The Magic Candle III

"'With a king's castle that dinky, no wonder the good guys are in trouble!'"

The Magic Candle games always seem to take up more time than you think they will. It feels about right--just as you swear you're going to be sick of the whole deal, it lurches about and forces you to try something new. Magic Candle 3(MC3) manages to bring a starkly different setting than its predecessors while still creating a new chunk of the world you need to explore and save. There are holdover characters from MC2, and you start off on Oshcrun island, but this time you must explore the world to the west and south, as King Rebnard is leading his troops to clear out the remaining evil in Gurtex. You are asked to investigate a mysterious magical blight that is ravaging neighboring lands. The solution--build a candle like the one in Deruvia. The plot ties the separate islands and their indigenous races together to a grueling climax where the game finds several ways to hint that there's no turning back.

While previous games began placidly, and the threat here seems less immediate, the maze where you start MC3 is large and dark, with monster waiting to ambush you a few paces away after you choose three companions. An orc prince, Garzbondgur, joins you and tells you his story after helping your party win the combat. Which may itself take a few tries. Once you find the exit, there are old locations from MC2 to visit. One, Castle Oshcrun, is the dumpiest castle I've ever seen--twenty times smaller than in MC2, but you can pick up companions who are an improvement your current friends. Another, Telermain, was already too big in MC2 and has only gotten bigger--but with many empty houses or uselessly anecdotal advice--although you will recognize many establishments carried over, too. It does however provide the basics of what you can do in other towns.

And you'll probably want to stay there for a while. The Magic Candle series rewards you handsomely for staying back and planning. By doing so, you can improve your characters' skills or even their gold. With sixteen characters, you can juggle them continually so that five or more not in your party are working and building an income. There are four different professions, and your troops are paid based on their skill levels. With that gold you can buy training in certain skills, spell books(there are eight) for spellcasters to memorize spells as they rest, or Methreal Plate, the best armor you can find. It's much more efficient than beating up monsters(I in fact won without winning a single fight above ground,) and you feel like you're mingling with the populace--even if there are some obvious dishonest ways to get ahead(save a game before gambling, customize your initial companions to be great metalsmiths as the game lets you and then release them, or just let someone join, rob them and give them their ultimate safety.) You can gather clues while you fund your expeditions to the various towers and dungeons, or figure out how to get in(some wallflower always seems to know the word to whisper.) The people are also easier to reach, as they or their friends hang out at the local bar, which eliminates some of the easter egg hunt that made Magic Candle a big enough hit to make me want to try its sequel years after the fact.

Not that there wasn't action. Part of the fun is discovering the islands and the personality of the towns there. Some even have joint histories, such as the ones populated by orcs and another with goblins--one side quest is that you need to reestablish peace between the two factions, who come off as rather civilized and in fact deride the 'barbaric Northerners who smell like Fermigons' for drinking fermented beverages(caffeine's their thing, i.e. tea.) I also like the city hall and palace being enclosed in what seem to be small buildings like any others--while they do wind up being bigger than Castle Oshcrun, it brings you to expect more than the usual shops that fit on a half-screen(although you can actually have interesting conversations with shopkeepers now.) They even provide that small bit of wonder if generally RPG-downtrodden races(orcs and goblins) have a little more mystique than the classical good guys(humans/elves/dwarves) and feature NPC's that bounce around to their own work schedules. Towns nearest the blight feature miserable inhabitants--and those engulfed by it are ruins. You'll see them on that ubiquitous main continent even an archipelagic game like MC3 has. They just give it less gravitas, although the city of the dead, its well-guarded library, and the rumored reticent shades that remain provide a mystery even after you find them.

The blight also has wiped out most of the mushroom fields which MC players loved, and it's caused prices to jump heinously in towns it rolls up on as the game goes on. It's as visible as its effects, a pulsing mass that produces monsters if you walk through it. Civilians also complain about it a good deal--with the graphics not quite good enough, shop owners complaining about lost profits or lost noses are still picturesque. There's no generic 'times are hard' and even the dwarven town below ground is affected--a few escaped miners will tell you about the nearby dungeon, which houses less fortunate and sane souls you need to help you.

Besides gathering information and better party members and memorizing spells, finding gods is your only priority above ground. There are a few not tucked away in dungeons, and with the right word you can wake them for a nice statistical bonus. It's the only way to improve important stuff like strength and hit points, but here people talk more explicitly about their gods and you sense some rivalries too--among the gods and their followers.

Once you're overstocked for the dungeons(and you'll need more than you think) it's pretty clear that evil forces can pack a good deal of anguish into a simple 40x40 maze. But often they'll go much bigger--or they'll build an eight level tower which is not simple at all. Moving around is a bit different than MC2; you can define a preferred formation for your party(6 people in a 3x3 box) but in narrow quarters they tend to slink around--some even zip into a side corridor and back to get where they should be. You'll frequently have to assign a new leader as one get trapped against a wall, which is annoying, but on the bright side, a bit of thinking may allow you to leap your party over a line of squares that trigger an ambush if you just rearrange everyone's location a few times. I don't know if it was intentional, but it's very thought provoking, and when you have very little space, the usual method won't work--you then have to dismiss a party member and ask him to rejoin, where he zips across the tripwire to safety or causes your party to rearrange heinously, with someone stepping on the booby trap. All this may not be integral to the game, and the spoilsport designers crack down later with narrow corridors that leave no space for shenanigans, but it shows the flexibility that can still exist in 2-d RPGs and gives something 3-d ones can't.

And the ambush combats to sneak by should be the only tough ones--and then only when you don't detect the ambush(other guys move first.) Dungeons have rooms where you square off with fixed enemies that are randomly placed. This renders the jump spell, which you can learn quickly from a cheap spell book, more useful in combat than the others combined--especially with fighters hopped up on mushrooms to do triple damage to opponents, move four times instead of 1-3, or be extra sure to hit opponents. The nifts, which give invulnerability to physical attack, are infinitely less useful than the magical shield to avoid acidballs and fireballs. It will become a point of honor to all but the last few dungeon room combats in one turn. You can even wipe out Kothspawn, which create five illusory replicas that cast spells, or various undead creatures who need a 'RESTSOUL' spell before dying, on the first turn. There's no big bad monster even in the later fights, although some of them do go for volume.

What I found more treacherous by far were the dungeons. The penultimate one, Crowndeep Caverns, features a goddess that won't give you her blessing until you have the items you need for the final trip. You then have to walk among crevasses which look like tar pools, or the more regular blue stuff you can't jump over, and often a square you think you can walk on is nonviable--it has stalactites and such, and although it may not be perfectly fair, you feel as though you're stumbling through a dungeon, looking for a safe foothold, even though you're really just poking keys on the number pad in the general direction you want to go. There's even a bridge that crumbles after an ambush, and I only wish they'd have done more of this--actually altering the area you walk around in based on puzzles you complete(in one, you split up your party to step on four pressure plates and open a distant door) or even snatching a party member over to the other side of the wall. Where you must climb down two flights of stairs and back up--and many dungeons offer a choice of ways to the top, with one leading to a nasty dead end or treasure trove.

MC3's atmosphere also feels right, as many of the enemies have withering names(half are prefaced by 'blight.') I would perhaps have liked a few cut-scenes to feature characters moving on a grid instead of a big picture of some random ranting chieftain, but the ruins make olive green look exciting, and the shocking blood-drenched tones of the final dungeon are shocking compared to the previous deep blues of the dungeon before. Although many monsters look the same dead or alive, and Fermigons are disappointingly upright(oh, for the old green blobs with teeth,) there's a pile of new names and conceptions. Rustmoss are particularly interesting monsters, as they corrode your non-magic weapons so they will need repair sooner. Some other monsters resemble toupees. There's also the innovation of gradual darkness as the hour gets later--a matter of just pushing down the RGB count, yes, but any blight you sail by still pulses fervently. In the more disorganized towns or half-civilized dungeons, you'll find tools scattered or even miniature waterfalls spouting from the wall, and while NPC's names aren't as inspired as the original, there's a nice bit of orc genealogy, and most names are short and sweet, the sort you'd wish you thought of, if you're into fantasy writing.

The game's big fault may be that it devotes too much time to the pieces of the candle you need to build, the puzzles for which are anticlimactic. Most are buried in ruins you can enter and leave quickly, and on the other hand you don't strictly need to visit some dungeons with intriguing puzzles--they'll often tell you what and where to ask about your next item. You've got a few new magic items that aren't clearly axes or swords or bows, and nobody offers much background on them. Even when you climb the final tower, the conclusion feels like a shadow of the grand candle rebuilding ritual of MC(where'd the cool chants go?) or with many of your acts coming directly from a book in a town library and not from your own ingenuity. In fact the weapons dropped on you wind up making your halfling a better fighter than your dwarf in the optimum lineup, with the wizard wielding an axe. I guess they were trying to establish harmony between the races and not go by the conventions of so many stale paperback fantasy novels, but they are bending over backwards!

As a book, MC3's story wouldn't really hold up, and besides, they did it more elaborately before in MC. You have to bring together a party whose balance is slightly forced. Every race plays a part in the end. The components of the candle seem forced, and it's not just a game you can replay due to the constant dungeon-room fighting, where even a relatively sure knockout win requires repetitive preparation. But I enjoyed mapping out the islands and working through the ruins--and shuffling my party to start them out with armor rendering half their opponents' attacks useless. Later, I found ways to sort my party around the dungeons which gained more variety than 'different colored dirt floor' or 'monsters with five times the hit points.' So MC3 was overall a positive experience, but still I'm not surprised Mindcraft went into the past with Bloodstone, the next game in the series. There's only so much to be done with a candle, I guess, especially a seeming cure-all that brings all races together to swear to guard more carefully the next time.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 02/04/04