Last time, I gave my thoughts on the new gameplay elements of Heroes 4. Now that you’re familiar with the factions, let’s discuss the campaign stories.
The Haven one is “The True Blade”. It’s a shameless rehash of the plot of Heroes 2, though a remarkably well-written one. Catherine died in the cataclysm, ending the Gryphonheart line and throwing the remnants of Erathia into chaos, but a guy called Lysander stood up and managed to rally the people behind him, forming them into an ordered country once more. Now, however, a guy has suddenly shown up claiming to be the illegitimate child of the old King Gryphonheart and therefore the true heir to the throne. Lysander Just Knows this guy is totally an evil usurper, and so sets out on a quest to try and invalidate him.

…It may be well-written, but it’s not well-plotted. The plot is cringe-worthy, honestly – the Gryphonheart guy really is a fake, he’s not a sympathetic antagonist in the slightest, and to top it all off, at the very end of the story, out of absolutely nowhere, it turns out that Lysander was the true heir all along!!! It’s more of the painfully cliché nobility worship we’ve seen the entire series.

But the writing really salvages it. The campaign honestly plays more like an RPG than a strategy game – you actually don’t recruit or fight lots of generic troops. The campaign throws special super-powered storyline heroes at you like they’re going out of style, and by the end you can form nearly a full army from them. (There’s even an epic final boss battle, where Lysander fights the bad guy and his army alone which, on a pure cathartic level, is intensely satisfying but it’s also a perfect example of my issue with heroes being combat units.) This has the result of making the campaign a heavily character-focused story. Interestingly, Lysander is not the viewpoint protagonist – instead, the story is told from the perspective of his squire, who we never actually control in gameplay. I think the writers missed a lot of potential they could have milked from this, though – they could have used this to make a connection to all the nameless troops who are forced to die on your orders by making one of them a protagonist. There’s some of that, with the protagonist questioning his purpose and whether he truly has any life goals beyond aiding Lysander, but I think they could have capitalized on it more.

Also, remember how I kept snarkily poking fun at how Roland claimed to be the “good” absolute dictator of the country in Heroes 2? This story does a much, much better job of showing instead of telling. Lysander is clearly shown to be a genuinely nice guy, and he does make a lot of personal sacrifices for the greater good during the story. He also isn’t trying to overthrow the usurper guy for personal power – he actually refused to be crowned king when he first cobbled the new nation together, and he actually seems legitimately sad and worried when he learns his Gryphonheart blood means he has to take the throne. I get the impression that he realizes how terrible of a system monarchy is…although that’s all swept away in the ending because it’s not like we can ACTUALLY criticize monarchy, that’s crazy talk!

This really could have been a great story if they had just altered some of the plot events. Make it so Gryphonheart guy really does have legitimacy – Lysander is shattered when he learns this, because he’s stuck in a stupid feudalistic mindset and can’t imagine the possibility of just pointing to the guy’s incompetence. Cue his squire or some of the other characters giving him a pep talk, then they realize that monarchy actually kind of sucks and Lysander has a better claim to leadership based on merit alone. Really, who would you follow in that situation – the guy who forged order out of chaos, or the incompetent power-crazed princeling? (Come to think of it, this really would have been fitting for the “order” campaign, wouldn’t it?)

The Might campaign is “Glory of Days Past”, and it’s a continuation of Tarnum’s story from Heroes Chronicles. Presumably it’s written by the same person because the writing continues to be really good. The premise is that the barbarian clans have become hopelessly fragmented – the cataclysm decimated them more than the other factions, because some of them were stupid and didn’t go through the portals because they have an insane phobia of magic. (They’re all dead now, though, so as per usual natural selection sorts these things out!) Even with their population devastated, they still fight pointless wars with one another, making things even worse. The protagonist is Tarnum’s foster son Waerjak, who vows to unite the tribes under a banner of honor and community – working together for the greater good instead of endless fighting for the sake of fighting.

It’s a good message. Even though we don’t really see the direct effects, the narration mentions that Waerjak’s united tribes quickly become extremely prosperous and productive, to the point that other warlords try to pillage them. It makes a distinction between the stereotypical barbarian archetype that kills everything out of bloodlust and the honorable warrior that fights to protect the weak. The writing also gets a gold star from me for being a strategy game plot and not an RPG like everything else. The focus is not solely on Waerjak – the entire point of the story is about helping the people and the faceless soldiers you have in your army. Waerjak is truly fighting for a good cause rather than throwing bodies into a meat grinder for personal glory – indeed, the two mindets are starkly contrasted with the bloodthirsty villains. I really believe that is the only kind of story you can tell in the medium of a war simulation game – at least the only one you can portray as truly moral.

There’s even a great plot point where Tarnum is captured by one warlord while another is working hundreds of slaves to death. Waerjak faces the dilemma of rescuing Tarnum at the cost of forsaking his people to the warlord or liberating the slaves, knowing that Tarnum will die. Believe it or not, this is actually integrated into the game mechanics – you can rescue Tarnum, but doing so will make you lose the scenario since your army will desert to protect their homes. Unfortunately, the dramatic tension is ruined if you already know Tarnum’s immortal and leaving him to die isn’t that big of a deal. It also might have helped if you had just explained that to your foster son instead of being mysterious, Tarnum!

There is also the problem that this is about barbarians who hate magic for no reason, which always annoys me because anti-intellectualism etc. (and magic is just awesome why would you purposefully write it out of the story you horrible person). It’s played differently from what I expected, though – instead of stupid romanticizing about simplicity and traditional values, there’s a lot of talk about progress and change. Waerjak also isn’t your typical maniac barbarian – he enjoys reading about ethics and philosophy, and favors cerebral strategy over brute force.

At the end, Tarnum is finally judged worthy of entering paradise, but chooses to stay so he can watch over everyone. In the ending, he says that he doesn’t just feel connected to the barbarians – he wants to help everyone work together. What kind of flaming socialist rhetoric is this??? Seriously, they should have let this person write the entire game, they’re the only one who knows what they’re doing.

The Academy campaign is called “The Price of Peace”, and it’s probably the closest thing the game has to an “official” campaign. The protagonist is given focus in the intro video, it’s the longest campaign, and while the other stories are fairly personal in scope, this is an epic fate-of-the-world one. It stars Emilia Nighthaven, who starts off as an enchantress’ apprentice, but, in a sudden burst of passion, manages to rally the people of her town behind her banner and fight off the barbarian lords who have been oppressing them. She is crowned queen of this new nation, but her actions attract the attention of Gavin Magnus, king of the wizards, who would prefer that she marry him and assimilate her kingdom into his instead of letting her run amok. Ew, Gavin, you’re thousands of years old and she’s, like, fifteen. She is offended by this and refuses, leading to a civil war that probably kills thousands of people, but who cares about them, only main characters matter.

The writing for the early bits is pretty good. Emilia is convincingly written as a scared little girl in over her head who, through extreme circumstances, slowly molds herself into a strong ruler and a force to be reckoned with. Things fall apart pretty fast, though. Her rejection of Magnus’ offer is incredibly contrived – the story goes on and on about how it’s a thinly-veiled threat to take over all of her lands and keep her on a leash, but he seemed pretty reasonable to me (assuming he’s talking about marriage in purely political terms, which it…seemed to heavily imply he was?). Emilia also monologues about how being a queen is so stressful and she’s not sure she can be a good one, so, uh, why doesn’t she want to hand over her leadership to the more qualified guy, exactly…?

From there the plot gets really ridiculous. I said before that the Academy’s “order” schtick turned its personality into Saturday morning cartoon levels of ridiculousness, and Magnus’ plot is where that rears its ugly head. He’s portrayed as an insane nitpick – in his introduction, he complains to some architects that one of the pillars in his palace is half a centimeter thinner than the others, and that the floor is sloped two degrees to the side. After seeing a bunch of people being stupid, he comes up with a master plan to eliminate all war and conflict by hypnotizing everyone into being his mindless slaves. This is portrayed as ~deep and philosophical~ about the question of whether or not free will is worth sacrificing for peace or whatever. It’s just so extreme that I can’t take it seriously at all. We see the effects of Magnus’ hypnosis – the people have no autonomy of their own and act like mindless robots. At that point, even if you can attain perfect peace, if everyone’s too lobotomized to appreciate it what’s the point? The story doesn’t even pretend that Magnus might have a point, as the campaign is completely linear so you have no choice but to fight against him. There’s even this big deal where his servant Solymr, who is a secondary protagonist and frequently crosses paths with Emilia, decides to betray him because he realizes how wrong it all is.

To be honest I didn’t even know what the story was trying to do by the end. It feels like it tries to portray Magnus as sympathetic (which is rather interesting, as literally every other villain in the entire series has been completely evil and unsympathetic), but he just acts so unrealistically that I can’t take him seriously. I just saw him as insane – tragically driven insane from living too long and seeing so much suffering, perhaps, but still a nutcase with no legitimate points to his arguments. Also, at the end of the story, he kills one of Emilia’s closest friends just to show that he can, which kills any potential sympathy points he accrued before then. I really have no idea what the writers were trying to do here, or how I’m expected to view him. I’m reminded a bit of Lysandre from Pokemon X/Y – the arguments the game makes for why he’s wrong or right at various points are bizarre and nonsensical, and the story insists he’s way more sympathetic than he actually is. Perhaps you should have stayed with psychopaths, New World Computing, you clearly can’t handle well-intentioned extremists.

The story’s tone is also jarring with the game mechanics. I believe I’ve talked about this before – the story focuses entirely on the main characters, with no mention of the thousands of innocent troops they order to their deaths for their own personal quests. Early on, there is a nice bit where Emilia acknowledges this and says that she hates leading people into battle, but of course that can’t actually be reflected in the mechanics. It’s also never brought up again – although in one quest, she does only bring along a small band of heroes to minimize the losses if things go south. That’s a nice gesture I guess, but her actions are still ridiculously inconsistent. It reminds me of what I was saying about Roland in Heroes 2 – there’s a lot of show-don’t-tell issues.

Oh, and normally, the Academy has a special building that grants you access to death spells, but in this campaign, that building is disabled in all of Emilia’s towns, because only evil people use death magic right??? I taught Emilia death magic anyway just out spite.

Also, bonus feminism fail! This is one of the two campaigns with a female protagonist, but the narrator in cutscenes is Solymr. Always. And when he joins forces with Emilia, he becomes the viewpoint character for in-scenario story messages as well… so I guess she was never the real protagonist after all, Solymr was. There’s also this random bit in one scenario where Emilia has to kiss a sailor to make him tell her vital information to continue her quest. She doesn’t seem to mind that much, but that doesn’t make it any less skeevy. There’s a similar, genderflipped subplot with Solymr later on that manages to be terrible for different reasons. A very flirtatious ghost woman appears to him, telling him that she knows information that he desperately needs. She will only provide this information if he undoes the curse that has turned her body to stone… which requires that he kiss her. Then, she refuses to actually tell him anything until he kisses her again. It’s not entirely clear how Solymr feels about this himself – his thoughts and internal narration are oddly sparse when he’s describing the situation – but he does not seem particularly enthused about the idea. And then at the beginning of the next map, she ditches him without giving him any more help, because as we all know, flirtatious women are cowardly and untrustworthy.

Emilia herself is… not portrayed that well. She’s constantly full of self-doubt, which makes a degree of sense early on when she’s in over her head, but it never really stops. The story also places a bit too much focus on how emotional and inexperienced she is, requiring her to constantly rely on her (male) advisors for help. It… could be worse I guess; the other characters do idolize her to a ridiculous degree and she does come through as a capable leader in the end, but… still. For a story about a teenage girl becoming an awesome ruler it is pretty darn misogynist.

The Preserve campaign is “Elwin and Shaera”, a stupid star-crossed lovers romance with some civil war thrown in to justify the war simulator gameplay. Elwin is the protagonist, and he is the whiniest, stupidest character I’ve seen in this entire series. He spends all his time going on about how he’s so weak and cowardly and pathetic and also he hates the wilderness because it ruins his beautiful clothes even though he’s supposed to be an elf and a druid. He manages to amass armies and conquer his enemies anyway, because he’s a hero and heroes are ~special~. He’s unapologetically selfish – he fantasizes about killing Shaera’s suitor (and is completely justified in doing so because it turns out he’s SECRETLY EVIL, because why have a three-dimensional antagonist with realistic motivations when you can have a cardboard cut-out) and does some pretty unscrupulous things just to be together with Shaera. The story begins with him pulling strings so he can be assigned to an important mission he has no qualifications for, just so he can spend time with her. However, Shaera’s father has been trying to stop him from doing exactly that (the unreasonable jerk!!!), so when they’re at sea, he drugs everyone on board so that he can spend time with her. This leads to their ship getting attacked by pirates, which probably results in quite a few deaths. But Shaera’s father makes it out okay, so no worries, it’s not like anyone IMPORTANT died or anything! I wonder if Shaera would still be fawning over Elwin if she knew he was responsible for this…

Elwin eventually ends up fighting against his rival suitor, Harke. Harke orders his men to kill Elwin, at which point Elwin rallies a massive army and crushes them all beneath his heel. This sparks a civil war, but Elwin claims he was totally justified because it was self-defense (even though killed literally hundreds of people in process). Elwin tries to claim some Good Person Points™ when he meets up with the agent that was originally ordered to kill him – he’s all nice and forgiving and agrees to put in a good word for him after he confesses (which is necessary to expose Harke’s crimes). However, when this happens, the agent also brings a small army that Elwin has to cut through to get to him, and I am just utterly baffled how he can act like he’s ~so noble~ for sparing this one guy when, just seconds ago, he murdered hundreds of people who were just doing their jobs. He’s later hastily made the elf king, because the writers have to fulfill their nobility worship quota somehow (even when the actual mechanics are closer to democracy), and told to stop Harke from taking over the country. You see, apparently Harke is a really popular military leader, so the elf nation is split between his loyalists and the rest of the country. However, the loyalists seem to make up a larger army than the side Elwin is fighting for, so I have a really hard time seeing why Elwin shouldn’t just lie down and let democracy take its course – a majority of people seem to want Harke in charge. But no, Elwin defeats him and, like Roland in Heroes 2, makes a point about how he’s ~so great~ for sparing his life even though he’s such awful scum. However, his loyalists still hate Elwin, and so they send a false message to Shaera that Elwin has died. Elwin thinks that Shaera must have committed suicide because LOL women, so hysterical, but it turns out she actually didn’t, and they manage to live happily ever after. Congratulations on not completely rehashing Romeo & Juliet by depriving your story of any lasting drama or consequences, writers!

You could probably write a much better version of this story just by making Harke or Shaera the protagonist and portraying Elwin as the villain. (Because he is.)

I really hate Elwin. Pretty much the only person he isn’t a callous jerk to is Shaera herself. Because this game was made recently-ish, there is some token progressive-ish stuff about how Elwin ~cares about her as a person~ and asks her what her hobbies/interests are (girlish things, naturally). Despite this, Shaera is still a complete non-entity who only exists to be fought over by the protagonist and antagonist. Pretty much the only saving grace is that she actually gets to narrate the scenario introductions instead of Elwin, but it’s all just vapid stuff like “Oh, why can’t those mean people see how we’re in ~true love~?” that doesn’t do anything to elevate her above a satellite character. Oh, and in the final scenario, Elwin stashes her on a secret island for her safety while he goes off to do the dangerous things like a manly man… except we finally, finally get to see her show up as a hero on the map, and according to her stats she’s actually a capable fighter who could totally hold her own. So… why can’t she? Why does she continue to be a nonentity even after the game explicitly tells us that she has high-level combat stats? I would still have been annoyed if they made her a level 1 weakling, but at least it would have been consistent.

…Oh wait, actually, I will be fair: there is one legitimate progressive moment in the story, and that is that Elwin is okay with Shaera not being a virgin. You see, midway through the story, Elwin’s rival gives Shaera a love potion, then forces her to marry him and, uh, well. However, when Elwin rescues Shaera and breaks the enchantment, his internal narration explicitly states that he doesn’t think any less of Shaera and generally seems pretty okay with it. …Although, I think any feminism points the writers could claim for this is kind of counterbalanced by surprise rape. Was that really necessary? It would appear it is inescapable, even outside of terrible YA novels. (Still, if this was a terrible YA novel, we would probably get a spiel from Elwin about how Shaera is such a horrible person and she’s worthless but he’s still going to be with her anyway because he’s so magnanimous and eugh.)

Oh, and an aside, because if the game developers feel the need to be a broken record about this than so will I: In one scenario, the hidden villain of a subplot turns out to be a necromancer. There’s a story snippet where Elwin says how he hates battle and he always feels guilty about taking a life, even from evil people… however, he doesn’t feel any guilt about killing the necromancer because necromancers are the most evilest evil scum ever and are even worse than the other designated evil creatures.

*sigh*

And that makes for a lovely segue into the Necropolis campaign, “Half-Dead”. It’s about a necromancer who, due to a magical accident, has become half-alive, half-undead. I went into this campaign with foolishly high expectations, because I had earlier heard some musings from fans about how necromancers were portrayed as more morally gray rather than straight evil in this game.

Ahahahahahahahaha. Hahaha. Ha.

The campaign begins with our protagonist, Gauldoth, being driven nearly insane by starvation and desperation. Since the cataclysm, he’s been living in the wilderness, eating whatever he could find. He attempts to steal some chickens, but the farmer sees him and rounds up the village to capture him and burn him at the stake. They refuse to listen to his pleas for mercy, condemning him for being a necromancer and insisting that he must have had nefarious plans. In an act of desperation, he frantically casts a half-remembered spell that allows him to escape.

This looks like a really solid introduction, I thought! Gauldoth isn’t actually evil, just trying to survive – it’s the peoples’ own prejudices against necromancers that are causing a conflict where there doesn’t have to be one. It’s looking pretty good on the morally nuanced front.

Then everything proceeds to return to the norm after that blip of actual decent writing. Gauldoth amasses an undead army and uses it to massacre the village as well as anyone else in the general vicinity to prevent a message from getting out. Then he kills the leader of the village and enslaves his soul. Great job disproving those prejudices and stereotypes about necromancers being genocidal soul-slavers, Gauldoth!

From there the writing just gets more and more nonsensical. I really have no idea what they were trying to do – it feels almost like there were two writers working on this, one who wanted to go for a more sympathetic angle and one who wanted to do a typical evil necromancer story. In the next map, Gauldoth’s ghost slave informs him that the greatest kingdom on the planet has left their borders undefended, and so they could potentially break through and take the throne with ease. However, Gauldoth refuses to do this, realizing that being overambitious and drawing attention to himself will only unite the world against him, like what happened to Sandro in Heroes 3. He decides that, instead, he just wants to stake out a small kingdom for himself as a refuge for necromancers. This… sounds fairly reasonable, but it’s not elaborated on very much. He never considers that if they’d stop killing everyone and enslaving their souls, then maybe people might stop seeing them as the ultimate evil in the first place. The story seems to be trying to address some of the problems the necromancer plot has had previously, but it just uses such weird motivations and justifications that don’t actually address the root causes.

The political plot is derailed by Gauldoth rescuing his mentor, who is imprisoned by demons for a reason that is never explained. Gauldoth proceeds to be his grovelling lapdog, doing everything he asks without question, even when he’s very obviously being suspicious and evil, because protagonists with agency and functional intelligence are bad.

In the third map, the plot just gets utterly baffling. Gauldoth discovers that some of his troops have gone ahead of him and are raiding a village, even though he gave orders not to harm anybody. In one house, he finds that a vampire has killed a woman’s father and is about to kill her. He saves the woman and takes her prisoner for no real reason. She becomes ridiculously enamored with him, saving his life and then choosing to stay with him of her own free will, because she believes that she can awaken the good inside of him or whatever. They talk about a lot of pretentious philosophical stuff about destruction and creation, and according to her, the reason Gauldoth has the potential for good is because half of him is still alive. This reminds me of the Zuko plot in Avatar The Last Airbender, where he was only allowed to be good because half his DNA was from a good person. It’s weird innate fatalism crap and I cannot fathom why writers love it so much. It’s also pretty explicitly saying that yup, undead = evil, because apparently if Gauldoth was a full lich he’d be irredeemable.

Then he kills her.

You see, the quest in that map is to activate these special MacGuffins for Gauldoth’s master. The final one kills the person who activates it. Gauldoth apparently knew this, because he specifically went inside ahead of time to clear out the skeletons so priest lady wouldn’t get suspicious. Then he has another philosophical discussion that uses her own logic against her to trick her into activating it for him. So not only did he use her for personal gain, it was cold-blooded premeditated murder he set up well in advance. He doesn’t appear to feel anything after her death, but I’m not sure if that’s intentional or because the writing is crappy at showing Gauldoth’s thoughts and feelings, because immediately afterward he wants to give her a proper burial because he “at least owes her that much” or something? I…I don’t. I don’t even.

In another map, he needs this special artifact from a holy shrine. He has to take it from the corpse of a saint entombed in the shrine. After he takes it, he reanimates the saint’s corpse and tells him to kill everyone in the temple. Why? Because necromancer, what more do you want.

The climax is insane. It turns out Gauldoth’s master was serving a god of death who wants him to construct an unholy artifact that has the power to kill every living being on the planet. The dialogue is cringe-worthy – the death god thing goes on about how it was so happy about how many people died in the previous cataclysm, but it was so sad and angry when those stupid portals showed up to save people! Now it’s going to kill everyone! Because death! Like with Magnus in The Price of Peace, it’s Saturday morning cartoon levels of ridiculousness. It’s just so over-the-top that I just can’t take it seriously.

For some reason, this plan will also kill Gauldoth, even though he’s already half-undead…? But yeah, that’s his ultimate motivation to save the world. Not out of even a shred of selflessnes or altruism – he does it to save his own life. I suppose if his master told him it wouldn’t kill him, he wouldn’t even bother, then? That kind of pragmatic motivation can make for some good anti-hero material, but it’s just done so blandly. He isn’t shocked that his master was plotting to kill him, he isn’t surprised by the existence of random death gods, he doesn’t consider any of the full-scale ramifications of this… he’s just like, “Welp, if I don’t do anything I’ll die, guess I better get moving.” Like the rest of the story, there’s no emotion or personality behind this choice, it’s just hitting obligatory plot points.

There’s also some stupid pseudo-philosophical stuff all throughout. Gauldoth starts with death magic and nature magic, an unusual combination for a necromancer. He talks about this throughout the campaign, going on about the duality of destruction and creation, and can you really say destruction is evil and creation is good? (The story itself is an inconsistent mess regarding this, but I get the impression that the answer is supposed to be yes.) The ending is really dull and generic, with him just musing about which side will win, good or evil, and that the only thing he’s learned is not to commit yourself to any one side. It sounds kind of impressive I guess, but in actuality it’s closer to the ramblings of a madman (or a hack writer trying too hard to sound deep) than anything actually profound.

So yeah. Necromancers. Still totally evil, except for one guy, who is only evil sometimes.

What’s so annoying is that this could have actually been a great plot and an excellent opportunity to humanize the necromancers. Say that the necromancers are only performing “evil” acts out of desperation, because morality is a luxury. Show how the prejudice and persecution of the necromancers is what drives them to such ends and what fuels their hatred of the living. It’s a vicious cycle – the “good” factions are creating the very problem they despise through their enmity. Instead of having necromancers be opportunistic backstabbers, emphasize how they can still be sympathetic to their own kind by not having Gauldoth’s master plotting to kill him. Perhaps his actual motivation is to help Gauldoth, because the death-artifact will turn him fully undead like he always wanted. His “kill them all” plan is done out of spite for all the persecution he has seen necromancers face. Gauldoth stops him not out of a concern for personal safety, but because he realizes that in order to forge a permanent solution, they have to break the cycle of hatred instead of continuing it. Also, don’t have Gauldoth randomly killing and enslaving people for the lulz.

The Asylum campaign is “A Pirate’s Daughter”, and it’s… weird. I thought the writing was pretty good overall, but the story is completely segregated from the gameplay. This is a big issue because it is by far the hardest and most tedious campaign – if I have to spend hours and hours running over a gigantic map fighting stressful battles that I can screw up with the slightest mistake, the story had better give me a darn good reason for it!

The protagonist is Tawni Balfour, the daughter of a famous pirate captain. Her father is killed in a battle just before the story begins, so she succeeds him as captain and begins to pursue her own ambitions. She’s not content with just pirating – she wants to control the entire area they’re in and consolidate her power. The plot itself is nothing special – every scenario is just her taking control of another area (and ends with her killing some mermaids who pop up out of nowhere). The real appeal is in the writing and characters. There are a lot of scenes, and the writing is vivid and well-constructed. Tawni shows extreme ruthlessness and cunning in her quest to keep her crew under control, yet I still found her sympathetic. She grew up in a random tavern not knowing who her father was, and the story is surprisingly good at elaborating on the details of her life. As a little girl, she is completely helpless and her life is not at all glamorous. One scene that I particularly liked was about a fight that broke out between some pirates at the tavern. Tawni is terrified that she’ll be caught in the crossfire, and indeed she is, with one of the pirates using her as a human shield. She barely escapes with her life, and afterwards, the pirate says he admires her tenacity and promises to give her a cut of the treasure – but he never returns, and all she gets is a day spent cleaning the blood off the floor, like she always does when a fight breaks out.

What’s interesting is that she doesn’t actually like her father. As a child, she was enamored with him because ~yay pirates~ but after she joined his crew and realized what a terrible person he was, she grew more cynical. She frequently thinks about how stupid he was and how she doesn’t want to make the same mistakes he did. She does eventually eclipse all of his accomplishments, so good going, I guess!

The story does a good job of rebutting the weird romanticism that seems to surround pirates these days. For some reason, popular culture seems to have pegged pirates as cool and edgy or something, while forgetting the horrible things they did (and do) in real life. The story accurately portrays the pirates as dangerous, cruel, and amoral, with short lives and petty ambitions. You aren’t even fighting for treasure, just territory and control. I wonder if the overall story was meant to be a culmination of this – Tawni is not just a plunderer but a conqueror. Her ideals of forming her own queendom mean shattering the status quo: if her ambitions are realized, her pirates will be granted long-term stability and prosperity instead of having to work as scavengers and thieves. This point is never actually brought up in-story, though (maybe because it’s a pretty awkward thing to have in a “chaos” campaign).

One caveat I do have is this weird forced-sexism thing. There are a few offhand lines sprinkled throughout that imply having a woman in charge is a weird, unusual thing, and Tawni has to be extra-great to keep their loyalty. I really don’t see what the point of this is. It seemingly contradicts other parts of the setting – no one bats an eye at Catherine or Emilia being rulers, and there are just as many female heroes as male ones. The world seems to be fairly gender-equal, so this feels contrived. This is far from an isolated incident, either – so many stories I’ve seen just shoehorn this in for no reason, as if a patriarchal society is the status quo across the multiverse, even in fantasy stories that are supposed to be limited only by our imaginations.

As for the gameplay… like I said, it practically exists in a whole other world. It’s ostensibly the “chaos” campaign, so the game forces you to use Asylum creatures, but this is never reflected in the story. The story snippets never have Tawni reacting to the fact that she is controlling dragons, minotaurs, and medusae – her troops are always just pirates. There is virtually no mention of magic, either, aside from mermaids and sea monsters. Most of the maps don’t even have a good justification for why you’re fighting enemies at all. Past the second scenario or so, the story snippets never really talk about why exactly there are other armies just like yours that you have to fight. It makes me suspicious; did the writer try to lift a story they previously wrote or were working on for this, and that story was historical fiction or low fantasy? Could explain the awful gameplay if the writer had no experience with the setting (or if the gameplay was done by another person entirely). If so, I’d like to see the original manuscript, personally – it’s probably more coherent than this.

The campaign’s maddening difficultly makes everything even worse. Every map is gigantic, with lots of sea travel (a very tedious and annoying mechanic). Odds are almost always stacked heavily against you, with lots of shortcuts and even portals that lead directly into your territory that only the enemy can use. They generally start with more towns than you, too. It’s very easy to get overwhelmed, and you have to do a lot of running around to get anything done.

The campaign ends with a boss battle…or tries to, anyway. You have to track down and fight two huge (but stationary) armies at the end of the level. Here is where the RPG and TBS mechanics the designers have so desperately tried to marry can finally no longer be reconciled, and collide catastrophically. The battles are pitifully easy. Why? After you defeat your opponents, you can just mash the “end turn” button and get more troops without expending any effort. Boss battles make sense in RPGs because you need to actively input effort to get stronger – but in a game where you’re constantly getting an automatic influx of troops no matter what you do, it doesn’t work at all. It’s inevitable that something like this would happen eventually, really – the developers wanted to have their cake and eat it too, not realizing how diametrically opposed their two design philosophies were.