King’s Bounty: The Legend

Long ago gamers didn’t have HD graphics or 5.1 surround, we had small, flickering CRT screens on which dragons were made of large squared pixels and the soundtrack was a series of shorter or longer high pitched beeps coming from within the magic box itself. We moved through blocky worlds and saw mythical beasts within a kaleidoscope of crude signifiers. We had to imagine once the world as the creator intended it, and again the world as it was presented to us. If ever there was a chimera locked up in gaming’s enchanted towers it was in those days, early in the 1990s when the world opened up to the first graphical strategy and role playing games. And if you go back in time, when it comes to turn based strategy games, you can’t go much farther than King’s Bounty. Released in 1990, the game asked of players what most games humbly ask of them – salvation from impending doom. And between your starting castle and your new found purpose for living, there were of course hordes of enemies. For those unaware, this was the prequel to the Heroes of Might and Magic series. Now, regardless of whether or not you’ve succeeded the first time around, that impending doom is apparently still pending… and hence, King’s Bounty: the Legend. Almost 20 years later the game gets a well deserved re-imagining. As perhaps expected, this comes from a small company, Katauri, whose team was probably fuelled by a sort of creative nostalgia, an emotion which adequately caters to the gaming nostalgia that most followers of this game will be heavily under the influence of. But rest assured that even complete newcomers are welcome to this world. The end result is a truly earnest praise to the oldie-but-goldie through all the necessary modern improvements the genre has witnessed. I say necessary, because the game does not go for the commercially viable changes every other normal company striving for market share might consider. This is a hard cut TBS; there’s no make-up here.

On the surface the game plays much as a Heroes of Might and Magic game. But don’t let this dissuade you as indeed it did me in the first hours of play. This is ultimately not a strategy but a much needed RPG that draws upon this formula. I think its creators got one thing right – they understood what the original King’s Bounty really wanted to be, but at the time couldn’t. In this respect, armies cannot be built, but hired. Also, there are no other heroes, it’s just you, your army, your spell book and your Chest of Rage. The latter refers to the game’s intriguing summoning system, a new addition to the formula which actually adds a lot of neat tricks to your tactical arsenal. The spirits inhabiting this chest can be called upon using rage points, which are similar to mana but accumulated a bit differently. The more damage you either inflict or receive the quicker the meter fills up and the more powerful the abilities you can use. For example, one of your summoned units can reverse time one turn for a stack of creatures. Another creates a rolling ball of ice that deals exponentially more damage the more it moves in unhindered lines across the map. There’s even a seemingly undying cloud that rains poison down on areas with a high concentration of units; just be aware that it doesn’t tell friend from foe. I’m sure you’ve already thought of varied uses for these tricks, and there are many more where they came from.

The game starts you off as a Royal Treasure Hunter and lets you choose one of three classes for your hero – warrior, paladin or mage, each with unique abilities. Regardless of your choice however, with the exception of 1 unique master skill in each class, you will be able to access all the others. These skills are learned by using runes which are gained through quests or simply by levelling up. The problem is that warriors and paladins seem to have drawn the short end of the stick, which unfortunately is generally the case. With the exception of some skills like tactics (which allows you to re-arrange units before battle), or being able to have 2 reinforcement slots, the skills don’t feel too important, at least not when compared to what the good old mages get, and that is everything that has to do with the magic system. And considering that the only way heroes take part in battles is through magic or rage summonings, you get the idea. As for magic, it works something like this. Spells are split into chaos, order and distortion magic. Like in the original King’s Bounty you can cast spells through scrolls, but this time you can also permanently learn them from these scrolls by spending magic crystals scattered throughout the world. What’s really interesting however is that the game decides at start what scrolls and in what number they will be found throughout the world, and the decision is quite arbitrary, meaning that on your first play through there is a possibility that you will miss some very important spells. In one game “Resurrect” became available very late for instance. This adds to the replayability factor and prompts you to undertake side quests and search the map, but without seeming annoying because even with some spells missing there’s enough here to fill any eager mage’s book. As for the size of the army you can hire at any given time, this is decided by your leadership, which again is obtained by levelling up or performing quests. But when all is said and done, just how tactical is the game really? Consider this. One side mission asks that you fight your future self, which is basically a mirror image of yourself, times 2. Indeed, it would appear that life for our hero, playing true to fairytale rules, has seen a linear ascension on the achievements graph. Everything is directly proportional with time here. The +50 years your soul brother has accrued apparently does mean double the army, double the mana and double the hair length. Now I don’t know how much the hair part adversely affects the outcome of the battle, but you should be pretty worried about the other two aspects. Any jokes aside, few games have the courage to enact such a scenario, because it is the harshest and most sincere trial of a game’s tactical system. In any Heroes of Might and Magic game, with the exception of my personally beloved 4, such a scenario would have been a paradox similar to that of the rabbit trying to catch up with the turtle that gets a head start. To beat the enemy you would need to go back and grow your army, only to see it doubled again on the enemy’s side in an endless loop that has you trying to overman your opponent. It would have been a quit game, a letter from an angered gamer and a quick patch.

Moving to the story, rest assured it is very nicely integrated into the game. First, it is all text based, so if you missed the long and beautiful fairy tale campaigns of Heroes of Might and Magic IV, you’re in for a treat. It’s not academy award winning material, but it shapes the universe nicely. It feels like there’s a back story to every story in the game. Every character seems to have a history, as does every castle and lonely hut. The artists and writers were working quite closely together on this one, a thing that more video games should keep in mind. What ties it all together though is the humour which is essential to the experience. The writers themselves know that this world shouldn’t be taken too seriously, so time and time again they poke fun at its inhabitants. One of the characters in the game locks himself up in a tower, as is fitting of any self-respecting scholar living in an imaginary world, and dedicates his life to proving his peers wrong. The world, he insists, lies carefully placed on a series of vertically stringed animals culminating with a giant turtle, whose carapace offers the base platform for our homes and daily lives. We smile as we get a sense of hindu mythology déjà-vu, but the real laugh comes 30 hours later in the game when his theory is, surprise, proven correct. I suppose it makes sense that in a realm where the swamps are being ruled by 3 rivalling frogs, a turtle’s shell is all that keeps us from falling off the edge of the world. Your antagonists are equally humoristic. An orc shaman of doubtful intelligence but undoubted confidence keeps crossing your path and threatening you with world domination. His rhetoric makes high use of Yoda talk and in your first encounter with him he summons his most fearsome weapon – “small turtle”, which as the name implies is of course a turtle the size of a football stadium. Coincidence or not, turtles do seem to be quite the topic of the day this side of the enchanted veil…

As for the visual aspect of the game, it’s beautiful. There are a multitude of worlds to explore and most of the maps are impressively large and rife with details, befitting a fantasy universe. The graphics is truly old-school but it has received some nice polish. The perspective is a nice 3D isometric view, which we would expect from the game. Sound effects and music are ambiental and immersive into the experience. The production values won’t make your jaw drop, but it will pull at those old-gamer heart strings and coupled with the game’s solid gameplay it should serve as every old geek’s defence that “graphics do not a good game make.” And did I mention the beautiful, detailed drawings that adorn the interface? It’s been a while since I’ve seen this much loving care given to those click-battered menus.
The game is also long. Very long. And just when it seems to get stale it constantly reveals a new secret. Little gameplay touches and easter eggs are everywhere. Out of the blue a seemingly ordinary quest might earn you a wife – and just like real life she’ll give you bonuses to both your attributes and inventory capacity. The rage chest with the four spirits you can summon actually appears many hours into the game as well, when one would generally consider they’ve already seen just about everything related to the game’s system. But the most refreshing aspect of the game is that from time to time it changes the setting entirely, and I do mean entirely. In the land of the elves you can enter the plane of the dead which sees you going through the same maps, but in an alternate dimension where things are less green and generally more dead looking. The caves of the dwarves see you changing levels via elevators and eventually through a portal you can access the burning world of the demons themselves, a world of floating islands over an ocean of fire. And what makes the journey even more personal is all the lore surrounding these locations. You hear stories of the elvish lands long before you know you will ever reach them. There is a dragon world spoken of in legends, but you have no idea you will one day be able to actually find it. You travel under the world in submarines and fly above it in zeppelins. You search for treasures sailing around the pirate islands and if you can imagine it it’s somewhere in this game and that my friends is an achievement in design and storytelling. And it’s not just the eye candy, every new setting introduces completely new units, each with intriguing abilities that actually matter in battle, allowing for a nice change of tactics that keeps the game constantly fresh. The pacing is incredibly effective and it quickly turns into that rare game that sees you early in the morning hours, repeating to yourself, “just one more battle”.

On the barely visible negative side of things, at the beginning of the game you can’t auto-solve battles, forcing on you a series of repetitive early fights before tactics is truly an option. And to round off the irony, towards the end battles become long, up to even 30 minutes worth of long. It’s somewhat fun by that point to see fights where you are so greatly outclassed slowly evolve in your favour, but one mistake might cause you a painful and arduous rematch. The game also seems to suffer at times from a rather bad English translation, with quite a few grammatical errors popping up here and there. It’s not strikingly bad however, especially considering the vast amount of text on display. It doesn’t deter from the experience, but let’s hope a future patch will remedy this. There’s also no multiplayer here, but that’s not really a negative remark, just a statement. Multiplayer wouldn’t really work, nor is it called for. The experience starts and ends in the single player universe, it does not need to be diluted by a feeling-free, slow paced multiplayer component. This was a single player game 20 years ago, it’s a single player game now.

When many of the games in 2008 will be gone you will probably still remember King’s Bounty. For me, it’s already in the same long term memory slot like the original. It is the sequel I’ve always dreamt for. In an industry where console games seem to be more and more the preferred platform of development and PC games are blessed with shoddy ports, here is a game that dares to remind us all that game genres were actually invented on the PC and then ported to the consoles.

Sometimes the gaming worlds today are too perfect, too much a stylized representation of reality. The sounds we hear we recognize, the creatures before us familiar images. But the hardware available to developers in those old days built an eerie world, an encoded world. The limitations of those times were the mediums triumph though its idiosyncratic aesthetics. The game did not look or sound like a movie yet, but it did not quite read like a book either; it was miraculously lost between realms, inviting enthusiasts from all the corners of the world into a digital primordial soup ripe with endless possibilities. Not all heeded the call to arms, but many of us brave warriors that did have now earned our badge of nostalgia, our medal of geeky valour. Well today we can put some lustre back on those faded colours on our chest, shine off some of the dust from its scratched silver, and with a tear take one more journey, from past to present, while whispering to ourselves: “The King is dead. Long live the King!”

Rating: 9/10