The Legend of Kyrandia
| The Legend of Kyrandia | |
|---|---|
| developer | Westwood Studios |
| Publisher | Virgin Interactive |
| Designer | Brett W. Sperry |
| First title | The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One (1992) |
| Last title | The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge (1994) |
| Platform (s) | Amiga , DOS , FM Towns , Mac OS , PC-98 |
| Genre (s) | Point-and-click adventure |
The Legend of Kyrandia is a three-part point-and-click adventure series from Westwood Studios , which takes place in the specially created universe Fables & Fiends .
The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One
The first part appeared in 1992 for the Amiga , FM Towns , Mac OS Classic , MS-DOS and for the PC-98 . The FM Towns version and the CD PC-9801 version have CD audio. For DOS there is a floppy version and a CD version with speech output, but without CD audio.
action
At the beginning of the game, the player learns that Malcolm, the king's former court jester, murdered the king and now rules Kyrandia. Shortly thereafter, Malcolm seeks out one of the chief royal mystics, a magician , so to speak, named Kallak and turns him into stone. The real game then begins. Brandon, the grandson of Kallak, finds him turned to stone in his tree house. Shortly afterwards, a talking tree tells him that only he can stop Malcolm and save Kyrandia with it. Brandon then goes on the journey through Kyrandia and meets different people, he also meets Malcolm several times, who keeps putting obstacles in Brandon's path. Brandon also learns more about his origins and his destiny. Shortly before the end of the game, Zanthia disappears and Brandon brews himself a magic potion and gets through it to the castle island of Kyrandia. The story ends in a final battle between Brandon and Malcolm; the villain is petrified.
characters
- Brandon
- Brandon is the main character in the game. He is the grandson of Kallak, the father of the murdered queen. He wanders all over Kyrandia to defeat the evil court jester Malcolm so that Kyrandia and his grandfather can be saved. Brandon was young when Malcolm murdered Brandon's parents. Kallak raised the prince in the woods and withheld his noble origins from him in order to protect him. Brandon will only find out from Zanthia who the jester has on his conscience - provided the player finds the way through the cave labyrinth behind which the house of this sorceress is.
- Malcolm
- The villain of the game. He murdered the king and queen in order to become king himself. Then he ravages all of Kyrandia and puts obstacles in the way of Brandon. This is also the character you play in part of the game series who can be a very funny guy.
- As a punishment for the murder, the royal mystics locked the culprit in the castle and created a force field around the building. That spell has recently been expired and Malcolm escapes to seek revenge. To do this, he stole the magic powers from the gemstone Kyragem, so that he can now petrify people, poison trees and conjure up obstacles.
- Zanthia
- Zanthia is a royal mystic. She helps Brandon to find the way to the castle of Kyrandia, furthermore she informs Brandon about his origin.
- Intestines
- Darm is an old wizard, he lives with his dragon in an old hut. Due to his old age, he is very confused and talks strange things, and his memory is not the best. He hands Brandon a spell that he later has to use to solve a problem Malcolm posed.
- Herman
- Herman helps Brandon fix a bridge at the beginning of the game so that Brandon can continue his journey. You meet him again shortly before the end of the game.
- Brynn
- Brynn is a priestess in the Temple of Kyrandia. She supports Brandon at the beginning of the game.
The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate
Hand of Fate (the first American edition was called The Hand of Fate) appeared in 1993 and is the second part of the series, here the player Zanthia plays.
action
For some inexplicable reason, Kyrandia is disappearing little by little. Even the royal mystics are puzzled. But an oversized, living hand knows what to do: a magical anchor stone has to be obtained. Zanthia is entrusted with this task. When, after a long and arduous journey, she finally finds an anchor stone, it turns out that the hand that once belonged to a powerful wizard is to blame for the disappearance of Kyrandia. And so Zanthia sets out to find the true cause of the disappearance and can finally defeat the hand.
characters
- Zanthia
- She is the youngest of the royal mystics and is chosen to embark on the expedition. As a fashion-conscious character, she always uses a spell to adapt her clothes to the surroundings.
- Marko
- Although he is not a magician, due to the desperate situation he is still allowed to attend the crisis meeting of the royal advisers. Actually, he can only do a few simple tricks, but likes to show off. He's been secretly in love with Zanthia for a long time, so he's trying to impress her.
- The hand
- She has recently been Marko's mute servant. Their exact origin and background remain unclear at first. However, she seems to like to hang around in the swamps.
- faun
- The little satyr (half man, half goat) lives with Zanthia and in her absence does a lot of nonsense with her ingredients for magic potions.
The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge
Malcolm's Revenge (there was an edition with Book Three and an edition with Book 3: Malcolm's Revenge as a subtitle) was released in 1994 and is the third and last part of the series, here the player plays Malcolm.
action
Malcolm comes out of his stone prison, to which he was banished at the end of Part 1, and wants to take revenge on the residents of Kyrandia. Deprived of his magical powers, he must first disappear from the island, find some allies and then launch an attack on Kyrandia. He finds allies in the form of a bunch of pirates who are on the island of cats. There he also helps the Cat Rebellion to overwhelm the dogs that keep the island under control. So he travels back to Kyrandia with the pirates to get revenge, but the pirate captain turns against him, and so Malcolm is banished to the end of the world by the rulers of Kyrandia. From there he makes it to limbo (the world between life and death, which is also the realm of fish) and then to hell. There, contrary to all expectations, he is welcomed with great joy - everyone is happy to welcome him into the community. But due to problems with the paperwork (presumably because he has not yet died), he has to go back to the world of the living. Back on Kyrandia, the pirates have turned most of the residents into mice and keep the regents captive. Malcolm manages to overpower the pirates and, in a séance, conjures up the spirit of the late king, whom he is alleged to have killed. The ghost tells the people of Kyrandia that Malcolm did not kill him in any way - on the contrary: he was killed by a cursed dagger, and Malcolm wanted to save him. Now that Malcolm has finally gotten through all of these hardships, he can finally lie down and take a nap.
Malcolm's constant companion is the evil side of his conscience, Gunther. The good side of his conscience, Stewart, was crushed under a large rock in Malcolm's childhood. When Malcolm returns from Hell, back to Kyrandia, he accidentally frees Stewart, and the player can choose for the finale whether he wants to play with "Angel and Devil" or just one of the two.
characters
- Malcolm
- Apparently when he was petrified he lost his ability to do magic. So he has to get by with his sense of humor and subtle remarks first. His love of handicrafts allows him to make some useful objects from the last garbage and find an unusual use for apparently worthless objects.
- Gunther
- He is Malcolm's guilty conscience, which repeatedly stimulates him to do bad deeds. Besides, he doesn't hold back from making comments.
- Stewart
- He is Malcolm's clear conscience, which was incapacitated for many years due to an incident in Malcolm's childhood. He also comments on the event, but of course from a contrary point of view.
Game principle and technology
The games of the series The Legend of Kyrandia are point-and-click adventure . From Sprites composite characters act before hand-drawn, some animated scenes. With the mouse, the player can move his respective character through the locations and, with the mouse buttons, initiate actions that allow the character to interact with his environment. Brandon, Zanthia or Malcolm can find objects and apply them to the environment or other objects and communicate with NPCs . As the story progresses, more locations will be unlocked. Manufacturer Westwood simulated a certain amount of three-dimensionality within the two-dimensional game environment by allowing the player freedom of movement in the depths of the room, with the game character being reduced in size to visualize a distance from the foreground. A special feature compared to commercially successful competing products was the greatly simplified control of the games: While games such as The Secret of Monkey Island or Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis rely on controllable dialogues and variable application options for objects carried with them and the resulting multitude of possible combinations challenged the minds of the players, the Kyrandia games provided possible uses for objects and dialogues; the latter ran automatically, the former only required a mouse click in the right place. On the one hand, this new control principle led to easier access to the games for inexperienced players, on the other hand, specialist magazines criticized the lack of challenge for more experienced players.
Production notes
In the early 1990s, graphic adventures were very successful commercially; Lucasfilm Games and Sierra Entertainment in particular developed products popular with critics and gamers. The development studio Westwood, which had recently been bought up and renamed by the British publisher Virgin Interactive, wanted to participate in the success of this genre and produced Legend of Kyrandia . According to studio founder Louis Castle, the employees involved in the game were fans of the humor of the Monkey Island series by Lucasfilm Games.
The German versions of the games suffered from a large number of serious translation errors. In the second part, for example, the phrase a piece of cake erroneously became a piece of cake instead of the intended one piece of cake . From winding was windy instead curved , the ambiguous toadstool was poisonous mushroom instead of toad stool translated from a jack one was boy instead of a playing piece and from Where's the other three ( Where are the other three (letters) ) was Where's the other tree . Even simple phrases such as You are welcome ( You're welcome ) have been translated completely wrong ( You're welcome ).
In September 2013, Westwood Studios published all three parts of the series on the GOG sales platform in a version that can run on modern PCs. All three parts can also be played with the ScummVM virtual machine .
reception
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Contemporary reviews in trade magazines were usually dominated by very positive evaluations, in which graphics and music in particular were praised. Retrospectives tend to have mixed ratings, as the play value after deducting the audiovisual presentation, which was undoubtedly high quality at the time of publication, is rather average.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Retro Gamer 1/2017, p. 48
- ↑ a b Power Play 10/1992, p. 112
- ↑ Point & Click Adventures . In: Retro Gamer . No. 3, 2015, p. 26.
- ↑ Mogelpower.de: The Legend of Kyrandia Book 2 - Hand of Fate. Retrieved January 26, 2020 .
- ↑ GOG.com: Release: Legend of Kyrandia. Retrieved June 13, 2018 .
- ↑ ASM 10/1992, p. 6
- ↑ AdventureClassicGaming.com: The Legend of Kyrandia: Fables & Fiends. Retrieved February 24, 2017 .