The Legend of Kyrandia

[toblix]

Just finished this, and what a weird game it was. I played the CD-ROM version, and I don't know what the differences are exactly, but Jesus Christ is this one beautiful game – the environment art is just fantastic. The game itself, though, was pretty bad. I quickly turned to just following a walkthrough when I discovered that the game is mostly tons of walking back and forth through the world, picking up randomly distributed objects and using them in some order at an altar/shrine/crystal. It's very much failure-based, in that if you're not playing with a walkthrough, I imagine you'd have to play most of the game probably three or four times over to do the right thing so as to not get stuck right at the end. It's almost like a puzzle game wrapped in an adventure game GUI.

I seem to remember they toned that stuff down for the sequels, and got more proper adventurey, but we'll see.

But holy mother of god, beautiful pixel art is beautiful.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Cool. Nice to hear your review. Makes me want to give it a shot myself.

[Roderick]

Yes! A unique and wonderful game. Malcolm was quite menacing here, and I especially loved the maze near the start of the game, where you need to pick fire berries to illuminate your surroundings.

The second and third games (Hand of Fate and Malcolm's Revenge) are all more like standard adventures, though all of them try to incorporate novel systems like potion creation and morality-based puzzles. Well worth looking into, if only for the gorgeous, and frequently absurd and humerous visual direction.

[toblix]

Yes! A unique and wonderful game. Malcolm was quite menacing here, and I especially loved the maze near the start of the game, where you need to pick fire berries to illuminate your surroundings.

The second and third games (Hand of Fate and Malcolm's Revenge) are all more like standard adventures, though all of them try to incorporate novel systems like potion creation and morality-based puzzles. Well worth looking into, if only for the gorgeous, and frequently absurd and humerous visual direction.

Actually, I've played both sequels to completion, so I know I'll both enjoy (and complete) them again.

The fire berry puzzle was quite good, but most of the other ones were pretty weak.

[Irishjohn]

I played the first game years ago and all I remember is the art style. Really makes me want to go back and play all of them.

[CaptainFish]

Hand of Fate is definitely my favorite of the trilogy. Love the fantastic locations, the player character and the sense of humour. There's also less interactive fiction style huge maps that you just wander looking for items to drop.

[Roderick]

Also Zanthia is one of the best female characters in gaming. Love Zanthia!

[mikemariano]

Wow, I've never played this game, but its creepy cover art has been permanently grafted onto my brain.

[syntheticgerbil]

Wow, what a surprising thread to find springing up here, Toblix. I'm very sure there's no differences between the CD and disk versions of the first two games besides just added voices (while 3 just had a CD version only).

The first game definitely has the worst gameplay of the series. Being relatively short, it's not the biggest deal to me. Mostly a lot of people don't want to map out the fire berry maze, which is sort of essential as annoying as it may be. The rest are pretty dumb trial and error puzzles like the birthstones (which I still don't think make much sense to me and if I'm not mistaken, change their correct answers each playthrough), the dead end near the end from not picking up a certain flower, and all the instant death traps you have to figure out to continue the game.

However, I always liked the amulet gimmick with the powers as well as the gimmicks that come with each individual character for the next two games. I feel those helped keep the series fresh and separate their mechanics somewhat from other adventures outside of the strange pick up and drop interface.

To me, Kyrandia 2 moves and is designed almost like a straight LucasArts game, with not many dead ends and open spaces to explore. And while Kyrandia 3 also sidesteps the mistakes the first one makes, the design on that one has always seemed like a mess to me because of of the different available paths early on in the game and the collect x amount of this item type of stuff that uselessly padded out an already long game. I think we discussed this before. in some other thread though.

I don't think there are any save and restore type puzzles in Kyrandia 3 and most everything can be fixed even if you screw it up. There's one dead end when you are trapped in a prison on one of the paths in the final act where you can eat the sesame seeds you can break out with, thus making it impossible to escape. Maybe there's some way to get more on the screen but I couldn't figure it out.

And yeah, the game covers are pretty awesome, except the 3D version of the third game. Definitely all eye catching.

[Kolzig]

The cover art for the first Kyrandia game is one the most memorable game covers of all time for me.

Did the first game have voices in the CD version? I seriously need to hunt that down someday or GoG should get rights to release these talkie versions Win7 enabled.

I've only had the disk version.

[syntheticgerbil]

Yeah that one had voices on the CD version. Malcolm's voice is completely different from the third game though.

I think the CD versions are relatively easy to find in comparison to the hard disk versions now.

[toblix]

Completed Hand of Fate, a much better game in every respect. I kind of like the... non-adventurey aspect it has, with the limited inventory and various stuff lying around, especially in the more improved form where you're not getting stuck over some minor detail. You'll always find what you need, and every so often, the game clears your inventory to avoid confusion. It's also funny how there are so many sweet art assets in this game, and sometimes it seems like the game hurries to get past them. Maybe they cut a lot of stuff towards the end?

[toblix]

Oh Jesus Christ I had forgotten that the third game uses horrible 3D graphics!

[Roderick]

I love the little references between the Kyrandia series and Westwood's Lands of Lore series. Is that a Pseudobusha Hugiflora?

[toblix]

This is such a great example of how so many games were broken in the 90s.

Let me demonstrate:

This is the opening screen of Kyrandia 1, from 1992:

Look at how beautiful it is!

One year later, in 1993, this is the opening screen of Kyrandia 2:

Look at the colors and the detail! Everyone wants to go to this magical place!

One year later, in 1994, this is what they come up with:

Look at how fucking ugly this shit is! Look at how the low-poly model with its clearly visible polygons and terrible rendering artifacts is only made more fucking shitty by the terrible, low-resolution texture! What the shit is that yellow line supposed to be? A road? A road that twists and turns for no apparent reason and then plunges into the flat sea and comes back up again because nobody involved even cared about what they were doing?

In what other medium would this rape of aesthetics constitute progress? blegfeahaelghaelhgaehgae

[Patters]

Look at how fucking ugly this shit is! Look at how the low-poly model with its clearly visible polygons and terrible rendering artifacts is only made more fucking shitty by the terrible, low-resolution texture! What the shit is that yellow line supposed to be? A road? A road that twists and turns for no apparent reason and then plunges into the flat sea and comes back up again because nobody involved even cared about what they were doing?

In what other medium would this rape of aesthetics constitute progress? blegfeahaelghaelhgaehgae

I kinda like it.

[Roderick]

Yes, that is quite a turn-off after that gorgeous 2D art.

[Nappi]

What the shit is that yellow line supposed to be? A road? A road that twists and turns for no apparent reason and then plunges into the flat sea and comes back up again because nobody involved even cared about what they were doing?

That's my favorite part.

Crappy 3D cutscenes (usually landscape pans or zooms) in otherwise perfectly beautiful 2D games are depressing.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Yep. The "3D Revolution" went even worse from the ugly pre-rendered stuff that it started off with. I remember saying around the time of the Sega 32X (anyone remember that?) that graphic quality had gone backwards.

From the hand-drawn beauty of this (in 1993)...

To this "3D progression" of this (in 1995)...

Edited January 12, 2011 by ThunderPeel2001

[Jayel]

The thing I remember most from the first Kyrandia game is the music from the beginning of the game. It isn't particularly awesome or anything, but it would often loop in my head like Yellow Submarine and drive me insane.

[CaptainFish]

Yep. The "3D Revolution" went even worse from the ugly pre-rendered stuff that it started off with. I remember saying around the time of the Sega 32X (anyone remember that?) that graphic quality had gone backwards.

From the hand-drawn beauty of this (in 1993)...

To this "3D progression" of this (in 1995)...

I don't know how fair this is, because Virtua Fighter animated so much smoother than anything before it, and the gameplay was actually different than it's predecessors. With the set of goals in making the first Virtua Fighter (and other Virtua games) 2d art wouldn't have sufficed. That's a much different story than the Malcolm's Revenge situation, where the art became worse without any gameplay benefits.

I also think there's an aesthetic quality to that type of 3d model, that is completely defined by wireframe and polygon colours, without any real texture work, that is somewhat appealing. It holds up IMO better than early textured work with better polycounts. For example, I'd rather look at untextured VF1 models over the textured versions, and I think the Interstate '76 cast looks nicer than that of Tomb Raider 1.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I don't know how fair this is, because Virtua Fighter animated so much smoother than anything before it, and the gameplay was actually different than it's predecessors. With the set of goals in making the first Virtua Fighter (and other Virtua games) 2d art wouldn't have sufficed. That's a much different story than the Malcolm's Revenge situation, where the art became worse without any gameplay benefits.

That may be the case. I've never played Virtual Fighter, but I've played plenty of other 3D fighters since, and I can't say that the gameplay felt any different... but I don't know anything about VF, so I can't comment. I'm sure there's plenty of other examples where there were no additional -- or very slight -- gameplay benefits from jumping into 3D, though.

[Patters]

That may be the case. I've never played Virtual Fighter, but I've played plenty of other 3D fighters since, and I can't say that the gameplay felt any different... but I don't know anything about VF, so I can't comment. I'm sure there's plenty of other examples where there were no additional -- or very slight -- gameplay benefits from jumping into 3D, though.

There are a lot of differences the 3rd dimension adds to fighters, projectiles simply don't work in 3D, however directional attacks are possible, say a grapple from behind or the side.

[ThunderPeel2001]

There are a lot of differences the 3rd dimension adds to fighters, projectiles simply don't work in 3D, however directional attacks are possible, say a grapple from behind or the side.

Fair enough, but as I say, from the ones I've played, being able to tap "down" twice to avoid an attack has made a negligible difference to the ones I've played. Obviously I've just not been playing the right ones.

[syntheticgerbil]

Haha, yeah I didn't want to say anything about the art in Kyrandia 3 earlier, because it definitely got worse. It's still super difficult to not have prerendered 3D and digitally painted or traditional work not clash, it definitely wasn't easy in 1994. I haven't played Kyrandia 3 in a while but I remember some of the backgrounds being nice despite all being 3D.

I know the 3D cutscenes are used somewhat sparingly besides these laughably long ones that serve no purpose in these caves later on that have almost zero tie to the game and seem to be showing off. They just come off as horrible tech demos of fucked up cameras going around erratic planets and half baked rollercoasters rather than anything special. I remember a review loving them though.They also ruined a rather nice dragon by trying to recreate it in polygons.

The most I can say for prerendered 3D of the 90s is that it's at least not the 320x240 real time 3D stuff. A lot of those games with those sorts of setups (like Virtua Fighter) become borderline unplayable for me now. Too much possibly movement crammed into too little space.