A look back at: Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra

 

Well it's certainly been a while since I played an RPG of some sort! I focused heavily on platformers for the tail end of last year, but I did get a bit of a start playing Might and Magic III at some point. I just put it off for months to do Dooming and platforming and what not. But hey, I never want to leave a stone unturned, and I got right back into the swing of things. Though I did need to refresh myself somewhat, since it's been a while and this game like the others still remains quite hard.

The good news? Well, things are far more convenient. Menu options are done much better so that I can get my spells easier as well as getting experience and saving, more conveniences makes the challenge much less but sometimes it's appreciated. To offset this, there's no number values visible on the screen for HP and what not, you just get character portraits (still an indicator of their status) and color bars (a less-than-adequate way of indicating health). Thankfully there's still the menu options which are a godsend coming off the heels of the previous game. So Might and Magic III, your gameplay improved greatly and I'm starting to ease into the series a bit more and more as we go along. Indeed, the gameplay and the character customization are still the strong suits and remain strong.

The weak suit, of course, is the plot, which, well, hey, the franchise has so far been quite primitive in storyline and there's not much to really go by. But this one in particular is a bit more confusing. So new setting, that's nice, but the adventurers of Terra that you recruit and use aren't really connected to anyone in particular. They're not the same ones from the previous game, as they live on Terra. They just somehow get caught up in the whole Corak vs. Sheltem conflict. And there's no endgame boss to speak of, Corak just pursues Sheltem with your party pursuing both. And I hear somehow that the party loses their way and ends up in a distant sequel as opposed to the fourth game, according to the Wikipedia article? Seems strange. I think Wizardry does better with the storylines compared to Might and Magic, but I'll still see just how far Might and Magic can go with its craziness and maybe there's some interesting stuff later on.