So, I have finished the Secret of the Silver Blades:
If I had to enumerate things I deemed problems in Curse of the Azure Bonds, it would look like this:
I) Inability to store money or do anything productive with it - addressed in Silver Blades by adding a well requiring 100 gems for a tip, and adding a bank with a convenient option to pool all my money there or convert it to gems. Now, I didn't need to avoid gathering currency. Nonetheless, past ~midgame money became pretty much obsolete - just like in Pool of Radiance.
II) I was unable to leave four of five major areas normally for more than half of their span; in other words, despite having the ability to pick a mission to solve now, the game was very linear - unless I already knew what awaited me where. In contrast, Silver Blades allowed me to explore the city as I saw fit; I was able to backtrack whenever I felt like backtracking, and the exploration was enriched by teleports strewn across the world. Almost every part of the world was different structurally and offered distinct challenges; mines had their long corridors, the well was a hub for teleports, and the dungeon (at the bottom of the mine) had its riddles or rough encounters. The game became lost in linearity only about halfway through.
III) The unrewarding, sometimes outright punishing exploration characterized by repeatable, meaningless encounters. Here, random encounter density was much lower; even if there were locations not meant to be explored (like mines), information on how to resolve the affair quickly was obtainable.
In other words, they did attempt to improve from the previous entry, and they succeeded - to some extent.
And, specifically about this game:
1) The exploration was uneven. On the one hand, each closed place except the Well - giants' village, the castle, the dungeon, and Black Circle HQ - looked exactly as I expected; there were journal parts scattered among those levels, encounters were fixed, and many pieces of text added a pinch of uniqueness to each of those locations along with distinct enemies. On the other hand, there were huge areas amalgamating those places - and, oh well, they had their fair share of problems:
a) The New Verdigris outskirts were terrible. There were 6 points of interest on a map with 1368 usable fields; it was filled with unskippable, banal encounters and had as uninspired a design as a dungeon can have. Just look at
:
Four 8x7 segments of the map are copy-pasted.
b) The encounter density in the mine was reasonable, and the exploration was mostly avoidable - if you used the well. Still, 10 segments of barely anything framed in ten 100x100 maps?
c) Glacier, part I (before the village) wasn't that bad thanks to the implementation: when a random encounter occurred, flying in any direction other than the one from where the adversaries came made them trail me; and running towards them allowed me to flee again.
d) Glacier, part II (after the village) wasn't just abysmal, it reused the worst patterns from Azure Bonds - pointless corridor filled with unnecessary enemies dropping worthless loot. And it was the only hard part of the game, for all the wrong reasons (it's not hard to make a segment hard if it has indefinite length, no place to rest, and random encounters like {6 mages + 12 legionnaires and other meleefellas}).
Also, the game had some basic riddles, but alas, they were mostly just linguistic garbage, requiring players to guess a word or an idiom outside of the game's context. I don't like those enigmas: they require knowledge of the language rather than the game world, they are practically impossible to brute-force with the game's mechanics, and so they could be considered a separate mini-game. Thankfully, it was possible to circumvent them through combat.
2) Combat also wasn't perfect:
a) The implementation of 'difficulty' leaves a lot to be desired; I noticed the ability to change the difficulty midway through the game, switched to 'Champion', and suddenly half of the random encounters in the mines consisted (solely) of petrification-enjoyers trying to defeat my team of mirror-enjoyers. I didn't have any trouble except for the second part of the glacier.
b) The default behavior of AI is still problematic. Having a companion and casting a 'Stinking Cloud' is asking for trouble. Thankfully, none of the companions were spellcasters - in the last entry, I had to strip the mage from Hap of all area-of-effect spells. SSI's unwillingness to move forward with the engine gets on my nerves.
c) I can't complain about enemy variety, but tactics necessary to beat enemies didn't change a lot from Azure Bonds (this might be more related to the system). My technique consisted mostly of abusing foes with 'Hold Monsters' and 'Fireball' spells.
3) The story was barely relevant, but at least there was something more to it than just going around and whacking Bonds owners. The journal, beautiful as always, didn't really bring anything to the table gameplay-wise. Was there any choice with implications in this game? There was a bit of reactivity here and there - like in the Giants' Village, where defeating giants in the tower ceased the onslaught of raining boulders when walking through a passage - but they were rare and uninteresting.
4) As for the other things, the game introduced a permanent companion, which acts like a permanent companion should - warrior without unnecessary speeches, giving only necessary intel about the world, who dramatically influences the battle without the player's control.
I don't get some of the critique this game gets; one can say it overstays its welcome, but the same can be said about this entire series with its lackadaisical attempts at improving the engine. It's roughly what I would expect from a dungeon crawler set in this system. I had more fun here than with the previous entry.
