It might take a while for me to explain why I hate this place so much. Just the thought of it makes me foam at the mouth, so I'll have to take it slow.
To continue on his quest, Cho must pass through Gilliards Rhine and leave by the exit on the East side of the map. That's all that you need to do.
BUT.
Nothing is ever as simple as that. The level starts off simple, with a small explorable strip of land at the North edge accessible at first...
Bloody stupid ghosts. Why do you have to be so hard to hit? Why does everything have to be so small?
You've got infinite Continues, and all that you lose for dying is all your accumulated, unused EXP. You keep your level, everything you're carrying, as well as your conversation progress. I might have levelled up in the Royal Maze from killing blobs, but I wasn't looking. If I did level up, there was no great ceremony when it happened.
Before I can explore the village proper, I first must pass a green troll that's blocking the bridge. He refuses to listen to reason, and I get a warning buzz when I try to attack with my sword. I have to walk all the way back several screens to an inventor who says that the troll is a bit of a tough geezer, and the only way I'll be able to defeat him is to collect ten gems and buy the inventor's special dagger.
Thankfully I'd already gotten most of the gems I need during my first ill-fated wandering.
I hold Fire to charge up a dagger. I wait for the guy to turn around. I release Fire. It's a real thrill-o-rama.
It is nice having a new weapon, but it could at least make a cool (but not too annoying) sound while it's charging? And go 'plink!' when it hits an enemy? There's nothing.
I don't even get special music for the fight.
The village exit is behind both a locked door and a series of mysterious golden posts. To open it up, you need to be a super heroic adventurer and explore the village, befriend its denizens, and overcome great trials.
No, wait, the gameplay in Gilliards is a series of Dizzy-esque item-trades spread out over a gigantic map.
Gilliards Rhine is ten game screens across by twelve game screens down. To be exact, it's 3200x2560 pixels. No, there's no ingame map.
I'm standing by the third three down on the right hand side, just above the fenced-off cornfields.
For comparison, the entirety of Koholint Island from Link's Awakening on the Game Boy is 2560x2048 pixels.
It's no exaggeration to suggest that you could fit all of Link's Awakening - every screen, every building and every dungeon - into the outside map of Gilliards Rhine.
But big doesn't mean bad by default. Heck no. Some big games are very good. But not many. And especially not this one.
I didn't mention the music yet, did I?
The music for Gilliards Rhine is a very special piece of music. It's a relentlessly peppy shuffle with a twee panpipe melody and a bouncing bassline that never bloody ends. Perhaps you'd like to enjoy listening to it as I play through the town?
Here's Cho having a perfectly normal conversation with an old woman. This is what happens when your kids get their social skills from playing games like Noctropolis.
I'm lucky I followed this conversation to the end, because otherwise I'd never be let into her house to take her tinderbox. Without it, you'll never be able to use your bombs and have no idea why!
Let's try out the bombs!
Bombs are almost entirely useless in combat. Despite moving rather slowly, the bad guys always seem to be just out of range of the blast. When a bomb does connect, it does half the damage of Cho's sword. Don't worry about wasting the bombs though: the game loves to make defeated enemies drop more and more bombs for you, never healing, and never money.
Inside the chest is a fully-charged, battery powered, heavy-duty hand drill!
The drill seems to be of sturdy construction. It should be able to get through pretty much anything. The power source is unidentifiable, it must be some kind of high technology.
Wow, what an interesting item! I'm sure there's going to be some clever game reason why this anachronistic technology is locked up here in Gilliards Rhine. With this I'm sure I can open all kinds of new areas.
It also doesn't count as an improvised weapon, in case you were hoping to see innocent little lampshade-man Cho engage in some horrific visceral violence.
At least the drill sound effect is very realistic. Full marks for that.
There's nothing in the Church of use. It's very weird that I can't ask the priest to either heal me or save my game (and bloody hell I'm glad this reminded me, I'm not doing that last hour again).
The only way I've been able to heal so far is by levelling up. Every time I kill an enemy, the EXP bar advances by a pixel. When it reaches the white line, my VIT refills and the white lines move a little to the right. It's nice. Lets you keep track of how long you've been stuck in this damned place.
These two loutish lumberjacks want a smoker's pipe. To get the pipe, you've got to... *deep breath* wander about without any guidance until you find a red potion in a chest. When equipped in your OBJECT slot, it lets you push one moveable unmarked block in the upper right of the map, which takes you to a teleporter where you can find an orange potion, which you need to give a person on the other side of the map to be rewarded with an item which you give to a shopkeeper in return for the pipe, which you give to this lumberjack in exchange for... Somefing. He refuses to give me anything while his boss is here, so I've got to find something else to occupy my time until his boss is gone.
The Speris Legacy wants to entertain the player with a
The Speris Legacy does not do this. Like I said, it's got Dizzy gameplay, but it's a feeble, amateurish version of it. Completed item trades don't lead to further clues in dialogue, but instead often inexplicably and silently progress events involving unrelated characters on the other side of the map. There's no clue whatsoever that these new events are available, so you have to continually make laps of the town, round and round, talking to every fool again and again until something new happens.
There are no pointless NPCs in Gilliards Rhine: every character has something that you need to do for them, but the game makes accomplishing these often very simple tasks excruciating. On the other hand, there's plenty of pointless locations. There's strange stone faces that look like they're part of a puzzle. They're not. There's fenced off areas full of flowers that require specific tools to enter that look like they might be a useful, reliable source of money. They're not. And if you're nostalgic for the Royal Maze already, there's a miniature hedge maze included in the lower corner of Gilliards Rhine as well, except with no objective, no treasure and no point to being there.
I might, if I'm being exceedingly generous, chalk it up to the writer trying to make the village seem alive and unpredictable.
The entrance to the shop is purposefully obscured, as a kind of joke. At a certain point in the story, Cho will become able to ask directions to the shop, and everybody in Gilliards will mock him for not being able to figure out how to get inside: you have to enter from the North through a hidden door like the Palace in Sharma. I laughed 'til I cried.
I've already mentioned that gems are ridiculously hard to come by, but now I need to spend another 55 gems on a pair of Hyper-Speed Boots, a set of Green Rubber Gloves, and a Sturdy Mallet.
Why do I need any of these things? No bloody clue, it's Speris Legacy. Am I certain that I do need all of these things? Abso-bloody-lutely, it's Speris Legacy.
For example, you might think that the Hyper-Speed Boots are there to help cut down on the travel time while you're running errands in Gilliards. And that's true. If you don't mind the three-second charge up time, and the way you can only run in straight lines, you can cover ground faster some of the time.
What you may not know, is that (click to reveal) you have to charge up a run and bash into the inventor after he refuses to give you his security pass to make him drop it. Like hell anybody playing this back in 1995 figured that out properly. Using the boots like this on any other object, character or enemy has no effect.
And, like conversation options, new items will magically appear in the shop from time to time, just to ruin your day. You think you're finally done with grinding and bought everything you need? Think again. At least the game prevents you from accidentally buying key items twice.
In most RPGs, shops have expensive key items and armour you save up for and look forward to, and single-use items to help you out which are cheaper. Speris inexplicably flips this around by making the key items (relatively) cheap and the consumables near impossible to buy. The red stars are small, somewhat-small, and kinda-small instant healing, and the likelihood I'll ever have enough money to waste on even the smallest one is zero. This is the only place you can get healed, and the most expensive life item at 35 gems heals you a mere pixel's worth of VIT.
Also, you are told nice and straightforwardly that you need to trade a specific item with the shopkeeper to receive the smoker's pipe the lumberjack wants. What isn't clear is that you have to equip the item in your OBJECT slot and use it on the shopkeeper to offer it - it feels as if it should appear as a dialogue choice as well.
Hello, Minsk 'da Cat!
He only appears after you do a certain number of things, but at least you're given a hint to where he can be found. He's a loveable, friendly fellow who is eager to help me once I've done one small thing for him. Minsk sends me on a mission on behalf of all catkind to... get him some cream because the shopkeeper doesn't like him.
Meow, you're so kind, you'll be doing the cat world a great favour, puuurrr!
Minsk 'da Cat also appears in Binary Emotions' second game: Minskies Furballs, for Amiga and MS-DOS.
This isn't something that the game has been leading up to in any fashion, by the way. I walked into a room, talked to someone who I'd already talked to, went outside, and a couple of the NPCs had suddenly died, with everyone acting as if there was some unfortunate disease that had been afflicting them for months.
Let's have a look at it then.
As soon as you touch the seed pod you feel a tingling sensation shoot down your arm. Soon after you start to feel dizzy and your whole body feels weak and convulses with pain.
Mhm. Alright. Shouldn't have touched that. Sorry Cho, you didn't deserve that.
Will Cho ever make it out of Gilliards Rhine alive? Find out in Part 3!
“Minsk 'da Cat” will also be appearing in my nightmares!
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