Games - The Legend of Kyrandia

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	Games - The Legend of Kyrandia

The Legend of Kyrandia is a fantasy point and click adventure game trilogy with comedy elements, created by Westwood Studios, and released for DOS, Amiga, FM Towns and Apple Macintosh.

The games of the trilogy are named as follows:

Fables and Fiends: The Legend of Kyrandia, Book One (released on floppy disk and CD-ROM) - Came on nine disks for the Amiga version
Fables and Fiends; The Legend of Kyrandia, Book Two: The Hand of Fate (released on floppy disk and CD-ROM)
The Legend of Kyrandia, Book 3: Malcolm's Revenge (released on CD-ROM only)

Each installment of the series uses the perspective of a different character. In the first game, the player controls a young hero named Brandon. In the second, the player controls a royal female mystic named Zanthia. In the third and final game, the player controls Malcolm, the evil court jester who was previously the main antagonist.

Plot

Book One: The Legend of Kyrandia

In the fantasy kingdom of Kyrandia, King William and his wife have been murdered by the mad and evil Malcolm, the court jester who possesses vast magical powers. Brandon, the prince, has been hidden in the forest by Kallak, a counselor of the King, who raises him as his grandson. Malcolm has fun destroying the forest of the country, and meets Kallak, turning him into stone. Brandon, oblivious of his past, soon discovers the truth about his origins. He finds out that Malcolm has stolen the Kyragem, a mystic stone that contains the kingdom's energy. Brandon has to recover the Kyragem and defeat Malcolm.

Book Two: The Hand of Fate

Years later, Zanthia, a young female alchemist and wizard, discovers that the kingdom of Kyrandia is in great danger, disappearing piece by piece. The Mystics hold a meeting, and The Hand (a giant glove serving as Marko's assistant) formulates a plan, which requires a magic anchor stone from the center of the world. He chooses Zanthia to be the one who shall recover the stone.

Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge

After Malcolm's defeat against Brandon in the first game, Malcolm had been turned into a statue, but after having been struck by lightning, he was liberated from the spell. Malcolm then decides to take his revenge upon Brandon and Kallak, helped by his evil conscience, Gunther. Even though he lost his powerful magic, Malcolm decides to use his malicious wits to go through his means... and eventually prove his innocence from the murder of Brandon's parents.

Gameplay

The Legend of Kyrandia became known for its extremely simple interface, a feature present in all three games in the series. Though vaguely reminiscent of Sierra's point-and-click adventure games of the period, the primary detail that distunguished Westwood's trilogy from Sierra's games was the use of a single "use" action, as opposed to Sierra's multi-action interface. Opinions vary on whether this added to the games' atmosphere or dealt them damage.

All three games are characterized by a quite innovative inventory; while most Sierra games had an icon which was used to access a separate inventory window, that in Fables and Fiends and Hand of Fate could be seen at all times at the bottom of the screen. In Malcolm's Revenge, however, the player has to move the cursor to the bottom of the screen in order to access the inventory and options menu.

The puzzles in the series are largely based on experimenting with inventory items, combining them or depositing them in the correct place. As the series progressed, however, so did its puzzles, which steadily increased in difficulty. In fact, the final part of the series was occasionally criticized for the complicated and confusing maze found at one point in the game; though a maze was indeed present already in Book One, many players agreed that the one in Malcolm's Revenge lacked logic.

Engine recreation

Current ScummVM daily builds support Kyrandia 1 to a great degree.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for The Legend of Kyrandia ]

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