Beat as paladin. The last question came down to justice vs honor. My order of Virtues is: honor, justice, honesty, valor, humility, spirituality, compassion, sacrifice. I bought a bow and wandered into the moon gate to Moonglow, where I recruited the mage then accidentally attacked a little girl because I had turbo mode on. Why is attack even in the menu? That should be something far more difficult to do. So I loaded back to Trinsic and this time ended up in Yew where I recruited the druid. She could use a bow so she was a better choice than the mage. I had to refer to walkthroughs regularly since the game was very obtuse, and there were differing opinions on the best party composition. Getting mage, druid and fighter was the original plan, but the more I played and seen how long it took to accumulate money, the less value I seen in using the mage. I ended up saying the hell with it and taking the bard because of his easy availability. I was trying to save up money for the best gear, so I only bought 3 bows, then later a X bow for the fighter who gave his bow to the bard. The bard was using his starting sling long enough for me to complete 2 or 3 dungeons.
I absolutely refused to learn the moon gate mechanics so I took a pirate ship and sailed everywhere. I did Deceit first, then Destard and Despise. I gave up on buying a wand for the druid and instead got 2 magic bows for myself and the bard. I then sailed counter clockwise to hit the rest of the dungeons; Covetous, Wrong and finally Shame. Then I got the last 2 stones, trying out the balloon for the first time. It was nice to not be constantly assailed by random battles, but the gold cost for steering the balloon was not helping me afford new stuff. I made sure to talk to everyone, donate to beggars, and give blood at the healer every chance I had. Valor and honor were mastered very quickly from combat. Compassion and humility were mastered by the time I finished getting the stones, and sacrifice soon after by grinding the healer at Britain. I tried to max honesty and justice by paying slightly more for reagents, getting 99 for all the common ones. But it was not working. I had to read through another guide to find that I had to move 16 steps on the overworld between each purchase for it to improve Virtue. Spent some reagents on heals and grinded that. Last was spirit, so I went to its shrine and meditated a couple times. Like the reagent shop, it took considerable time moving around the overworld to reset the timer on being able to meditate, and not just standing there letting time pass. Finally I was the avatar and got the best sword and armor, then went off to the abyss to finish the game. I was not expecting there to be a fight against all of the classes. Even though it was the 2nd last battle, I considered it the closest thing the game had to a final boss.
I bought a few gems to reveal the map, and used save states to never lose them. I only needed that on the overworld to check my position since I was using online maps. The dungeons were surprisingly small and simple and it was interesting how the game switched between top down jrpg style view and 1st person Wizardry style. Combat was tactical and I found it absurd that every character and enemy could only move 1 space per turn, or take an action. No move and attack, no speedy cavalry and no terrain effects; walls didn't even block arrows. All this led to ranged attacks being vastly over powered, and the only time melee was used was when the enemy ambushed the party. Combat was more tedious than fun as I had to manually tell each character to focus on a particular enemy; auto mode had them waste time moving in for melee! Enemies were more a nuisance than real threat because of the 100hp per level (up to max level 8) and the most damage I ever seen an enemy do was around 30. So there was only risk after extensive fighting and running low on healing reagents, especially when fooling around with the stat up orbs that inflicted damage. I pretty much only used the cure poison and heal spells. I bought some manroot but never bothered to get any fungus so the view spell was completely out. Near the end when I was getting sick of random overworld battles against a dozen of the strongest enemies, I tried out tremor (did 200 damage to several enemies, easily one shotting them), blink to flee from battle without valor loss, and fire to bypass reflect (which only worked against arrows). I used exit to get out of dungeons, and gate to get around. My guy ended up with max str, which was the only stat anyone had maxed. Several other stats among the party were near max but I did not see the point to go back into the dungeons to farm stat orbs. I had about 2000g at the end. It was funny that I never bought any armor, doing the entire game with the front line fighter in only leather, and the druid and bard in cloth. Bard didn't even have a melee weapon until late when I got the ultimate axe for the fighter.
This game did have some impressive features that made it stand out from other NES rpgs; virtue system, auto battle, not targeting dead enemies, world building etc, but it was more tedious than fun to play. Great concept but the execution needed improvement. The biggest problems were around travel. I would fix them by having moon gates always open and allowing you to teleport to any previously visited town. That way you get some adventure to discover each. Change the balloon to be fully controllable for a limited duration for each casting of wind, rather than casting every time to change direction. And reduce the random encounter rate at sea while allowing those battles to drop treasure so they were not as annoying. Enemies should have a chance to drop gear, reagents, and items to make looting more exciting. Same with dungeon chests, and there should be 1 time high end gear in the dungeons. New items like potions and spell scrolls. Make combat more challenging (especially in dungeons) by not increasing character hp past 100 or so, and allow moving + attacking in the same turn; even better with higher movement based on dex stat. More dynamic ways to increase virtues to avoid tediously grinding them. You definitely should have maxed all virtues just from completing all objectives without doing anything wrong. Max spirit just from getting partial avatar in every other virtue. Gain sacrifice for taking damage in battle instead of party members, compassion for healing others, honesty and justice from treating npcs and party members well (like not forcing the fighter to wear dingy leather armor for the entire game while I saved up for a sweet bow). Even some sidequests with interesting trade offs. I do like the concept of having to spend extra effort and giving up things like power, wealth and privilege in order to gain in virtues, but this game didn't implement that as well as it could have.
7.0/10
