May Maturity 06: Menzoberranzan (Intro)

Mento's Bloganza Presents Menzoberranzan!

As the game begins, we're treated to this FMV of a completely ludicrous ice dragon millipede getting taken down by a group of wandering adventurers. The dragon manages to eat one of them. If the rest feel any grief, they haven't shown it so far. Not even a "hey, remember Jim? Remember how much it sucked when he got ate by that garbage blue spider dragon?"The two remaining heroes return to a hero's banquet back in the local town of... I'm not sure they ever name it. It's that important to the plot.But the village's troubles are far from over, and during the night a raiding party of Drow sneak in, setting the storehouse ablaze and abducting many of the villagers. Never a moment's peace, is there?Welcome to Menzoberranzan! This title screen was inspired by Jeff Easley's cover art for Salvatore's first Drizzt novel "Homeland", first published in 1990. And by "inspired", I mean they just scanned the image and digitized it. The title's new at least?The game has a curious framing device for its character creator. Rather than some static screen where we fill in details, we see this Drow High Priestess conferring with the Spider Goddess, Lolth, and using her magic to divine the identities of "the surface interlopers" via their appearance, class, stats, etc.. It's putting the cart before the horse a little, but I appreciate they tried to in-universe it.Curiously, this involves moving around a ring of bowls while various mystical and spider-themed 3D objects fly into view. Drow magic is mysterious indeed.We start with a pair of characters who I hope are survivable: a half-elf fighter/thief and a dwarven cleric. We wake up in the tavern mid-raid, though we're not so pushed for time that we can't poke around this GUI for a while.As with Ultima Underworld, Menzoberranzan has an auto-mapping feature that not only fills in geography in sight (rather than just the areas the player has walked over) but points out items of interest, including objects on the ground. It also offers an annotation system, which will come in useful when the environmental puzzles start showing up. You can also save the maps to disk, which... I'm not sure why you'd want to do that. So you can use them the next time you play? (Ditto the print feature. Didn't think I'd see an ol' beige 90s-ass printer in a D&D game.)Here are our heroes in more detail. You might have already ascertained by the amount of blank space on either side of our heroes here and in the portrait view above that we have room for two more. Curiously, the system of having two created characters and two recruited NPCs is exactly the same as how Divinity: Original Sin did it. Huh.Anyway, the innkeeper has a task for us: find some buckets full of water, and put out the fires the Drow have started. Well, first he tells us to hunker down, but we're too heroic to sleep off this buzz right now.As you can see from this... oh wait, I guess you can't see anything. Man, did this game's graphics not age well.As you can see from this screenshot, there are still Drow raiders around. The game's combat is, surprisingly, not like Ultima Underworld. Whereas that game let you actively swing at enemies with a mouse cursor, adjusting the direction of the swing for high, medium or low attacks, this game goes back to the Eye of the Beholder standard of clicking the attack icon over and over. Each attack has some amount of cooldown after it, which is lessened for faster or more proficient characters.Also, for whatever reason, everything I've met in this game just explodes into gooey viscera after dying. I guess there's some Doom influence here too.The map's easily my favorite part of this game. You can see how the map only fills in areas I'm able to see - the angular brown parts were blocked by buildings the first time I swept the camera south. You can also see the orange dots everywhere: most of these are the buckets I need, but there's also useful items just lying around everywhere.To put out the fire by the storehouse, you simply need to equip the buckets and use them near the burning building. It takes around 8-10 buckets to douse all the flames, and you can refill any empties via the well in the middle of town. Sort of odd way to acclimatizing the player to the game's puzzles, but I worked it out eventually. Like we've seen many times before in this feature, older games could be more than a little obtuse.Fortunately for us, Frank Zappa is also on the scene.Our reply here is an attempt by the game to explain why our level 5 characters don't have any magical items whatsoever. We're just starting with some basic weapons and armor, but hopefully we can change that later. Anyway, it looks like we'll be chasing after the Drow to rescue these prisoners.The guard captain (that was who that guy was) also lets us take anything we want from the guard barracks, maybe in case the game started us with the wrong equipment? The only stuff in here of any note is a quiver full of arrows (but no bow, of course) and an extra set of leather along with a bunch of lesser weapons. I took all of them just in case.Ah, we have a crossbow to go with that quiver full of... arrows. Oh.The lands outside of the village is full of gnolls and bugbears, neither of which pose too much trouble. Or so I'd like to report, but somehow my level 5/5 fighter thief has a HP total of 25. That's... about average for a wizard of that level. This game might prove tougher than I anticipated. There are times when you can talk to enemy NPCs. This one's an injured Drow, who is all too happy to sell out his fellow raiders for leaving him behind. We tells us that the prisoners are likely in the Underdark already, and that they were up here to find Drizzt. Since he couldn't be found, they decided to have a little fun with our village instead.And over here is... wait, what? A centaur?This. This line about Drizzt sounding like fire is one of the few things I remember about playing this game way back in the day. It's such a dumb line it sticks in the memory.The centaur's also happy to come with you, but only to a point. I suspect when we reach the Underdark, he'll split. But hay, I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. (Don't worry, I'm not going to fill this blog with horse puns. We're going to stick to the gameplay, front and centaur.)We were told to check in with an old man outside of the village. This guy's a gem merchant, but clearly he was also a mage at some point. He's willing to enchant a few gems to drastically increase our chances of surviving the Underdark - one to prevent the radiation in the caves, another to let us see clearly in the pitch darkness, etc. - but we have to supply the gems ourselves. That means we gotta go explorin' first.The second area after the village is full of Verbeegs. I wish I'd remembered to snap one: they have armor down one side that sort of makes them look like the Cyberdemon. This one gives us some ambiguous directions: the southern valley directly behind him is an ambush trap, but there is another southern tunnel just a little further east.We also found a mysterious cave with this note inside. If we're finding poetry this bad, I guess we're getting close.Taking the southern route, we're about to get jumped by a giant when a figure drops down from nowhere and cleaves it in half.Of course it's Drizzt. He also knows what's going on, then, and starts giving us his tragic backstory in case we weren't familiar with the novels. It's three books' worth of backstory in several pages of dialogue, and I don't envy this game's writers in condensing it. I'm sure we'll get more snippets as the game continues also: this pretty much becomes The Drizzt Do'Urden Show from here on out.Of course, you can always turn him down after his spiel is finally over. But you don't want to do that. Mostly because......the guy is an absolute beast. We're hovering around level 6 at this point (our centaur friend's level 4). If we were having any trouble with enemies before, we won't be now.

The game naturally takes a turn at this point, dropping any pretense of it being about two plucky mid-level adventurers heading towards certain doom in order to save their captured friends and family from the most dangerous environment in the Forgotten Realms, and making it more about two hired caddies who can hold Drizzt's swords for him while he wipes his brow after he cuisinarts a hundred disposable foes in a matter of seconds. In fairness, Salvatore is always effusive about Drizzt's skills, but doesn't spend whole novels talking up his exploits. They're always more along the themes of prejudice (everyone hates Drow, though with good reason), exclusion (and all Drow hate Drizzt, so that works out well), knowing who your true friends are (many of the Drizzt novels has him come to terms with how rare friendly faces are in the Underdark and on the surface), and being that one weird kid in school who didn't have friends for a long while because no-one could get past the fact he brought two glowing scimitars to band practice. Metaphorically speaking.