Command and Conquer 3

The Legend of Kyrandia series of three games (titled Book One, Book Two and Book Three was a critically acclaimed, side-scrolling, point-and-click style adventure franchise that was published between 1992-1994 for the Amiga, DOS, FM Towns, Macintosh, PC-98 and Windows 3.x platforms.

The idea that a franchise, if placed in the hands of the right developer, could be published back-to-back three years straight and that all the released games would not suffer a drop from quality, consumer fatigue, creativity and in fact show an improvement year on year stands in stark contrast to the annual franchise releases that we have in the current video game generation that serves as a mere "rinse and repeat" without any real add-value for the gamers purchasing the game.

Legend of Kyrandia came about as a result of Westwood being purchased by Virgin Interactive. Prior to the acquisition, Westwood and SSI both had technical differences on the direction the Eye of the Beholder series was going to take before they were going to develop the third game in the series.

The key issue being the sound samples that was going to be included in the third game and how it would either provide add-value or break the player's immersion in the dungeon setting of the game. In addition to the immersion-breaking aspect of that, there was also the point to contend of the more advanced sound samples requiring and drawing more performance from the processing hardware of players' computers from that era.

The following quotes from this blog adequately explains the issue in contention:

SSI chiefly wanted to add digitized sound support to the EOB engine. To do that, they hired John Miles, later famous for his middleware Miles Sound Drivers, to revise the engine. The original EOB1/2 engine was strictly meant for real mode and 640KB of RAM. Instead of just requiring EMS, which would have solved the problem of storage for sound samples, Miles rewrote the engine, called AESOP, to use the 16-bit protected CPU mode.

The engine's performance on anything but high end hardware was dreadful.

Regardless of engine, loading a save game takes far longer than it should especially compared to EOB 1 or 2.
Source: nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com

The digitized sound that SSI and Miles were so keen to incorporate into the game detracts from the immersion instead of adding to it. The ghosts in the opening level and the undead warriors in the mausoleum make machine-like noises. The sound is extremely loud, usually unpleasant and it never seems to stop. Turn down your speakers or your significant other will make you turn them down or order you to put on your headphones. On lower end machines, the game will pause at times for the sound samples to load off the hard disk and into memory.
Source: nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com

Going back to the series in question, The Legend of Kyrandia franchise was the first self-IP that enabled Westwood to develop their own flavour to the game in a (at that period) saturated D&D clone market (akin to the multiple Call of Duty clones we have presently).

One of the first thing that was noticed by players in the game world of Legend of Kyrandia was that from a slightly serious tone albeit added with awkward humour akin to the earlier Eye of the Beholder series in Book One to a more comical and campy, exaggerated feeling in the subsequent Book Two and Book Three.

The more serious aspect and tone of D&D gameplay would be reserved for a third franchise, that of Lands of Lore which would be explained in the following section.

Shout out to World of Longplay which has excellent long play walkthroughs of all three games in the Legend of Kyrandia series and of which I will include at the end of the respective summary of each book below. They give an excellent sense and first look at the progression of the series in terms of humour, plot direction, graphics and audio capabilities as well as overall quality in the series.

Book One of the series introduces the player to the protagonist Brandon, who by the way is voiced by Joseph D. Kucan of Command and Conquer fame, who is the grandson of the King's Royal Mystic named Kallak. He becomes the protagonist for the main game and a supporting character for the subsequent Book Two and Book Three.

The opening sequence of the first game sees Kallak being cast into stone by the introduced antagonist, Malcolm the jester/clown. Malcolm would subsequently beocme the protagonist or rather the main character for the third game in the series; Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge. It is elaborated that Malcolm had prior to this killed the King and Queen of Kyrandia with his magic and harbours the ambition of taking over as its new ruler.





Malcolm is captured but then manages to break free after 16 years, which leads us to the opening sequence. As explained earlier, Kallak is cast into stone but being the serial joker he is, Malcolm leaves his eyes open so that he will be able to see of the mischief that he commits.

Brandon who then steps in after Malcolm has left is shocked by his grandfather becoming carbonite and clumsily wanders what he is to do. That is when the wall of Kallak's house comes to life and explains that it is the embodiment of the land of Kyrandia, encouraging Brandon to go against Malcolm and the deeds his is about to do against the Kingdom.

From there the game starts and there's a healthy mix of archaic RPG combat along with difficult puzzle solving with gives the Legend of Kyrandia series the reputation it rightly deserves.

The end has Malcolm being cast into stone himself after fighting against Brandon in the final fight (you fight against Malcolm many times throughout the game). Setting the premise for the second game.





Book Two is set several years after the events of the first game and puts the player in the perspective of the sorceress Zanthia from the first game and has Brandon now known as King Brandon.

The graphics engine from the first game is retained and thus there is not much of a significant visual or audio shift in quality in Book Two, even though some polish is admitted. King Brandon becomes the narrator for this game as well, it has to be added.

Plot wise, there is a marked shift in direction, as Zanthia is a much more outwardly lively protagonist to play as as compared to Brandon. As Brandon narrates, parts and pieces of the kingdom are beginning to disappear and all of the Royal Mystics are puzzled as to the source of the occurrence.

One of the mystics, Marko the Magician, who is joined by his companion/servant "The Hand" which literally by the way, is a human sized hand and of which the game draws its name from. The Hand comes up with a plan involving getting a magical artifact from the planet's core and King Brandon chooses the young sorceress Zanthia to lead the quest to save the Kingdom.

The plot twist that builds up to the end of the game is pretty cliched but its all in good humour and there rarely seems to be a sense of fatigue and boredom as the developers have managed to add even much more difficult and intriguing puzzles and challenges to keep players on their toes.

The end has Zanthia and Marko fighting the Hand (which they win) and where Kyrandia and its vanished pieces are eventually restored leading to a pretty happy ending.

Westwood cleverly includes in the credits a hint of what's to come in the third game with the following, and which goes to show that the problems and adventures of the Book Two was more of a break and retreat from the main antagonist Malcolm, who should not be forgotten.





Also from a trivia perspective, Joe Kucan's brother Michael voiced the Hand but what is more amusing is that in the credits, instead of putting his name, Joe Kucan decides to put the voice actor of the narrator (King Brandon) as that in the following:









The final game in the series, Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge, was again published the following year in similar fashion to the second game and twists player's norm of playing as the hero as the main character is Malcolm the jester himself.

The plot is more or less a look of Malcolm's side of events since the first game, where it explains how he lost his good conscience at a young age and of which he tries to clear his name from the crime of murdering the King and Queen of Kyrandia which formed the crux of the whole point of Book One.

Trying to bridge the idea of the truths presented in Book One after playing Book Three can screw up your mind a bit so consider it to be a partial retcon on the side of Westwood as they tone down the whole psychopathic Joker-esque philosophy of Malcolm and where he becomes a character that can be much more empathised and relatable.

I suggest reading Hardcoregaming101's review of Book Three (link at Credits section) and that of the whole series itself as it can be a bit crammed trying to explain the gameplay mechanics and every nook and cranny.

What is certain however is that Kyrandia is playable in the first and third (last) chapter which forms to be the most enjoyable part of the game. The middle segment in which Malcolm is at a hundred and one different places can not only be repetitive and irritating for gamer's with a short attention span, it is also frustrating due to the throwback puzzles that is presented which are randomised and which most of the time requires players to reload their game.

A nice catch plot-wise is that there are three different endings to the game, and that the approach to many of the puzzles and quests are left open-ended in signature Westwood style.





Technical wise the game uses a different engine which is much more eye pleasing and the background is digitally rendered in contrast with the pixelised characters which is kept from the previous two games. The inventory screen is kept hidden and thus the screen looks much less cluttered.

Personally for me, one thing that is irritating and which keeps cropping up in the game is the audio track of an an in-house audience laughing at most of the things that Malcolm says throughout the game. It doesn't really value add to the immersion experience for the player and actually takes away from how enjoyable Book Three actually is.

Also foreshadowing Bioware's esteemed dialogue wheel that would be featured a decade after Legend of Kyrandia was published, Westwood actually enabled players to choose the type of response Malcolm was to give to the non-playable characters (NPCs) through the mood-o-meter feature implemented in Book Three.

Another feature that Command and Conquer fans will be able to recognise is that of the new soundtrack scored by none other than Frank Klepacki. Right from the Intro screen you can hear the familiar sound of his industrial-rock genre that would be famous in subsequent C&C games.

Finally in the credit screen of the game Westwood mixes things up a bit by portraying a video of the Westwood staff as Malcolm invades their office. In my personal opinion it perfectly characterises the humour the staff of Westwood had at that time as well as representing a snapshot of the zenith of their RPG-making days before they would shift gear into a more serious RPG franchise in the form of Lands of Lore and also before departing the RPG scene franchise wise with their successes with Dune II and Tiberian Dawn.