Deathlord is an RPG made in 1987 for the Apple II and the Commodore 64. It plays like a cross between Ultima and Wizardry; Ultima for nearly everything except the combat, which is more Wizardry-like, though simpler. It's a game I initially played on the Apple II in my early teens, though I got the C64 version later. I never finished it when I first got it--not surprising, given its difficulty. Later on I tried again, and then succeeded. Twice, in fact.
There are a couple of things about Deathlord that make it unique and worth covering. The first is its "Japanese" theme. Funny thing about that though--Deathlord wasn't initially supposed to be a Japanese-themed RPG; it was supposed to be a Norse-themed RPG. Executive meddling at EA at forced the change to the theme late in development. While not immediately obvious, it shows--the forced change was not taken well by the devs and I am absolutely convinced they said "to hell with it," grabbed a English-Japanese dictionary, looked a bunch of stuff up without knowing any context, and called it a day. I never realized it at the time when I first played it, just being a kid. But replaying it after learning Japanese, it's blatantly obvious and often hilarious.
The second thing about Deathlord is its difficulty. Hoo-boy is it hard. I personally think it's the hardest CRPG ever made. Yes, that includes Wizardry IV. Not only are the base game mechanics punishing, but the dungeons, while often well designed, are the most brutal in CRPG history. The source of the problem with Deathlord's difficulty is that the devs' QA testers were really familiar with the game and how it worked, so in order to make it a challenge for them, they inadvertently made it borderline-impossible for everyone else.
There isn't a lot of info out there about Deathlord. The official guide book was complete garbage. There are some decent maps on GameFaqs, but as FAQs go, not so much. There's one general FAQ with a lot of good info but is riddled with errors, and another guide with a decent walkthrough but written in a hard-to-follow narrative format and with mindblowingly poor party creation advice. To actually figure out what the hell is going on in this game, I had to use memory viewers and hex editors to attempt to deconstruct how it works. Even still there's a lot I don't know, and despite all I've figured out about it, it's still a huge challenge.
So why cover Deathlord? Because under the layers of sadism and BS there are the trappings of a decent game hidden somewhere there in a deep, dark corner. While a lot of the dungeon designs are pure evil some of them are actually somewhat inspired. Also Deathlord is a really good example of how to design a balls-hard party-based RPG. Whereas Wizardry IV, another example, did so with obtuse puzzles, Deathlord does it with dungeon design. Not that I recommend this as a general-purpose good game to play. A very, very small subset of RPG enthusiasts will be able to tolerate Deathlord, let alone enjoy it. Odds are you won't like this game if you play it yourself.
I'm going to be playing the Commodore 64 version, because the square tiles are nicer for mapping, and VICE is easier than AppleWin for screenshots. (and I don't know how I'd even take screenshots using original hardware) However in my opinion the Commodore 64 version plays a little worse than the Apple II version with poor load times, a few wonked-out mechanics and an annoying keyboard layout.
I will not be playing Deathlord ironman or cheat-free. The game is just too damn hard. If a bad encounter reduces my endgame party to a level 5 party, (which can and will happen if you're not careful) that's effectively the end if I don't cheat. I'll be mostly using the "classic" method of cheating--backing up floppies--but I reserve the right to use save states to reverse ridiculous situations the game throws at me. I'll probably end up using save states to abuse level-ups because HP levels are low enough as-is; I don't want to deal with level-ups that raise my HPs by 1 or 2.
So let's get down into the weeds.
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