By Kurt Kalata

The Quest for Glory series first started in 1990, and was designed by the husband and wife team of Lori and Corey Cole. There were originally four games planned - So You Want to Be a Hero, Trial by Fire, Shadows of Darkness, and Dragon Fire. However, after the second game, the Coles deviated from their initial plan to create another game, Wages of War. The series then continued as planned, and ended with the release of Dragon Fire in 1998. It's clear that the Coles had an overarching plan for the series from the get-go, which strengthens the ties between installments. It's amazing that they were actually able to finish their plans, given how many other gaming series get cut short, particularly Japanese series like Xenosaga and Shenmue. Although similar in appearance, the Quest for Glory titles are very much unlike many of Sierra's other adventure games. Although they use the same interface, graphics style and interpreters, they're less like point and click adventures, and more like Western RPGs that happens to be dressed in adventure gaming clothing. The open worlds are reminiscent of the open worlds found in the early Kings Quest games, with one main town center and a fairly large, non-linear world to explore. Your specific goals usually aren't apparent when you first begin any of the games, but you'll soon learn after talking to the townspeople, or checking out the local Adventurer's Guild for people in need. Most of the main storyline involves conquering a number of trials before moving on to the final segment of the game. There are usually also additional subquests that can improve your stats, give you extra items or money, or even change the ending of the game. The biggest influence on how you play through the game is determined by your character class, chosen at the beginning of each game. As a Fighter, you are more well suited to combat, and can simply choose brute force methods to conquer many of the puzzles. As a Thief, you're a bit more sly, preferring a stealthy approach. As a Magician, you can just use your magic spells, provided you've learned the appropriate one. Starting with the third game, there's also the "hidden" Paladin class, which is much like a Fighter but with extra abilities, and some additional subquests to conquer. Each problem usually has multiple solutions. If you need gold, as a Fighter, you might simply wander through the land and destroy enemies to take their cash. As a Thief, it might be better to just wait until night and break into some houses, or take on some jobs for the local Thieves Guild. As a Fighter, if you're strong enough, you can simply break down doors. As a Thief, you can pick the lock. As a Magician, you can just cast an Open spell. The puzzles in Quest for Glory are quite different from the puzzles in other adventure games, because they're usually pretty direct and logical. The most difficult element is simply hunting down or finding the items you'll need, and you might not even need them, depending on your character's skills. Additionally, while there are still death scenes, they aren't as random and frustrating as other games. They're usually because you died in combat or did something particularly stupid. There are also very few cases where the games can become unwinnable if you forget to grab a certain object (except for one easy-to-miss thing in Quest for Glory II.) It's also possible to create hybrid characters. At the beginning of each game, you can allocate a number of skill points to a number of statistics, including Strength (which determines you attacking power), Vitality (stamina), and Magic, as well as other skills like climbing, lock picking, and stealth. Normally you can increase these skills in five point incremenets, but you can also spend fifteen points to give your character a skill they might not normally have. This way, you can create a Fighter that can pick locks, or a Thief with magic skills. Some of the games still have specific paths for each character (for instance, you may not be able to use certain spells unless you're a Magician, even if you've granted Magic skills to another character), but it does allow you to diversify a bit. Once you've learned a skill, you can increase it simply by performing the action over and over. There aren't technically any experience levels, but you gain Strength, Vitality, and Weapon Use stats by fighting in combat. You can also repeatedly throw stones to build up your Throwing stat, or repeatedly try to climb something to build up your Climbing skill. It's a bit silly that you might need to stop for a few moments and repeat a single action over and over just so you can proceed, but it's much less tedious than the level grinding found in other RPGs. Each game has battle scenes, although you can usually avoid most of them, depending on your character. Although the specific battle system changes from game to game, they're usually one-on-one scenes fought in real time. They're generally all pretty sloppy, and their outcome is more based on your statistics than your skills, but there's rarely any case where things get too difficult that you can just gain some stats and mash some buttons. The really cool thing is, once you finish the game, you can save your character and import them directly into any of the sequels, keeping all of their statistics. You can change their class if you wish, too. With each game, the default stats for the hero goes up. In the first game, when you're a newbie, the levels for most skills is are pretty low, with about 10 or 20 points in each skill. By the time the fifth and final game roles around, you average around 300. If you play the entire series from scratch, in order, you see your hero start out as a rookie, slowly save land after land, gain a reputation, and become far more powerful than when you started. The main concept of Quest for Glory is evident through the subtitle of the first game: "So You Want to be a Hero?" In each of the five games, you play as a character whose job it is to travel the world, saving the inhabitants from evil. Each of the five games takes place in a different part of the world: the first takes place in the Germanic land of Spielburg, with a bit of a traditional medival flavor; the second takes place in the Middle Eastern land of Shapier, with an Arabic flair; the third takes place in the African land of Tarna; the fourth takes place in the Transylvania-esque land of Mordavia; and the fifth and final takes place in Silmaria, heavily resembling Ancient Greece. Each game has a unique setting, complete with interesting characters to meet, good and bad. Many real life folk tales and myths are also woven into the story. The main plots themselves rarely go beyond the usual "find and conquer evil demon", but what makes the story so interesting are the individual plights of the townspeople, and how you save them. This epic feel, complemented with the fantastically designed game world, is largely what makes the Quest for Glory series so interesting. In the first game, you stay at an inn run by a group of cat people called Katta. In the second game, you travel with them to their homeland of Shapeir. So whenever you see any of the Katta in the rest of the games, you can say, hey, I've seen where these guys come from! Many other elements remain consistent throughout all of the games too - nearly all of the games have an Adventurer's Guild, which act as a starting place for each quest, and provides a place for training, as well as a logbook to sign. Each country you visit has a different form of currency, so the first thing you need to do (at least in the first few games) is to hunt down a money exchanger so you can actually purchase some goods. One particularly important recurring theme is the presence of the great hero Erana, an elf who traveled the world many years before, and seems to have completely disappeared. In almost all of the games, you'll find an area blessed by her powers, which act as a safe haven for your hero to rest. All of these culminate with the final game, where characters and events from the previous games all come together to form a rewarding finale. Quest for Glory also has a fairly unique sense of humor. Though not quite as off the way as, say, Space Quest, the developers clearly have an affinity for goofy puns, pop culture references, and British humour, particularly Monty Python and Douglas Adams. Like most Sierra games, plenty of the death scenes have some pretty funny messages and are usually worth seeing, just for the chuckle. The only consistent downside to the series is that they've often been very buggy. They're much more complicate than the average Sierra adventure, featuring more random elements and non-linear play, so many were released before they had been properly tested. You can find patches for all of them, some of them fan made, although they don't necessarily fix all of the issues. Just save often! As a side note, the series was originally known as "Hero's Quest". However, once it was published, Sierra ran into some problems with a board game company who had already trademarked the name. It was then changed to "Quest for Glory", and then re-released. All subsequent games used the Quest for Glory moniker.

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Hero's Quest / Quest for Glory I: So You Want To Be a Hero - MS-DOS / Amiga / Atari ST / PC-98 (1990)

EGA Cover

VGA Cover

Quest for Glory (EGA)

The first Quest for Glory begins in the land of Spielburg, a Germanic village in the middle of a lush forest. The town's not in the best of shapes, given that their princess has been missing for years. Furthermore, the local brigands are causing trouble for travelers. And if those woes weren't enough, the area is cursed by the vicious ogreess Baba Yaga. Only you, a young hero fresh from the Famous Adventures Correspondence School, can save the day. The town of Spielburg is fairly small, but it does have a castle, and a large maze-like forest to explore. The thief is a particularly good class for rummaging through the shops in town, most of which are otherwise inaccessible. The land is full of ghouls and thieves, but there are kindly creatures too, like the weird little hermit who lives by the waterfall. One of the most important characters to meet is the addle brained wizard Erasmus and his wide familiar (or is that the other way around), a rat named Fenrus. If you're a magician and you've found the right spells, you can challenge him in a minigame. You'll also come across the mysterious Antwerp, a goofy, bouncing blob creature that seems harmless, but can cause quite the trouble if you bother it too much - it'll launch itself into the sky and come plummeting down on top of you, killing you instantly. Also amusing is the mushroom garden, where taking too many mushrooms will result in some nasty drug trips that can eventually kill you. Like the first entries in many other Sierra series, Quest for Glory comes in two flavors: the original EGA version, released in 1990 using SCI0, or the enhanced VGA remake, released in 1992 using SCI1. Unlike the remakes for, say, Space Quest or Leisuire Suit Larry, where the remakes looked and played vastly better than the AGI originals, the gap between these two versions aren't quite as big. SCI0 only supports 16 colors, but it uses the full 320x240 resolution, and still manages to look pretty decent given the hardware limitations. The mouse-based movement is a bit fussy, but this is one of the later revisions of the engine, which allows you to examine any object by pointing at it and right clicking, much better than typing "look at ____" then trying to figure out whatever noun the game had in mind. The VGA one features the usual handdrawn backgrounds, which are generally quite faithful to the originals. Sometimes some effects are missing, like the fancy fireworks outside the magic store in the EGA version, but on the flip side, areas like the hedge garden are vastly more detailed in the VGA version. The VGA version also uses claymation for the combat sequences. While the animation is a bit jerky, they don't look too bad. The same can't be said about the character portraits, which look almost universally ugly. The music is slightly enhanced, although it's largely the same, but the addition of digitized sound effects adds a bit to the remake, especially during combat. The VGA version does have an odd easter egg where you'll find a character from the early 90s TV show Dinosaurs wandering through the forest. The EGA version features a cameo by the submarine from Codename: Iceman, another Sierra game released around the same time. The design of the Antwerp is also different between the games. In the EGA version, it has four eyes and a beard. In the VGA version, it only has two eyes and no beard, but you can kinda see its digestive system through its gooey flesh. The hero's design changed between games too, with the EGA hero wearing blue armor and a black cape, with the VGA hero wearing a brown and white suit with a red cape. The VGA version features the usual Walk, Use, and Talk icons, but there's also a Magic use icon, and a miscellaneous function that will open up a submenu, allowing you to view your character sheet, check the time of day, rest, or run. However, the EGA version had funny little messages if you clicked on random item that don't have any description written for them, like "We're sorry, but the pixel you clicked on is not in service at this time. Please check your mouse and click again." Unfortunately, these are all removed from the VGA version - you'll just get generic descriptions. The two major other revisions with the VGA version are with the conversation and battle systems. In the text parser driven in EGA version, you need to "ask about" a variety of different topics, and keep guessing at different ones to see if you can dig any useful information out of them. The VGA remake simply presents you with a predetermined selection, making things much easier. On the combat side, the EGA version sticks the camera right above the hero's head, giving a pseudo first-person look at the action. While immersive, the combat is extremely slow and clumsy. It seems like you're constantly swiping at air, and damage seems to be randomly generated by your stats rather than your actions. As a result, it's all too easy to get decimated any random encounter in the early portions of the game. Furthermore, if you keep the game Speed on High in order to quickly explore the land of Spielburg, you need to be quick and set it to default (with the = key) or else you'll end up fighting in fast forward motion. The VGA version fixes things up a bit. The camera has been switched to a over-the-shoulder angle, giving you a slightly better view of the action. A shield in the lower right corner shows all of the commands, including two types of sword attacks, as well as parries and dodges. You can also simply click the center to run away, or switch to the spell menu. While the combat is still based largely on your stats rather than your skill, at least it's far less difficult and frustrating. One major snag is that if you run out of stamina during combat, you'll die immediately. Since the technological differences between the two is slight, picking a version is mostly a matter of preference, although the easier fighting probably makes the VGA remake the better choice for newcomers. MP3s Download here Title Theme (VGA) Battle Theme (VGA)

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Comparison Screenshots

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Quest for Glory II: Trial By Fire - MS-DOS / Amiga / Windows XP (1990)

EGA Cover

VGA Promo Artwork

Quest for Glory II (EGA)

Quest for Glory II, using the SCI0 engine, begins with our hero riding a magic carpet to the land of Shapier, a desert land straight out of the Arabian Nights. All seems well for a few days, until the city comes under attack by a variety of troublesome elementals, whom are based on earth, fire, wind and water, per RPG standards. After taking care of them, the hero will ride off to the crime ridden Raseir, Shapier's evil doppelganger city, which appears to be permanently devoid of light. Here, he must foil the plans of Ad Avis, who wishes to call the usual evil demons to rule the world. Rather having a small town and a huge world to explore, Quest for Glory II flips that around, by having one gigantic town and a fairly small world. Shapier is an enormous city, filled with a labrynth of streets that connect each of the city's five plazas. Whenever you enter one, the viewpoint switches behind the back of your hero, which can get extremely disorienting when you change directions. It also doesn't help that your hero will keep walking forward until you hit a button to stop, making it difficult to walk through side doors. This is pretty standard for Sierra titles, but it definitely works against the game's favor here. Using the mouse doesn't really help much either. One of your first tasks to accomplish is to find the money changer so you can purchase some items. Of course, said money changer is also hidden in the depths of these winding roads. The idea is that you're supposed to look at the map that came bundled with the software, read the names of the streets, and carefully navigate to your destination. This is, naturally, pretty difficult, and it wouldn't be surprising if many less devoted gamers simply gave up right here. Thankfully, once you get your cash, you can buy both a map and a compass from one of the vendors, which allows you to instantly warp to any previously visited locations. Once you've found all of the major centers, there are only a couple of times you'll ever need to break out the physical map and wade through the tunnels. The city itself is full of interesting characters. Two of the merchants bear suspicious resemblance to the Marx Brothers (and make sure you buy a Saurus within the first day or two, or the game will cryptically kill you, for reasons which will sorta make sense by the end of the game.) The resident magician is a wacky little floating gnome, with a penchant for terrible puns and a room full of weird objects, including a Rosella dool, a Cookie Monster puppet, a squid with wings on it (Narrator's description: "You don't want to know."), and an object so baffling that the game's only description if you try to look at it is a single question mark. Most of the residents include the cat-like Katta, and you spend most of your time at the inn run by your friend Shameen. On certain nights, you can even watch his wife seductivlely dance, which is a bit discomforting, given these are anthropomorphic cats. You can also find a helpful but ill-tempered fortuneteller in the depths of the city, who's vital to your quest but will have no problems tossing you on your behind if you insult her. Each class also has a unique optional quest to accomplish during the game. The Fighter can join the Eternal Order of Fighters, and the Magician can join the Wizard Institude of Technology (WIT), both accomplished by surviving through harsh tests. The Thief can hunt down the local guild and run specific quests for even more cash. Also new to Quest for Glory II are the Paladin quests, and along with it, the Honor statistic. If you act in accordance with the laws of the Paladin (which mostly amounts to "don't be a jerk"), you can eventually be promoted to the powerful class. However, this doesn't actually happen until the end of the game, so you don't actually get to use any of these skills. The idea is that you can import them into Quest for Glory III as a Paladin, but as it turns out, that game lets you choose to become a Paladin regardless of the deeds you accomplish here. Outside of the walls of Shapier lies a vast desert. It stretches infinitely to the east and west, but there are only about five screens that separate the north and south borders of the game world. Compared to the Forest of Speilburg in the first Quest for Glory, you won't spend nearly as much time navigating the desert - there are only a few locations to visit, and once you memorize the exact directions, they're never more than a few screens away. In addition to food, you'll also need a good supply to water to survive in the blistering weat, so make sure you fill your waterskins at every possible chance. There are plenty of enemies roaming the desert, of course, although not nearly as many as the first game. The combat has changed to an isometric viewpoint, similar to what was used in the Quest for Glory I remake. However, there are many more combat options. While the rest of the games only give you two attack options - slash and thrust - there are numerous types of high, mid and low level attacks, in addition to parrying and dodging manuevers. All of this is controlled by the numeric keypad. (Just make sure to turn Num Lock off!) While this should add depth to the fighting, it's still too based heavily on your statistics, as attacks rarely seem to connect when they should, and it's really just easier to either button mash, or just run away. The biggest change from the previous game is that all of the events run on a very tight schedule. After the first days in town, one of the elementals will appear - if you don't kill it within a couple of days, it'll destroy the city. Once all four are defeated, over the course of sixteen days, you'll automatically be taken to the city of Rasier, where time ceases to be much of an issue as the rest of the game plays out. Given how much freedom you have in all of the other games, it's a bit aggravating to conquer the quests as the game demands, when the game demands it. Some other minor aspects have been changed in ways that become a bit annoying. For instance, there's no place like Erana's Peace where you can just rest for a bit and end up with fully restored health. Even if you sleep at an inn, you only regain HP if you sleep for the night - and since you're on a limited timeline, that can prove troublesome. The only way to quickly regain health (or stamina, or mana) is by purchasing pills from an apothecary. Naturally, these are all pretty expensive. At the beginning of the game, you might be a bit strapped for cash, but you get much more money as you begin to take down the elementals, so it's not an issue as you progress. Also new is the Communication stat, which can be used to bargain with merchants. It's all too easy to just continue to bargain with characters until your skill is high enough to convince them. (At least, for most of the characters.) There are more clever bits of humor too, including a cinematic sequence that begins with a homage to Lawrence of Arabia, which switches to an intermission (complete with popcorn and soda graphics) as you come under attack, only to end up defeating all of them singlehandledly for reasons that aren't entirely clear. Also, in a brilliant fourth wall shattering move, if you try to throw a rock at a certain tree, it'll bounce off and "crack" your computer monitor, complete with an electric hum and a Game Over message lamenting the fact that you'll need to buy a new one. In another slightly amusing easter egg, you can by a pair of X-Ray Glasses from the magician's shop. These may seem useless, but you can use them to spy on one of the female characters when they're changing clothes. It's not particularly detailed, even compared to, say, Leisure Suit Larry III, but hey! Stuff like this is awesome when you're thirteen. There's even a cryptic "Silly Clowns" option in the menu bar, which causes some rather goofy stuff to happen through the game, like finding a Harpo Marx-a-like running through the streets of Shapier, or a doomed golfer permanently stuck in the desert sands. Just one word of warning - the Quest for Glory games are usually pretty good about not sticking you in unwinnable situations. But after you beat all of the elementals, make sure to talk to all of the citizens, because one of them will give you a vital item for later in the game. If you forget to get it - and it's something very easy to overlook - then you'll be completely stuck once you get to Raseir. Despite a few of the aforemention aggravating issues, which you'll mostly learn to avoid through multiple playthroughs, Quest for Glory II is a damn fine game. Although Sierra never released a VGA upgrade for Quest for Glory II, an awesome software development studio named AGD Interactive released their own remake in 2008 for Windows. The interface is pretty much the same one as Quest for Glory III, even using the same font. All of the writing is intact, all of the locations are beautifully duplicated with 256 color backgrounds, and all of the major (and most of the minor) characters have portraits when talking. Although a majority of the interface is mouse drive, you have the option to enter text during the dialogue screens, in addition from choosing from multiple selections. The streets of Shapier are now much brighter and less dingy, with street names helpfully popping up as you highlight them. There's even an option to simplify the layout, which is still confusing, but much easier to navigate than the numerous twists and turns of the original game. All of the music has been redone too. The battle system has been tweaked a bit as well. The screen no longer fades to black during combat. You can now advance or retreat around the screen, allowing for a greater scope of movement. You also regain a bit of stamina as long as you're not attacking. If you want to forego most of this, there's an auto-battle option too, which you can manually tweak. It's still a bit hard to deal with, and fights tend to take longer than normal, but it's also a huge improvement over the original. Since the remake was released as freeware with permission from Vivendi Universal (the rights holders to Sierra's licenses), it's definitely worth downloading, and might even be preferable to the original, as long as you don't have any nostalgic attachment to it. MP3s Download here Battle Theme (EGA) Intermission (EGA)

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Comparison Screenshots

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Quest for Glory III: Wages of War - MS-DOS (1992)

American Cover

Quest for Glory III

Quest for Glory III

The developers originally intended to continue the Quest for Glory series with "Shadows of Darkness", which would've taken place in the Translyvania-esque village of Mordavia. They put these plans on hold though, with the release of "Wages of War". (Apparently the Coles once again ran into copyright issues, and had planned to re-release the game under the subtitle "Seekers of the Lost City".) This time, our hero visits the land of Tarna, the homeland of Uhura and Rakeesh, the residents of the Adventurer's Guild in Quest for Glory II. Tarna is much like Africa, although it is ruled primarily by lion-like creatures Liontaurs. As you and Rakeesh return, you learn of a mounting war between the human Simbani tribe and the apparently evil Leopardman. Obviously, things aren't as they seem, and it's to you, as the hero, to find a way to avoid a bloody and unnecessary conflict. Quest for Glory III uses the same SCI1 interface as the Quest for Glory I remake, which mostly identical commands, although the graphics are a bit better. However, it feels much smaller than either of the previous games. The bargaining interface is now a bit more advanced, allowing you to give specific offers to merchants, and you can now click the mouth icon on yourself for more dialogue options, including greeting characters and telling themselves about your adventures. There's also a handy autosave, too. Outside the city of Tarna lies a huge savannah on the west side, and a jungle on the east side, making up the land of Fricana. Travel is accomplished via an overhead map, complete with Indiana Jones-style dotted lines that traces your hero's steps. The game world is only four screens long, but time passes quickly as you travel. To make up for this, you can now camp anywhere in the savannah, as long as you have a source of fire (either the slame dart spell for magicians, or a tinderbox for any other class.) Outside of the first couple of days, the game does not run under any schedule a la Trial By Fire, so you're free to take your time on your quest. The music takes on a tribal African feel. It works some of the time, but it's usually just pretty grating. There are a variety of combat themes, but none of them are particularly good. Battles still occur randomly on the world map, but you're given the opportunity to run away before conflict. The fighting is pretty terrible too, arguably the worst since the original EGA Quest for Glory. The viewpoint is similar to battle scenes from the Quest for Glory I remake, but the camera has been positioned at waist level behind the hero, giving a more dramatic look on the action. But neither yourself nor your enemies seem to react whenever they get hit, and there aren't any sound effects at all to indicate damage, so it makes you both look like you're flailing randomly at air, all while the HP and stamina meters mysteriously start dropping. Like most of the other games, you can still win just by spamming the attack commands, and at least you regain a bit of stamina if you hold off attacking. For a good portion of the game, your quest feels pretty aimless. Most of the game revoles around extremely simple fetch quests, none of which require any real effort or ingenuity. You can't really advance any events in the game until the Simbani capture a Leopardman. The problem is, this event is triggered by completely unrelated tasks, leaving you to stumble around until the game finally decides you can move on. But once that happens, you're basically entering the second half of the game. Quest for Glory III is fairly short, and the resolution of the plot isn't particularly interesting either. It doesn't help that there doesn't seem like there's a whole lot to do. There's a ritual initiation for the Fighter, and a staff building quest for the Magician, but there's almost nothing for the Thief. In fact, there's no Thief Guild, no houses to break into, and only a few cases where your skills are of any use. If you imported a character from a previous game, you can also choose to be a Paladin from the outset. The Paladin is more or less the same as the Fighter, but there are a few extra quests that grant additional abilities, like a flaming sword to deal extra damage, or healing magic to cure wounds. You also need to act properly in order to increase your Honor and Paladin statistics, and run various subquests. Some of these are interesting - at the beginning of the game, you help catch a thief, whose "honor" is stripped away as a punishment. In Tarna, however, this basically means that a person is more or less nonexistent, so the thief can no longer talk to anyone, much less find food. You can offer to help him, which in turn breaks the rules of the land, but this is required to fulfill the duties of a Paladin. Others, however, are more lame. There's a Simbani tribesman that you repeatedly need to challenge in a dull minigame. After doing this for days on end, you can eventually become his "friend" and gain another skill. It's a bit disappointing that after all of the hype that went into building up the character in Quest for Glory II, it really just amounts to a few skills and minor story segments - some more moral quandries like the honorless thief would've worked much better. All of this doesn't stop the game from feeling a bit empty though. There are a couple of interesting characters - most notably, the Sanford and Son-esque duo in the Tarna bazaar, and the super hippie at the Apothacary - and there are a few amusing scenes, like the fake death message you get if you fail to put out a fire, or the Awful Waffle Walker, a strange, edible being you'll find wandering through the jungle, but only if you're nearing starvation. If you're lucky, you'll also happen upon Laurel and Hardy (dressed as French Legion soldiers) and Andy the Aardvark (who dishes out useful hints.) But touches like these are uncommon, and neither the plot, nor the characters, nor the writing is as engaging as any of the other titles. So while the setting is quite unique amongst any type of adventure game, Quest for Glory III just feels lacking in too many areas. Also, it's a minor disappointment, but from this game onward, the hero just wears a generic brown and white outfit, instead of donning some of the local garb, a la the Arabian outfit from Quest for Glory II. Oh well.

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Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness - MS-DOS / Windows PC (1993)

American Cover

Quest for Glory IV

Quest for Glory IV

After dallying in the land of Tarna, the hero is mysteriously zapped to the land of Mordavia to take on the Shadows of Darkness, as promised back in the ending of Quest for Glory II. Mordavia is a Slavic land that bears more than a passing resemblance to Translyvania. It has a bit of a spooky horror atmosphere to it, complete with undead creatures and a monster movie mainstays. There's a mad scientist character named Dr. Cranium who essentially acts as an apothecary, dealing out potions and pills. There's a grave digger named Igor, and a spooky castle, guarded by a Boris Karloff look-a-like. Of course, vampires play pretty heavily into all of this, although they're usually portrayed as sympathetic rather than something to be killed - one of your first friends is Katrina, a mysterious cloaked woman who only comes out at night. The real evil is Ad Avis, who somehow survived your attack and is now back for revenge. In some ways, Quest for Glory IV is a throwback to the first game. There's a single town, along with an expansive labrythine forest to explore. Your primary task, as you eventually learn, is to hunt down seven rituals, contained in seven scrolls across the land. During your adventures, you'll also encounter Baba Yaga, who has since fled from the land of Spielburg, and work to reunite a young vampire child with her family. Erana also features more heavily into the plot of this game too - if you sleep in any of her gardens, you'll have nightmares that clue you in her fate. You'll also come across the mysterious (and wacky) Antwerps again, which haven't truly been seen since the first game. The quests for each of the classes are much more fleshed out than in the previous game too. At one point, you'll meet the Rusalka, a beautiful naked woman in the middle of the lake. Of course, if you run into your arms, she'll drown you. If you give her some flowers, you can become friends with her and chat about her woes. But only the Paladin can undertake the quest to free her. There's also a fairly expansive subquest regarding the ghost of the Paladin Piotyr, who seeks to restore his unrightfully sullied name. There's also a new skill, the Acrobatics stat, in addition to a new Jump command to go along with it. Perhaps in order to capitalize off the popularity of Street Fighter II and other similar arcade games, the battle perspective has switched to a side viewpoint, complete with gigantic sprites. Despite the graphics, however, it plays nothing like any typical fighting game. Using the mouse, you can click around the area to advance, retreat, jump or swipe your melee weapons. This system is much more advatangeous for wizard and thiefs, since they can use their ranged spells or daggers without putting themselves during in the line of combat. Ultimately though, it still tends to devolve into button mashing, although it's not nearly as sloppy as the original games. When there are actual sound effects when taking damage, and you can visibly see the enemies dodging your blows, instead of your sword simply passing through them. If you're too aggravated by these segments, you can also set it to auto-battle, and adjust the levels of aggression used by the AI. There are a lot more logic puzzles to complete during the game. Some are simple color matching exercises, used when disarming traps as the thief, but others require a bit of thinking, mostly requiring that you spell out a name in the correct order, using either letters or colors. Perhaps the most maddening are the colored bells, requiring you to play a game of Simon Says before you're allowed entry. Each time you enter, it just gets longer and longer and longer. There's more of the usual Quest for Glory humor too, including Monty Python-style killer rabbits that inhabit the forest. Dr. Cranium, the mad scientist, requests that you give him formulas for various potions. (This is the game's method of copy protection. Unlike most other games, it was not removed for the CD version, so you'll still need a manual.) In addition to the usual earth, fire, wind and water elements, he insists that there's a fifth element based on pizza. (Too bad there weren't any Pizza Elementals back in Quest for Glory II.) Much of the humor shines through the voice acting on the CD version. Several characters are parodies of famous actors - other than Boris Karloff, the thief guild leader looks like Peter Lorre, and the townspeople all have voices and speech patterns based off Rodney Dangerfield and Jack Nicholson. The narrator's voice is provided by John Rhys Davis - famous for his role as Sallah in the Indiana Jones movies, and Ghimli in the Lord of the Rings films - and while he has some fun with certain lines, it's a bit on the dry side. The music in the Quest for Glory games has usually been pretty decent, but there's been little outside of the title themes or battle songs that really stood out. In contrast, Shadow of Darkness' soundtrack is particularly spectacular, especially with its battle themes and beautiful rock ballads. Although it could've benefitted from real guitar instrumentation, the MIDI music - even on the weak Adlib synth - is pretty damn good, and easily up next to Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, as the best Sierra soundtrack. The graphics have seen some subtle improvements too. The trees in the forest actually cast shadows over your character as he walks beneath them, which is pretty cool. But now all of the major characters have full screen portraits as you talk to them. Their dialogue isn't lip synched like some other Sierra games, but it still lends a ton of personality to the inhabitants of Mordavia. Quest for Glory IV is undoubtedly one of the best games in the series, having taken the template of the first game, and improved on practically every aspect, while keeping down some of the aggravating issues from its other sequels. The only real bummer is how buggy it is. The Quest for Glory games have always had QA issues, but it's particularly bad here, especially in the original disk release. Even with the fan made patches, some areas can become impossible to conquer, or require strange workarounds in order to advance. MP3s Download here Intro Nectrotaur Battle Lesshy Erana's Peace

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Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire - Windows PC / Macintosh (1998)

American Cover

Quest for Glory V

Quest for Glory V

The four prior Quest for Glory games were released between 1990 and 1993, essentially giving gamers a new one every year. Unfortunately, by the mid 90s, the adventure gaming market was starting to dry up a bit, causing Sierra and other companies to scale back a bit. It wasn't until 1998, five years after the release of Shadows of Darkness, that the hero was finally able to travel to Silmaria for the fifth and final Quest for Glory title. The land of Silmaria is essentially much like ancient Greece, and the land consists of an expansive (with a gigantic crater in the middle) and several smaller islands. They're in the middle of a rather dire crisis, with their king having been recently assassinated. You, along with several other contestants, must take part in seven trials to determine who will become the next ruler of the country. Things get even more complicated when several of your opponents are murdered, and longtime pals like Rakeesh and Erasmus end up poisoned at the hands of the wicked assailant. The interface has been simplified quite a bit. There's the standard pointer, which allows your hero to move, use, talk, or otherwise interact with the world. If you right click, you'll change into "look" mode, allowing you to examine the scenery. Conversing works much the same as before, but the character portraits have been shrunk to postage stamp size windows on the right side of the screen, a huge step down from the huge portraits in Quest for Glory IV. They're computer rendered and look a bit on the ugly side, although at least the voice acting is still quality. For some reason, the narrator isn't voiced at all, with all of the usual descriptions reduced to a text window at the top of the screen. The graphics are a mixture of bitmap backgrounds and polygonal modeled characters. The scenery pans around as you move left or right, giving them a panoramic feel, and the camera slightly zooms in and out on the hero in certain areas. While this causes some light distortion on the backgrounds, it does lend a bit of extra depth to the graphics. While the high res, computer generated bitmaps don't quite have the quaint appeal of the pixel art or the hand drawn artwork of the previous games. they still look pretty decent. The polygonal characters don't fare quite as well, but it's hard to notice their boxiness most of the time, since the camera is usually pretty zoomed out. This is the only game in the series where your equipment actually affects how your character looks, which is a nice touch. Overall, the visuals haven't aged quite as well as the older games, but it's not bad considering the usual standard for prerendered graphics in the mid-to-late 90s. It's still a lot better than the third Gabriel Knight game, which used both 3D characters and environments, with rather disastrous results. Much like Quest for Glory III, exploration is handled via an overhead map, although important locations are marked with little emblems. Through your adventures, you'll find the usual mythical creatures, being charged with raiding a Pegasus nest, fighting the three headed Hydra, exploring the city of Atlantis, and entering the underworld of Hades. At one point, you get to reconstruct a set of Icarus Wings to fly over the landscape, but that obviously doesn't last too long. Later on you can build yourself an airship, which makes traveling a bit less of a hassle. There's more emphasis on combat in Quest for Glory V, with the battle system being completely changed up. There are no longer any combat transitions, and all fighting happens on the same screen. It's pretty simple - all you need to do is click on an enemy to attack. You can also use the keyboard to execute other types of attack, or to defend, but this is a pretty clunky way of handling things. Additionally, you'll often need to fight several foes at once, and trying to target a specific opponent can get confusing, often resulting in your hero jerking back and forth while being assailed from both sides. You can run past most encounters, at least, but make sure to stock up on tons of healing and stamina potions. There are also more weapons and armor to equip, making trading a slightly more important part of the game. The autosave is gone, but there's now a Restore option which will automatically restart you at the beginning of the screen. The other major annoyance is with the pacing. In the older Quest for Glory games, you could simply ramp up the speed to the highest setting and dash all over the land, even on really old computers. Not here - the hero casually saunters from place to place. For instance, you could explore the entirety of Mordavia in about ten seconds, in maximum. Here, it takes at least a few minutes to make the rounds in Silmaria. You can double click to run, which makes things a bit faster, but in turn, drains your stamina. This isn't a big deal when you're just exploring the town, when you can just rest any time you want, but it does make combat pretty frustrating. Given how much you'll need to fight, level up, trade in weapons, rest, and buy more healing stuff, it ends up feeling more tedious than the other games, at least in the initial stages. Thankfully, there is an item that will transport you directly back to your bedroom at the inn, which reduces some travel time. If nothing else, Quest for Glory V pays out huge amounts of fan service, collecting a number of major and minor characters from the previous games. You finally visit the Famous Adventurer's Correspondence School, our hero's alma mater, where you finally meet the mysterious F.E., the author of the magazines included with each copy of the previous games. Erasmus, Fenrus, and Rakeesh all appear in the early stages of the game, having recommended our hero for the contest in Silmaria. Sam the beggar, from way back in the first game, is now Silmaria's banker. Bruno, the nasty informant also from the first game, also plays a pivotal role. Signor Ferrari and his informant Ugarte have somehow escaped from Raseir in Quest for Glory II and have set up a new Blue Parrot Inn. Salim, the hippie pharmacist from Quest for Glory III, ended up marrying Julanar, the tree lady from Quest for Glory II, moved to Silmaria to set up an apothecary. One of the contestants is none other than Elsa von Spielburg, the princess from the first game. What's more, you can choose to marry her, if you'd like. There are a total of four potential brides, including Nawar, one of the harem girls from Quest for Glory II, that you only met if you were a thief; Katrina, your friend from Quest for Glory IV; and the famed elf heroine Erana. It's a really cool idea to bring forth all of the major female characters from the series, but there's not much of a payoff. There's no real wedding scene and it only slightly affects the ending. The music is very cinematic, using orchestral style music that changes with the action on screen, composed by Emmy winning Chance Thomas.It's a big change from other Sierra games, but it also greatly adds to the sense of drama and adventure. Quest for Glory V ends up focusing a bit too much on the tedious RPG elements, and not quite enough on the adventuring. Still, there are plenty of cool sights to see, and most of the humor is still intact. (One exception: death scenes just don't feel like death scenes when there's no music or goofy animation to accompany them.) Bringing all of the old characters together is a brilliant reward for longtime fans who followed it throughout the decade, although it won't quite mean as much if you haven't played all of the previous games. So in spite of its quirks and occasional tedium, it's a fine send off to one of the best series of Western RPGs ever made. Like many of the other Quest for Glory games, Dragon Fire is a bit on the buggy side. You need to install one of the patches in order to complete parts of the game, and an additional fan made patch is required if you want to play in Windows XP. Before it was released, Sierra promised that the game would include multiplayer functionality (they even put out a demo with this) and the ability to play as two of the other contestants, Elsa von Spielburg and Magnum Opus. Alas, these features, along with the ability to use a bow and arrow (you can still pick up arrows, but only to sell) were cut from the game. Rumors initially spread that another patch would enable some of these, but the entire staff at Yosemite Entertainment, the branch that developed this title, was laid off shortly after it was published, so these plans never came into fruition. MP3s Download here Quest for Glory Overture

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Links

Quest for Glory II (EGA)