Treasures of the Savage Frontier, Chapter 12: Fin

It's the climax of Treasures of the Savage Frontier... finally. The party must take the evidence they have gathered to the council of Mirabar. There they must prove that Waterdeep is not the expansionist power that Luskan has secretly made it appear to be. If they do not succeed, Mirabar will side with Luskan, and the war that would follow could easily spell the end of the Lord's Alliance.

Treasures has enlightened me as to where a number of the pics available in FRUA come from.

The party, with the help of the lucky papers and crystals, easily convinces the council that the Axis of Evil is at fault.

As it becomes apparent that the council will vote to remain a part of the Lord's Alliance, the Neverwinter representative moves to leave the council room. He is stopped by the guards, there is a struggle and it is revealed he has a Kraken tatoo! What a surprise! This hasn't happened ten times already! Thankfully, I had properly buffed my characters before entering the council, and managed to beat the mega-battle with only one character going down.

More Krakens and Hosstower mages... yay.

After this, the two rulers of Mirabar, Rauthym of the humans, and the dwarven King Steelfist request the party's presence. They both offer rewards, and here is where it gets a bit weird. It seems both the humans and dwarves lay claim to an ancient dragon's treasure hoard, and want you to recover it. Specifically, The Gem. That's right... not a gem, The Gem. There is no explanation of what The Gem does, really. It's like the design team sketched out a plot, planned to flesh it out later, and never got the chance.

The game completely shifts gears here, you've spent the whole game stopping the Axis of Evil's plans, and now that they're thwarted, you are sent on a completely unrelated hunt for a dead dragon's MacGuffin. The odd part is, despite its incongruity with the rest of the plot, it's arguably the best part of the game. The party must first take a ship to Fireshear.

I was hoping Fireshear would be a nice town, a simple base of operations for the rest of the game, but no, Treasures don't play that. Fireshear is an underground city, and the party immediately finds signs of trouble in the form of mutilated bodies.

There is a well set up atmosphere of survival-horror as the party explores Fireshear. They come across mutilated bodies and ransacked rooms, wondering what beasts could have caused this kind of carnage. Then it just turns into, as usual,  repetitive encounters with large amounts of abominable snowmen. Or yetis... I think in D&D there is a distinction between abominable snowmen, yetis, and sasquatches.

These battles fall into the pit trap that many of the Gold Box games do of having massive amounts of creatures in random encounters to make them "challenging." This brings me back to my point of D&D working best as a game of attrition. If every stinking encounter is a life and death "challenge", the game quickly becomes a drag.

At the end of the two-level dungeon, you find out who the mastermind of the yeti infestation is. Perhaps the most feared creature in the Realms...

Sorry, most DREADED FOE in all the Realms.

I had little bit of trouble with this battle, as one is bound to with the myriad of status effects a beholder's eyes can cause. However, I probably would have made it out of the battle in good shape if not for that berzerk-lover mechanic I mentioned distaste for earlier. I think an excerpt from my notes will best illustrate my feelings at the time:

"This game... I would have beat the beholder with only two guys getting stoned, expect for the STUPID MOTHER F*NG BERSERK LOVER MECHANIC MADE AUGUSTAR SHOOT F*NG ARROWS AT THE STUPID ICE HOUND. Chode was disintegrated. F*."

Augustar was pumped up with magical arrows and haste, and would have easily taken down the beholder, except that he was out of my control. That's what you get for falling in love, in Treasures.

I won the battle relatively handily with a new strategy. Which brings me to another excerpt from my notes:

"I love fighting the hardest battle so far, and getting the same amount of XP as one of the easiest :{"

3,000 XP for beating a beholder and his army of minions? That's less than most of the random encounters in this game, even the easy ones. Treasures, you can *** and ***.

After freeing the still living miners and defeating the beholder, Fireshear becomes a functional home-base, complete with a magic shop. Treasures did manage to get one thing right, it handles its economy very well, unlike the other Gold Box games. Magic shops are scattered throughout the game that allow the characters to spend extra cash on items that are both useful and not overpowered. This is a balance that the other Gold Box games are infamous for not being able to negotiate.

Wow, what a climax! The game must be almost over, right? Well, relatively, but there are still four more maps to negotiate! I'm not kidding when I say Treasures is the FF13 of Gold Box games. It has a good story on paper, and is filled with good ideas. The execution of all this plays like a team created these good ideas in a vacuum then tried to plug them together at the last minute, which is exactly what FF13 is. Treasures' design team is much smaller, so I'm not sure what exactly happened with this game, but the result is analogous.

Ice Peak, the last part of the game, and Mirabar have unique snow tile sets which are neat.

The characters meet some Northmen and Ice Folk on Ice Peak. The Ice Folk seem to think their coming was foretold 600 years ago.

If you mean the end of the game, than yes, definitely! Please!

There is a useless sub-plot of soldiers from Hellgate Keep seeking The Gem, and of course you must fight them first, because Treasures wouldn't let you get through a map without fighting hordes of high-powered NPCs.

I don't have any notes for this image... but I feel like I reloaded after this.

After the battle, the heroes seem to be magically mesmerized by the dragon's horde, losing control and falling victim to greed. They are especially drawn to The Gem. THE GEM!!!!

You don't think this dragon is going to come back to life and attack us do you? Well, I think any RPG player worth their salt would be disappointed if it didn't!

Amanitas appears and interrupts the greed filled party. He reminds them they are here to retrieve the Staff of Ages... No, that's not it, it's The Gem (TM) they seek! Amanitas warns them their enemies are hot on their heals, then he disappears oddly. Augustar greedily fondles (their words, not mine) the gem. The ancient dragon, Freezefire awakens! Then Augustar is suddenly back to normal and says a heroic speech. Hmm, I just realized even this haphazard ending sequence is reminiscent of FF13.

"I don't know. It was a new Focus, or something. You know, I'm thinking, didn't really make sense of course." -Sazh during the final sequence of FF13. Yup, applicable.

Fighting the reanimated ancient dragon was fun, and he had a cool unique sprite.

The game even anticipated one of my characters getting disintegrated in the final, fateful battle.

Not intentional I'm sure, but I did find it funny that only 5 of the usual six PCs are depicted. Although, one of them looks like Siulajia. Maybe the last of my heroes is off in the corner there, heheh?

The ending uses the same tile effect Gateway did for an affective ending.

Being as I completed the game more than a month ago, I'll again refer to my notes to sum things up:

"The game does great things with story and npcs, outside of that, it does most everything wrong. Dungeon design isn't as bad as the first game, but there is a lot of empty space. Encounters are boring or "unfair" (surprise attacks with disabling and high damage abilities. I honest to god only made it through a few set encounters without losing a character or two), random encounters happen too much, and treasure is abysmal. The magic item shops were a plus. I hate to say it, but this game is not good."

Just like FF13, it's a game I had high expectations for because of its pedigree, but it fails on almost every account. I do look forward to CRPG Addict getting to it for another opinion, because there aren't nearly as many perspectives out there on Treasures as there are on the other Gold Box games. I'm curious whether the game felt so bad mainly because of my nostalgic expectations, or if it is really an objectively bad game. I hope it was entertaining to read about, because man, it was a drag to write about! It's funny how that works.

I've got to assume this is supposed to be Yartar, to bring the game full circle. It is a nice touch that the scene now shows the game's new lovers. I mean that they are lovers in the game, not of the game... I doubt anyone loves Treasures, except maybe it's parents.

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