Clash of the Princes

  

RANKINGS

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1. The Warlock's Way - Score = 6.3    Tier = OK

Attempts to beat: 21

So now I get to tackle the first adventure on my list that was intended for two players, but can also be played solo. As a solo player, that is the perspective I will be reviewing it from for the most part, so perhaps something to keep in mind as it could possibly be better (or worse) with two players. I am beginning with the book that sees you playing as the character of the warlock brother, Lothar, and will leave the playing of the warrior brother, Clovis, for last. The story opens by describing to the reader the rules of accession upon the ritual abdication of the king within the city-state of Gundobad. In such a situation, the contenders for the throne (in this case, the king's sons Lothar and Clovis) must prove themselves worthy by venturing out into the wild and obtaining one of the Sacred Gems of Gundobad, which were long ago scattered across the surrounding lands, with the first to acquire one being declared king. I'm not sure what happens if no one manages to get their hands on one (and with how difficult they are to find, you'd think this must happen quite a bit). However, seeing as how if we don't manage this task we will be killed by some manner of foul creature or suffer some other horrible fate in the attempt, we probably don't care what happens after that. So off into the wild we wander to see if we can locate this particular MacGuffin, and while this really isnt a very interesting premise playing solo, I suppose it would have at least set up the competition aspect required in the two player game.

 

"One, two princes....princes kneel before you....that's what I said now..." 

(I've been waiting a long time to review this book just to make this "Two Princes" by the Spin Doctors reference. Does anyone else remember this song from the 90's? If this gamebook had a soundtrack, this song would surely be on it. )

One thing that needs to be addressed right off the top is that the amount of instant deaths in this book is crazy! After only 10 minutes of playing it the first night, I had already been insta-deathed 3 times! This is really not good for an adventure that requires lots of exploration in order to find a collection of items necessary to progress through to the end of the quest. You need to carefully map out where everything is in the adventure, (which is a very good thing in a gamebook) but unfortunately because of the plethora of unfair instant deaths, I found myself dreading to even peek under a rock much less experiment with all the different options you are given, and this is very counter-productive to the whole fun of the adventure. There also appears to be very little, if any, logical reason for how you could have predicted some of these deaths beforehand, thus making them feel very random. One example occurs when you attempt to cross The Lake of Death near the very beginning of the book. You can choose to pay the ferrymen 6 gold pieces to take you across the lake, but halfway across they stop the boat and attempt to shake you down for an additional 2 gold pieces. Your options at this point include: getting out to wade across, trying to commandeer the boat for yourself, or cave in to their blackmail and pay them the 2 gold. Two of these options lead to instant death and the only correct one is the option that most players will likely find hard to stomach, and therefore not choose unless they already know the other two lead to game over. The adventure is chock full of situations such as this (an encounter with a group of druids is another absolute doozy) and Im going to have to rethink my earlier anointment of Robin Waterfield as Captain Insta-death because the authors of this book have now firmly put themselves in the running for that title.    

On the plus side, you get to travel across and through a varied set of terrain, including plains, forests, caves and mountains as you battle creatures all along the way in your attempt to find one of the Sacred Gems. It's hinted at during the adventure that you need to acquire four rings in order to eventually succeed in the quest. This is kind of odd though as only two of the rings (the first two that you can get) are really necessary. The information inscribed on the last two rings is really quite "Captain Obvious" knowledge that seems rather pointless to acquire once you get to the end and need to put the rings to use. Thankfully there are several other items that you can hunt down, with a couple of them proving very useful. I believe the Magical Rod you can find which deducts 1 Skill point from your opponent every time you hit them is likely a must-get if you hope to beat the high powered foes that hold the two needed rings. I have to say that, instant-deaths aside, I did really enjoy mapping out the landscape and discovering the location of these items as I slowly plotted out what I felt was the optimal route through the adventure. You are given a final choice among three different coloured gems right at the end of the book (with two of the choices leading to game over), but thankfully this choice isn't one of the totally random ones in the adventure as you can pick up information earlier that guides you on which gem to select, and seeing as how this adventure will likely take many attempts to complete, you will probably have acquired this information long before you make it to this final choice. 

I will also say that for the most part I enjoyed the magic system included here as well, though it's certainly not without its faults. You have a list of Battle Spells shown at the front of the book that you can attempt to cast before any combat (unless you are specifically told otherwise that you can't before the fight, which is rare), with each spell costing a certain amount of your Magic points. There is a 1 in 6 chance that your spell will not work at any given time, which I felt added just the right amount of tension to the spell-casting. That said, the list of spells didn't seem all that well balanced, with a few of them standing out as far more useful than the others. The Clumsy spell in particular was an overpowered go-to spell of mine, as it allowed you to take 2 Skill points off of any one enemy you were fighting. This spell was especially useful considering Lothar, being a magic user, begins with a lower Skill score than the normal Fighting Fantasy system provides. I do have to wonder though why this incredibly useful spell only cost 1 Magic point while many other less useful spells cost 2 or 3 points? In addition to casting spells before combats, you are also frequently given a choice to select among several of your spells in order to overcome some sort of obstacle (such as crossing The Lake of Death for example). The system betrays itself a bit here though, as you are often given a choice among three of your spells, with one of them costing 1 Magic point, another costing 2 points, and the third costing 3 points. You can be fairly certain that at least one, if not two, of these choices will fail to get you past the obstacle, even if you succeed in their casting. However, the option that costs the most points almost always seems to be the correct choice. This makes sense from the standpoint that your more powerful spell would be more likely to help you out of the situation, but it also gives away which one you should probably be selecting in the first place. Still, the inclusion of any sort of magic system is usually a boost in an adventure's score right out of the chute, and overall this one does enough to allow for some experimentation and at least a small bit of strategy.  

The authors do I think need to take some kind of course in maze construction however, as there is not one, but three mazes within this book that can make very little sense when you attempt to map them. Section references are routinely repeated within these mazes, seemingly at random, which can lead you far from where your map shows you should be, and this unfortunately led me to map them using section numbers instead of a proper drawing, which I always hate doing. This kind of thing sort of made sense for the swamp area of the book I suppose (and I believe you can find yourself trapped in a loop here with no way out), but in the plains and mountain areas it was just annoying and felt poorly planned out. 

    

I have always found author Andrew Chapman's writing to be subpar in the Fighting Fantasy series and I found nothing here to make me change that opinion. In fact, the writing actually seems even slightly worse in this effort, as very little description or atmosphere is given to many of the situations you find yourself in, which is a shame as the authors actually came up with their fair share of what should have been more interesting and colourful encounters such as the Wight, Djinn, Black Knight and Nightmare. Im not sure how much of this was written by Chapman and how much by co-author Martin Allen (or if they each wrote one of the two books on their own), but this definitely feels to me like a Chapman written book. I have no idea if I would have scored the book higher or lower had I been playing along with someone else, and as near as I can tell, the two-player gimmick seems to involve one of the players having to wait until the other player joins them at certain locations based upon a Status score that is tracked as you play. This seems like it might lead to one of the players having to wait around doing nothing until the other person catches up to them, which could get boring, but I don't doubt that a lot of work must have gone into this to make it playable in this fashion (assuming that it is of course) so credit does have to be given to Chapman and Allen for putting in the work on this front.  

Ranking: It definitely has more than a few faults, but I found this to be a fun enough item hunt with a decent spell system that is unfortunately hurt by the lackluster writing and insane amount of instant deaths. I am interested to see how the second book compares as I'm assuming it has no magic system, which was one of the better things about this book. At the very least I hope the "game over if you chose to pick an apple instead of an orange" type situations are toned down considerably. I will hold my own contest to see which book I can complete in fewer attempts, with that book's prince thus getting to the Sacred Gem faster and declared king! 

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2. The Warrior's Way - Score = 7.4    Tier = Good

Attempts to beat: 23

I now get to make another try at obtaining the Sacred Gem and thus being declared king again, only now I get to do it as Mayor Quimby's beer swilling brother Lothar's brother, Clovis. As assumed with Clovis being a warrior as opposed to a warlock like his sibling, there is no magic system at play here, and we fall back to using just the basic Fighting Fantasy stats. The opening setup is obviously the same as the previous book, and begins with Clovis just wandering out into the wilderness in search of one of the Sacred Gems to prove he is worthy of the kingship. Clovis' quest plays out across a mostly different set of locations than did Lothar's, which is a blessing as I would have been severely disappointed had this adventure just been a rehash of the first with Clovis visiting all the same locales that Lothar had. Once again there is a good mix of locations and many varied encounters here as Clovis makes his way north toward the Isle of Orcmoot, although it does seem odd that there are not one, but two different evil chapels that can be visited along the way!  

Much like in the previous book where Lothar was expected to locate 4 rings, here we have Clovis needing to find 4 parchments that when joined together will provide the answer to the question posed by the Demon at the end of the adventure. This works by having each of the parchments contain part of a three digit number, with lines of the number drawn on a 3 x 9 space grid. Assembling all the parchments gives you all the lines you need to draw on the grid, and thus reveals the section number you need to turn to in order to solve the Demon's question. I thought this worked beautifully, as even if you didn't manage to obtain all the parchments before you made it to the end, you could still take a guess as to the correct section based upon the information you were able to collect. I made it a point however to find all 4 parchments, as it really encourages you to explore the book to the fullest.  And though while as in the previous book, this adventure also has a few paths that don't seem to make a lot of sense as to where they meet up in relation to other paths on my map, overall I found this adventure to be constructed much better than the prior one. One of the big reasons for this is that the stupid random mazes found in the previous book are not repeated here, thank goodness! 

The real strength of the adventure is in its layout and how good of a job it does in providing a mix of essential, non-essential but very helpful, and complete red herring items. Therefore you really need to use trial and error in order to locate not only the parchments, but all these various items and find out which ones will help out where, and which can ultimately be ignored. Many of these items can be quite well hidden. For example, and while they didn't prove necessary to completing the adventure, I still have no idea where the birch seedlings are located, which could have saved me some grief on a few of my playthroughs I'm guessing. On the flip side to this however is that there are helpful, and even essential, items hidden behind seemingly totally counter-intuitive choices. I mean seriously, what Fighting Fantasy adventurer is going to choose to actually eat the mushrooms over the berries? Or more importantly, to try and steal gold pieces out of a magical well? The latter in particular took me forever to figure out, and almost drove me crazy as I scoured my map wondering what the heck I hadn't tried yet in order to find the only piece of parchment I still hadn't located. Speaking of gold pieces, I do have to wonder what the point of your gold is in this adventure, as other than one solitary moment where you can throw a gold piece into the aforementioned well (and you really don't want to do this anyway), there appears to be absolutely nowhere you can use it. 

There are a lot of battles you have to fight your way through in order to successfully complete the adventure, but this works for me as I personally enjoy books with lots of combats (as long as they are not ridiculously unfair anyway!). On the balance front, there are a fair share of tough fights here so you will probably need a double digit Skill score should you wish to have a realistic shot at winning. Once you finally gather all the parchments and battle your way to the end, you then answer the Demon's question by turning to the secret reference number that you have uncovered. You haven't quite won yet though, as you have to make the same 1 in 3 choice among coloured gems that Lothar had to make in the previous book. It was a bit disappointing though that if you have already beaten that adventure, you will know exactly which gem you need to select here as well, but once you do that you are then declared the next king of Gundobad. 

I was surprised at how much better the writing felt in this adventure in places. This may be the effect of "everything is relative" in coming off the previous book so that I wasnt expecting much on this front, and while portions of this adventure retain the bare bones descriptions found in the previous book, there are also a few well written sequences. I found an encounter with an abused Pegasus to be quite moving, and there is also a sequence that takes place within a graveyard and mausoleum that did a good job of creating a horror atmosphere (if even the illustration of a vampire that looks like a game show host does its best to counteract this).    

More to the illustrations, and touching in particular on the covers of the two books, I wonder how much information illustrator John Blanche had to go on when commissioned for this assignment. The Warlock's Way cover seems to provide an illustration that I don't believe occurs anywhere in the adventure. In fact, it looks like Blanche may have gotten his Clashes mixed up and thought he was asked to provide a scene from Clash of the Titans instead, as this appears to be the Stygian Witches. The cover of The Warrior's Way seems slightly more appropriate at first glance, as I believe this is meant to show the final confrontation between Clovis and the Demon, but even this doesn't really match the interior of the book. There is also a huge missed opportunity regarding the map shown on the inside cover of the two books. This map is so generic as to be almost useless, and doesn't seem to properly represent the areas you are travelling. With such a varied set of terrain and locations that you get to traverse in these adventures, it is really a shame that more highly detailed maps were not included as they would have added greatly to the atmosphere and immersion.  

Ranking: Lothar may have technically won (barely) my personal contest on who could acquire the Sacred Gem the fastest and therefore be crowned King of Gundobad, but Clovis' adventure, The Warrior's Way, is clearly the superior book. It lacks a magic system yes, but other than that it's an improvement in every area. The overall design is much better, the stupid mazes are gone, the writing is a step up, and the crazy amount of instant deaths has been scaled back (although still prevalent). While the plot remains dull, I fully enjoyed uncovering the locations of the parchments and planning out the route that would allow me to pick up the most useful items. Not a classic by any stretch, but well worth a play as a tougher item hunt with lots of dice rolling combats.