While the random encounters made parts of the game feel sparse, the "Citadel of Chaos" area was packed with characters that made it my favorite installment in the series. Some sections of the game pull off that story element better than others. It matters whether you're the kind of hero who'd try to rescue a servant from a cruel master - even if the guy you're trying to rescue would rather go for your throat than accept your help. But when you're the one making the decisions, a false choice is still part of your story. The servant's never going to help you, so you can either fight the pair of them or run away like a wimp. There are only two real outcomes in the orc chieftain's room, despite the three options you're given. The books are filled with red herrings and false choices, of course. We settle our disputes like real ruffians - with dice. The chieftain himself made an appearance further along, barging out of a boathouse for a randomly selected battle. But all it contained was a random fight with a giant rat. After exploring Firetop Mountain for a while, I found the room where the orc chieftain and his servant should have been waiting for my intervention. It's nothing big enough to disrupt the game for casual players, but enough to make the world seem a little less lively than I was expecting. The paths you can follow are almost exactly the same as those laid out in the books, but bits of the story seem to be missing. Instead of getting lost in the maze, you get a clear but distant view from above it. The art that conjured up fantastical rooms is missing, replaced with a top-down view of the world. Descriptions of the books' events and locations are pared down, sometimes to just a sentence. But somewhere along the line, it loses some of the atmosphere. You can't accuse Fighting Fantasy Legends of being unfaithful to its source material. Turn to that numbered section of the book and the story continues. Do you flee the room? Do you prepare to do dice-rolling battle with the pair of them? Or do you attack the chieftain in the hope that his servant will join you? Each option has a corresponding number. Here's how the books work: You're on a perilous adventure to defeat a villain, usually one with a comically evil-sounding name like "Balthus Dire" or "Zanbar Bone." You stumble into a room where you discover an orc chieftain whipping his servant. These longer games make combat more challenging while preserving the story and atmosphere of the original books they're based on. Like Inkle's Sorcery and Tin Man's The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, it looks and feels more like a traditional RPG. These "gamebook apps" left the contents of the books more or less intact, while automating the dice-rolling and page-turning elements of the game.įighting Fantasy Legends positions itself on the more ambitious end of the scale. Tin Man Games and now-defunct Canadian developer Big Blue Bubble both released digital editions of the books. ![]() The books are an analog predecessor to the interactive fiction genre, so perhaps it's not surprising we've seen them adapted so often in recent years. The open-world layout allows you to dip in and out of maps based on "The Warlock of Firetop Mountain," "Citadel of Chaos" and "City of Thieves," three separate adventures written by "Games Workshop" founders Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. And just like in the books, your weapon of choice is a fistful of dice. The game casts you as an adventuring dwarf, human or elf. "Gold" and "Frankincense" weren't on the list, unfortunately. I chose the name "Myrrh" for my elf heroine. So as a fan of board games and a dice-and-paper veteran, I was keen to see what the creators would do with the gamebooks I grew up with. ![]() I grew up too late to read the books during their '80s heyday, but a stash of second-hand copies gave me my first real taste of interactive fantasy in a pen-and-paper world.įighting Fantasy Legends was created by Cheshire-based Nomad Games and published by Asmodee Digital, the company responsible for the app versions of cult board games such as Settlers of Catan, Pandemic and Ticket to Ride. Readers were armed with a character sheet and a set of statistics generated with a dice roll. It's based on the Fighting Fantasy books, which inspired a cult following by combining a choose-your-own-adventure format with a role-playing element. That's what I asked myself after a few hours playing Final Fantasy Legends, a new casual RPG with card- and dice-based gameplay. I'm fighting my way across a fantasy continent filled with monsters and magical artifacts.
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