Franchise: Myth
Game: III: The Wolf Age
Most tend not to like it for a variety of reasons: The Trow Iron Warriors were bullshit powerful to fight against, the narrator was a scholar and not a soldier like in the previous games, Wolf Age wasn't made by Bungie, the game lacked polish, not enough modding support, the atmosphere was too heroic and not dire enough, and the game was a prequal i.e. "What's the point in playing a game if I already know what happens.
Sure the 2-story high monsters with 1-foot thick iron plating and a
mighty war hammer which could wipe out
all who dare stand within a 120 degree arc infront of them, were a bit over powered, but at least they were slow... like slow enough for a warrior to get behind him to get a couple of whacks and run away before the giant can turn around to return the favour. You weren't supposed to merely plink them from afar with arrows, lead them into an ambush where you have prepared 16 satchel charges and a live grenade; because now you have no explosives left, a half dead Trow Iron Warrior, and at the very minimum 2 extra trow left unmolested on the map.
Fighting Iron Trow should be like fighting The Limper or The Dominator: it takes more than just a clever ambush and a rain of arrows to kill them. They need to be bound, gagged and jumped on by an entire company. And then you have to repeat it 3 more times after they break the chains, forcing you to flee in order to both escape their attacks and recover your stamina as a player. For those uninitiated, fighting Trow is like fighting Chuck Norris. Fighting Iron Trow is like fighting Chuck Norris with a hammer. When Chuck Norris has a hammer a round-house kick is the least of your worries.
Out of all the levels you fight Trow, they each give you a different way to kill them. The first level has you fleeing with your remnant of an army in a titanic route, while trying create as many landslides as possible to prevent the Trow from following you by blocking the passes in the mountains behind you with rubble. Your first lesson in Trow fighting is simple: Don't fight the trow. Run away from the trow... as fast as you can.
The second level has you defending the mighty city walls of Llancarfen with your archers, Heron Guard, warlocks, dorfen grenadiers, and footmen against multiple waves of Trow, zombies, and ogres. You must here use the high ground to your advantage, bombarding them with for quite a while with archers and dwarfs, and your warlocks' giant fire balls, as the Trow must waltze through the main gates while under intensive and prolonged fire from multiple angles. Another thing you can do to Trow is stun them with your Heron Guard's mandrake roots (which also heal a unit up till a certain percentage. For trow, 50%).
The fourth and fith battles involve charming the Trow's ogre allies with Myrdred the Avatara, then using his attack to stunlock the Trow while your ogres swarm the giant, and if you run out of mana toss a mandrake root from a heron guard on the trow to further stun the Iron Norris. This is where the dogpiles come in.
There is more about Trow I could be raving on, but you get the picture. My only gripe with trow fighting comes from that Warlocks can no longer confuse their enemies, causing them to temporarily wander aimlessly, uncontrolled by player or computer, unable to attack.
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As for the Narrator: Each Myth game uses a framing device, and in the first two they were war journals. So the voice of the veteran has been done, and it is not necessarily a bad thing to have a new character with a new profession. It also serves to offer new perspective of the franchise with the narrator's voice being that of a monk. Plus this is the Wolf Age, a prequal, so it would be a bit of a stretch to believe that such a journal would survive a thousand years. After all, there wouldn't be much of a framing device if the document didn't survive.
On a tangent, since the narrator of the second game did start pondering about joining the Heron Guard, and the Heron Guard may perform the tasks of monks, it is a fun thought that the narrators of the second and third game are one and the same!
The "Not by Bungie" thing, just hurts my head a bit. If a product is in a franchise is published, and the publishee holds the rights to do the publishing, the events in said product are canon.
On the issue of pollish though. When I consider the game's short production cycle, rushed release, and the fact that it was MumboJumbo's first major game... I remember Croaker's words to Mogaba in Glen Cook's
Dreams of Steel, "You've done wonders with nothing". And I feel like Myth III was still a great game despite its bugs.
Back to Myth III's plot:
Ofcoarse Myth III isn't dark!(, well, it is a little dark at the start,) Myth III is about Connacht "The Wolf" levelling the playing field by turning back the darkness which has plagued humanity for the past thousand years; and the dawn of a new age of enlightenment: the Wolf Age. To those saying the third Myth isn't dark enough are missing the point, besides which those people already know that the world of Myth will get a lot darker in a thousand years. As the Deceiver, Narayan Singh (not to be confused with The Deceiver) would say, "Darkness always comes"
As for the lack of surprises inherent in a prequel. Firstly I would like to say that it is not about the journey. Finally, there comes my point from the following quote.
Wolf Age said:
Through all the confrontation and arguments, Connacht had learned great respect for the emperor. Even with the knowledge gained from Mazzarin's Codex, he muttered to himself, "This was not written"
Connacht's very words, after a moral shattering (to him and his army) event happened, "This was not written", ring contrary to those that say a prequal is incapable of handing out surprises.