This is one of those games that I played for hours on end, for months at a time (15 years ago). It's got a D&D vibe, but more karate than dragons. Set in an ambiguous Asian land, you roam the countryside trying to rescue the good monks and protect innocent people from palace guards, assassins, evil monks, and overlords. While journeying through various levels, you have to oust the evil monks from temples, find good monks, and reinstall them in the temples.
If your karma is high (from protecting villagers and monks), the villagers will help you by giving you food.
This is one of those games that I played for hours on end, for months at a time (15 years ago). It's got a D&D vibe, but more karate than dragons. Set in an ambiguous Asian land, you roam the countryside trying to rescue the good monks and protect innocent people from palace guards, assassins, evil monks, and overlords. While journeying through various levels, you have to oust the evil monks from temples, find good monks, and reinstall them in the temples.
If your karma is high (from protecting villagers and monks), the villagers will help you by giving you food. If your karma falls too low (from letting villagers die, striking a corpse for emergency food if you're starving, or from a hex
set on you by an evil monk), the villagers will not help you and may call the palace guards on you.
The palace guards are the lowest ranking bad guys and easiest to defeat. You can kill them with throwing stars (if you have them in your inventory) or kill them in one-on-one combat. All palace guards carry swords, and some carry food or whetstones that you can use to keep your sword sharp. As a general note, I found it easiest to fight bar-handed, as you move faster and more gracefully than when you carry a sword. Additionally, if you try to fight an overlord with your sword, the sword will disintegrate and you will have to get a new one from fighting a palace guard.
Next in the bad guys line-up is the assassin (ninja). You see one in the picture above. They can throw stars at you, so it is good to either keep out of a direct line from them (you move in the eight cardinal directions) or get to them before they can hit you with a star. The assassins fight without swords, so they move faster than palace guards. A few well-timed strikes will dispose of them.
Evil monks are next. They can hex you, hurting your karma, hit points, or both. They move a little faster than the assassins and do more damage, if they hit you. Practice on the assassins and you can defeat the monks without much difficulty. Finally, you get to the overlord. If you don't have many hit points, they can kill you with one sword strike. However, their movements are identical to palace guards (though slightly faster), so they are easy to defeat. (Big hint: a low leg strike when a swordsman crosses his legs will defeat the swordsman before he can hit you.)
Overall, it's a fun and interesting game. It's well worth a couple KB of hard drive space.
