"Finally, a sequel comes again!"

This game, Might and Magic IX was released on March 2002 and it really was something really strange, because the last Might and Magic game was released like about two years ago, and the creators of the game, just seemed to release another one to see the success that the game would have, and most of us know what happened to them after this release, don’t we?

If you have had played some of the prequels of this game, it is traditional of the game to run into a multitude of thousands of enemies that are too tough to face at breakneck to be able to get to other places beyond the point at which you are at, but do not even think that there is a possibility of that working in this game, and if you do so then you will see that the consequences are that you will die a whole bunch of time and not in a nice way. If you are rushing into a town keep an eye out to them to be able to avoid them, and when you get outside of the town, they will be waiting for you as if they were hunters and you the hunted. And if you don’t want to get assassined by one of those enemies, well, ,y recommendation is to keep your distance, and if it is possible kill one enemy at a time since the risk of getting hit decreases.

The interface of Might and Magic IX, in some ways, it was improved from the other previous versions, but in some other ways it was totally bad to change it. You no longer walk into a shop or things like it, and now you have a bigger screen while you are watching the menus. In this game, after you enter into the shop, you go up to the shopkeeper, and the way to navigate menus is that you navigate them underneath each one of their images. That is the way all the conversations happen. It now has the feature that there is now voice acting and you can listen to people talking to understand the plot. But for some people who have played previous prequels of the game Is a bit harder, and it is a problem. When your character are doing promotion quests, you must select the person that has to do the quest before you can complete it.

And if you forget to select a character for that purpose, or you select the character that was not supposed to, you cannot change your mind and that is frustrating. So make sure to save your game before choosing a character. There are also new skills that replace the last one, od course they are better than before. And now to get from one place to another is less, even if you are using a high end system. And if the system has the minimum requirements it is just in some minutes. Collecting the treasure thatyour enemies drop after you kill them, is annoying since it come in little sacks, and if it contains other than gold it brings up a menu every single time. And there is also another glitch, when you see the compass and tells you that you are moving north, when you see the map you are actually going west or east, just another glitch.

Well in my opinion I think that the music of this game is quite good, it adapts very good to the environment and it is quite calm except when you are fighting. The music is in mp3 format so you can listen to it even when you are not playing the game. The sound effect of the game are awesome, the way the voices fade in the character or characters is just great and it varies their volume depending on your distance from them, or when an arrow sounds when it is thrown at an enemy and also when it hits it, it is just great.

The series of Might and Magic are not like any other game that I have played so far, you may sometimes forget that this game has a plot because the sub-plots of the game are more in number and in time to complete than the plot itself. You have to deal with one group, which is one of the main groups that you have to deal with, it is a group of fanatic goose worshipperd, which are the member of the Temple of Honk. There is a game called Whack a Honky which is basically the same from the popular Whack a Mole at carnival parades. And you will not find this gameplay in any other games, at least not that I know, and I have played lots of games.

Well, the plot start like this: you have to go convince the leaders of the towns that they become one whole to be able to defeat a much more powerful enemy because if they don’t know one will live at all. I think that was done in Might and Magic VIII, don’t you think? But once you are done with that, the plot of the game begins to turn out interesting. You will need to do a whole bunch of side quests to be able to gather enough experience and complete to plot of the game, and since there are more sub quests than the plot itself, that will be not much of a problem.

This game was made on America and was designed to be played by American people, so this time there will not be weird translations stuff like in other ones. I like this game less than some of its prequels since it has lots of interface problems and it is short on features, so that made me like it less.

Even tough I enjoyed the last games in the series, the visuals in this one are much, much better, the monsters are totally full of life, so much that they seem real. But there isn’t so much designs of townspeople but that’s not so important. The game is based that you have an adult and child male an female, and if they don’t appear on the same quest, they look the same way.

The game itself is very hard to complete on your own, so if you are not good at this kind of game then buy a hint book or get a walkthrough. Now you need to plan very carefully to know to which places you are going to go since the monsters in this game are much harder than in the last games of the series. And without a hint book to tell you what kind of monster you have and you will encounter on which area, you will die a whole bunch of times.

Well, I didn’t really counted the hours that it took to end the game, if you do all the side quests and all the other quests, but it really did take some time. My estimations is that it took more than 20 hours... and that is if you have played this kind of game before.

If you have enough patience to be able to wade through all the interface, there is very good gaming in there. But I really didn’t like the game because of the interface, so I enjoyed the game less because of it. There are some ways in which Might and Magic is a very old game, but in some other ways it is absolutely not. If you play this game while you have installments of six, seven, or eight, then you will more likely hate this game because of it. This game is a very good game but unfortunately it doesn’t live up to the past just like other games like The Legend of Zelda and Mario for example, and others like Final Fantasy and all that stuff. I am pretty sure you will end up liking this game, and not feeling sorry for buying it and/or renting it, whichever you did or will do.

My overall score of this game is a 7 out of 10, and that means that I think that it is about 70% perfect of the way that it could have been seeing all the possibilities of technology and including the gaming system it is played on and all the other stuff.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/24/02, Updated 12/24/02