Zoomer review of Might and Magic 6!

Why did I started playing this game?

HOMM3 was the game of my childhood thanks to my older cousin, and recently I had abruptly decided to revisit this universe as well as try out more classic RPGs.

How long it took me to complete this game?

I think I had started somewhere in late October, but for a couple first weeks I kept restarting the game, figuring out the basics of the combat and game world's geography, as well as trying out various party compositions. Ultimately, I had settled down on what I dubbed an "ideal balance" - the party of a Paladin (with Mind and Spirit magics), Cleric (Body, and later both Light and Darkness), and two Archers (Fire&Water Archer and Air&Earth Archer). With this "ideally balanced" party I had saved saved Enroth in about two and a half real-life months or three and a half years in-universe.

What was good about the game?

-The sheer size and richness of the world. It is impressive even by today's standrads, and I can only imagine how outright magical it should have felt for people in 1998. Someone playing without a guide probably could have fun discovering all of the little secrets hidden in various corners of Enroth for [real-life] years.

-Changing monthly monster bounties and travelling circus's sheldue (and druid promotions being tied to astronomical events) is enough to make the world feel somewhat "alive", but at the same time it is not too much to seriously mess with the player's freedom of questing and adventuring or permanently lock them out of something a la Daggerfall.

-The user interface is [largely] intuitive and lavishly beautiful at the same time. Its artstyle feels both lovingly crafted and authentically "medievally romantic" (even though, ironically, the main plot twist of the game is that it set in not in a high fantasy, but in a sci-fi universe, arguably even with elements of cosmic horror). I especially loved the icons of the spells in the spellbook - they are true art, no joking!

-The music. I am guessing it is also Paul Romero's work? If then, he was just as good there as he was in HOMM3!

-Skills and weapons system is simple enough to be intuitively understandable, but allows enough freedom for you to show off all of your tactical skills. And swatting goblins and mages like cockroaches when returning in New Sorpigal with a middle-to-high level party is really satisfying, which means the game fullfills its purpose as a RPG :-)

What was miscelanneos/neutral about the game?

-I personally had a good chuckle at seeing Ego magic's symbol being Da Vinchi's Vitruvian Man, even though for some people it probably may have felt immersion-breaking.

-At the similar note, why the hell chaimail bikini-clad "amazons" terrorising travellers in Frozen Highlands and serving under warlocks in castle Alamos are called the real-lide endonym for Hungarians? That surely was immersion-breaking for me (and I am not even Hungarian), even though, apparently, some Hungarian gamers actually find such "representation" hilarious.

-How much dirty-minded I am if, when trying to navigate though Alamos, I was pondering on how often Warlocks have orgies with Magyars when there are no intruders in the castle? I mean, Magyars are big busted babes wearing little clothing/armor, and Warlocks are their bosses and implied to be... not the most moral people in Enroth. To make things worse, Warlocks are able to cast Insanity on the party, which means they should be able to use mind-affecting magic to get around Magyars' consent with ease... Okay, let's stop here.

-I wonder, did the devs use stock photos for NPC portraits, or did they, like... use the faces of themselves, their friends and family members. I know that at least Sir Mullich in HOMM3 is based on a NWC staffer and uses his real photo as a base for his hero portrait (and this is why he wears a modern hat in his portrait). Neverthless, sometimes the contrast between the person in the photo, standard "peasant" model and NPC's supposed profession is so jarring it becames unintentionally hilarious - e.g. - the photo portrays a respectably-looking grandpa, the model (obviously) is a guy in his 30s at most, and his profession is a "pirate". Ultimately, however, it is not too serios to be a real flaw, so I had put it in neutral/miscellaneous.

-What the hell is Fire Lord's halls? I had discovered them early in the game and tried to investingate two times. Both times I ultimately was telported back to the exit and had HP drained from my characters by some invisible "owner" of the place. Ultimately, since there were no quests leading to it, I had abandoned and forgot about it. No one else in Enroth I had met seemingly even knew about this place's existence. Was there something worthy deep down Fire Lord's Halls?

-In a similar vein, no quests lead to the Dragon Riders' caves... But at least this place is actually filled with a good loot, so I quessed this is a nice bonus dungeon for those who can brave whole packs of Death Knights and Wyrms... I didn't brave it, I went straight for the Hive's reactor before I had a chance to investigate Dragon Rider's caves past the first few rooms.

-Temple of the Medusa is filled with peaceful, but non-interactable human NPCs. Were they all meant to be stone statues, but due to some programmer's oversight, ended as alive in the final version of the game? Also, while I wouldn't call it a real flaw, putting a Golden Dragon in the Temple of the Medusa is a BIG dick move from the developer's side. :-/

-Why are Titans hostile in this game? Weren't they a noble semi-divine allies of the good wizard faction in HOMM3? And did Roland ban all Elves from Enroth after his victory over Archibald? Even Archer enemies seem to be human and not elvish, although I may be mistaken...

-While exploring Enroth I had discovered few textures I vividly remember seeing in other games of my childood... namely, first two Harry Potter games and early Nancy Drew of all things. Now THIS is a crazy crossover!

What was bad about the game?

-Let's start with adressing an elephant in the room... Castle Alamos is an atrocity of game design. I legit cannot imagine even a hardcore gamer who would enjoy trying to find a sensible path though a spaghetti-like mess of a near-identical corridors stretching for what feels like kilometres while constantly clicking down hordes of identical Magyars and Warlocks... and have Insanity cast on your charaters each 30 seconds. It is neither a good RPG expierence, neither a good FPS expierence, neither a good adventure game expierence... not even a good horror expierence! (Thinking about it, Darkmoor maybe can qualify as a passable horror expierence, but not Alamos).

-Darkmoor existing in the same game as Alamos makes it even worse. And Tomb of Varn existing in the same game with both of previous dungeons makes it exponentially worse. I had originally intended to beat the game without using any guides for the most authentic expierence, but half ot Alamos was enough to dry my patience to such a degree that I used online detailed dungeon maps with step-by-step guides to finish Alamos and fully beat Darkmoor and Tomb of Varn... Hell, Alamos + Darkmoor had traumatised me so much that I had beat the Hive dictated by the step-by-step guide despite the Hive actually turning out relatively small and easy dungeon.

-I am convinced that the "Lord" difficulty on Arena is geniunely unbeatable to anyone who is not a Navy Seal veteran in real life. If I am remembering correctly, I had got multiple red dragons when I had tried "Lord" arena battle with a level 30 party... And when I had tried it in the very end of the game (the day before going in the Hive for the Reactor and Kreegan Queen)... the "Lord" arena battle had me surrounded by a dozen of Terminator Units, which is an objectively impossible battle without, like, some game AI abuse I am not aware of or something.

-In general the late-game is rather dissapointing. There is nothing about late-game enemies that truly makes you rethink your battle tactics - the most you would need is to get a new "Cure negative condition X" spell and a better damage spell. Monster immunities to some damage types make it only marginally less boring.

-You know what else is dissapointing? This is a high fantasy RPG set in the same universe as HOMM (that has an impressive bestiary of all sorts of creatures), and yet most of the enemies are... human. Like, when I want to play a high fantasy game, I wanna to fight magical beings, if I had wanted to fight humans, I would play a game in a different setting! To make things worse, some of these human enemies are racist caricatures, or sexualised women in uncomfortable amounts. (I am not gay, and do not mind some fanservice in games I play, but half of enemies in Alamos being Magyars is... like... "Am I playing Might and Magic 6, or an Incel Mass Murderer Of Women Simulator?")

-Death Knights are stated to be human in the game's text multiple times (lorewise, they are merely powerful Enrothian warriors gone rogue), yet their death animation shows them to be magically animated empty suits of armor. How such a blantant oversight was even able to get to the final version of the game?!

-There is only one real way to seriously heal in the late game - plant a Lloyd beacon in the place where you are now, Town Portal to New Sorpigal, heal in the local temple (it's almost free comparing to other temples), recall your beacon to return to where you were, repeat when your party is down on HP and SP again. Power Cure and Shared Life are just secondary healing that to be used while your Paladin/Cleric has a spare SP.

-Inventory management is an utter nightmare, mainly due to you either having to waste skill points to level up Repair, Identify and Merchant for all characters, either having to open inventory and give an item to a character with a nesseaserry skill each time you have to identify, repair, or sell an item. EACH FUCKING TIME YOU HAVE TO IDENTIFY, REPAIR OR SELL IT!!!

-Thanks to a really nasty bug, I actually got myself locked out of a Champion promotion and had to download and use a save file editor to fix the situation. I had assumed, you merely have to kill all enemies in Warlord's fortress and return to lord Temper to have quest completed, and thus discarded the letter in Warlord's chest to save space in my inventory, deeming it as yet another flavor text scroll. When I relaised you have to actually bring the latter to Temper to complete the quest, and returned back to dungeon, the letter had despawned. Had it not been for the save file editor, my game would have been permanently tainted, even though you don't really need all promotions to complete the game.

-Another bug is with a Fly spell. Closer to the end of the game, when I already had blasters on my characters, Fly spell abruptly stopped working. Pressing PgUp just didn't do anything, even though the spell was showing up as active, as if I was in the dungeon, even when I was outdoors. Yes, I checked if my Warrior Mage has mana, and tried reloading the game multiple times - nothing had helped. Thankfully, you don't really need Flight to make your way though Sweet Water to the Hive, but this bug made finishing finding Obelisk treasure way harder than intended.

My least favorite dungeons:

-Castle Alamos -Castle Darkmoor -Superior Temple of Baa -Lair of the Wolf -Temple of Tsantza -Silver Helm Headquarters

My favorite dungeons:

-Temple of the Moon -The Monolith -Warlord's Fortress -Dragoon's Caves -Temple of Baa

If I was remaking this game, what changes I would made?

-Massively rework the magic system. Maybe remove a couple of negative conditions from the game, together with the spells for curing them (Who would vote for removing Eradication from the game?). Fill the freed spells slots with a powerful healing magic that can serve as a potential alternative to the "Lloyd Beacon + Town Portal to New Sorpigal" combo. Some of the ideas of mine:

--A Mind/Light/Dark spell that restores mana of the character in the party in exchange of inflicting on them an incurable paralysis-like condition for an in-game hour or something. (Paralysis duration can be shortened with caster's skill) --A Light (?) spell that restores mana of all characters in the party except the caster... in exchange for killing the caster (inflicting a Death condition on them). --"Drain Lifeforce" - a Dark spell that instantly kills an enemy with less HP that 5%/10%/15% (Basic/Expert/Master skill level respectively) threshhold from their max HP and heals the caster on the amount of HP equal to what a killed enemy had. Spell fails if attempted to cast on an enemy with HP above the threshhold. --"Righteous Rage" A Spirit or low-level Light buff that grants the character vampiric attack, but only exclusively against Undead, Demons and Dragons. --"Anti-Magic" Not a healing spell, but would make midlle-late game more interesting. An Air/Earth buff that makes a caracter impervious to enemy spells and magical bad conditions... but it also dispells all other buffs on your character and makes him impervious to helpful magic from his teammates as well.

-Maybe slightly rework spells like Flame Arrow, Static Charge e.t.c. to make them viable past early game. Instead of doing "1dX" damage, they now do, say, "2% from a target's max HP, but no less than 1HP". That would make these spells work with little-to-no difference against goblins and rats, but also make them actually usable against enemies past New Sorpigal (You'd be able to inflict "Death by Thousand Cuts" with them... err, more like "Death by Exactly 50 Cuts").

-Replace around a half of human enemies with creatures. First of all, Cannibals/Head Hunters/Witch Doctors need to go, racist caricatures they are, probably would be ideal to replace them with Orcs (which this game, weirdly enough, lacks).

-Reduce an amount of Memory Crystals you need to "resurrect" Oracle from four to three and cut Castle Alamos from the game entirely.

-Rename peaceful NPCs from "Peasant" to "Laborer/Craftsman/Noble". (They live in towns and cities. They are not peasants.) Make it so different subtypes of civillians have different professions (e.g. Cook or Sailor can only be Laborer while Gate Master or Master Healer can only be Noble). Make civillians despawn from the map at dusk and respawn at dawn.

-Make civillians run away from the party in fear when attacked instead of attacking your party outright. In compensation for that, make them automatically hostile (even if you didn't attacked them on this map) if you have reputation lower that, say, -600. Make resurrecting the civillian with "Reanimate" spell from Dark school of magic improving your party's reputation by +100.

My final score for this game?

6.5/10 - Probably would not play again, but am interested enough to try out MM7 if there are no such places as Alamos in MM7.