"The beginning of one of the great pioneers of Western RPGs, enhanced for the console."

Might and Magic is the Jose Carreras of oldschool computer RPGs. When gamers are asked to name the greatest examples of the genre, everyone mentions Ultima, with a slightly fewer number mentioning Wizardry, but Might and Magic is often forgotten about despite having nearly as great a claim to video-game history as the other two series. Perhaps this is because Might and Magic started so many years after Ultima and Wizardry, but ironically, Might and Magic is by far the largest of the three franchises in the West, spanning two major series and a host of spinoffs. The problem is that the most popular offerings of the franchise are nothing like the dungeon crawls of yesteryear; instead, they're turn-based strategy games and, more recently, action games. The main series came to a disappointing end with the ninth game in 2002, and is unlikely to be resurrected by the current owners of the IP, Ubisoft. Thus the beginning of the franchise is quite different from what most people are used to from the brand, and is arguably well worth looking at because of that.

The first Might and Magic for the Apple II was mostly created by one man, Jon Van Caneghem; his company, New World Computing, at the time consisted of himself and another man who presumably handled the business end of the work. As such, this original version of the game was decidedly unpolished and amateurish. The NES version, on the other hand, was handled by Sammy, a rather large Japanese corporation that is today best known for buying Sega in 2004. Though the NES version is largely faithful to Caneghem's creation, it is an improvement in a number of ways, though there were also some decisions that may leave purists fuming.

Might and Magic takes place on Varn, a world which on the surface conforms with all of the sword-and-sorcery archetypes. (That's why it was called "Might and Magic," after all.) As your adventurers go out into the world, however, it becomes apparent that something is amiss, and you soon find out that one of the world's kings has been replaced with an imposter from outer space. Ultimately, your quest is to find the real king, expose the fake and get him kicked off of the planet, and then, as a reward for your service, travel to the world of which Varn is a satellite. Though the first Ultima had already played with the concept years earlier, the mix of fantasy and futurism has always been a hallmark of the Might and Magic series, one that has been rarely duplicated.

Might and Magic's character system is of a D&D-like style common to these early RPGs. The usual attributes are all there, such as might and endurance, and the usual races such as human and elf which favor some attributes over others. There are six classes to choose from, and most of them are what you'd expect; fighters and clerics, robbers and wizards. You also have an archer that specializes in ranged combat but can also cast low-level black magic and a paladin that is weaker than the fighter but can also use low-level white magic. The leveling system is nothing out of the ordinary, either, though it's worth noting that paladins, archers, and wizards need more experience than the other classes to level up. There's also sex and alignment, both of which only affect a few minor things, and age. The age of a character is interesting because beyond a certain point your characters will drop dead of natural causes, and there are spells that will artificially increase or decrease it.

In true oldschool style, Might and Magic is massively nonlinear. The game, played from a first-person view, takes place on a number of 16x16 grid maps, and the overworld itself is a 5x4 supergrid of twenty of these maps. Add to that five towns (four of which have dungeons), six castles (one of which has multiple floors), and a bunch of miscellaneous caves, hideyholes, and locations that don't even exist on the material plane, and you have a lot of places to explore and things to do. Might and Magic gives you no direction at all until you've searched through the nooks and crannies of Varn, and even then you're given a lot of leeway in how you want to proceed. It's actually all a bit too disjointed; you don't feel like you're in a complete world as much as a jumble of landmarks.

Most of the things you can do in Might and Magic are in the form of quests. Many of these quests come from the three true kings left in Varn, while others are stumbled upon during the course of the game. Some quests can be done repeatedly and are connected to other aspects of the world; for example, there are fountains that can permanently increase your attributes, but they can only be used once each until you participate in a particularly difficult quest to reactivate them. The main quest line that allows you to beat the game is actually quite short, but everything else serves to power up your characters and keeps you plenty busy. That's not to say that all of the quests are of the "hunt the wumpus" variety; in fact, the clear majority of quests don't require you to kill anything, instead making you look around the world and use your brain to solve a variety of puzzles and riddles. You don't even fight a final boss; you get rid of the imposter by discovering his true name.

As with any RPG, though, there are still plenty of creatures to slay. Monsters are still the best way to grind out levels, and most of the best equipment in Might and Magic is most easily obtained through combat. The most interesting thing about combat is the fact that even though you can normally only fight the first six monsters in a group, the groups can consist of upwards of twenty monsters, with the rest of them waiting to take the place of their dead comrades. In your own six-member party, sometimes (depending upon the location) only the first two members can do melee attacks, with the others forced to use ranged weapons and spells. Combat can be extremely hard, even by old RPG standards; the toughest battles involve enemies that can eradicate a character in a single hit and hordes that can swarm over your party before it can respond. Things get easier by the time you get everyone to Level 13, the minimum level needed to beat the game, but getting there in itself can be a risky adventure.

Spells in Might and Magic are fun to play with, especially in the late game. Some of the spells are useful outside of combat and relatively unique, such as the spell that allows you to fly instantly from one overworld map sector to another and the walk-on-water spell, both of which the series is known for. The combat spells are strong but not overpowering; for example, the meteor shower spell your wizard gets at the end does horrendous damage but only works in the outdoors, and the cleric spell which cures everyone in your party of everything except for eradication (including mere damage) only works once a day. Your spellcasters get additions to their grimoire every two levels until reaching the aforementioned Level 13, by which time they'll be the lynchpin of your party.

All of these things are common to versions both Apple II and NES, but Sammy did quite a bit of work in bringing Might and Magic to the console audience. The most obvious change is in the graphics and sound. The original version had no sound outside of beep-boop sound effects and the visuals were awful even by Apple II standards, being mostly system-font text. The NES version looks and sounds much more like a proper RPG; it has real sound, including music, and the graphics are much brighter and less mushy, with monsters that look like they came out of Dragon Quest. A big barrier of entry for the first Might and Magic consisted of these aesthetic problems, and Sammy solved them admirably.

I also liked what they did to the gameplay, though reviews may be more mixed on that score. The biggest effect is a change in difficulty. Fleeing from battles is a lot more likely to succeed in the NES version, you need less experience to gain levels, and other more obscure changes add up to make your journey a lot smoother. In addition, the beginning of the game was simplified, the modification which I enjoyed the least. Not only are you forced to use premade characters (which aren't class-balanced), but you can't leave the starting town of Sorpigal until Level 2. Undoubtedly this was done so console gamers wouldn't feel completely lost, but this sort of arbitrary restriction goes against the way these Western RPGs work. In an attempt to make up for this, Sammy added a guild in Sorpigal which allows you to reroll the default characters, but this erases any progress they may have made. There are also different characters in the other towns, but by that point you might as well stick with what you have.

As for the plot, there wasn't much there to begin with, but probably due to space restrictions, a couple of bits of dialogue towards the end were removed. This has no real effect on the plot, but Might and Magic fans might feel the need to nitpick because those bits reveal more about the overall Might and Magic universe. Besides that, differences were mostly the result of minor translation errors (most notably the amusing mistransliteration of "Varn" into "Barn") and Nintendo's goofy censorship policy at the time ("minotaur dung" changed to "squishy slime," among others).

At the end of the NES version of the game, you get a password that can be used to import your characters into Might and Magic II for the SNES. Unfortunately, that version of the sequel didn't come out in America because of weak response to the first game. I'd like to say that this is because console gamers didn't play computer RPGs back then, but I'd say that just as much to blame is the fact that the first Might and Magic is far from the best in the series. It wasn't until the first sequel that the series found its voice; the previous game was more of a proof-of-concept, almost like another Akalabeth (Ultima 0), just removed by a span of years and better technology. But if you're willing to put up with the excessive lack of cohesiveness and a plot that's as lacking as it is unusual, Sammy's NES version is the one to play.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/10/07, Updated 08/31/07

Game Release: Might & Magic: Secret of the Inner Sanctum (US, August 1992)