Treasures of the Savage Frontier, Chapter 11: Not My Best Work

The party returns to Neverwinter.

I was somewhat surprised that the strange man we had just helped, Ougo... the Strange, was still with us as we returned to Neverwinter. The party didn't know what to expect, as they had just been shipped off as prisoners from this very city.

Oh... phew.

The quest in Neverwinter involves... wait for it... fighting ridiculous amounts of enemies behind hidden doors around Neverwinter. Fluff-wise, in this case, the party is rescuing the captured ambassadors from the beginning of the game. Besides the fluff, it's the same thing I've been doing all game. I can sum up Neverwinter pretty quick: I found the hidden ambassadors, returned to Lord Nasher, and received a reward.

From there, I went to Port Llast, just north of Neverwinter. I think I was just visiting it to see how similar it was to the Port Llasts in Neverwinter Nights and Gateway. The layout was pretty similar, giving me flashbacks to the ridiculous random encounters in NWN. 

Instead of having the abandoned Gallant Prince in its harbor however, Port Llast now offers exciting tours!

In a video game, this assures that there will in fact, be pirate attacks.

Before taking on the tour, I searched the town itself. At one point I encountered a large iron golem, one of the over-powered monsters created specifically for the Gold Box games. I was already a little worried about that. Then, of course, another one "entered the battle" from behind me. At this point it was getting crazy ridiculous. I followed this by going on the sea tour, and getting attacked by waves upon waves of mages. At around this point in my notes, I had pretty much decided that Treasures of the Savage Frontier is the FF13 of Gold Box games. 

The party then made their way to Luskan, and rescued Siulajia. Ougo took the opportunity to leave to see his family in Neverwinter. He assumes his family wants to see him...

There is a slight connection between Siulajia's family and the crystals, or something, it's a bit of a Chekov's Gun.

We also found Jagaerda again, and she sent us to the island of Rauthym to rescue some guy named Redleg. Even looking through my screenshots, I can't really remember what the story was. At this point, the game had overstayed it's welcome by about 20 hours, and so has writing about it. I estimate I played 46 hours of Treasures of the Savage Frontier. Most of it was the same thing repeated ad-nauseum. I think the game could have possibly been a good one if it was cut in half.

Here's a screenshot of Redleg.

 So after this, we finally get a message from Amanitas leading us to the end game.

This brings me to my next point. Throughout the game, the player finds numerous "lucky papers", as I've mentioned. These are hidden messages the enemy is passing around with their plans. To read them requires crystals that can be retrieved by the different members of the alliance: The Krakens, The Zhentarim, and the Hosstower Wizards. Ostensibly, the player collects these crystals to figure out the enemies plans, and heads to these places to stop them. This can be done in any order, creating an "open world" experience.

Looking at a lucky paper with all three crystals.

Right at the beginning of the game, Amanitas gives the players the option to receive an "artifact of great power." This is the Crown of Amanitas. This item completely negates the usefulness of the papers to the player, as Amanitas gives them messages leading them to the next part of the game, in ascending order of difficulty. It is possible that accepting this item is an "easy mode", which would be fine if it was explicitly explained to the player, but it is not.

Even if the player doesn't take the crown, it's a little hard to imagine decoding the partial messages actually meaning anything, as solving the issues always comes down to finding foes behind secret doors, nothing specifically related to the plans of the papers. There may be something I'm missing, but this whole plot just seems like a farce for the player. Collecting the papers and crystals is time consuming, yet in the end means nothing, besides the fact that you simple need to collect them, MacGuffin like.

Full transparency, while looking up what I might be missing with these papers and crystals (because, as I explained above, I couldn't figure out how they could actually be useful), I saw that if the player is missing any of the crystals, Jagaerda simply gives them the ones they are missing in Luskan. So, I went through a boat-load of reloads trying to get those crystals for no reason. This fact is harder to fault the game for since I only know this from the clue book, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

The good news is, the game actually improves dramatically as it comes to an end!