Might and Magic 2, for SNES
Rating: 5.5/10; Average
Played 2019
Not recommended for anyone other than old school rpg enthusiasts. Even then, a walkthrough is strongly recommended and maybe not the SNES version.
Might and Magic 2 is an old school hardcore western rpg which is very heavily inspired by games like the Wizardry series and pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons. Gameplay centers around an inn full of adventurers who you can switch back and forth between an active party of 6 + 2 hirelings (who are premade, must be found and cost money per day). There is a premade team and you are able to create your own characters, even beyond just 6. There is nothing stopping you from making 1 character of each class plus seconds if you really want that kind of huge party with back benchers. After choosing your party you are thrust into the first town with a short message about what you are supposed to do, which basically amounts to: explore the world, fight bad guys, save the world and have fun. That pitiful excuse for a story/hook continues throughout the game with cryptic and even encoded messages seeming randomly strewn about the towns, dungeons and overworld. You are expected to wander around aimlessly, fully explore every labyrinthine dungeon and jot down these messages. Better off using a walkthrough.
The world is viewed from a 1st person perspective and is set up as a grid of squares. You are able to move forward or backwards and turn direction. The world is very limited graphically, with little to no variety in your surroundings and anything of interest shows up as a text message when you step on it. Of course this means the game is tedious to navigate and the only thing to help on the screen is a compass. There are necessary aids that prevent getting around from being an exercise in tedious frustration but rather than being built into the interface they are offered as spells and a skill. 2 sorcerer spells grant a mini map that offers no special information (such as secret doors) and is essential for staying sane. The game has a fountain very close to where the game starts that grants both of these spells until the next rest, as if the developers knew the game was nearly unplayable without them. Another spell reveals the current map and shows your coordinates but the in game map already does this making the spell useless. More uselessness comes from light magic and items, which seem to serve no purpose. In the first game they were needed to auto map dark places but not in this game. Makes me wonder if these were changed for the SNES version. In order to do ANY automapping to see where you have been you need a character with the cartography skill. Thankfully sorcerers start off with this and the skill is sold cheaply in the first town. These are ways in which the game is too bogged down by its roots in pen and paper and old school games, which required drawing your own maps, to the detriment of user friendliness.
Another problem with lack of user friendliness is the menu system, which is used for party and inventory management, and battle. The menus feature long lists of options, often with sub menus, and are operated using only "up", "down" and 2 buttons for select and cancel. The kind of menu found in Windows and best operated using a mouse and keyboard shortcuts, neither of which are on a console. Thus simple tasks take much longer to perform than necessary. Highly repeatable tasks, like healing, trade item, attack, cast spell and thievery bear the brunt of this system and the game really should have contextual shortcuts to use these with a single button press. There were 2 commands that I found far too easy to perform by accident; destroying items in the inventory and blocking in battle (pretty much skip turn), neither of which had a prompt to confirm if you actually wanted to do it. Not that I think they need a prompt, but they should be more difficult to perform than the more useful commands.
Battle occurs when you step on a tile which has been assigned to have a fight there. If there are any Final Fantasy style random encounters I did not notice; I believe they are all fixed. What you have to fight is usually random, except for certain special fights. The types of enemies that can be present is determined by the location (so no worry about fighting end game enemies in the first town) but the actual composition and numbers are random. In the 1st game battles were set up in rows, usually with only the 1st 2 characters able to melee attack and take melee hits. Back characters could use ranged weapons or magic to target both front and back row enemies. This lead to interesting tactics where you wanted to ensure your archer, robber, cleric and sorcerer had ranged weapons and melee weapons for the chance of a battle where your front line is larger. It was also important to be able to target back row enemies that had nasty spells or abilities that they could use from the back and that the front line characters could not target without mowing down the enemy front line first. This game has no such convention. All characters are always in the front row and there is no distinction between melee and ranged attacks. In fact there is no point for a character to have more than 1 weapon. Only the 1st 10 enemies in a battle can participate in the fight; all those in reserve replace slain enemies and are not directly targetable (though area magic can hit them). The game likes to throw ridiculous numbers of enemies at you and it follows a very predictable pattern; the 1st 10 enemies are random, but every enemy beyond that is a copy of the 10th enemy, all the way up to 255. It seems like the more you level up the more enemies are in battles. In the beginning the battles are very difficult. While they rarely go above 10 enemies, a party of level 1 characters can barely manage a few of the weakest enemies. Later on these battles are mind numbingly tedious to the point where you will groan at the fights rather than be excited. Epic battles are an interesting feature of the game but they severely overstay their welcome.
Characters that drop to 0 health (regardless of how much damage they actually took) are just unconscious and will not die unless hit by an area attack. Any healing or resting will get them back on their feet. This is a great feature, especially when considering the cost and penalties of using resurrect. However there are multiple very poor features that make battles extremely deadly, frustrating and tedious. The most prominent are enemies that can perform special attacks, like dragon breath. In the first town can be found sludge beasts that are not too much trouble for a level 1 party to defeat. Unless they use their acid spray, which does 40 damage per hit, for several hits spread randomly to the party, including those who were dropped to 0 hp by a previous hit. Now a level 1 knight only has 10 hp, so a single use of that acid spray can very easily cause a party wipe for even a much higher level party. At best, you might only have a FEW deaths. In fact these types of enemies are so ridiculously overpowered that they make the game unplayable without save state scumming and I can only believe it is a massive bug (unique to the SNES version?). Another ridiculous concept is immunity to physical attacks by gender. These types of enemies are strewn throughout the entire game and make battles even more tedious by pretty much rendering half your party useless against them (assuming you do not massively screw yourself over by choosing mostly a single gender party). Zombies and woodsmen are some early examples; I say again, ridiculous. I could see the concept working on specific rare monsters, such as nymphs and succubus for men, and something childlike for women. I could also see certain monsters being resistant or immune to non magic weapons or specific physical damage types but there are only immunities to magic elements like fire. Some enemies destroy your resources; food, gold, gems and very rarely items. This can be incredibly annoying and often makes no sense that you cannot get the stuff back after killing the enemy.
After slogging through a fight you must specifically search to find any loot. Regardless of how many enemies there were you will never get more than a single item plus gold and gems, and there will always be a chest which may have a trap. Items are random and can come with magic +s that improve the stats of the item. However, once you go beyond +3 or 5 there is a high chance the item will be arbitrarily restricted by alignment to only be equipable by characters sharing that alignment. The only way to find out which alignment is through trial and error because nowhere is this info displayed. This is another ridiculous and user unfriendly feature that puts a massive drag on the excitement of finding sweet loot. The world has temporary and permanent power ups as well as conveniently placed spots to easily gain gold, gems and especially xp. It is almost like the game is more about being a puzzle to find the optimal way to achieve God like power than an actual adventure.
Pro
- Characters are difficult to kill because they will fall unconscious
to 0 hp regardless of damage taken
- Thievery can be used to hide to avoid combat
- Fleeing from combat is usually successful but returns you to the
start of the area
- Good variety of enemies with careful tactics required to win
Con
- Random rolling for stats at character creation (though it is quick
and generous)
- Huge epic battles that are massively overused
- Training in later towns grants more hp and is not retroactive
- Item + is not shown in the inventory
- Have to pay a shop to see basic item stats
- Some enemies are immune to physical damage from male or female party
members
- Character hp is not shown in the cast spell menu, making healing up
more tedious
- Awkward menu interface without useful shortcuts for use with a
controller
- Too easy to accidentally destroy inventory items and block (wasting a
turn) in combat
- Clerics and sorcerers are not able to use any ranged weapons,
including the sling
- Checking the map is awkward, requiring multiple button presses of
different buttons
- Wizard eye and eagle eye spells grant a mini map, which should have
been part of the basic interface because the game is nearly
unplayable without it
- Cartography skill required for automapping
- Light and location magic and items serve no purpose
- Some enemies are massively overpowered with high damage multi hit
attacks. High chance of party wipe, extreme chance of at least 1
death
- Map does not show things like stairs, portals, shops, etc
- Some enemies steal/destroy gold, gems, food or items and you can
never get it back
- Traps, hazards (and other points of interest) are not shown until you
step on them and see a text message
- Some traps and hazards are difficult to get past without suffering.
Jump and levitate magic does not always help
- World does not change, with fixed battles, loot and power ups that
respawn
- Which leads to easily farming specific loot and fights that have
ridiculous rewards for in effect infinite gold, gems and xp
- Silly stacking bonuses, like multiple thief tools or rings of AC
- Magic items can have arbitrary alignment restrictions which are not
displayed
- Cannot remove skills from hirelings
- Hirelings do not level up
- No descriptions for spells
- Bug where I lost 2 hirelings and 2 characters became hirelings
- Turn undead no longer seems to work at high level?
- Enemies that frenzy fall over dead without doing any damage
- Lack of story and direction
- Cryptography puzzles, especially the one at the end
- Time travel mechanic has a lot of useless filler
- Can only save at the inn
- No tactical difference between melee and ranged weapons. No front or
back rows
