Might and Magic X Legacy - Old School, Old Problems

I have never played any of the old Might and Magic series, and this would be my first one. Having heard this game was very faithful to the old series I gave it a try. They decided to start over with a new story and giving up all the sci-fi elements and made it pure fantasy. That is fine by me I don't really mind. This game is very old school as in, moving around you need to take one tedious step at a time. You move with WASD and turn the camera with Q and E. The game is in first person and you have your four characters at the start and the entire game is turn based. You move one step, the enemy moves one step. That itself isn't so bad but when you start adding very tedious things like moving around the world to find shit it really grates on your patience.

I'll start it off with this. The game is unforgiving. That was what old school games were like. You mess up a character you are doomed forever. You forget to bring antidotes, you're doomed forever. You wander somewhere you're not supposed to go, you're dead. One good thing I like about the game is the challenge isn't too hard. You have to use all your spells and you need to attack strategically. However, one big flaw in the game is how long it takes to do anything. Combat speed is slow as heck. When you see a ranged bandit shooting his bow at you, you can shoot him back with your range guy, but your melee guys need to select guard for their turn. If you want to walk you go slowly towards him while he pelts you with arrows. You cannot move and heal either so you can only pick one. If one person heals the other three has to guard or shoot. Then you get to the part where enemies are walking towards you. While you're busy fighting enemy groups will show up shuffle their legs and walk one step. This drags the combat out even longer because you need to wait for their animations to finish which can take around 15 to 20 seconds for some odd reason.

Then there are parts where you need to find where you have to go. The game doesn't tell you where to go nor does it give you a straight path to go. Hell half the time the quests doesn't even make sense because you're not supposed to do them yet. You're supposed to go explore. But watch out! If you explore too much you might run into somewhere you're not supposed to and die instantly causing you to lose hours of play. Remember to save often. You are constantly going back and forth walking slowly on the blocky world trying to figure out where you're supposed to go. One part has you clearing out ruins but you're only supposed to go to floors 1, 2, and 4 because the third floor just kills you. How are you supposed to know that the first time? You don't. Anyways the quest ends after killing a guy on the second floor. You either already know what you have to do or if you're playing through the first time have to know to wander around to the fourth and avoid the third. There is no quest pointing you towards the fourth. You just have to explore. When you are there you don't know what you have to do there either you just fight and eventually open a random chest that looks like every other chest and then pay attention because when you open a text will appear saying you found the water key. It doesn't show up on the list of items to grab it just flashes on the screen for a second. You then take that key to open a door somewhere else and then gain the ability to walk on water letting you access other areas that eventually gets you killed 50 times over because you don't know which area you're supposed to go to first.

Then there is the whole trainer thing. You have to learn skills but you don't know where trainers may be hiding. There are 4 levels, Novice, Expert, Master and Grandmaster. The game is very reliant on gear and some gear requires say a expert level of daggers. You have to find that elusive expert dagger trainer. You can't go up to a master dagger trainer and learn daggers. No that would be too easy. You need to look all over the world. They could be hiding in the alley of a town. They could be in a building, they could even be in the 4th floor of the fucking ruins you just went to. You look up a guide and find out that the master dagger trainer is in the last fucking town you go to and then realize your blade master is going to be pure shit for the majority of the game because you chose daggers instead of swords. While the sword master trainer is in the second town as well as the shops all selling swords and no daggers. Things like this will happen.

Last but not least this game is filled with bugs. At one part I was unable to progress through the storyline because the NPC was bugged. I had to go and edit the NPC to let me pass. Then later on I found out a NPC that was blocking the way was bugged too. So I can never cross the bridge and have to take a horse to take me to the next town every time. There are also bugs where you stay stuck in combat forever, bugs that cause weird shit to happen on your screen. A shit load of bugs.

The game itself isn't bad. The story is kinda non existent and stupid though. The biggest problems are the ones I pointed out. These are how games were like back in the "good old days" where people have to go up a hill in the snow both ways to get to school. Maybe I'm not used to games like this, maybe I just suck at this game, or maybe this is something they should've changed. Just because a game is old school, doesn't mean it needs to keep all the old frustrating things about the games. The game could be fun but I end up running around trying to find out what the fuck I'm supposed to do most of the time and end up getting bored and stopping. I wish I could enjoy it but I really couldn't stand the boredom of hunting every square.