Part 12: Bonus Update: Useless and/or Unobtainable Items

We've seen everything in the game needed to beat it. But there are actually more items in the game that you can find if you look around a bit, most of which can't be used for anything. I skipped over them in the main playthrough, but we're going to have a look at some of them now.

A big part of the main puzzle in Faeriewood involved filling flasks with magic water and potions to get stuff done. You can actually fill the empty flasks with all kinds of things if you backtrack around, such as mineral water from the pool in the labyrinth.



The mineral water is useless and actually locks up the flask - you can't drink the mineral water or dispose of it otherwise without leaving the flask behind too, so once you've done this you need to go fetch a new flask. If you backtrack even further...



... you can get a bottle of salt water from the Pool of Sorrows. Kind of gross, really. This one you can drink.

*COUGH* *COUGH* Yuck! It's salt water!



You can get a third kind of water from either the blueberry spring, or the spring back in Timbermist where we got the tulips, or the moonstone well once it's been restored. This kind is also drinkable.

-gulp- Ahhh...



On the topic of flasks, remember where we combined a red and yellow potion into an orange potion, a blue and yellow potion into a green potion etc.? You can mix red with red, yellow with yellow and blue with blue as well. You get rounded flasks containing the same potion as was already in the square flasks, and the result of drinking them is exactly the same as before, i.e. useless.



Rounded flasks can be filled with the same kinds of water as square flasks. They work the same, too.



Back during the main game, I said emeralds were useless. This is not exactly true, as it turns out; you can use these rather than topazes for the yellow potion. This is the only place you can get them, as the statue back in Timbermist remains unassailable throughout the game.

Remember the stump where we came out after taking the tunnel from Zanthia's house?



This rare gem has a tiny rainbow in it.

This thing is hidden inside it. It's kind of pretty, but you can't use it for alchemy. In fact, the only thing you can do with it is all the way back at the blueberry bush. Tossing the rainbowstone into the water transforms it into...



... a little silver statuette of a rearing unicorn. Now, you might think this would have something to do with the pegasus puzzle. You'd be wrong, though, because that has a semblance of logic to it and this game won't have any of that. As far as I know, this statuette has absolutely no use, nor can you use the rainbowstone for anything else. My best guess is that this was part of a quest that was in the game at an earlier stage of development, but was removed aside from this part. The third game in the series, Malcolm's Revenge, does mention pegasus potions again. In that game "essence of horse" is said to be an ingredient for it, and one of the items you can do as a proxy for essence of horse is a little wooden toy horse. The statuette might have had a similar purpose in this game once.

Besides useless items, the game's data files are full of items that are unobtainable, and have no use, but do have graphics and some of them even have spoken descriptions. Using ScummVM's debug console, we can check these items out.



Aside from the Scroll of Winter, which we used to clear the lava and extinguish the flaming tree, there are nine other scrolls, some of which are white rather than brown. None of these scrolls can be examined except for one, which makes Brandon go into his scroll reading animation.

Hmm. Nothing happened, but I feel like going somewhere else.

The purpose of this scroll is unknown. Of interest, the description for this item is fully voice acted, which is odd for an item that isn't in the game. Remember that the voice-acted version of this game was released a full year after the original, text-only version, so the fact that this item was unused must have been known when they decided to record the lines. There are several more items that also have voice-acted descriptions.



There are also five different parchment scrap items in the game. Perhaps at some point Darm made you collect these to form a full scroll (as if the birthstone quest wasn't enough random item collection)?



These jewels are Magestones. From the top, they're Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue-Green, Blue, and Purple. The "red" and "orange" stones share a sprite, and none of these have a description. I'm beginning to think this game had a lot more random item collection puzzles originally.



A pile of random unused items. The red stone is a Lodestone, purpose uncertain, possibly connected to the Magestones? Next is a silver coin, probably counterpart to the gold coin you pick up in the labyrinth. The next item is a gold ring, followed by an egg and a "Fallen Star". This item also has a voice-acted description when you examine it.

I thought this was a dead starfish.

The bottom row is a shamrock, a mirror, an ice shard, and two more key palette swaps (jade and obsidian - the game misspells the latter "obsidion"). There's nothing in the game that suggests a jade or obsidian key might be useful. The shamrock, ice shard and egg sound like they might be alchemy ingredients?



The top row is a bunch of fireberries; we've seen most of these, actually. The first four are just ordinary fireberries. When you pick one from a bush, you get an instance of the leftmost fireberry, and then every time you move it turns into the next one. The rightmost, dimmest fireberry is not used, however. It's possible this is the item they turn into as they burn out. Interestingly, this one has a description.

Help!!

... and a weird one, to boot. Brandon screams this one. It's pretty loud. The bright fireberry in the bottom row is an Everglowing Fireberry, which is exactly what it says on the tin: it never expires. The game calls the purple thing a mushroom, which I assume was planned for a cave room somewhere. The thing that looks like a flask and the rainbowstone pasted together is a Rainbow Potion, and the last item in the list is just called a "leaf". It looks like a dead, dry leaf. Perhaps at one point it was related to the Deadwood Glade puzzle. None of these items do anything.

Those are all the items left in the game. Some of them might have been related to old puzzles, but many are entirely confusing.

At this point, we've reached the end of The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One. Malcolm has been defeated, Brandon is king, and sandals are the official footwear of Kyrandia. The Land is safe, and peace will now reign forever.

Right..?