they both look good (well, insofar as a magic-slinging hag can look good). The combat animations are a bit problematic and were the only cause for concern for me in getting the game running, but tinkering with the options in the game's utilities fixed this easily enough (I should note I'm running it on Windows 7). Some of the backgrounds and areas look great too, such as my absolute favorite locale, Erana's Peace. It's a small nook wherein... ahhh, you don't care about that - it's just a pleasant looking area.

But it's not all great. There's a dire generic nature to all of this. Even for the time, the graphical inspirations were fairly uninspired. Goblins look precisely how you'd imagine a hackneyed fantasy artist to draw them. The town, while full of colorful characters, lacks any sort of real color itself, save for the tavern. And the forest, which is where you'll be spending a great deal of time as you adventure, is fairly dull. Some sort of originality here would have done leaps and bounds to improve the game's long-term graphical prospects. But keep in mind too that this was a labor of love and an homage of sorts to the RPG's of the day. That doesn't make it easier to approach the game from a modern standpoint, but it's something to chew on if you do decide to play it.

Sound

I don't have any problem with getting the EGA version running with at least sound, which is awesome because I can listen to the original score for this game. I say "score" as though it were an orchestral thing, but as you're probably well aware, back then, it wasn't quite so grandiose. Still, I love hearing that old theme song again, and I've had parts of the music stuck in my head for weeks.

With the VGA update came an updated score, and while it's shinier in some regards, I actually think the EGA score is better. The VGA score feels overproduced, as though they wanted to take advantage of every new bip and boop they could throw in there. It's not awful by any means, but if a game released in 1991 can have an overproduced score, it's this.

There are still some highlights. The theme is still memorable, and Erana's Peace is downright gorgeous. The small bits of sound effects in the game sound pretty good too. I think this is one of those cases where it might be impossible for me to seperate nostalgia from the truth. I want to say that, yeah, the music and sound are fantastic. But I'm sure anyone who didn't play the game back in the day would hear it and shrug.

Quick side-note though - I do still have the score for Quest for Glory V, and while 3/4's of that score is pretty awful, there are some fantastic songs in there to help balance it out. If you're a fan of the series, check it out. I'm going to throw in

Here's the QfG I theme. Tell me what you think, because I'm genuinely curious. Memorable? Overproduced? Too simple for modern tastes?

RPG Cheese

Here's a weird one. Up until this point, the RPG Cheese section has dealt primarily with the problems of a JRPG. Here, we have a game produced in the West. Obviously, then, you won't be hearing me bitch about googly-eyed children saving the world for once. Whew.

Quest for Glory does have some cheese of its own. I can easily look past the game's generic fantasy nature because it was one of the first fantasy worlds I was introduced to, but many newcomers to the series just won't see the appeal of Spielburg. it's fantasy generica, whether I like it or not. There's also a fair amount of grinding to be done if you're looking to continue the series beyond the first installment.

Being also an adventure game, Quest for Glory has some problems that will be unique to it in the Retrospective series. There's a great deal of trial and error, as with any Sierra game of that period. While it's easy for me to remember the solutions to a great many of the puzzles, some of them are a little obtuse and might require the use of a guide. There are several points in the game where, if you haven't completed certain side-quests or obtained certain items, you will fail. Combat in the VGA version isn't quite as cut and dried as the EGA version, and the graphical interface for fights can be a pain. There are a thousand ways to die, and if you're lucky, you'll remember to save, save, save because autosaving was still about a decade off.

All that will sound really minor to old school RPG or adventure game aficionados, but to newcomers, those little things will add up quickly.

Replayabilty

By today's standards, it would be relatively easy to see everything Quest for Glory has to offer if you create your character with the right skills in mind at the start. Create a thief with magic capabilities and grind out strength and vitality, for example, and you'll have an excellent long-term character. But playing a "stock" character can be problematic, as you'll often times be confronted with problems that have no apparent solution with your current character. This really doesn't become a problem until Quest for Glory III and IV (especially the latter), but it's something to keep in mind. The game's fairly brief - I imagine you could probably do a speed run with minimal grinding in a couple of hours tops - but you'd be missing out on everything that made the game special in the first place if you just blitzed through it.

Frankly, the replaybility is going to be determined by your age and proclivity towards antique games. If you can handle the laundry list of problems I've talked about for newcomers, you might be surprised at how replayable the entire series is. But individually, there's not a whole lot to Quest for Glory that can't be seen the first time through with proper character planning.

Overall Quality, Then and Now

Quest for Glory was and is my favorite game of all time. That's why this section actually hurts to write. Fuck you, Father Time.

If you played Quest for Glory back in '89 or '91, you would have found a lot to love. It was an endearing, witty game with a memorable cast of characters and an incredibly unique blend of adventure and RPG gaming. If you play Quest for Glory in 2012, you won't know what the hell I'm going on about. You can walk into any bookstore (sorry, I mean hop on your Kindle or iPad) and find a fantasy novel for a few bucks that will instantly make this game's story seem juvenile and downright generic. And that adventure/RPG gameplay? If you've played Skyrim, you've seen the gameplay evolved to an incredibly delightful sheen.

I'm actually trying not to get a little misty-eyed here. I recommend that anyone who played this game back in the day, buy it. But if you're younger than that? Go on back to Skyrim. There's nothing for you here.

Total Value Versus Accessibility

For years, the Quest for Glory collection was one of those Holy Grails of gaming. Copies of the disks went for upwards of $150 at one point, and you could barely get those bastards working on a modern computer. Recently, though, GOG.com put out the Quest for Glory collection for a ridiculously cheap price and instantly rendered the on-disc craziness completely moot. You should be able to get all of them running with minimal fuss - my only problem with the EGA version was that I had to run it in a windowed format that made it too small for my vision problems.

As for the value, again, that's going to depend on your age. Keep in mind that for a similar price, you could buy a copy of Morrowind or possibly Oblivion, two games which have modernized the spirit of Quest for Glory, even if it's unintentional. And frankly, unless you're seeking to revisit the ghosts of adventure games past, there's no reason to play this instead of them.

I love Quest for Glory. I always will. it's one of a very, very few games I'd actually call important to my life. But overall, ladies and gentlmen, I can't recommend it to you. I wish you'd play it and enjoy it as much as I do. But I just don't see it happening.