Fighting Fantasy - Books 46-50

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46. Tower of Destruction  - Score = 0.0   Tier = Broken (for me at least)

Sections: 400
Attempts before submitting : 20

Wow! Herbie Brennan wrote a Fighting Fantasy gamebook? Well, no actually, as this entry is from FF stalwart Keith Martin, but if I hadn't known who the author was after my playthroughs of this, Brennan would have been one of my top choices as to their identity. I thought there were more than a few of his hallmarks here. An icy setting, a crazy plot, a hub section for exploration, incomprehensible puzzles, and an apparent disregard for playtesting. But first, the plot, and man is this one ever eye-brow raising. It doesn't start off all that badly, as we play as a northern barbarian, who after returning to his village one day finds that it has been attacked and "fire bombed" by some sort of giant magical flying sphere. We then set off after it in a quest for revenge (and apparently not because we want to prevent this atrocity from befalling anyone else). However, it gets far worse when we eventually catch up to the sphere, and learn that it was just a trial run for an even larger doomsday device being constructed by a wizard who is currently enthralled to a demon. His plan is to build a flying tower (pictured on the cover) which would fly all over Titan, presumably bombing all the world's inhabitants back to the stone age (or whatever passes for that in a fantasy setting). Excuse me while I try to stifle my guffaws, because this has to be one of the most ridiculous "evil plans" of the whole series, with silly cover art to match, and would fit right in with the villain plans from the Nintendo Adventure series that I just finished playing. 

Turning to some of the specific rules for this adventure, we get two here. First is your Honour stat, which predictably goes up or down depending on what actions you take during the quest. While I have never minded this aspect when used in other gamebooks, it always seemed to me to be blatantly obvious in most cases what you are supposed to do. For example, right in the very first section of this book, when you return to your freshly-attacked village, you are given 4 options, one of which is trying to help the injured. I mean c'mon, that is clearly the option you are meant to take. Even without the Honour system I would have been taking that choice anyway, because you know, I like to play as a hero. The second specific thing to track here is Time passed, and in my opinion this is completely botched. You are told to add a day to your Time tracker every time you go to sleep, and then when you arrive at a certain location in the book, how much Time it took you to get there will determine if you need to fight extra enemies or not (as apparently they have time to "prepare for you" if you took too long). There are several problems with the whole thing though. One, why couldn't you have just been told when to mark off a day instead of determining it for yourself? This made it incredibly easy to miss the passing of a day, especially in later playthroughs when I was mind-numbingly going over the same paragraphs again and again. Next, arriving late only means that you have to fight a couple of extra lower-stat enemies instead of bypassing them should you be early. You are probably going to need a high Skill score to beat this book anyway, so instead of adding tension by arriving late, it just added more pointless dice-rolling. And finally, as near as I can tell anyway, the only way to get to the location early is by ignoring as much as possible on the way. Maybe that was supposed to be the point, but I just found it better to accept that I was going to arrive late, as at least that way I got to play as one of the good guys, with the added bonus of not having to worry about the Time stat anymore. 

So we set off alone in pursuit of the flying sphere, and I felt this opening act to be something of a drag. I usually enjoy the cold and icy settings, but I found very little atmosphere here, and other than the names of the creatures I might have to fight, I never got the feeling of traversing a desolate and icy wasteland. Once we finally catch up to the sphere, which has now landed, we make our way inside and fight our way to the control room where we destroy the magical ball of flying death. We also learn that our quest is far from over, as we now must travel to a desolate Ice Palace which was once inhabited by Elves, but is now where we need to head in order to also destroy the titular Tower of Destruction before it can unleash a similar fiery fury upon Titan. Thus begins another overland trek which I found just as uninspiring as the first one (do you want to fight an Ice Demon or a Polar Bear?), before arriving at the majestic Ice Palace. 

Ok, so here the adventure implements what I thought was the best part of the book, by providing a hub section that allows you to explore 9 different areas of the Ice Palace in any order you choose. There are some different items you apparently need to discover scattered throughout the Ice Palace, which should have made for a grand old item hunt. Unfortunately, you can easily find yourself locked out of certain areas should you not proceed in a specific order, which while perhaps not ruining the whole thing, sure can make it rather frustrating. So, what do you need to do in the Ice Palace in order to proceed further into the adventure? I wish I could say, because this is where my attempt at the book came to a grinding halt. Before I get to why, I will list below some of my frustrations with the book up until this point, saving the one that caused me to throw in the towel for last. 

- So I may only have myself to blame for this first one, but at one point I came across a fight against two Ice Ghosts (which appears to introduce some new rules for fighting multiple opponents?),  and proceeded to fight them with the instructions given. Upon finally winning the fight, I flipped the page to see where to turn to next, only to read the first sentence at the top of the next page which says..."When you first strike one of the Ice Ghosts turn to.....". Oh for f#@%s sake! Sure, that will teach me to read to the end of the section before beginning the fight, but would it have killed them to put that instruction on the previous page? In fact, why couldn't it have come even before the stats of the Ice Ghosts were listed? Gah!

- Staying on the combat issue, there are many fights in this book that have extra dice-rolling that needs to be done in order to resolve them. For instance, when you strike some enemies, you roll one die to determine if you do 1 or 2 points of Stamina damage. Or you might need to roll one die every round to see if that demon hits you with his fire breath in addition to the regular attack. In a book I wasn't enjoying all that much to begin with, this just made some of these encounters drag on too long. 

- Speaking of fighting a demon, there is a combat against a Fire Demon here where before you begin you are told "the Fire Demon can be struck and hurt by magical weapons". But it says nothing about if you have no magical weapons. Are you just dead?

- Ok so this one really bothered me, but at one point I was forced to lose an Honour Point because I apparently wouldn't help the spirit of an Elf who was in distress. The reason I wouldn't help is because I had already helped this spirit earlier, but the book did not seem to take into consideration that the player may have already done this! This is very odd considering the hub structure of the Ice Palace area.

- There is a tower you can ascend with a landing in the middle that has passages running off to the left and right. You are asked if you want to try the left or the right one, but this "left or right" choice doesn't change depending on the direction you are going, either up or down the stairs. Thus, the right hand passage is labelled as such even though when you are coming down the stairs, this is the passage on your left. It seems to me this whole situation could be avoided by using East or West instead of Right or Left. A small quibble perhaps, but it stuck out more than usual thanks to several of the other issues I was encountering along the way.  

- In another smaller issue, I at one point acquired a Snow Fox pelt as I travelled. Later on I was given the opportunity to sell a Silver Fox pelt if I had one. Hmm, was this meant to be the same thing or are there several different fox pelts out there to collect?

- The clock puzzle. Jeesh. I had to admit defeat on this one. Not because I felt I couldn't necessarily solve the puzzle, but because I couldn't read the damn thing! I know I have waxed on recently about some of the smaller printing I have been encountering in gamebooks lately, but this one is brutal, My eyesight ain't THAT bad! At least give me a chance without having to break out the magnifying glass. And on the subject of the printing, why is the text in this book smaller in general?

- So here it is, the issue that caused me to admit defeat. This being the numerical sequence puzzle. Now this one I do admit to not being able to solve, and unfortunately for me it appears that not being able to solve this means you can't win the adventure (although hopefully someone can tell me if I'm wrong on that one). This puzzle gives you the following numbers: 0,1,10,35,84,205 and tells you to turn to the section with the next number in the sequence. I tried many different things with this but didn't come up with anything that felt remotely correct. I considered just guessing every number until I found the answer (the number is likely greater than 300 based on the sequence, so this might not have been so onerous as it first sounds), but I eventually felt that this would be against the spirit of the game and would feel too much like cheating. 

And thus, with that last one, my quest to beat this book came to a crashing halt. I even stuck around for several playthroughs taking The Temple of Flame approach by trying everything else I could think of in other areas of the book, no matter how counter-intuitive it might have seemed, in the vain hope that there might be another way to acquire the Ice Bird that appears to be blocked behind that numerical sequence puzzle (if the description in that section is any indication). My total attempts at the adventure were really not all that high for a book I had to give up on, and that is partially a combination of there being hardly any instant deaths in the book, along with there being a plethora of healing options available to you.   

Speaking of healing options, was it just me or did the Provisions system here seem really out of whack? You begin the adventure with 10 Provisions, which can restore 4 points of Stamina. There are in addition times where you will be told you must eat a meal or suffer a Stamina point loss (Lone Wolf anyone?). The thing is, there are LOADS of times when you are instructed you must eat, sometimes even twice in the same section! This is all then offset by having the acquirement of more Provisions readily available throughout the book. There was one spot where I picked up a whopping 8 provisions at once, and another where my provisions were restored back to the maximum of 10! For the life of me this all ended up feeling like mindless bookkeeping just for the sake of it. And perhaps it was my frustration with other areas of the book bleeding over, but the writing here felt like a step down from earlier Keith Martin efforts. None of the creatures or encounters stood out to me in the slightest, and if you introduced a drinking game whereby you took a shot every time you read the word "ice" in this book, you'd have died from alcohol poisoning many times over. Who knows though, not being able to solve that one puzzle means I missed out on the final act of the adventure, so perhaps I missed out on a corker of an ending, although that might be overly optimistic. One thing at least I did feel the adventure got mostly right was the money system, as there are some useful items that you can purchase, but gold can be tough to come by and if you want to buy some of the better stuff you might need to plot out where you can acquire some extra cash. 

"An understandable but not excusable mistake" as Sheldon Cooper would say. This book is full of those. This could also be a picture of me trying to solve that numerical puzzle. 

Ranking: I feel somewhat guilty in putting Tower of Destruction into my "Broken" tier. After all, just because I'm not smart enough to solve a puzzle that appears to be essential to completing the gamebook, doesn't necessarily mean there is something wrong with it. But I've put every other book I have been unable to complete into this category so for now I will stick with this ranking. If at sometime in the future I am able to figure out the puzzle in question, I may return to try and complete it and then revisit this score. That said, up until the point where I called it quits, the adventure was on its way to a rather low score anyway, barring the possibility of the final act which I never got to see, blowing me away. The premise was ridiculous, the atmosphere was rather weak, inconsistencies in the text seemed to abound, wrinkles thrown into various combats just made them more tedious than anything, and the puzzles were absolute head-scratchers. After two Good entries (Stealer of Souls and Master of Chaos) and one Great one (Vault of the Vampire), it's hard for me to believe this is from the same author. I dearly hope Keith Martin isn't going the way of Ian Livingstone, where his books appear to get progressively worse. For now though I will give him the benefit of the doubt that this was an outlier and that he will return to form with his next entry. (Please!)