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January 19th 2015, 07:56 AM
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CocoMonkey
Bard He/Him United States
Please Cindy, say the whole name each time. 
337: Historical Hero II: Armageddon Author: Skull Release Date: July 16, 2012
"Let me tell you, the boogeyman checks his closet for cheese."
"Err?"
"AND CHEESE CHECKS IT'S CLOSET FOR DINK SMALLWOOD!"


REPUTATION NOTE: This D-Mod is one of the select group with a score of 9.0 or better (9.1) on The Dink Network.

"Armageddon" is the thirteenth and (as of this writing) final D-Mod by Skull. It marks the end of a remarkable five-year journey from prolific Award of Badness collector to creator of one of the BIG epics, the kind that gets you into their world and makes you start thinking of what you're playing as a proper game in itself (my 100% time was 8 hours, 11 minutes). No other D-Mod author had an arc to their output as dramatic as the one connecting "Adventures with Jani" to "Historical Hero II." I guess my own "Dink Forever" to "Malachi the Jerk" is the closest, but I wouldn't put "Malachi," a curiously confined adventure, on a level with this.

I did spend a similar amount of time working on it, though, so when I read Skull's emotional outpouring of "thoughts" on the release in the readme file, I felt it in my gut. So much goes into a project like this. You can't quite know how much unless you've done it. People see so much less of you that you don't have any choice but to tell everybody about this weird esoteric thing you're working on. "Well, there's this PC game from 1997..." And you put a lot more than your time into it; you put your heart in its hands. It becomes the sum total of your creative (and to some degree your emotional) output. It dictates your moods. I don't mean to project my experiences onto somebody else here, just to say that when Skull says the release was a "dramatic" moment for him, I understand.

You know, at certain points I felt like this D-Mod was speaking to me. I know it's just a coincidence, but look:


My wife's dad calls me "Timotheus."


That jerk! Whatever he told you to make you worship him, you got suckered, buddy!

"Historical Hero II" is a different type of game than the D-Mod it's a sequel to. Rather than having the structure of a broad but generally straight track, it's more like a hub with spokes. There's a big town at the center of the map, and you cross back and forth over it to get to the various locations you visit in the course of the story. One structure isn't necessarily better than the other, but the hub structure helps the player become familiar with the world as the game progresses. The setting feels less like a course and more like a constant thing that becomes part of the background - although naturally it is still a course.


The map of "Armageddon." There's quite a bit that you don't see here, of course.

HH2 is better than the original in nearly every way. Skull has called "Historical Hero" a "field test," and as strange as it may seem to view an epic that way, after playing this I have to say it's not much of a stretch. "Armageddon" takes some of the ideas from its predecessor and expands on them while doing a lot more to build and maintain a coherent story, world, and sense of action for the player.

This isn't a D-Mod where you jump right into the story at the start. There isn't an intro that sets up the whole premise. Instead, Dink is summoned to New Derlicon (adjacent to Old Derlicon, the setting of the first installment) to investigate a simple robbery. He even starts to go home after looking into it. Still, unlike the first game, you're given a purpose right away AND it ends up tying into the larger story.


The map isn't super-lavish with the decoration, but I think it looks quite nice for the most part. It feels very much like a world for a Dink adventure. The part I didn't like was the main hub town - it's too much of a big sea of pavement. You'd be totally lost in it without the map.

I did have some problems early on with not knowing what to do and turned to the walkthrough pretty quickly. I felt like I wasn't given enough instruction. I'm not saying I need everything handed to me, but as a designer you have to account for what the player isn't going to know. In the first segment you're told to talk to "the only different animal" in the first town. I figured out that this was a pig on a high cliff, but how was I to talk to the pig? There was nothing to interact with but the cliff, which isn't usually an object at all. Nevertheless, I tried talking to the wall - nothing. It turns out you've got to hit it. No D-Mod ever required me to do something like that before. It made me disregard my correct assumption that the pig was who I needed to talk to, and I wasted a lot of time on fruitless searching.


Gotta love that pig though.

There was also the same problem from the first "Historical Hero" where NPCs would leave the question of what to do next wide open, and you'd have to go talk to absolutely everybody in order to get to the next step. It would end up being somebody you'd already spoken to, who had nothing useful to say before, and it was hard to think of any logical reason that would have led you to speak to them again. I prepared to apply these complaints to the whole D-Mod... but these problems disappeared about an hour in, and the thread of the game became much easier to follow and seemed to have a greater logic to it. I could have handled the rest of the D-Mod (except for some of the secrets) fine without a walkthrough; I only continued to refer to it occasionally for convenience's sake because I have spent SO much time playing D-Mods now and am trying to wrap up this behemoth of a project. Anyway, "Armageddon" finds a good balance in terms of leading the player as it goes on, so this isn't a big complaint.


This new bark-themed status bar and inventory screen is unique but simple and pleasant to look at.

The version I played, which was released quite recently, contained few bugs. There were a couple of hardness errors that let you walk into cliff walls. The rest was mostly visual - some walls you can clip through, a choice menu where the top choice overlaps the title. I ran into a freeze bug, but it was obscure, caused by hammering the talk button really fast on a "familiar corpse" and triggering it again while it was already on its way out.

Like most RPGs, the story here is all about the villains. They act and the hero reacts. This D-Mod seems to understand this well and works to emphasize the villains' role in the story; there are a lot of them, and we get frequent updates on what they're up to. The villains include:

*The Disturbed Rats, the gang of baddies from the first "Historical Hero." BatHat, the leader of said group, has been resurrected and wants revenge on Dink. The female member, Luna, is in love with the group's REAL new leader...

*...Atraquis, the main bad guy. He's a copy of Dink dipped in black ink; he says that he and Dink are "Dimensional Twins," whatever that means. Every other villain on this list is a means to an end for this guy. He means to remake the world and turn it into what he calls the "World of Armageddon." "Armageddon" is apparently the name of his dead dad. That's sentimental of him.


Okay, THAT makes sense, but how come they can't see YOU standing behind that two-foot-tall rock?

*The Four Great Wizards. BatHat, whose real name is Qyernier, is one of them. They seek to use a Great crystal to summon a powerful being named...

*...AvoMal, a typical powerful demon type end boss. Smartly, the real end boss is a character who matters a little more.


Not the end guy.

*A group of renegade "blue knights," led by King Daniel's son Daniel the second. I had nearly forgotten that ol' King Dan was evil in "Historical Hero" and that Dink had to kill him. That just feels so wrong to me. These guys kidnap Libby SmileStein, who had come to visit Dink, so they go RIGHT on his s*** list. They also plan to assassinate the local king.


The Ancients understand Dink's noble quest to save Libby.

*The goblins. They aren't exactly villains, but they certainly become an antagonistic force. Skull makes some effort to give them a background, sketching out a goblin religion that explains the origins of both goblins and humans in a way that makes it clear the humans aren't to be trusted. To be fair to the gobbies, the humans' actions do little but back this up. Some of this stuff comes from "Rise of the Goblins," but it's articulated better here.

There are some interesting bosses here. Few of them are just "guy with a bunch of health." Hell, have a bunch of screenshots of them. Who says I can't? You? Toooo bad!


I believe these spiders are a brand new enemy. The big one spits venom at you.


This goddamned dragon! What a pain in the ass this fight was - not hard if you're careful, but it takes forever. He pops out from the sides to spit fire as you fight his spikey buddies, but retracts too quickly to get a hit in. Once in a while he comes all the way out, but he still moves so quickly that it's easy to miss your chance.


You drop rocks on her by blowing up the supports with bombs, a strategy I certainly cannot see backfiring in any way.


This is Hades, an optional boss who turns invisible and summons strong pillbugs. Honestly though, it was his doorman Cerberus that I found to be the hardest boss in the game.

Once again, there's a counter that keeps track of what percentage of the D-Mod's tasks you've accomplished. This is handled far better than it was in "Historical Hero." I don't think anything is permanently missable, which is great. You can now check your percentage any time in the escape menu instead of having to consult a scroll in certain buildings. Quests that are actually part of the main story are now worked into the count, and quests feel like actual quests rather than dry little errands. You can check the quests in the escape menu too, which displays an image for 15 seconds... it does it in an odd way, though. NPC text can show up on top of it. Why not use show_bmp, which would avoid this and also let the player dismiss it with a button press?

Collectibles make up nearly half the percentage. Honorgems, MageFist rocks, books and houses are back. The MageFist rocks were a bit annoying to find. I didn't mind talking to every rock in "Historical Hero," but here you have to punch them, and not with the herb boots. This means that to check a rock, you have to go into the inventory and equip the fist first. Thank goodness for the map with locations in the walkthrough. The houses are one thing I did feel was handled better in the original. Here, there aren't a bunch of houses you can enter and purchase. Instead, there's just one, and from there you can buy several more that you never get to see. You don't even get some kind of indication that you have the particular house you've bought - you're just directly trading gold for percentage points, and that's lame. At least the books give you a little text after you buy them, even if it isn't much.


This is the entire text of a book entitled "How to Behead Ducks."

One new type of collectible is captivating in its extreme strangeness: "familiar corpses." Dink can find the corpses of people he's known in the past who have died - some in "Historical Hero," some in the original game - and say goodbye to them, causing them to fade away. I can't say I ever thought I'd be collecting something like that. How did Dink's mother's dead body get to New Derlicon? My guess is that it isn't really there at all - it's just a shadow cast by a memory. Dink has known a lot of people who have died, violence being a convenient way to spice up a plot and tragedy a good motivating event for a hero. It must be a lonely life. It must be hard for him to get close to anybody.

If you find all of the secrets, you end up with one of the most powerful Dinks ever. There's a sword that combines the movement and attack speed of herb boots with the strength and range of a good sword, a crazy line that has almost never been crossed before (I think there might have been another such sword, once? It's hard to remember at this point). And then there's the spell which fires three hellfire shots and - this is key - has the minimum magic cost possible. Oh WOW. It's hard to imagine anything really threatening you with that up your sleeve. But you know, I didn't find this D-Mod terribly hard anyway. The beginning was the hardest part.


This... is art.

All those deluded villains I mentioned earlier soon rue the day they messed with Dink Smallwood, the crazy green-tights wearing superhero. Dink bursts with confidence and is kind of an ass to people, which can be pretty funny. Dink himself is easy to mock, of course. NPCs take all the shots they can fit in at Dink's pig-farming history ("I can never escape my past... *tear rolls down cheek*") and his fashion sense (Dink addresses his red bandana in this D-Mod as "Miss Bandana"), but he doesn't let it get to him, focusing instead on all the ass he constantly kicks. "Armageddon" defines Dink Smallwood as a guy who responds when there's trouble... and revels in it. "You never know what will happen in Dink Smallwood's life," he says, speaking in the third person. All the sucker villains out there can just step right up and have their turn. Dink doesn't mind. There's plenty of badass to go around.


It sure is.

Now there's a high note to go out on. What about the 100% ending? What further heights of victory and awesomeness could Dink possibly attain? I mean, he's not even alone anymore. At the end he's settled down with not only Libby, but also his good friend and mentor Martridge and his dad (remember him from the first HH?). What could make his "happily ever after" any sweeter?



Oh... Well... Um.

Moving on!