Game:

Quest for Glory III: Wages of War (1992)

Duration: 2:19:11

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00:00 Starting Soon ("Jungle Haze (Loop)" by Aaron Hodges-Boyle)
05:10 Beginning
10:00 Go East, Young Man
16:55 A Man-Friend in a Monkey-Friend's World
30:20 River Crossing
37:50 Lost City
51:37 Lost Liontaur
58:23 Let's Mosey
1:46:09 (Final) Final Battle
1:50:18 To Be Continued...
1:57:45 Closing Thoughts

Remember all that time I spent trying to figure out how to cross the river in the eastern part of the jungle?

After the peace conference descends into an orgy of murder, tensions are high, and Rakeesh dispatches the hero on a desperate quest to reach the Lost City and stop the demon before war breaks out for real. Heading east, the Hero meets his old monkey-friend Manu, and discovers that the secret to crossing the river is to be in the part of the plot where crossing the river is scripted to occur!

Manu escorts his man-friend semi-willingly to the city of demons, where we find that tight production schedules and the need to have four different end sequences for the different classes led to a pretty rushed climax of the game! I spend more time struggling to figure out the exact sequence of actions needed to win the final battle (memories of Ad Avis in Trial by Fire...) than I spend doing *all the other stuff* in the game's ending sequence!

In the end, the Hero is able to save the day with assistance from all his friends, which is probably an important lesson. Before he can celebrate, though, he is forced by *UNKNOWN EVIL POWERS* to start doing a ridiculous dance and then we cut to black with a TO BE CONTINUED message. Huh.

There's been a fair bit of frustration along the way with this game, but on the whole its strengths--great characters, beautiful aesthetics, some incredibly well-written conversations, and that general Quest for Glory "feel"--well outweigh the weaknesses of some frustrating quest progression design and a rushed ending. This game didn't replace Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire in my heart, but I'm glad it exists and I'm glad I played it.

Next up: the Hero heads/is taken to Mordavia, where an isolated Slavic village is dealing with some serious issues in Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness!

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*Intro Song*: "Jungle Haze (Loop)" by Aaron Hodges-Boyle. Aaron has an extensive catalog of "video game music to study or fall asleep to" on his Bandcamp page: https://aaronhodges-boyle.bandcamp.com/

This playthrough is was originally broadcast live on Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/58dreamstreet

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