I'm shallow!
Alright, I bought a new game, Majesty 2, and I can't complain about the game play that much. The real problem is that there is no "sandbox" or "freeplay" to it. In the first one I could sit there and have fun building up my little kingdom to the biggest it could be and then rip it to shreds just as fast. In this one I can't do that at all. Fuck, I can't even continue playing after the mission is done. Admittedly that isn't really a very big thing, but I like to explore the entire map for the fun of it. The only other thing I have against it is the fact that there appears to be a shortage on missions. There are about sixteen of them, and according to the box, there are also four chapters to it. I don't know what they mean by that though... While I have this in my mind, I think I'll ramble on about the story of this one. The first one really didn't have one. Just a "unite the kingdom" thing.
The kingdom is known for having kings and queens that have done something tremendous during the time in which they reigned. The king before you, Lunord I think was his name, felt like he would die without having his portrait on the wall. So he ordered his wizards to summon a demon for him to slay (they imply that it was supposed to be a weak demon by the way) and of course things go out of hand. He ends up getting killed and the demon takes control of the land, or you could say crown. The adviser manages to escape, or something, and find you, the last of the royal blood. He then gives you the task of overthrowing the demon and taking the crown back. Thus the game begins.
Ok, that was the whole back story to the entire game. I don't think I left anything out that was important to why you are playing it, aside from what your actual reason is to bother playing it. As for the gameplay, it is the same as the first one. Build a kingdom, destroy something (mostly creature dens) or become friendly with some of the other races (those being the dwarves and elves.) Of course you can't simply command your little units to run and attack something without motivation. You have to put an attack flag and back it up with gold. Depending on how much gold you put behind it, those little guys will start to attack it. Sadly, they made it harder to find the creature dens. In the first one all you had to do was build a ranger's guild, hire rangers, and wait until they explored the entire damn map. This one the rangers need a little more incentive, a.k.a. gold. So you have to pay someone to find the creature dens, pay someone to attack the creature dens, and then hope that that someone manages to live the attack from the angry creatures that pop out of the den when it is destroyed. An annoying cycle... The best part is the fact that while your heroes are out destroying the dens, there is undoubtedly five other monsters attacking your kingdom at once. Which means that something is likely to be destroyed by the time they return... if they return of course. It is kind of frustrating when I have about six heroes attacking something that isn't attacking back, they destroy it, and about that many monsters of the same level or something pop out and eat at least two of them. That may be a little unjustified, but it feels right. There isn't much else to this. The one cool thing is that you can choose which missions to do... well to an extent... They start you off with only two, then once those are done more open up. Depending on which ones you do you can proceed to an expert mission without doing one of the easy missions (by the way, there are only three difficulties: easy, advanced, and expert) or at least you should be able to. I need to actually look at how they set it up. I've just went and did all the easy ones first and then went to the advanced. No, I haven't beaten it yet... more on that later. The one important thing is that you have to beat all of the other missions before you even consider the last mission. I think they make you do that regardless of how good you are at the game.
That was just the missions and how to complete them. The rest of it gets better. The types of buildings haven't really changed that much. You still have the ranger's, warrior's, wizard's, and rogue's guild. There are of course the elves and dwarves. You could call them guilds, but they don't and I don't feel like it. That covers the old guilds that didn't change much. The other buildings that they have are the guardhouse, marketplace, magic bazaar, inn, blacksmith, and the trading post. Now then for the changes and the additional buildings. They have this whole elaborate story for this guild, but it's too long to be worth typing it. They added the "cleric's guild" to the game. At first I thought it was nothing more than the Temple of Agrela (I don't know if that is spelled right), which was nothing more than a bunch of healers, and they were called that. But in reality they are battle clerics... let's just call them that. They heal and fight shit, sounds like a battle cleric to me. This is a nice addition since it should mean that my heroes don't die off as fast... should... the thing is that the heroes have a mind of their own, and unlike the healers in the first game, these clerics don't follow and heal for no apparent reason. Nope they have better things to do like kill shit. Enough about them, let's get to the real temples. In the first game you couldn't build a temple and expect to build the rest of them. Much like in real life people have a knack to kill each other over their religious values, except this is actually funny. In this one you can build all of the different temples you want... well... almost... Do to some fucked up magic, the temples and their follows can't practice their religion everywhere like they did, for the most part, before. Instead you have to find "Holy Grounds" in order to build a temple (the cleric's guild doesn't suffer from this) and that can be a pain in the ass. Not only do you have to find one of these, but odds are there are only three of them on the map, which means that you have to think carefully before you build one of the six temples. Of course by the time you get around to building one of them, it is most likely game over anyways. Interesting note: there are seven temples in the first game. Due to a pissed off god, and the followers, the Temple of Lunord, not named after of the dipshit king nor does it have anything to do with him, is prohibited from being built in your kingdom. Which kind of annoys me since they were one of my favorites in the first game. I have two more buildings to ramble on about before we can move to something else. The trading post functions almost exactly the same way it did in the first game. They did three things to it though: took away the potions that it could sell, like the temples, made it only build-able in certain places, and armed it with arrows. So you have to go through, find a place that allows you to build it, and then keep it from being destroyed. But since you can upgrade it to shoot arrows at monsters it doesn't really matter now does it? Wrong... the trading post is more likely to be over run by monsters before it gets a chance to even do enough damage to kill one. Of course you have guard towers, but the monsters will continue to attack the thing that attacked them first, and odds are you neither have enough money to defend the post with enough guard towers nor will the guard towers be able to do much help. I had a trading post defend itself quite well, but I've had more trouble than good. Final building for the firing squad: the inn. A semi-useless building in the first one. The whole point of it was to be a place that your heroes could go and rest while still out in the middle of nowhere. This also helped make money for you... but it didn't do much else. Like the trading post in the first game, it was more likely to be destroyed be some monster before you got much use from it. You could still build it in the city... but it would always seem logical for the hero to run to their guild rather then the inn. That doesn't mean they still didn't run to the inn, but still. The inn in this game has a bit more to it. It does mostly the same thing as the first one did, but this time you can upgrade it. You're now thinking, "so what." Well they added this research-able (more money to something else...) ability called "party formation." Parties?! Where is the keg!? Not that type of party. More like the shit that happens in DnD. Once that is researched, you can click on it again to call heroes to the inn. A window opens up, and as the heroes get closer to the inn, they show up on it. You can assign a group (recommended) or let the game make a party at random for you, which can lead to two dwarves and two elves in a group... which any fantasy dork will tell you... is bad... And they make that true in this game. I once saw a dwarf run up to an elf, hit her with his hammer, and then wonder off as she stood there stunned. O yeah, unlike the first game you can have both elves and dwarves in your kingdom, without a cheat. The gnomes no longer exist it would appear. I'm not going to get into that one.
Let's get to one of the things I liked (when I actually played it without cheats) about the game; the heroes. The first game it was always amusing to see what heroes would do when in the presence of another hero. For instance, rangers normally would explore the entire map and then wonder off to explore the world (or leave the game and come back later) but whenever there were barbarians around they were more prone to follow them around and help them kill things. Which, actually, was a bad thing since it meant that you would have to put out explore flags to get the world explored. But since I always cheated it didn't matter what they did as long as I beat the game. But that's one of the things that made it so fun. There was more to thinking about what guilds to build then what they were good at. Let's say I need to protect my kingdom and it didn't matter if I destroyed all of the creature dens. I would make things like warriors, warriors' of discord, and paladins (though that combo is impossible unless you are cheating) or maybe the Adepts of Lunord or the barbarians (again impossible) but the point is that all of these either went out of their way to kill things or simply defended the kingdom. And if you have them sticking around in a group it made it all the better. Since rangers (and actually several others) would follow barbarians around it meant that I had a better chance of having the monsters I wanted killed, killed. Another fun heroine was the Solorii (I don't remember how their class name was spelled.) Like the paladins, these heroines would go out of their way to destroy creature dens and the spawn of them. Warriors would do the same thing but this heroine was consistent. I once destroyed the temple in order to prevent myself from recruiting them because of this. I don't remember the mission, just that having them destroy creature dens at their own will was a very bad thing. In this game... they really revamped the heroes, and a little more for the worse. Like I mentioned before, I have to actually put up explore flags, which means I'm wasting money on something, just to waste more money on something else, and then perhaps revive a dead hero (they made it to where you could do that no matter what) which cost money. So while I like to have rangers around... they don't do the same things they did in the first one. Other classes act mostly the same from what I've seen. Rogues are still the misers that they once were (though now they are women), warriors are the same old stupid meat shield (actually I think they've gotten worse), and dwarves don't get much action (damn slow bastards.) I have noticed that the elves, aside from being female (FNA), have this weird quirk. They like to attack things "for the fun of it." So they'll be attacking something that can easily kick there ass, and yet they still do it. I mean it's not like they are as stupid as the warriors but still they cost a shit load more to revive than them. Quick addition: they added two more flags to the game, I'm going to only explain one. There is the "defend flag" which can be place on peasants, heroes, and buildings. The more money you put on it the more heroes will respond to it and defend whatever it is that you put it on. I've noticed, aside from the rogues, that the elves and clerics really like to respond to these. While I have no problem with having heroes defend something, I have a problem with all of my healers defending something that I only wanted to be defended for a minute. I can take the flag down... the problem is if I do, no one gets the money, it doesn't go back to the treasury... Which means I have to put enough on it to get people to act, just to take it down when only one-third of the gold has been given to the heroes... Annoying as hell. Another thing, the whole party thing is based on who you decide the leader is. So a rogue is a great leader when it comes to making sure three other people are around to help kill something, while a cleric is only good when there is a low defend flag on something but I still need more than one person to defend it. So far the best party leaders are the elves. They get along with everyone, except the dwarves of course, and also have some spells that help the party and yet they can still dish out pain. The best part is that they respond to all the flags like a rogue would, it's just better since they can actually cast spells on the party. Of course I could have a rogue as a leader and have an elf in the group, too. That might work just as well... I can't be a hundred percent sure though.
I'm starting a new paragraph for this one. It's about the heroes, but it deserves its own paragraph. This was one of the things that I liked about the heroes in the first game: whenever their guild or temple was under attack, they would drop everything and defend it to the death. Better yet whenever the palace was under attack they would do the same thing. I won a game because one warrior (the only hero I had) was "defending the kingdom." In the second one, I barely won a game. I had more than one hero running around and the monster had only two hundred hit points left. Nope, they cared less. They were content with the palace being destroyed and me losing the game. I had no gold left to get them to do anything and their guilds were sure as fuck being under attack, but they sat in them and did nothing about it. I learned not to put so much faith in them. While I admit that I deserved to have my ass handed to me... COME ON! You have a giant dragon, that has destroyed ninety percent of the kingdom, killed about twenty heroes, and you're going to hide in your guild and hope that it isn't going to do the same to you? It's kill of be killed damn it! One good thing they did with heroes: whenever a guild or temple was destroyed in the first game, the heroes of that guild or temple would either mope around for a while before leaving the kingdom or they would instantly leave the kingdom. In this one, you have ten days to rebuild the guild or temple before they will leave. Which means that if by some freak accident the rogues guild is destroyed, you can keep your high level rogues (if they are that of course, besides it's cheaper to build a guild than to build a guild and then hire new rogues. then there is the fact that they might die a lot before they get to the same level as the others that left the kingdom.) which is cool. It's just annoying that they don't respond to it being attacked, WHEN THEY'RE IN THE DAMN BUILDING!
I've covered all that I've wanted: story, changes, additions, and pains. The only things I didn't cover were the spells and the money makers... The spells aren't that impressive... I mean sure I use some of them... but that's like three of them. As for making money... well if you haven't guessed it doesn't work out too well. I'm constantly below one thousand gold and end up using the extortion ability a lot (which I need to pay for in order to use, the rest of the time it's for free.) What it does is collect all of my taxes, but the rogues guild gets a... I want to say ten percent cut of what it collected. Making money in this game is a pain. I have to admit that I'm too used to cheating for that.
Well there is a simplified view of the game. They is a bit more to it, but I've covered what I saw and that's all. There are still things like the personalities of the other heroes (I only covered in detail about three of about thirteen.) and there is a shit load more to them than that. As it stands, I think I've done enough damage to my brain and back for one night.