Ambermoon (Amiga) - An Introductory Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
93Ambermoon is an RPG developed by Thalion Software and published by them in 1993. You might remember Lionheart and No Second Prize which we covered already. This is the sequel to Amberstar and it quite deep and takes months to get through it. Let's take a quick look.
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Production Notes:
Captured: 25th and 27th September 2021
Narrated: 31 August, and 17th October 2022
Ambermoon is not a game which was on my list to cover, but a friend from the Lemon Amiga forums, and supporter of the show, Paul Henderson, backed this game for review. As usual, I had never played this game before in my life, but I skipped through a walkthrough and an online longplay video to get used to what can be done in the game, and then after a quick wander around, I set the recorder rolling. I picked up the mirror on my warmup try, but totally forgot to pick it up on my actual play. There are no maps of this game that I could find, so it was a matter of making it into the town and trying the first missions. I think I spent way too much money buying the compass, because after this play, I went back to try to get further, but got beaten badly by the next set of rogues guarding a golden horse shoe. So I guess that money should have been spent on more training.
A few bits from the walkthrough are mentioned in the narration, like the ability to find an eagle later, and a broomstick to fly around. The voice recording was quite low in the mix and the quiet music is quite loud, so that's why the game sounds loud at normal volume. There are a few very quiet moments in the game and this made it hard to boost the soundtrack without the loud bits being too loud. This is a long review, so it took a few days to edit the narration. I noticed the footage ran out before I had finished the narration, so that's why the timing is a bit messed up at the end of the video.
Danscore:
RPGs are an acquired taste. They can take a long time to get into, and this starts off very slowly indeed. Just like most of them, you'll have to rank up by destroying all of the enemies that you can find, and otherwise grind out some experience before you can feel confident, and this is often a difficult and slow road for novices. Unless you have quizzed every NCP, there is a chance you might not have the words in your vocabulary to get by some of the rather difficult puzzles. Fighting is rather repetitive, and there is no quick battle option to get through them. Players of the game report it has a great story, and is a brilliant game, once you have your party all sorted out, but casual players might struggle to get this far, due to padding around and endless hours trying to figure out what to do. The 2D above view contains no enemies, and the 3D view is only used in towns and dungeons. It still has the roots of the Ultima series, but without the same open-world sense of freedom and exploration of those games, due to a very silly system of narrowing the view when it gets dark. I don't know about you, but I can usually see further than my elbow when the sun goes down. Ambernoon as a lot of fans but compared to easier RPGs, I will give it 7 out of 10.