Might and Magic 8 would be the last great Might and Magic ever made. While the game legacy would continue when Ubisoft acquired the rights to the brand, the same vision and sentiment would never be the same. Might and Magic 8 for me was the best of the 6-8 game series engine, even though it didn’t really revolutionize what 6 had started. More or less, Might and Magic 8 felt like a really polished version of what 6 was but it did have a variety of unique elements in a CRPG, which is why I enjoyed it more than 6 and 7.
Unlike previous Might and Magic games, Might and Magic 8 did something unique in allowing you to play what people normally might consider “evil” races or classes. You could play a necromancer/lich, vampire, dark elf, troll, minotaur or even a dragon besides the standard knight and cleric you’d find from previous games. Truthfully, there’s not a whole lot of overpowered qualities about any of these races/classes, even the dragon to a degree. Realistically, they just replace the skins of similar classes, tweaked the skills and added a few specific abilities to certain races. You’re still quite vulnerable. But it’s an element that had an RP feel to it that a lot of games provide an option to in the RPG genre.
In this game, you only can create a single character and your remaining 4 slots must be recruited through NPCs. And unfortunately, you are not allowed to choose a dragon from the start, which is kind of bullshit even though I understand the sentiment here. Because you cannot create a full party from the start and that you will not have the ultimate end game party of your choosing initially, you have to be very careful in selecting your starting character. Once you understand how the end game plays, you might even be forced to start from scratch depending on how you feel.
For the most part, this game is dominated by magic, namely the necromancer’s Dark Magic spells. In the end game, you’ll be fighting some super powered foes like dragons. So races/classes like knights, minotaurs and even trolls feel super weak compared to a party composed of a Dark Elf, two dragons, a cleric and necromancer. Obviously, it’s not impossible but you may feel overwhelmed at times in lacking the powerful end game magic.
Part of the saving grace of this format is that you store your NPCs for future recruitment. That means you can swap NPCs at any time, depending on your need. An example is where the vampire comes in handy in a dungeon requiring you to levitate over traps. No other class can provide that capability. Without it, you pretty much will get one shot. Also, you can recruit very powerful NPCs but that requires you to have certain quests completed and/or have a minimum level.
Combat can be both real time and turn based. Like anything both have their advantages/disadvantages. Those who enjoy shooters may like the real time combat system. Even with modest bows and bow skills, a person with decent skill can easily gun down any enemy as long as they manage to avoid getting it. In that situation, real time combat wins out. Turn based combat is stronger when facing superior foes in an underground setting. For instance, if you face dragons, you’ll definitely want to stick with turn based combat because you don’t want dragons advancing on you too quickly before you can kill them. And it takes long time to kill certain dragons. The worst is when you face a dragon with no room to move and you are forced to cast an AoE spell at point blank range, resulting in everyone taking damage.
The game is pretty balanced when it comes to meaningful gear and skills. While skills can take you to a degree in survival and damaging others in combat, your gear can really boost you up. Some gear can increase important skills like dark or light magic. So if you have gear that inflates your dark skills, then you’ll see your damage soar against tough enemies. At the same time, none of the gear is so critical that you absolutely will require it to complete the game.
The one real annoyance for me in this game is platforming. There are a few spots in the game that require you to be precise in moving or even jumping from place to place. Like the fire elemental castle. One wrong step and you’ll find yourself in a lake of fire. And this can be a real pain in the ass because you can’t completely move your camera angle downward, making it easy to slip off the edge, even when you’re careful.
But I really like how they handled skills and the class quests. Skills have four categories of mastery from novice to grand mastery. You cannot become a grand master in everything but only those skills permitted by your race/class. Even if you have the skill points in a certain skill, being a novice still means you won’t get the benefits of a higher mastery. Now, the problem with races/classes is that the game is far from balance in the distribution. For instance, minotaurs are probably the worst race/class in the game. The only semi-useful skill for them is the axe skill. But you don’t gain access to powerful cleric spells and their other main skills aren’t great compared to others. Then you have dragons on the other side of the spectrum who only need to put points into their “dragon” ability. What is the dragon ability? Why to breathe fire and have tons of armor!
Because of this lack of balance, there are some players who refuse to play dragons, feeling that their overpowered nature makes the game less challenging. Even if that is partly true, it doesn’t take away from the fact that knights, minotaurs, trolls and vampires mostly are useless in the end game. In theory, you could just take all necromancers and a single cleric to win the game because of how powerful dark magic is. But that shows just how critical magic is as opposed to how powerful dragons are. Or perhaps the better way of looking at this situation is how weak certain races/classes are.
The class quests themselves are content gates to your characters’ abilities to gain grand mastery for the most part. Some classes like the necromancer gain skills like regeneration from becoming a lich. In the scheme of things, regeneration for a lich isn’t a game changer, but the lack of grand mastery in dark magic is too huge of an opportunity to pass up.
The game supposedly is timed in the sense that you have to finish it within a certain period before the world self-destructs. Sure, you have age as an attribute but that doesn’t matter as much compared to not having enough time to finish the game. Fortunately, I never encountered that part and finishing up the last task doesn’t prevent you from continuing. But by that point, there really isn’t anything to do since the final area of the game is a great spot to farm experience.
Generally, time doesn’t pass too quickly except for when you train. Training in this game takes the AD&D approach to leveling where you spend a certain number of weeks to gain a level per character. If you level too much, you can easily miss time based events and reset certain areas. This can get super annoying, especially for areas that are a pain to clear.
Now, another semi-irritating aspect to the game is clearing and resetting an area. This can be both beneficial and a nightmare. It’s beneficial in that you can return to a zone and farm it for specific items like relics/artifacts and horseshoes or powerful mobs like dragons. But for the most part once you’re done clearing an area, you really don’t want to do everything from scratch again. Generally, you don’t really need to clear an area out multiple times and there’s only a few spots that are great for continuing to farm experience (like the fire elemental plane).
The game can be buggy at times, which drives me nuts. Because it’s so old, you won’t have patches and you might not be able to finish the game if certain bugs appear. For instance, you might be missing a critical quest item. If that happens, then you might be sol unless you happened to have a spare saved game handy.
Because the game is somewhat unbalanced, I often ended up using a trainer to boost myself up a bit. There aren’t a lot of in game cheats but there are a few hidden eggs that allow you to get somewhat ahead of the curve. For instance, you can have more attributes at the start of the game if you lower your luck and trading it for a more useful attribute. There’s a fountain in the starting town that will boost you up if your luck is really low. Another known egg is the capitalized containers found in the game. For instance, I think the second zone you enter has a tree with an artifact. If you know where that tree is and with the right random roll, you can get a really powerful artifact early on. Another classic is getting the dark elf patriarch quest completed. Doing that grants you an instant level 50 which can make a monstrous difference for a struggling low level party.
At any rate, I find it sad that this game did not have any an expansion because the basic system and ideas are really fun. My main wish is that they should’ve balanced the races/classes better. It always bothered the hell out of me that the minotaur was treated like a paladin only with very weak cleric spells. I only used the minotaur out of sheer boredom not because I thought he was awesome for the end game. I do like coming back to this game from time to time but as hardware and windows improve, the real challenge is just getting it and trainers to run on the new platforms.
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