Part 6: Dubious Dungeon Design

Update 006: Dubious Dungeon Design



And we're back on stage for my least favourite dungeon in the game.

With all of the housekeeping sorted at the end of the last update, I'm ready to jump straight into the wilderness.





This time we're headed up to the northern part of the Shire area of the game, which will resolve a number of quests. We'll be learning Grunaxe's fate, finding the Band of Boars, defeating Doshi-Gin and also exploring the "abandoned hovel" that Erzebette told us she took cover in when Erathsmedor was trying to turn her into his dinner.



Going clockwise from the bottom, the flags placed on the map here are Shurugeon Castle, the Stout Mines, the caves of the Beast of Bronze, a flag I put in the middle of nowhere for no reason I can remember and the "hovel" we're looking for in the upper right. There's a lake in the way but, as per usual for most water locations in the game, it mostly exists to slow you down and doesn't actually contain anything of interest, neither on its shores or at its bottom.





The northern side of the lake doesn't take up a lot of space, and it mostly consists of a couple of large, open areas with an odd "blasted" look.





And this definitely isn't what I would define as a "hovel," seeing as how it's literally a "cave" and a "treestump."






There's some ominous narrating as we descend, slightly sabotaged by the pack of ratling thugs chasing after me and peppering me with shurikens.



Seriously all those little slivers of metal in the wall on the right are shurikens that missed the party. The ratlings went wild. Anyway, let's step into this not-at-all-suspicious interior.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIP_8reUQ8Y

So welcome to the Boogre Caves. This is how all dialogue is here, dragged out to indicate slow wit and partially replaced with farting, burping and slurping noises. It's also random whether any given Boogre is friend or foe, and sometimes they even get into fights with each other for no clear reason. Thankfully none of them are required to actually complete the dungeon so if they punch each other to death, it won't inconvenience us.

Oh, and, as Boogres the party all get hefty HP boosts but have something like a 10% chance of any spell they try to cast fizzling(though, of course, it'll still consume mana).

Also note how the new Boogre models in the upper left are usually just super-imposed on the characters' usual model and thus some of them have four arms or other extra extremities as a result.






The boogres also have very poor understanding of personal space and will crowd up close to you on a regular basis. You'd think this would result in the party getting pinned in but, weirdly enough, their actual hitboxes for purposes of blocking navigation seem to be tiny or almost non-existent, which is funny because the Stouts in the mines who're a quarter of the size would constantly block corridors.





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZHxezav09U

So three things we learn here are... Grunaxe died in the pit, so we'll probably need to go there sooner or later. The way out involves finding S'keser'da's eye. And sometimes the game's "turn-based" nature goes all to fuck and some moron is stuck in real-time punching us in the back of the head! Fuck off already!

I also guess the infighting between the Plunders and the Thinkers is why some Boogres are aggressive towards us, but nothing ever differentiates them visually in-game!





It's also worth noting that while the Boogre Caves are full of twisty, narrow tunnels, they're not hellish to navigate because most rooms have only one entrance, or at most two, and 90% of the dungeon exists on one plane and thus the automap is actually useful.






As far as I can tell this is the only Boogre Witch in the game, they don't seem to be random spawns like the wandering Boogre Maniacs and Boogre Murderers(both of which are always hostile) are. She casts small-time spells, nothing that really inconveniences us, and rapidly approaches dead when...




Okay, so. Let me lay this out for you. You remember Amazoni Mantraps, who could one-shot the party, or close to it, if they got within medium range. They could just barely be handled outside because there was plenty of room to back up and recover mana, which was a necessity because they took a lot of putting down.

Here we have Jungle Lilies, who are inside the Boogre Caves, in packs of four, where there are constant corners and tunnel twists and the space to back up is quite limited. They're also harder to kill than Amazoni Mantraps, but thankfully our bonus Boogre HP make them slightly less than an instant kill on their own.

They also thankfully do not randomly spawn, but there's still like three packs of them in here and they fucking suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck to deal with.

I reload and save on dealing with this one for later, this isn't an area we can do anything with for now, anyway.





The bar here is where we could have acquired Boogre Brew for the guard over in the Stout Mines instead of finding the writ. And I just want you to note that doing this would require us to defeat, in total, 12 Jungle Lilies to complete this dungeon, without the benefit of the XP and loot from the Stout Mines, enemies fought in worse terrain than the Mantraps, with higher stats, who can only realistically be fought with ranged magic, with a semi-permanent curse that makes your magic less reliable than usual.

Wonderful design.



I don't record any of the conversation with Blubarb the bartender because I don't have a conversation with him. His dialogue is even more drawling and filled with slobbering and farting than Malgrim's so like four sentences in I just get tired of it and leave. He also, of course, has nothing useful to say even if you do talk to him.




Off in one corner of the main section of the dungeon is a number of rooms with metal strips where they start. Let's step into them.



Surprise! It's a teleporter dungeon with no obvious internal logic! And you need to go through it at least three times and also to find a necessary quest item inside one of the rooms!



If there IS any logic other than trial and error, I never find it, but thankfully being boogrefied makes it a lot easier to tank the damage from the teleports.



On my first time through I also manage to miss the one quest item tucked away in the teleporter maze, but I'll have at least two more chances to find it.





Something about fighting in this area makes combat actions resolve more slowly for no obvious reason, and boogres are big fat piles of HP, so working my way through three of them takes a while, though like a lot of other enemies they're mostly annoying for their HP totals and aren't actually able to do any real damage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFN6GII1eEI

"Priskiela" standing on top of the altar behind them is why we need to hit up the pit to find Grunaxe's corpse and his ring. This room also has two exits, one is to S'keser Da, and we can't go there until we've made Priskiela happy. The other one...





Four Jungle Lilies with only two bends of corridor behind me to lead them around. The only reason I even BARELY make it is that two of them manage to get stuck on each other and clog up the doorway, letting me take them down at my leisure. I then take down the third one while backpedalling furiously down the corridor.



The last one I end up kiting all the way back to Priskiela before I manage to take it down, since at this point I'm also starting to run low on mana.

Now, what deserves such ferocious guards?





Why, the exit! The quest items we need to escape are, I kid you not, four sticks. Not magic keys or anything, just four pieces of wood, why we can't use our own spears or staves I have no idea, to jam in those holes in the walls. This will cause various parts of the wall(the gray stone parts) to slide out, forming parts of a staircase that sometimes builds towards the exit and other times simply towards other holes. Since we can only find four sticks, that means we need to figure out the right order to project the pieces in.

I remember when I originally played this, I spent ages hauling a bunch of trash here and just building an easier way out rather than collecting all the sticks. Technically once you have the sticks or have built your own staircase there's no need to fight S'keser'da or be unboogrefied, in fact if you had a barbarian or other non-caster(though realistically a barbarian would be your only serious option), they could benefit from being a permanent boogre. But for anyone else, the chance of spell fizzles would be a big loss.



Anyway, all the sticks are back on the other side of the teleporter rooms, so back we go.




This time I find the Worn Stick(tm) on the way back, marking us at having 1 out of 4 sticks.





While looking for the Pit, I stumble across a section of the Boogre Caves that I had completely forgotten about : the training course!





So games deal with phys damage in a lot of different ways. In some it's basically instant death, in others the terrain always has primacy and the player just gets ejected in [whatever] direction is least obstructed and so on, but Wizards & Warriors is the only one I've ever seen where moving phys objects gently bonk off the player and the player is always the immovable object. It turns the whole obstacle course into a joke since you don't need to dodge anything. Worst case is that Rondor loses a whole 20% of his health or something from being repeatedly jammed into spikes or whatever.





These are probably the funniest. You're clearly meant to duck and weave from side to side to slip between the spokes. But in practice the smartest thing to do is just to mash your face against one of the wheels so it gets stuck and goes out of alignment with the other, suddenly making it ten times simpler to get through. It's clearly Rondor doing all the work since he's the one taking the damage, so it feels quite appropriate that he's a barbarian for this part.






The last challenge is a short corridor with a flamethrower. It's painfully simple to just jog between the jets of flame.




At the far end is this Boogre idol with two reward chests, which we do need to reach to complete the dungeon as one of them contains another stick. However, they also contain a mean trick.




Some chests in the game are placed the wrong way around so it's hard to reach their smaller loot items around the lid, and of course they ALSO tend to be jammed in geometry so you can't just slide them out of place once they're opened. I think it may be because the items they contain actually impose some friction on them. Stupid game.





On the far side is actually the entrance to the Pit! Now that I've found it, I decide to do a bit of exploration before going in.




And doing so I find the spectator gallery of the pit, this is where Vargul hangs out.




Of course the only thing he'll ever say to us is "GO AWAY DUMB TINKER I HATE YOUS" and then, it turns out, consistently stalk us for the rest of the Booger Caves to spam these lines at us!






The Pit is another "large single opponent with no multi-target attacks or summons"-fight, i.e. a huge pushover, especially since, not being poison immune, Sophia can make it nauseous and cause it to lose actions to gagging.





Funnily enough, Grunaxe was wrong that the way out was through the Pit... for him. For us, it absolutely is, because we need his ring.





So wait, wasn't Grunaxe boogrefied, too? Because his skeleton looks pretty human. And the remains of his armor look pretty human. Whatever, I'm gonna clean up the rest of this level before I go back to Priskiela, and that includes the corridor where I got owned by Jungle Lilies last.



Even though we only saw one last time, it's yet another four-pack of the awful things. Worse yet, these corridors have more short stretches then a lot of the rest, and stairs, too.



See, none of your spells are fired from dead center, they often tend to be fired from low and to the right, for ???? reasons. This means they're very susceptible to getting caught on corners or the lip of stairs, making this entire process more of an annoyance than it absolutely has to be and resulting in plenty of wasted mana. Thankfully the Boogre Witch from before joins the fight and helps clog up the Lilies' formation at narrower spots in the corridor, giving me more free shots at them.



These corners make it real hard to tell how close the lilies are and their attacks do not give a fuck about line of sight or solid level geometry.



DIE ALREADY.



Also through this entire miserable episode, Vargul stands right behind the party staring into the backs of their heads.

Anyway, the plants were guarding two things.




The place where we use S'keser'da's eye.





And the prison, which is, uh, odd.




Seeing as how all the prisoners are ghosts and all of the cell doors are of the "approach them to make them open"-variety, which makes them seem very poor at keeping anyone imprisoned for long. Also once again the key to the prisons is a goddamn stick.



One of the chests has our third of four sticks, and another of the cells has...



The ghost of Torin's father, Grunaxe! Mind you, this dialogue bugs out and I had to approach him and then walk far enough away that he auto-goodbyed me for it to allow me to talk to him properly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddmmElUoxZ8

So, of interest... his ghost isn't a Boogre, like his skeleton wasn't. Maybe Boogreification disappears on death? It's also weird that the game doubles a bunch of his audio lines. It happens for another couple of times in this dungeon, too, but nowhere else I've seen yet. So... I have no idea what the fuck is up. Anyway, talking to him was pointless.



Vargul is still stalking me, so I ice him and leave. Grunaxe starts wandering about at random, so I make sure he doesn't hassle me, either.






Now, let's go steal an old witch's eye, which is somehow the virtuous thing to do.




First more getting tazed in the teleporter rooms.



Then finding Priskiela after she's gone wandering post-conversation. An odd thing about the game is that most neutral NPC's seem to have a static starting location where they'll stay, but once you've talked to some of them they'll just go running around like idiots, even if they're NPC's you really, really need to find again like Priskiela.



She reveals that the reason she wanted Grunaxe's ring is that she apparently had a crush on him when he was around. Also, I'm not sure if there's any way into S'keser'da's room without giving Priskiela the ring, so while you couldn't quite softlock yourself here by killing her, you could doom yourself to playing the rest of the game as Boogres which would be, uh, probably not very fun when you REALLY need a given heal or offensive spell to go off.





Even if we knew the password, which is "boogre, psst boogre" , I don't believe there's any object or NPC we could yell it at to trigger the opening of this gate.





Now, Grunaxe warns us not to let her get her hands on her eye. Priskiela tells us to be quiet because S'keser'da is sleeping. Clearly our only option is to sneak in, abscond with the eye and get out rather than fighting this mighty, legendary hag of great wizardly power, right?

Ha ha, no. There's literally no reason not to grab her eye from her bedroom and then beat her to death before moving on.





Since the game has no stealth mechanics, it's just hard-coded that attacking her or opening her loot-filled chest in the corner is what wakes her up, so even if you wanted to be stealthy, you don't even have to think about it.





Because the game engine and enemy AI are both wonky as fuck, she spends like a solid minute dancing around on the edge of her bed before figuring out how to path off it to attack the party.




Sophia hits her with Poison Breath round one, once again tagging a large enemy with Nausea and thus negating about half their actions. It's weird, too, because despite its relatively innocuous-sounding name, nausea definitely seems to be the strongest condition. Paralysis seems to wear off once enemies are hit, much like sleep in other games, poison does extremely negligible damage, etc. but Nausea is a reliable friend against anything that can possibly be nauseated.



And what little damage she does is largely negated by the party's bounty of Boogreification HP. It feels like the devs failed to account for it since the Boogre Caves, Jungle Lilies aside, do very underwhelming damage for the amount of hurt you're able to take.



She drops the fourth stick needed for the exit "puzzle," though as noted before I'm pretty sure some creative stacking and carrying objects could obviate the need for it, and a relatively powerful staff that sadly requires a high-ish strength to wield.



Now, back through the teleporter rooms.





Time to get un-boogre'd!







It never fucking ends with this game.



Like usual, it takes more patience than skill to finish off these stupid plants.






Coincidentally, this is also the Idol of Aku we needed to find for the Mages' Guild.



Just touch it once with each character to un-boogre them, thus allowing you to leave any characters who need a massive HP boost and won't be casting many/any spells as boogres.



Also killing S'keser'da, of course, has no actual impact on the local boogre population. They're still 50-50 on wanting to kill you and not giving a fuck about you. I go looking for Malgrim in case he has some dialogue about it.



He's not in the bunk room...




Ah, he's gotten stuck on/in geometry with two other random boogres. Of course.



And he's doing the "mirroring every line he says"-bug, too. Great. Let's get the hell out of here.



On the way back I test Gizzord's new "Meteorstorm" spell.




Very expensive to cast, but the fact that there's no single projectile that can miss an enemy might make up for it, especially for the purpose of ducking around a corner and shooting at an enemy and then running the hell away.




I don't think I've ever solved this puzzle legitimately because it's easier to cheat. There are only two platforms you HAVE to have out to be able to reach the exits, and then you're meant to call out the right platforms to be able to walk up to them like stairs.



Now they're out, as they should be.



Then I just find an appropriately positioned ledge and jump to them. One of the secrets of W&W is that you can jump much better than you think, because in most games, your facing only matters for where you go. Whether you're looking up, down, sideways, etc. you have the same jumps. Not for W&W, if you look upwards while jumping you go from an arthritic pensioner to an athletics superstar.



In fact I manage to jump so high I take falling damage coming down, despite the two platforms being at equal height.






The doorway on the right leads to the entrance we originally came through, the chest ahead contains the Band of Boars for the thieves' guild quest, which is actually also a quite decent accessory, so it's a shame we have to give it up.





The other doorway leads to a small meadow on the overworld map that's disconnected from the rest and unreachable without going through the Boogre caves.





It has some generic random encounters in it, those latter creatures are Creeping Spores which are like mini-Lilies/Mantraps. They have AoE toxic attacks, but they're literally melee rather than being ranged like the bigger plants', and they do considerably less damage, but they also spawn in bigger groups so they have more of a chance of actually being dangerous with it. I have on very rare occasions seen them spawn escorted by a single Mantrap, but when I say very rare I do mean "literally once in all my time playing this game."




Why we're here, though, is this guy, Doshi-Gin. A big two-headed giant that we need to kill for the fighters' guild, and also because he's carrying some good shit.




Firstly, he'll drop those nice axes he's carrying which should give VG Rondor a chance of yet another weapons upgrade(though sadly a two-handed one, so his shield will have to go in storage).





Secondly, he drops a golden lamp. And we ALL know what a golden lamp always does in fantasy settings, right? Yeah, that's right. Next update we're gonna fuck around with a genie.






Now back into the caves, over to the other exit, pull this lever and...

Hang on.



For some reason the game bugs out and thinks my party's much lower than it is, not letting me pull the lever unless I'm literally jumping up to reach it. This fucking game, it always finds some new jank to surprise me with that I've never seen before.



Of course it takes me like two minutes to figure out that this simple trick will solve it and I panic mildly as I worry that I won't be able to get out of the boogre caves.




Time for a bit of housekeeping prior to going on the Regicide Run.



First, the fighters get a pittance of XP for having killed Doshi-Gin. For context, this gets them 1000XP each, every single enemy killed in the Boogre caves gave the entire party at minimum 680XP a piece. I think it unlocks more training options, though, but this isn't really documented anywhere. Guild training is also part of why Fighters are probably the worst starting class. You can always level up a Cleric to be a Paladin if you want to perpetrate some beatdowns, or a Monk if you want to access Bushi Dojo quests and training, but each character only gets access to the training of their "core" guild.

I.e., Kuros, Sophia and VG Rondor can buy training for their combat skills and combat-related traits, but they'll never be able to buy training for their spellcasting, or the important caster traits like Quickspeak.



Gizzord is still a couple of Strength points off from being able to use it, but having something that can blind beefy enemy combatants in melee, if I ever find one that has a dangerous melee attack rather than a dangerous magic attack, could come in handy.



Gizzord gets his wizard guild level-up. I still can't get over Xander saying MYSTICAL GREETINGS every time we bust into his store.



This level-up unlocks the interesting wizard guild traits, like the aforementioned Quickspeak that results in less delay between casts.



Kuros and Trap Option get props from the dojo, which then tasks them with finding an evil assassin that's gunning for the dojo's Daimyo.

God if there's one thing I really do not miss, it's shitty RPG developers/authors fetishizing THE MYSTICAL EAST. I mean, Wizardry 8 had ninjas and samurai, but it didn't have this trash, or whatever the hell Torin and his accent were.



Trap Option completes the last Ishad N'ha thieves' guild quest. I'm not entirely sure what this actually unlocks for him, if anything.



I also get Sophia promoted to paladin for the sake of having a second healer. This happens off-screen since me walking back to Valeia and then to Ishad N'ha again wasn't exactly high excitement.



And then, since everyone shares my bloodlust, it's off to deal with ol' Freyedies!



The game looking unintentionally atmospheric.




Hello Comrade, please let us in so we can destroy the bourgeoisie.






'sup everyone, we're absolutely not here to murder your monarch.



So it turns out the FAQ's I read were wrong, and Freyedies only coughs up one suit of Dragon Armor, even though I gave him two lumps of ore. I feel somewhat cheated. It IS nice armor, though, better in every way than generic plate and providing 80% fire resistance.




So this fight isn't super hard but is actually interesting! Because firstly, you've got a mixed set of enemies. Freyedies is mostly just a clonkity bonkety melee powerhouse, but he also has the ability to summon extra guards sometimes. The guards meanwhile switch between throwing axes and bombs, so it's about splitting your offense between blasting the guards and just stabbing Freyedies so he doesn't summon more of them.



It's actually more dangerous of a fight than S'keser'da, with Gizzord getting below 30% health.




Ultimately Freyedies goes down without anyone dying, and the narrator informs us that we've killed one of the good guys and something evil is happy about it. After that it's just cleaning up the guards.




He DOES drop Kraokendon, too, but sadly it requires some stat boosts for Hierophant before he can wield it. We'll get there, though.



He also drops a key that opens... interesting places, like this lock set into the wall to the right of the throne.





And it's a haaaaaaaaul. In addition to two more suits of dragon plate, which go to Sophia and Rondor(I save Sophia's +1 plate for Trap Option, since assassins can apparently wear any armor, in case I get his strength pushed up to where he can actually carry it without collapsing into a singularity), there's also a suit of Omphaaz War Chain for Hierophant and a bunch of stuff for selling.

That bastard Freyedies, he could've just handed us a couple of these suits instead of sending us into the depths! Or at least given them in addition to the one suit he did give us!

Anyway, let's hit up the main vaults just in case we didn't completely loot it with Raskalion's help.






A few guards and miners get flattened along the way.



Now, this is a lot of guards. If they all threw bombs and axes at once, I might be in trouble. But instead of these nine guards(including some out of sight) dogpiling me in a sensible way, five of them stand in corners and just walk in place or get stuck on each other rather than jumping into the fight. I swear the fucking AI for this game sometimes.

This makes it a lot easier to deal with.



Look at these idiots.





So the main room just has guards, but has two doors both leading to T-shaped corridors, which have a treasure room at the end of each passage.




Each of these rooms is equal to the one we looted with Raskalion's help, and one of them is, indeed, one of the ones we looted with his help, but that's still three full treasure rooms. None of them contain anything exceptionally good(but one of them does have a very nasty chest that turns Trap Option to stone, thankfully Gizzord can still undo that), but that's still a hell of a lot of gold. I guess killing rich royals is absolutely the right thing to do.



I'm sure the gate guard will make it very difficult for us to leave.



Or maybe he's a fellow revolutionary.






I head back and sell oodles and oodles of loot, and also realize I forgot to get the level 3 mage guild quest from Ishad N'ha for Gizzord. Good thing I remembered to get it, though, since it's about hunting a fish with crystal eyes that can turn people to stone in the caves that have the Bronze Beast, which is where we're headed next anyway. This, at least, is a somewhat original creature, I've never encountered something like that quite in fantasy before.



And so, we're off again, with two assassins to kill(Shrew Chishi for the Bushi Dojo and Grue Morde for the thieves' guild guildmaster), a giant fish to kill(the Colesanth for the mage guild), a Bronze Beast to disable(for the mayor of Ishad N'ha), a letter to deliver(for Erzebette) and, lastly, a fated sword of ultimate power to recover from Erathsmedor so we can save the world or something. I guess.

Vote of the Update:

Erathsmedor apparently hunts random travellers and has set Kuros' hair on fire at least a dozen times by this point, are we going to peel him apart like the giant lizard he is once we get to his lair and have collected the Mavin Blade?