Backlog Bingo 2025: Might and Magic IX: Writ of Fate

Leading with this: this is a stone cold 1/5, no notes, and it was highly unlikely that it was ever going to be anything else.

So, uh, some context: this game is known to be really, really bad. It's the swan song RPG from a company that was kinda dying. (Then again, we got Sirtech's swan song at the same time, Wizardry 8, one of the most beloved PC RPGs of the time, so this wasn't guaranteed to be bad.) But I've finished every other game in the series: getting 6-8 as a kid caused me to revisit 1-5 over time, and then 10 came out a lot later (9 in 2002, 10 in 2014) so I played and finished that too. 9, though, has always eluded me, because its 1.0 patch was a broken mess with a save-killing bug about 2/3 of the way through. (tldr, when you finish the giant meta-quest of "unite the six tribes to fight this invader dude", someone sends you to get a doll for a kid, basically as a fetch quest so you have to leave and come back for plot to happen, and if you teleport out rather than walking out your save is broken; no normal person would ever walk from city to city at that point in the game so many, MANY people did not finish 1.0). Young Ammy didn't finish this game for exactly this reason, but thought it was okay, and since then, it's gotten two official patches and a third unofficial one, which is what GOG is running, so let's give this 1.3 patch a go.

Older Ammy thinks this game is a fucking dumpster fire, the 1.3 patch is a less-but-still-broken mess, and that finishing this probably cost me some small amount of sanity.

Here's a list, in no real order, of the very frequent things that would happen while I was playing this game:

• every four to five minutes of walking, my entire party would be snapped to facing directly south, no matter what else was happening
• there's a town in which the compass just...doesn't work, it always faced east no matter which way I was facing; this was 100% consistent
• I had to load a lot of saves because I would softlock by being clipped into something that moved, with one particularly egregious example that I'll get to in a bit, but basically any object that rotated or shifted or turned was a recipe for a softlock because you'd pretty reliably clip through them
• maybe 1 in 20 loading screens would load me into an empty gray void and force a load
• the party formation screen just...does not work, full stop, there's no actual way to put your mage and healer in the back row, so you better hope you created your healer last so they end up behind your tanks, otherwise fuck you
• speaking of character creation, naming characters only works if you name them, and then, WITHOUT HITTING ENTER, visit the party summary screen and then go BACK to hit enter; if you don't do this, their name gets changed to a single capital O. (Spoilers: I spent my entire run with a healer named O.)

Here's a list, in no real order, of the weirder things about this game:

• there are four schools of magic: light, dark, spirit, and elemental, and there's just...no top-tier spirit spell. It doesn't exist. There are two top-tier Dark spells though. I have no idea if one of them was supposed to be Spirit or not, and it doesn't really matter because one of these two, Souldrinker, hitscans an entire screen and heals you for the damage dealt, making you effectively immortal (n.b. that this is only the second most OP spell in the game)
• the single hardest encounter in the entire game was a bookshelf in a library dungeon that has a book you can press to rotate it out of the way to get into a secret room with a required item. This one bookshelf caused me twenty-one softlocks, until I figured out that you can haste the party to walk through the rotating bookshelf faster than it rotates and avoid getting clipped into a wall
• the top-tier light spell, Divine Intervention, is a party-wide full heal, full revive, full mana heal, once per day. The "once per day" restriction does not work, so the priest class has access to an infinite use reset button that trivializes the entire game
• at some point at the beginning of the endgame, the six NPCs that give you all of the game's required quests all die in a battle that they get betrayed in. However, many of them also give you sidequests, and if you haven't finished those sidequests, they don't actually despawn, so they're plot-dead but also still able to be talked to to finish off random sidequests
• the spell that increases your resistance to dark element magic is called Resist Death and not Resist Dark. This isn't really important but it is funny.
• class promotions work like "start as physical or magic, promote to one of two choices each, promote again to one of two top-tier choices. So, most parties will end up with one of two of: physical damage class, tank, magic damage class, healer. The class promotion quest to "basic tank" just...did not promote that character, which would have locked them out of the final class for the entire game. I had to fix this by hex editing my save.

And, of course, last but certainly not least: - the final boss cutscene broke enemy AI, rendering it untargetable and unkillable and thus preventing me from actually watching the final cutscene unless I wanted to load a save from outside the dungeon

I don't even really want to spend any time talking about how the actual plot gets thrown out between the penultimate and final dungeons because God Did It, how excruciating the penultimate puzzle dungeon itself is, how several skills have top tiers that do absolutely nothing because maxing out things like disarm trap and repair item is a waste of levels because no trap or item in the game necessitates that many points, or how there's an entire subplot about a goose-worshipping cult called The Honkies which pained me to even fucking type.

To say that this game feels unfinished would be an insult to works in progress. Please, please save your time. And. I am free of a twenty-year-old hole in my backlog~