King’s Bounty: The Legend first impressions
A month or so back, a friend alerted me to the existence of the upcoming King’s Bounty: The Legend for the PC. We have similar taste in games, having both enjoyed Majesty: Gold Edition and have love for the Heroes of Might and Magic series. So when she told me about the game, I made a point to keep my eyes peeled for it. And since Circuit City is offering it for $10 less this week, I figured now was as good a time as any to pick it up.
King’s Bounty is a turn-based strategy RPG in the fashion of Heroes of Might and Magic and is actually playable on a Vista machine, unlike HoMM5, which, Vista issues aside, had serious scripting errors in some of the campaigns, which halted my progress midway through the Necromancer campaign.
The game is so similar to the HoMM series, someone needs to get sued (and it turns out I was wrong, KB as a series existed long before HoMM). You are a hero, mounted on horseback, cruising around a map to pick up goodies and fight monsters, In battle, you zoom to a grid-based sequence, where you can command your units to attack and unleash spells. The differences are minor and nuanced, mostly owing to the game’s more RPG flavor — for example. The number of units that you can command is not solely a function of how much cash and resources your character has, but also one of how many “leadership points” he has. And silly me, I thought I high leadership score meant a better chance of poaching hostiles to join your army and better overall morale. Oh well!
Unlike HoMM, for which the hero in question was incidental to the overall campaign, King’s Bounty focuses more on building up your hero, and thus has starkly limited your options. The game has three character classes to choose from when you create your hero. Fighter, Paladin, and Mage, each one having the expected strengths and weaknesses across your typical RPG continuum of strength and wits. As you cannot choose a female character as your player character, I had no choice but to name my fighter character Rod Mansweat, and loaded up a new game:
Me: Why is he riding his horse inside the castle?
Angrymob, aghast that I would ask such a thing: He loves his horse!
Unfortunately, King’s Bounty was a little heavy on the graphics (not that they aren’t lovely, there are some impressive touches to the game’s high detail, but it was sloooow on a laptop), and the attempt to turn some of the graphics down resulted in the untimely demise of Rod, so I had to restart the game and create a new character I’m calling: Grunt Hardsword.
After a fairly simple set of three tutorial battles, Sir Grunt was released to the world, where he could make his fortune and slay knaves and scoundrels. Unlike HoMM, which operates on a scenario basis, King’s Bounty is more RPG-like, with a static map and a series of quests that Good Sir Grunt must achieve as he builds his army and advances his levels.
Women in the Game
As you may have intimated from the very limited options available on character creation, the game is not exactly at the cutting edge of gender equity. But perhaps the game’s inclusion of women can best be summed up by this little tidbit from the user manual, which I was flipping through during install. On page 22, right underneath the section for “Enemy Heroes,” there is a section entitled “Wives and Children.”
You have the possibiltiy to acquire a wife and children in the game. Your wife will provide different useful bonuses to the hero and his army, and allow you to equip more equipment, adding four additional item slotes.
You can talk to your wife by clicking on her portrait. Part of this conversation might include a talk of having children. If your wife agrees to have a baby, you’ll soon have a child. He or she provides bonuses to your hero. One wife can have up to four children.
If you ask your wife to leave, she will take the children, items that she has equipped, and one-fifth of your Gold.
Wow.
Just… wait… no… wow.
We have: 1) Wives as something to “acquire,” in the same way one might acquire a new suit of armor or a better steed, 2) Wives are useful insomuch as they appear to be cheap labor, buffing the hero’s army and acting as pack mule (four additional slots! What, does she carry those potions in her vag?) 3) We won’t even get into how the wife, as a wife and not as a soldier, buffs the whole army. 4) Talking to the wife is secondary to her job as laborer and pack-mule. 5) Talking to the wife is only pertinent in her ability to grant you The Hero children. 6) Children are not necessarily important because they are an enduring bond between two people who love each other, they are important because you can make them carry shit around and exploit them for buffs. 7) Once can exploit one’s wife for up to four children, at which point 8 ) One can dismiss the wife and all children for 20% of one’s gold. You will actively have to strip the wife of all her belongings before you dismiss her, as the game will not automatically remove the clothing from her back when you send her from your site to rear your four children alone, which appears to be a grave injustice.
Oh yeah, and the whole normative heterosexuality thing.
The game is firmly entrenched in ye olde fantasy stereotypes of bygone years. Princesses are to be rescued by knights, etc, etc. It’s almost quaint that they made absolutely no effort to create a little more gender parity. Most modern games will at least throw a bikini amazon into the mix and simultaneously try to claim Girl Powa and Sex Appeal.
Ultimately, I had to ask myself: In a game that is so unabashedly unoriginal, is it realistic to expect an original take on fantasy gender roles? Signs point to no.
October 10th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Off top/head, the original King’s Bounty had four character classes: knight, barbarian, paladin, and sorceress. M,M,M, and F respectively.
If it’s wobbly and in need of a rebalancing–break it, I guess.
Not sure what to say re “wife” situation. I thought Fable’s marriage mechanic was bad enough.
October 10th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
I always find it fall-off-my-chair-funny that whenever a fantasy game comes up we have world which are basically limited only by your imagination, we have dragons, elves and fairies running around but somehow the idea of stepping outside of medieval gender roles apparently makes everything so unrealistic! Or is just so out there that no one thought to run with the idea….
At least there are novels which feel confident to play with it so-I-heard
October 10th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Yah, I love the “Buts its fantasy…!” whine trolls pull when you complain about sexism. Yah, cuz dragons and minotaurs existing is easier to accept than a gender equal society.
Anyone heard if they’ve tweaked the new Fable’s marriage system especially in regards to the pregnancy bit? (Like say, a birth control patch if you play as a female character)
October 11th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
While I never spent much time on King’s Bounty back in the day (the disk for my apple IIC was faulty), the little time I was able to spend on it had me really enjoying it-it was very fresh for a tactical rpg, and certainly served as the inspiration/source material for Heroes of Might and Magic-right down to the hunt for map pieces and digging for treasure. Though my memories are rather vague (being about 10 at the time and completely lacking in awareness of gender issues), I don’t recall a wife and child-game mechanic at all in the original. For which I am profoundly thankful.
October 11th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
DK: I think I love you. Birth control patchery for ultimate win. or at the very least they ought to have contraceptive conjurations. Come on, man, WORK THAT FANTASY.
I concur in re: gender roles too. The only place I can think of that sort of does it is Forbidden Realms and the Drow, and they’re EVULZ hello stereotyping nonsense, and WotC recently hosed their worldstructure so we don’t go there, zub0n, rabies isn’t on.
Hooray for run-on sentences! XD
October 13th, 2008 at 9:26 am
Laughing out loud at Rod Mansweat and Grunt Hardsword.
Your screenshot made me go “Ooooooooooh!” with a rising and falling tone in the middle. Since they felt obliged to add a wife-and-child feature (or is it a bug?), though, my enthusiasm for the game has waned.
I’ve played a few dogs in my day. The Scandinavian game Cultures featured a group of Vikings in the new world wherein all the males (Rolf, Erik, etc.) did all the work and fought all the wars, and the women (who at least weren’t named Skold) had the babies, fed the men, and gossiped. Since you could park several men in the larger houses, and one woman in the house would keep them all fed, you ended up not getting as many girl babies, especially since the soldiers and scouts (men all) would not wander off and feed themselves, and even if war didn’t kill them, if you forgot to micromanage their eating habits they’d happily starve to death.
More recently, I picked up an updated version of Sid Meier’s Pirates! I can’t recall much about the VGA version, but this polygon version has your pirate (and you can only choose to be male) wandering around the Caribbean knocking over other vessels. The only women in the game are the barmaids, who give you tips and sometimes need rescuing from asshole guard captains, and governor’s daughters, who are rated by attractiveness (which apparently correlates to how low cut their dresses are, and in period costume this can be low indeed, but at least their breasts all seem to be about the same size, so it’s not endowment, it’s display that matters) and with whom you can play a dancing minigame. If you succeed, you get a rumor; then they ask you for a piece of jewelry, if you have one; then they tell you they have a jealous suitor, and you have to duel him; and then, they get kidnapped; and if you rescue the girl, you get to marry her; and the more attractive she is, the higher your score.
So there’s that. I don’t think I’ve played the game since International Affect a Piratical Idiom day, which I notice was incorporated into the game itself, so there’s a laugh. No, my wife and I have been playing Tales of Symphonia in anticipation of maybe having enough to afford an XBox and Tales of Vesperia. We were talking about Symphonia; at one point early in the game, you have to go talk to a unicorn trapped under a lake, and after you jump through the requisite hoops of getting Sheena to make a pact with Undine so we can walk out there, they’re discussing who will go. Raine opts out immediately. I thought perhaps it was because she’s afraid of water, but a couple lines later, she simply states “I’m an adult,” to not much fanfare. When it turns out Sheena *is* qualified, that’s a big shock. So there’s some assuming, for you.
Sorry to ramble on so long. I guess my blog is the place for this, but since the only member of my readership who knows what I’m talking about is my wife, with whom I have already discussed this, it seems a bit indulgent and thoughtless to go on about it there.
Suffice to say, I think I will stay with HoMM3. I think it’s the best of the lot, actually. 4 was kind of dumb and restricting, and 5 won’t run on Vista at all smoothly. So 3 is still my favorite.
October 13th, 2008 at 10:01 am
I vaguely remember that part of Symphonia.
October 13th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Well, the thing is, Raine’s announcement that “she’s an adult” was something we took it to mean “I’ve had sex,” because as far as we know, it’s virgins that unicorns are interested in, regardless of age. Meanwhile, Lloyd makes a big deal of Sheena being a pure maiden because she wears her tunic open down to her navel, so he just assumed she was no longer a pure maiden.
Perhaps we’re misinterpreting Raine’s statements. However, since nothing else is ever stated to contradict our interpretation, I think we prefer it because it gives Raine more characterization, and a history, in a game that can sometimes leave its characters flat. Besides, it’s fun to speculate — where did she meet this person? Was it love at first sight, or did they fight horribly first (you know, Hollywood’s two love narratives)? How did it end? Not that we’d go so far as Symphonia fan fic, but we’re both creative.
October 13th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
right — that’s what I remember thinking — that it was an oblique reference that Raine (the schoolmarm! OMG!) was not a virgin. I don’t know that this is necessarily a cultural difference between the US and Japan.
Here’s a little something for your fanfic: Raine does appear to harbor some pretty violent attitudes toward the male characters in the game. Whether or not she’s exhasperated by their boneheadedness or is in fact deeply resentful of males is your call. I’d like to err on the former (also, just the irony of the healer being the one slapping everyone around).
October 14th, 2008 at 12:17 am
Well good to see that Katauri Interactive are continuing the post HoMM 3 tradition of inscrutable menu buttons. *pft*
Also weird that they scrapped the sorceress, I mean yeah, there’s that whole marriage mini game thing they introduced (which leaving aside for a moment how stupid and more than a bit offensive it is, just sounds half baked and un-fun), but even with that (and an apparent unwillingness to run the risk of offending uptight bigots) why not have a straight up magic character? Or is that what they changed the bard to?
Odd that they also made the combat movement hex based since the original was basically just a grid which allowed your armies to move diagonally.
October 15th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Well, except that we really *aren’t* writing Symphonia fanfic. Really.
(Oh, yeah . . . hi, I’m Falconer’s wife. I mostly lurk.)
At any rate, I’ve always thought that Symphonia has a surprising amount of feminism underneath a really, really standard formula. Such as the fact that Lloyd—Mister One-Sword-Good-Two-Swords-Better, a guy who normally has all the keen perception of a brick—starts noticing fairly early on that Collette’s relentless selflessness isn’t sweet or feminine, it’s disturbing and it might get her killed. (Not that I think he ever gets her to stop apologizing for apologizing, but he does try.) Or that the relentlessly chauvinistic character isn’t just there for laughs, he’s a desperately sad guy trying to distract himself from his troubles.
Izunya