The dragon was exactly where I had seen him before so I cast my invisibility and water walk spells…

and stole one of his scales. The shaman made me my invulnerability spell and suddenly the game gets a whole lot easier.

I head for the imperial palace. The guards let me straight in wearing my robe.

In the palace I find a scroll by the evil alchemist with all sorts of clues. There are details of the poison used on the emporer and it also tells me how to meet the god of luck but this only happens on a full moon. Finally I learn that the evil alchemist travels through a mirror to the astral plain on the new moon so if I destroy the portal then it will trap him in there.

First its time to deal with the evil warlord.

No doubt this would be tough if I didn’t have the invulnerability spell…

..but with it hes down in no time.

For some reason I let him recover, run off and sail away threatening to return. No doubt a hint at a sequel that (thank god) never happened.

The evil alchemist hangs out in front of his portal. As long as I take a sidestep before walking into his room he doesn’t even notice  me. I sleep in the room until he disappears through the portal with a flash.

Then cast the exorcise spell I learned right back at the start of the game. This destroys the portal.

He’s trapped at the other side but still manages to corrupt the shrines. That would be another job to do then. Thats both the games main baddies polished off anyway. Now I just need to heal the emporer.

I go down to see the medicine man to get an antidote for the emporer but get nowhere as I needed to copy the scroll of the evil alchemist so its another trip back to the palace.

While I’m there I start gathering ingredients. There is some jade hidden in the throne.

In the warlords bedroom is another ingredient.

There is a nubian princess downstairs. Using the foreign language scroll, I get some jasmine tea from her which is another ingredient.

I get the scroll copied and since I’m on the way past have a go at freeing a shrine. Not freeing it was causing my robe to burn so I’m kind of forced into the job even though its not part of the main quest. All I have to do is cast exorcise and aim at the possessed monk.

 Something I should mention in that the levelling up in this game doesn’t seem to be based on combat. I only ever levelled up after peforming tasks like freeing shrines, killing the warlord, etc. You don’t meet any harder enemies in the game at any point either ao by the end I was killing them in about 2 or 3 hits. This seems a strange way of doing things as it makes the start of the game such a pain.

Now I have the scroll, the medicine man sends me in search of another medicine man….

Before I go for that I go for another ingredient. There is a cave full of thieves with a trapped explorer in it on one of the groups of islands.

I kill off the thieves and he rewards me with some gold dust.

Thats 4 out of 5 ingredients. I can only get the last ingredient (the peach seed) at the full moon so I head back to find the 2nd medicine man. I hand him the scroll of introduction the 1st one gave me and he sends me off to his shop to get a scroll with the antidote recipe.

Since I’m using a walkthrough I already knew this recipe, but I need a copy of the scroll anyway so I go to the shop and do this. Thats everything in place except the seed.

The new moon is a long way off so I sleep away a few days then head back to the Isles of the Dead.

At midnight the panda guarding the tree turns into the god of luck who blesses me and gives me the seed.

Back to the medicine man again, he takes the ingredients and heads back to his hut.

I follow behind, sleep for a bit and then he hands me the medicine.

The emperor is in the jail. I give him the antidote and it triggers the endgame.

Its a pretty poor end sequence. It hardly adds to what there was of the plot but its about as good as I would have expected given the rest of the game. I didn’t enjoy its predecessor Moebius – I think this game was worse. It certainly didn’t improve upon the faults of the original and removed a few of the better aspects of it. Knights of Legend had more going for it than this but the combat in that game was much, much worse than here so this was more fun overall.

I don’t get the combat in this game. Just like Moebius there are only about 4 different opponents and they are all equal difficulty from the moment you start the game. An RPG for me should have a variety of opposition and you can’t attempt certain areas until you become strong enough. You can even make a case for stronger opponents as you level up although I’m not keen on that either. This is worse than either option. If you take the effort to really learn the game and level up a lot you will end up having a really easy time of it, just when you don’t need the help since you have been playing the game for ages.

The other things that I didn’t like were just simple gameplay mechanics. Movement is too slow. The storms that make me constantly have to wait every time I try to sail anywhere are unbelievably annoying. Finally the plot of the game went nowhere – this game offered no more plot than Moebius which is just unforgivable this many years on. The manual lists a bibliography of books that were used to research the culture and the like. Very little of this comes across in the game and it was pretty much wasted effort as far as I am concerned.

Rather than attempting to extract my copy off 5.25 inch disks, I just downloaded it from abandonia.com where they rate it 5 out of 5 so I guess there is no accounting for taste. Windwalker isn’t utterly awful but it just isn’t any fun, my rating would be more like 2 out of 5. Still, its another one over with and I can get onto some decent games now.

I’m a bit undecided as to the next game. I’m trying to work through a year at a time and this is the last 1989 game so its 1990 next. Bad Blood would have been the next one but it was re-released in 1994 in VGA with a few other updates. Thats the version I will be playing so I guess I may leave it until I get to that year. I don’t really want to jump 4 years ahead then back again. That leaves me either Ultima 6 or Wing Commander.

Not exactly a bad couple of games to have to choose between I have to say. Both classics in their own right but I’ve had a whole string of RPG’s it seems during the 80’s. I think I’d enjoy Ultima 6 more if I had a change first so next up is probably Wing Commander.