Part 13: The End of Might and Magic

Update 13: The End of Might and Magic



For an adventure full of first times and unique experiences, this was probably at the top. Sure, other people had probably seen some of the things I'd seen before, at some time or another. Or done some of the things. But this? Entering the Plane Between Planes? It couldn't possibly be replicated.




Of course, no one was letting us have this one easy, and the moment we entered the giant crystal, we were beset by, well, more crystals.


Crystal Walkers are about as tough as elementals, but with a "fuck you" for a cleric-less party consisting of being able to paralyze with every hit. They also, inexplicably, do air damage. Why air damage? They're crystals, if you wanted them to be elemental, crystals are much more... earthy than air-y. Right?



Hah! Down they go! Watch out for the splinters!
Don't get cocky now, something bigger's coming up behind them!




Lumbering in behind the "crystal walkers" were even bigger guardians, shaped like large lizards, or perhaps wingless dragons. Whatever they were meant to be, they were clearly even more dangerous than the ones that had come before them.


Crystal Dragons seem to punch oddly below their weight in terms of stats. They've got huge hit points, what I believe are the biggest HP totals of any enemies in the game, the biggest damage dice, and they do un-resistable Energy damage to boot. But somehow they just fail to really threaten the party most of the time. Perhaps it's the lack of spellcasting spike damage, or simply that clearing out the four elemental planes has skyrocketed the party upwards in terms of levels. Mostly they're annoying to fight through, to the point where I have Arachne bust out the Dragon Breath spells when I catch them at range rather than around a blind corner.





This crystal sub-area is really just a straight line with only one side corridor of note.




Which only exists to hide one secret panel which conceals a single chest.




I feel kind of bad about this, someone went through so much effort to make action figures and here we are, breaking them all.
It looks like we're coming up on the end at least, I could happily go all my life without seeing another gem.





After all that fighting, with most of us still shaking crystal dust out of our clothes(and Infaustus picking crystal splinters out of Ithilgore's paws), we'd hit a dead end. I know we hadn't missed any turning-off point, but all that was here was a strange machine and a pair of rods sticking out of the solid crystal ground.
Bloody puzzle dungeons. Well, let's get this over with...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pxt2U9RzOk



...so the evil genius archmage's final security device between us and the Plane Between Planes was a game of "simon says"?
We used to get some real cerebral stuff until someone pointed out it was unfair for all the barbarians and druids if we had to know ciphers and trivia about ancient heroes to progress.
While Leland and Cauri debated the merits of fairness versus wonder, I took in the Plane Between Planes. I found it hard to seek out the right words to describe it, it was... it was...
Absolute. Horseshit.
Infaustus! Bad words!




Brown soil, blue skies, blue water?! Not even any sort of alien plants?!? Towering crystal spires or alien vistas that melt our mortal(mostly mortal, sorry Arachne) minds like warm butter?! And look at this thing. Someone clearly just threw this together in five minutes from some putty and some spare eyeballs!


Nightmares are pretty "Eh" enemies. Their big things are that they can make party members be Afraid or go Insane, and they're completely immune to physical damage. However, everyone's weapons have a side order of some other damage type by now and Ithilgore doesn't give a fuck, so I just plowed right through them and didn't even realize they were meant to have that immunity until I checked the strategy guide after doing the play session.




And what are these guys supposed to be? They're just leftover skeletons! Sure, someone dressed them up all fancy but what the hey kind of letdown is this?!


Ether Knights are just completely forgettable, they have no special abilities and are weaker than the crystal monsters we just killed. It's a weird thing, but in general everything in the actual Plane Between Planes is weaker than the crystal guardians inside Eschaton's Crystal.




Ah! But maybe this area is just to lull us into a false sense of security, as we venture towards the edges of this plane, maybe things will get strange! Bizarre! Twisted!




Or more brown.
What about the egg, though? That's pretty odd.




Very nice of someone to stamp "AIR LORD PRISON: DO NOT OPEN" on the underside. Shame I can't see how to open it, however.
Perhaps we'll find something more interesting in another corner.






Alright, to the center, then!
This place really does have everything! Blobs, skeletons and eggs!





The fight to the center of the plane only has two noteworthy things. Firstly this, where a Fear finally manages to wear down the party's Protection From Magic and show us Cauri's "Insane" face. Absolutely worth it, completely fucking hilarious.




Secondly, a new enemy!

And a giant metal hat in the background!
A helmet, sweetie.


Once again, an enemy that hits bizarrely below its stat-wise weight. It should do MASSIVE amounts of physical damage, but never really threatens the party, plus despite all of them being able to cast Paralyze as a ranged spell, they never manage to wear down the party's protections even once. Sometimes I wonder if the official strategy guide might be completely wrong about some of these stats.



We're headed for the helmet, but FIRST...




Interacting with the sword with the character who's got the flute from the Tomb of Lord Brinne in their inventory...




Takes us to the dev dungeon! The layout is almost exactly like it was in MM6 but... it's actually, sadly, worse.




No cafeteria loot, and the "vending machines" don't work.




JVC's still here, though entering his office no longer inspires automatic fear.



That's for abandoning us to go work on mobile games.

Ahem, anyway, back in the REAL world...




I mean, I know, I KNOW, sometimes the polygon art can't always look as good as the pre-rendered stuff but... c'mon man, the difference here is so fucking huge. Even the surrounding terrain looks different! That's like the crusted, cracked soil from the Ravage Roaming. Just. Argh. Let's get inside.



...
...
...
Soooooo... is Infaustus gonna do the thing?





Hey everyone! Welcome to the unique and exciting adventure of Eschaton's Palace!




Hours and hours of lever-yanking fun, you'll hardly remember where you begun! What's this one do? Who the hell knows! Gotta yank 'em all!




Take a break from yanking your lever to say hi to the bone bros, here to offer you exactly a minute and a half of entertainment as you run them over!




I don't think I'm allowed to look at this!
We got all kindsa does at Eschaton's Palace! Doors that don't open! Doors that need levers to open! Doors that open anyway! Secret doors! Visible doors! Horny doors! Goth doors!




The place has even got two, count 'em, two beds, so you won't even have to spoon with Eschaton if you hit the place up for the night!




We guarantee our random suspicious fountain is free of Eradication, Insanity, Death, Stat Gains, Secret Treasures or Hidden Teleporters!
Boo! Lame! Eschaton's palace sucks!




C'mon everyone, gotta be something here that pushes your buttons!




How about a nice, uh, table? Man I'm outta steam.
As a final challenge went, Eschaton's Palace was rather a letdown. We'd spent about eight hours running around corners kicking our way through Ether Knights and Chaos Protectors without a shred of a challenge, pulling more levers than I could remember, usually having no idea what they were going to do.
I refuse to let a dungeon lever go unpulled.

So yeah, Eschaton's Palace kind of... sucks. You just see a lever, pull it, no idea what it does, but it's gotta be pulled. Gotta pull all the levers to proceed. No thought involved, no levers that undo the work of other levers or trigger bad things. No challenging enemies, hardly even any loot, no traps... and of course the levers that are behind secret doors are mandatory to open non-secret doors to allow progress through the dungeon. Nothing in here even tries to ERADICATE the party. Nor are any of the enemies robots, cyborgs or aliens. What the fuck kind of last Might and Magic dungeon is this?

You betrayed us, JVC.




Thus, we show up at Eschaton's throne room not even bearing a cube or anything.







Buried under... rising tide of... exposition...

So yeah, Eschaton hangs out to explain the plot to us. But what's with this "Save The World" business?



Here was something to salvage the experience after all. A riddle contest! All of the greatest adventures had one of those. I readied my collection of generic answers like "man," "egg," "fish" and "time." Those almost always popped up...






Two of them are pretty simple, I'm not sure if there's a pool it pulls from or if they're always these three. The third one, though...




This one just bounced off my spongey brain. So, assuming you're a moron like me, but too proud to look up a FAQ, how are you gonna beat a hardcore puzzle like this? Cast your minds back to like... update 2 or something, back on arriving in Ravenshore, the team looted the merchants' guild library for shits and giggles...



The "Torn Page" always contains the answers among several red herrings, but you can tell which ones are right because they're single-word.






Really.
Oh, I remember where I saw an egg!
Really, Ithilgore, why don't you show us?




Eschaton's sledgehammer-subtle hints imply that we can now open the eggs and there are, of course, four of them, one at each corner of the Plane Between Planes, one for each element.



Water drops us right into a small, angry squad of Ether Knights.



It ends predictably for them.





Turning the corner and mashing three small groups of enemies brings us to the end, this is definitely the simplest of the prisons.





That's one of four elemental lords freed, next up is Air, trapped in Earth.





This one is slightly larger, but ultimately still just a windy line through single-direction tunnels with a few enemies packed in.






It's also still completely trivial to shove through.




Two out of four elemental lords freed, let's go bust out Gralkor the Cruel next, his dungeon is actually slightly interesting!






This dungeon's actually notably different from the other two!



You gotta nimbly navigate your way up all those steps to the top to complete it! Obviously this is why I, a genius, instantly fumble the first jump and fall off the starting platform.



Down below is a nasty confusion of Chaos Guardians and Fears, however!



Touching the bottom instantly teleports you to this chamber with the exit and a pedestal that sends you back to the platforms, so all those enemies at the bottom serve... literally no purpose.





Jump makes the whole thing a lot easier since you can take the platforms two at a time and the basic MM jump is pretty anemic.




Inexplicably, the last platform is actually an elevator.




That's three out of four elemental lords, and now it's time to head off to the last cell. And just for clarity's sake: nothing interesting happens in the travel between each cell, the Plane Between Planes is flat as a prairie and has no flying enemies or notable landmarks besides Eschaton's Hat Home, the four prisons and the NWC dungeon.




With in-game night having fallen, though, this one last flight actually looks kinda neat! Maybe the Plane Between Planes should've had this aesthetic all the way through, or just more crystals everywhere rather than putting the crystals in just the one short transitional "dungeon."





It's kind of sad that, here at the end, there isn't really a whole lot for the party to comment on or for me to comment on for that matter, though in this last dungeon there is one pretty spectacular dick move.



Really, JVC, spawning the party right into lava? The only way around this one is to be psychic and have your Vampire cast Levitate(if you even brought one, though we did) before entering the dungeon.




I'm somewhat amused that the Levitate icon is a hovering wizard that sort of bobs serenely up and down on the left side of the screen. It makes me wonder if it was originally intended as an Air spell and finding the magic to survive in adverse elemental conditions would've been part of the plot.



Honestly, it always baffles me a bit when games that aren't heavy on consumeable resources have chests in the last dungeon, especially when the contents are randomized. Like I can get it if the chests contain some sort of badge of honor from beating a super-tough final dungeon optional boss, or if it's some sort of thematic cool upgrade for the Main Character just before the last battle. But this? These chests are just annoying since they consistently drop gear that would've been of use like four updates ago, or even two updates ago, but now have like two minutes of playtime left to be relevant.






So... that's that, then?
It did, in fact, seem to be "that." The ground was already starting to rumble under our feet and after collecting a few spare souvenirs, we all agreed it was time to go. I didn't fancy our chances of running back to this side of Eschaton's Crystal and then legging it for Ravenshore, so instead I hoped that Town Portal was good across interdimensional distances.

As soon as you hit the button to teleport you back, the ending cinematic plays...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_N0khfWAfs




That was...
Complete and utter bogus! We didn't even get to kill the bad guy!
Could've been worse, at least this one didn't feature a cube.
You know what? We make a good team. We should do this again, but somewhere more fun. I heard the shipping lines are about to open up a route to Vori...
Oooooh, isn't that cold? Do they make dragon-size mittens? My mom always gets angry when I go out without warm clothes.
I leaned back against the fountain to write my last entry for this adventure as the others argued about whether or not there was profit potential in mittens and ear warmers for dragons. It had definitely been a long and strange trip. I'd lost all of my skin, I'd gained a lot of experience(and some unusual friends), I'd seen things no one else ever would, acquired souvenirs that were completely impossible to match in this world... but I had absolutely failed at pissing off my parents. They were going to love this, not only had I become a lich, but I'd saved the world, I'd become a famous lich.
It's settled, then! Our first objective is to slay enough gorgons to forge Ithilgore some cold-weather clothes!
Yay!
Seemed like our course was set. Hmmm... I wondered how my mother and father would feel about a frost giant son in law...

THE END