Might and Mento: March-Date of Heaven: Part Two

Enroth awaits, my friends, and so we're back with part two of this quasi-LP/excuse to post terrible MS Paint comics, as was my whole thing on here in what felt like another lifetime ago. Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven has proven to be exactly what I anticipated it would be: a game fundamentally the same as MMVII (which is to say Might and Magic VII, not "2,007"), which I've played through at least twice and count among my favorites in this genre, but lacking many of the smaller QoL features I'd come to take for granted. Everything feels like a 1.0 version of MMVII's 2.0 edition of the same engine and ruleset, though at least now I've gotten used to the game's divisive visuals and I think I might even appreciate the OST for this one a little more than VII's. I wouldn't dare to presume to know how far through the game I am, though I'll probably have a better idea once I've explored more of the world. That I haven't completed a single one of the game's major Lord Council quest chains is probably a red flag though.

OK, so, where did we leave off last time? I was threatening to head west where the rest of the game could be found, wasn't I? Well, I decided to postpone all that once again by hopping on a ship north to the island of Mist instead. Three reasons: A) by all accounts Mist is a very mage-focused place so I was hoping to finally find some Air/Water expert trainers for those in my group who could use them or else buy some better spells, B) ascertain what was needed to obtain master rank in the various magic skills, since I already knew the island had a Fire master trainer (the expert trainers tell you where the master trainers are, by the by, but unlike in MM7 and beyond it won't actually record that information for you; good thing I have Notepad open), and C) finally figure out what's going on with that planetarium and the clock tower. Whoops, wrong Mist Island—I meant, talk to the guy in charge to get another story-critical council quest and maybe see what it'll take to get a Sorcerer class promotion for my gals So-and-Sorcery and The Egregious One (who I'll be calling TEO for short from now on).

Mist doesn't have a whole lot going on outside of those NPCs and the usual town amenities. It has a single dungeon and a quest attached to it—an arm of a major mercenary company that has become somewhat authoritarian in nature of late, rounding up citizens for even the mildest misdemeanors—and while it was challenging dealing with all its high-HP melee enemies I got through it eventually. To become Wizards, the next rank after Sorcerers, we simply had to head to Bootleg Bay and avail ourselves of the magic fountain there. Not quite sure which fountain they mean but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it, or water walk across since Bootleg Bay doesn't really do bridges. It's already in my nature to gulp down every body of water I can see in a Might and Magic game: sometimes that doesn't work out, like just now when I drank from a horse trough and got poisoned, but some fountains replenish HP and MP (up to a point before it needs 24 hours to refresh) and temporary—sometimes even permanent—stat and resistance boosts. Bootleg Bay actually has fountains that will increase a person's Personality and Intelligence (the magic-user stats) to a minimum of 15 and somehow neither is the "fountain of magic" I needed. Instead, that one was closer to the town of Goblin's Tooth and simply restored MP. Go figure.

Hey, since we're all magic-users here, let's talk about the various magic schools real quick and what we're planning with them:

• Fire: Fire's where you go for pure offense. Bathing the world in flames is a good solution to most problems. Firebolt's your standard single-target attack spell for mid-level, Fireball has that splash damage for the larger groups, Ring of Fire is handy for when you're surrounded since it hits everything a certain distance from you. Fire's only real utility spell is Haste and that comes with a downside (everyone gets the "weak" condition after it runs out, though this is easily cured by one of the simplest Body spells). I have both TEO and So-and-Sorcery focusing on Fire.
• Water: My personal favorite school from 7 and 8, still just as effective here. An endlessly versatile group of spells. Ice Bolt (useful for locking out fascist deportation agents) and Poison Spray (for when the fascist deportation agents get in and all you have is mace) are decent against enemies vulnerable to them, though anything poison won't work on undead or venomous creatures like cobras and oozes. Acid Burst and Ice Blast are the water mage's Fireball. Water Walk is an indispensable tool for exploring coastal/wetland areas before you get Fly; Town Portal and Lloyd's Beacon make fast travel possible; and Enchant Item can add permanent passive boosts to sufficiently high-quality equipment either for your own use or to sell on for more money than the standard depowered item would receive. I have Cheerhealer and So-and-Sorcery maining this one, and TEO has some points in it too.
• Air: Good support/offense mix, like Water. Lightning Bolt is a reliable attack spell, Sparks can do a lot of damage in the right scenario (basically, when there's many enemies in an enclosed space like a corridor, since the sparks bounce around a lot in multiple directions), and Implosion is brutal once you're high enough level to use it. Air also has the all-access Fly spell (and its "falling with style" sibling Feather Fall) and the useful Wizard's Eye that highlights monsters (and, later, treasure) on the mini-map. TEO's the only one pouring points into this right now.
• Earth: Comparatively useless, alas. Best spells are the defensive Stone Skin and Protection Against Magic, which can save your hide against tougher enemies. I'm not prioritizing this school for anyone, though all the mages have points in it.
• Spirit. Buff city. Heroism (vastly increases melee damage) and Bless (boosts to-hit for melee and ranged) are exceptional party buffs to keep on around hostiles. The high-level Spirit library also includes revival spells, including Raise Dead and Resurrection (the latter a stronger version of the former). Cheerleader is the party's Spirit expert and is using those two buffs fairly regularly. What's Her Faith is not too bad at Spirit either.
• Body. The healer's domain. Various healing spells as well as status effect cures like Cure Poison and Cure Weakness. Obviously WHF is repping this one hard.
• Mind. The best magical offensive option for clerics. Most enemies aren't resistant to Mind, barring a few like the undead or slimes that don't have a brain. Also cures any psychological status effects like insanity and fear. Best of all, it has Telekinesis, which lets you hit distant switches and open any chest at range and not have to worry about trap damage. I have Cheerhealer and WHF both focusing on this as their main damage source.
• Light. Absurdly strong buffs. Not yet acquired.
• Dark. Absurdly strong offense spells. Not yet acquired.

At Mist I picked up Water Walk, Enchant Item, and Fireball for a great deal of added utility but higher-tier fare like Fly and Town Portal still elude me at present. These new additions meant exploring the smaller islands surrounding Mist (though it only had one, and you could also warp there via a teleport pad) and Bootleg Bay was now possible, as well as those around New Sorpigal if I ever head back there again soon. In Mist I also learned that to become a Water or Fire master I'd have to raise those respective skills to rank 12, not rank 7 or 8 like the other master requirements. That's... going to take many more levels, though with all those ranks at least those spells are going to be pretty formidable by the time I acquire mastery tier. Curiously, all I need to acquire Air mastery is to be an Archmage, and I went back to Mist to learn how I could do that once I'd unlocked Wizard class. Dude actually wants me to plunder Corlagon's Estate for some crystal or other: that estate happens to be the same ghoul-infested house near Castle Ironfist that I bugged out of last time, so there's another reason to keep sticking around this side of the world map, along with the fact that the Mist council quest requires an item from, you guessed it, a dungeon from New Sorpigal. It's not just me that's averse to going west: the game seems to insist that I stay on this particular longitude.

Bootleg Bay has at least four temple dungeons on it, so I was certainly busy there. The simplest and shortest was The Temple of the Order of the Fist, which was a small dungeon packed with monks—relatively basic spellcasters that never dropped money or items, those damn ascetics and their aversion to worldly possessions. The Temple of the Sun was a little more chaotic, owing to the fact that while most of the enemies were monks again it did have one Minotaur King in the basement. That dude was fun: a melee attack strong enough to KO anyone in the team in one hit and a ranged attack that had a small chance of instantly killing whomever it hit, as well as what felt like over 1,000 HP (to the 40 or so my guys have). Not sure why it was there but I had to use some very creative tactics to dispose of it... which is Might and Magic player lingo for "got it stuck on geometry and killed it from a spot where it couldn't reach me", which is unsurprisingly the foundation of a great many of my M&M strategies. The Temple of Tsantsa was actually full of snakes, not jovial Christmas spirits, and despite its size proved to be relatively painless thanks to plenty of Cure Poison spells. Last is the Hall of the Fire Lord: a multi-tiered subterranean maze that had some Anubis-looking boss at the end that I had to defeat. Most of its enemies were goblins and ogres, the latter being new to me if only in the context of this game.

I should pause here to mention how monster types work: most places have two or three monster "types" and each of those tend to have three tiers of difficulty, essentially just slightly bigger palette swaps. For the ghost enemies coming up in Corlagon's Estate, for instance, the green-gray Ghosts are pushovers while the second-tier blue Evil Spirits could artificially age anyone they touch by a whole year and the top-tier red Spectres could knock someone unconscious instantly regardless of their current health. These status effects have a certain chance to proc, though the aging one is the worst because there's no way to heal it right now besides one specific late-game location. Just gonna have to take those years in stride I suppose.

Finally, after our business is done over here on the east coast, I took the road west of Ironfist to the Mire of the Damned. Our first task in the Mire, besides culling the vast hordes of undead skulking around the overworld (all those old sheets and bones sure do seem flammable at least), is to take out Snergle's Iron Mines. Turns out Snergle is the name of a childishly evil tyrant (oh man, you guys have one of those too?) that has taken over the local dwarf clans and he's stashed the key to his quarters in the Tunnels in Ironfist, where he awaits with a small group of guards according to the guy who hired me to do him in, at this adjacent location in the Mire. The regular dwarf enemies are just whatever but the red Dwarf Lords are much tougher and stockier. So much stockier, in fact, that they can't even fit through the doors in this place which made my job that much easier. The Mire also contains the town of Darkmoor, which has a few Master trainers but not for any skills I have, as well as a couple more dungeons nearby: the Dragon's Lair, which consists of precisely one pissed-off dragon that you need to slay for a promotion quest, and Castle Darkmoor, which seems to strongly hint towards being the place I wanna go if I plan to turn one of my guys into a lich. It's also full of ogres, liches, and beholders and I'm not really at a level where I can deal with all that yet. The dragon, though? That thing is toast. Surprisingly light damage once I had my high-powered anti-fire barrier up. Magic's so dang useful you guys I don't even know what to tell you.

One more aside for today: I started to run out of space in TEO's inventory because I'd just been picking up potion bottles and reagents without any plan for them. The three primary colors of red, blue, and yellow get you some very basic HP recovery, MP recovery, and Cure Weakness potions respectively; it's only when you start mixing those together that you start seeing some interesting effects. In MM7 you needed a separate skill, Alchemy, before you could concoct the higher-level shit but there is no such skill in this game and therefore no such restrictions. Downside is, if you wanted to make the super pure black "permanent +15 stat increase" potions each would also take away 5 points from a different stat which was sometimes an acceptable trade but not always. This is where those "increases stats to a bare minimum" fountains came in useful: any deficits created by these stat increase potions could then be recovered with a quick trip to the relevant "manneken pis". As always in these games, the cheapest tricks are the best.

After a few more visits to New Sorpigal to try out the council quest dungeon of Gharik's Forge (it's full of fire elementals and high-level mage enemies, pass), to Mist for the Archmage promotion, and to Castle Ironfist to knock out Disney™'s Haunted Mansion™ before finishing off Snergle—that is, after I'd dispatched what was approximately 200 dwarves he had surrounding him, "small group of guards" my ass—and cash in on that dragonslaying-related promotion. I should also point out that a year had passed since I started the game, with most of that time having been eaten up by level training. The Teen Magical Girl Squad are now a little older (well, a lot older in some cases) and a little wiser but they're surely not going to stop here, not when they have equipment ensembles to slay and more dungeon dives to drop on their Instas. Next is the town of Free Haven where I can jam out to this chill guitar music. Will I finally pick up the Town Portal spell here? Maybe find some quest sponsors who want any of all this "key item" crap I've been lugging around? More monster throngs to nuke? (Definitely yes for that last one.) I might just try to wrap things up by next week, since my team is getting pretty formidable by this point already, but it's more likely I'll just procrastinate a lot. If only I had a spell to cure ADD...

<- Back to Part One, Onward to Part Three ->