Moebius: Won! (with Final Rating)

There are no CRPGs I don't win. There are just CRPGs I haven't won yet.

Moebius: The Orb of Celestial Harmony

ORIGIN Systems (developer and publisher)

Greg Paul Malone II (creator)
Released 1985 for Apple II, 1986 for Commodore 64, 1987 for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS

Date Started: 28 July 2010

Date Ended: 13 July 2013

Total Hours: 18

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 24
Ranking at Time of Posting: 28% (29/105)

Long-time readers know that I didn't give Moebius enough ink when I played it three years ago. To the best of my recollection, I made an initial posting and got extremely turned off by the character icon. About that time, I went on a couple of back-to-back business trips (there's a 12-day absence in my blog), during which I played the game sporadically but never developed an affinity for it and decided not to write any more (or even do a GIMLET) by the time I got back.

But a few weeks ago, when I saw that its sequel, Windwalker, was coming up on my list, I figured I'd better sit down, finish it, and give it a proper rating. It took me about 10 hours (in addition to the 8 I invested in 2010). I still didn't like it much, though I praise the game a bit for offering eastern themes in an era when anything outside of Tolkien-based high fantasy was pretty rare.

The evil "conspiracy of darkness."

Here's the back story of the game, from my original posting:

The game takes place in the formerly-peaceful realm of Khantun. The evil monk Kaimen has stolen the Orb of Celestial Harmony from his master, Moebius the Windwalker, and has set up a fortress on the Plane of Fire from which he is wreaking havoc across the land. Since the Orb "holds in effect the forces of dissolution that are inherent to our land" and allows passage through the elemental realms, Moebius is stuck on his own plane and Khantun is suffering a variety of natural and monster-based disasters. Complicating things is that Khantun has no army ("since the Windwalker showed our people the path of peace, there has been no need") to stand against Kaimen's horde of evil monks. That tasks falls to the player and the aged monks who will aid him.

After you spend a bit of time training in hand-to-hand combat, swordplay, and "divination," you begin the adventure on the plane of earth. The character proceeds through earth, water, air, and fire.

On each plane, you have two shrines to liberate.

Each plane features two shrines (one yin, one yang?) that must be liberated before you can proceed through the gate to the next shrine. This involves defeating the "evil monks" that have taken residence there, freeing the captive priests, and leading the priests to the vacated shrines. There's also a boss "overlord" on each level, though I don't think it's strictly necessary to defeat them (hard not to encounter them, though).

Leading the priest to his shrine.

Exploring the lands is like trying to take an exam while someone keeps running up every 5-20 seconds and blasts an air horn in your ear. The game seems hell-bent on annoying the player as much as possible. It seems that every few seconds, there's an earthquake, a rainstorm, a rockslide, a heat wave, or some other natural disaster that you have to stop and acknowledge. There's a day/night cycle, and at night torches blow out or burn out with such frequency that you might as well not bother to light them. Enemies respawn constantly and attack you from all directions. "Guards" will often paralyze you for a few turns and steal your things (there's no way to avoid this), forcing you to chase them down and get your stuff back. Moebius the Windwalker doesn't stop popping up with a vision to tell you how pleased he is with your progress. Even when nothing is happening, the eyes of the PC shift back and forth and yin-yang symbols rotate constantly in the corner.

A typical Moebius screen. An assassin approaches from my right while a palace guard lurks in the lower left. There are two buildings in the lower right that may contain enemies or NPCs. Meanwhile, there's an earthquake going on.

During all this, you need to keep a careful eye on your food and water. They deplete quickly, and when they hit 0, you start to lose body points. There are fresh water points throughout each map, so keeping a full waterskin involves little more than backtracking. Food is tougher; you essentially have to kill enemies for it and loot it from their bodies. I ended the game starving, but by then I had enough potions to replenish the hit points I was losing from starvation.

Much of the difficulty in the game comes in the form of navigation puzzles. None of the planes are particularly large, but it's hard to get from one place to another. You have to cleave through trees, bust up stone barriers, and navigate currents between islands. The graphics of the game often make it difficult to see where the paths are.

There are only three regular foes in the game: palace guards, assassins, and evil monks. When you fight them,  you're taken to a side-view action screen in which you can perform various types of punches, kicks, and slashes (depending on whether you had your weapon active when you entered combat) as well as blocking with the SPACE bar. A lot of sources suggest this combat mechanism was inspired by Karateka, though I can't imagine that Karateka sucked this bad. There's basically one strategy that works for every foe: time a downward slash or kick as they approach. Repeat over and over to win. Whether other attacks connect seems to me almost entirely random, and I couldn't figure out any strategy that would have been informed by carefully watching enemy movement.

Sparring with a palace guard.

Evil monks will melt your sword if you engage them wielding it, so you have to carefully watch for them and sheath it if they approach. You can only fight them hand-to-hand.

He doesn't have any such restriction, though. He gets a staff!

You have the option to toss a shuriken (one hit = death) at any foe if you can time it right, but you get far less experience (and no items) from the kill, and shurikens run out easy. I used them a lot, in conjunction with the "paralysis" spell, on the final level just to get by all of the evil monks.

With "paralysis" in effect, I prepare to hurl a shuriken across the fire and into the forehead of the evil monk guarding the gate out of this hell hole.

Theoretically, you can also trade fireballs with the evil monks inside the shrines. I could never seem to hit them, though, while they didn't have any problems hitting me, so it was easier for me to just fight them by hand.

If you die, you'll be resurrected as long as you have a "life" left (yes, this is is a CRPG with "lives"). You start with three and get one more every time you liberate a shrine. The game saves automatically when you die, so you can't just reload. If you run out of lives, the punishment is a little bit harsh considering you were trying to save the world.

There are NPCs in the game, and talking with them is important to get various clues to help you get through the levels and figure out the magic system. They also give you various items. You have to be careful not to talk with them while your sword is active, though, as they get scared and run away. There's an option to ask any NPC to follow you, but I can't imagine why you'd do it except for the priests you have to lead to the temples.

I'm not sure watching his eyes is even possible in this game.

Enemy bodies, scattered chests, and NPCs deliver various items. Torches are plentiful but never work. Whetstones are needed to sharpen blades dulled by hacking through trees. There are body and mind elixirs to restore those attributes. There are also a variety of special items: a hammer to break through rocks, a lens to view where various creatures are on the map, an amulet to solve a puzzle on the plane of air, and a pair of gauntlets to pick up the Orb of Celestial Harmony on the plane of fire.

Technically, random skeletons hung up around the world also drop items. I always got the sense I was doing something "bad" in attacking and stealing from them, and I never needed items so bad that it was worth it.

I didn't get a handle on the magic system until late in the game. As you rescue priests and liberate shrines, you're given various "artifacts" that you first have to identify through the "divination" mini-game, in which you have to use the arrow keys to keep a constantly-agitating yin-yang symbol inside a box.

Once you identify the artifact, to "invoke" it, you have to have the right reagents. You generally get them from various creatures in the game, like pandas, tigers, and water beetles. However, these are only found on specific maps, so if you make it to the plane of water without collecting any panda fur, for instance, you won't ever be able to cast the "spirit" spell. Although there were six artifact-based spells offered in the game--"ventriloquism," "paralysis," "teleport," "invisibility," "were-spell," and "spirit"--I only ever used them a handful of times, and generally just to solve puzzles.

Invoking a magic charm.

There's another dimension of magic. If you "fast" long enough, you get the ability to pray for a special effect, like healing or curing poison. I never used this at all and didn't figure it out until I read a walkthrough at the end of the game. Apparently, I needed to talk to the priests after I delivered them to their shrines to get the words necessary for each prayer. It didn't occur to me to converse with them after I'd delivered them to the shrines.

The planes of earth and water were pretty straightforward. It was just navigating, fighting, and rescuing priests. The plane of air was a lot harder, and I spent half the game or more in this one area, trying to solve the puzzles. The gate out of the plane was across a void, and I needed to polymorph myself into a condor to fly there. This involved first getting the artifact for the "were-spell" from a demon minstrel. It took me a long time, and several helpful NPCs to figure out how. Basically, I had to wait until he stopped trying to attack me and instead played a song. Then I had to cast "paralysis" to freeze him in minstrel (non-demon) form, then wear a special amulet while approach him, and finally un-freeze him.

Gee, thanks.

Even after getting the artifact, I had to spend a while tracking down where the condor (who buzzed around my head and attacked me during the day) bedded down at night so I could get its feathers for the spell.

Polymorphed into a bird, I fly to the exit.

The plane of fire was difficult for a different reason: the two captive priests were on an island, I had to lead them across the water to the building with their shrines. But as you swim through water, you slowly sink, and I kept losing them under the waves. It took 10 or 12 trips before I could successfully lead them across.

Trying to lead a priest across a lake before we both sink.

The end game came when I liberated the last shrines and defeated the final "overlord" on the plane of fire. Then, wearing the golden gauntlets, I lifted the Orb of Celestial Harmony from its pedestal and brought it through the gate to the astral plane to Moebius, who said:

Behold the return of the Orb of Hamony! The heavens and earth will sing the praises of your victory! You have restored peace and harmony! You have become a Star in the Firmament! In you I am well pleased! Write to me about your journeys...and I will send you my congratulations! Your fame shall be known by all!

The game otherwise doesn't give any indication who, specifically, to write to get those congratulations.

The Orb of Harmony at last.

Let's do a quick GIMLET:

• 3 points for the game world. The game makes it seem like it's going to be interesting and original, what with the möbius strips and taijitus, but these are just window dressing. The plot itself is a bunch of silliness with no twists, lore, or intrigue. It's barely referenced during the game.

• 4 points for character creation and development. There isn't much you can do during creation. Development is relatively swift and rewarding--you definitely get more powerful as your level goes up. Moreover, Moebius pops up and gives you a little haiku every time you reach a new level.

Now I get to fight the forces of Voldemort.

• 3 points for NPC interaction. Disappointing for an Origin game. You can basically just say "help" to the NPCs, who may give you an item and a one-line bit of lore.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. This game may have the lowest number of different enemy types of any CRPG I've played. They don't really behave much differently. The "boss" battles were often far easier than random battles against mooks. There are no real puzzles or role-playing encounters in the game. You do get lots of respawning and grinding opportunities.

Fighting the final overlord against a backdrop of fire.

• 2 points for magic and combat. If you're going to have an action-oriented combat system, player dexterity ought to count for something, but I really couldn't see any clear tactics in this game. Combat swiftly becomes rote and tedious. The magic system is original but ultimately underwhelming and faulty.

• 2 points for equipment. There isn't much of it, and most of it is for puzzle-solving. You don't get much in the way of equipment upgrades, save replacing your sword with the overlord's and getting the priests to bless your sword when you rescue them. At no point, can you see what the effects of these changes are except in combat itself.

The "population lens" was a useful item that showed me where other beings were, relative to me.

• 0 points for the non-existent economy.

• 2 points for quests. There's one main quest, no branches, no options, no side quests, no role-playing.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and inputs. I thought the graphics were silly and jarring, and the sound was invasive and annoying. The interface worked well enough, though I think the combat system could have been mapped to better keys.

• 3 points for gameplay. Linear and not replayable, it only gets points for moderate difficulty and a quick pace.

So for those who read my blog and always wondered if Moebius was any good, the answer is basically "no." The final rating of 24 puts it in the lower tier of 1980s games. It's yet another "between-Ultimas" Origin misfire. But I'm glad I was finally able to give it a rating.

This was creator Greg Paul Malone's first credited game. He worked on a number of other ORIGIN titles during the late 1980s and early 1990s (Omega, Knights of Legend, Ultima VI) and somehow appears at New World for Might & Magic III in 1991. In the late 1990s, he produced the Duke Nukem 3D series for 3D Realms Entertainment. Today, he works as a technology director at a school in New Mexico.

Windwalker, the sequel to this game, is coming up in a few, and judging by the screenshots, they kept the action-oriented combat and disembodied heads. I hope they improved other aspects of gameplay.

I guess it's time to stop procrastinating on Sword of Aragon now.

Game 20: Moebius: The Orb of Celestial Harmony

What a difference a couple of years makes! I was amazed when I started up Moebius: The Orb of Celestial Harmony and saw introductory screens like this:

He's not Chinese! Neither, incidentally, is the Moebius strip, which has no particular Asian origins. It notably appears in Ultima IV as the ultimate answer to the summation of truth, love, and courage: infinity.

I have no idea what's going on down below, but it's damned impressive.

Granted, the DOS version of this game is from 1987, two years after the original Apple II version, but it's still astonishing that photorealistic effects and animation have advanced so much in such a short time. I'm guessing the introduction of the VGA graphics card standard in 1987 probably had something to do with it.

Even though I haven't caught up with where I was at the end of Might & Magic, I've decided to stop "backtracking" at this point because I want to give Moebius proper attention. From what I can see so far, it's an authentic CRPG, and it's exclusion from the Wikipedia list is thus somewhat mystifying. (So is the fact that I'd never heard of it until a couple of weeks ago.) This means back to my original rules.

Moebius is notable in a lot of other ways. It is the first CRPG (that I know of) based on eastern philosophy and themes. Perhaps an exception is Ultima IV with its inclusion of avatarhood, but this is really just the use of a term. Moebius is set in a quasi-Asian fantasy kingdom with frequent use of Asian (or, at least, pseudo-Asian) symbology, names, weapons, and combat styles. Confucius quotes appear throughout the manual. There aren't many other games that do this. I think of Jade Empire and...any others? (Other than JRPGs, of course.)

The "yin-yang" symbol appears frequently in the Moebius materials. Fun fact: what I've always called the "yin-yang symbol" is properly called a taijitu. Variations appear in Celtic and Roman art, and it was introduced in Taoism in the 16th or 17th centuries C.E., representing the interplay of opposing forces. The light and dark halves are commonly and erroneously thought to represent good and evil, but "evil" is rather the consequences of imbalance in opposing forces. History/theology lesson over.

The game takes place in the formerly-peaceful realm of Khantun. The evil monk Kaimen has stolen the Orb of Celestial Harmony from his master, Moebius the Windwalker, and has set up a fortress on the Plane of Fire from which he is wreaking havoc across the land. Since the Orb "holds in effect the forces of dissolution that are inherent to our land" and allows passage through the elemental realms, Moebius is stuck on his own plane and Khantun is suffering a variety of natural and monster-based disasters. Complicating things is that Khantun has no army ("since the Windwalker showed our people the path of peace, there has been no need") to stand against Kaimen's horde of evil monks. That tasks falls to the player and the aged monks who will aid him.

Moebius was designed by a game developer named Greg Malone and released by Origin Systems. There are echoes of Ultima IV in the game, with its emphasis on virtue in the form of "karma," but you can also sense Richard Garriott's lack of direct involvement with this one, especially in the combat. Incidentally, ever since I reviewed all those shareware games that listed the names of the developers, I've become more interested in the "authorship" of particular games. This led me to Malone's current web site; it looks like he's putting his talents to good use today.

The initial stages of Moebius deliver two fairly original features. First, before you head off on your adventures, you go through three training sessions: sword combat, hand-to-hand combat, and meditation (which involves keeping a floating orb within a defined box through the use of the arrow keys). This is an early, if not the first, example of a feature I've come to like in later games: tutorials. I prefer to learn the interface a little before I head out into the game world. In this case, I learned a valuable lesson about your fatigue level: striking when it's low barely causes any damage.

Fighting mano-a-mano with a palace guard. Incidentally, "mano a mano" means "hand-to-hand" in Spanish, not "man-to-man" as some people think. That would be "hombre-a-hombre." Yes, I'm full of them today.

The second feature is action-based combat. You fight in real time by blocking your enemy's attacks and making attacks of your own. There are a variety of high, middle, and low kicks and punches (or sword thrusts) to choose from, and figuring out the best one to use in any given situation means carefully watching what your opponent is doing. Matt Barton calls the game "Ultima Meets Karateka," which I guess was a popular karate game of the time.

The assassin staggers from my sword blow. The word "assassin" comes from the Arabic "hashshashin," which in turn derives from the common belief that assassins were under the influence of hashish during their killings. This belief has led directly to current U.S. drug policy. Okay, I made that part up. I think.

In the final part of training, you have to learn to keep an agitated, floating taijitu within a box by using the arrow keys. It took me a while but I found it much easier once I reduced the CPU cycles in DOSBox.

Having finished training, I began the Moebius adventure by leaving the temple and heading out into the troubled land of Khantun and what in the name of Confucius is that disembodied head floating around?

It is, regrettably, me--and the subject of my next posting.

Edit on 07/15/2013: I didn't like this game so much that I stopped blogging about it after this posting, but because I didn't even play it long enough to assign a rating, I always felt bad about it. I finally went back and finished the game three years later. Here's the second and final posting.