Faery Tale II - Exploring the land

After my visit at Rorkas castle I continued my exploration through the southwestern coast. See the automap below for my exploration.

The southwestern part of the continent

Here is what happened:

• I fought dozens of battles against serpentmen, shadow warriors, serpents, dire wolves, smugglers and other denizens of this region. I have given up searching the bodies of the lesser creatures by now. I have enough gold, potions or gems than I can carry.
• I stumbled upon a total of three caves in this region. Caves is actually quite fun to explore because they often contains valuable items like new spells (Scrolls) or magical items. In this way I found a sword of Tempest with which I replaced my Caldera sword. I also found a jade great sword which I let Philippe try out. 
• Rock spiders in caves are tough bastards that in principal only my best fighter Julian is capable of killing. They also have a nasty habit of spitting at me from a distance.

A Rock spider takes almost 15 hits to be killed

•  The last two caves where infested with Banshees. They are easy to kill but if you don´t take them out early they could cast powerful direct attack spells on you. In their worst moments they are accompanied by moving amoebas that resurrects and are very tough opponents. I had to run through them to grab what I wanted from that cave or we would have been overrun by them.

Plundering a body of items

Some gameplay reflections:

1. Magic wise I have only used about 4-5 spells out of the over 20 I know of. The most important spells are healing and critical healing, followed by fireball and other direct attack spells. I haven´t bothered to use any defense like spells. There have been only one major fight (against Rorka) so I prefer to save my mana. By the way, I haven´t really figured out how the mana is working. You have spells divided into several classes, each with their own color and mana pool. I think that you increase your specific spell class by using spells from it. My green mana pool that houses the healing spells are the largest by far which indicates I am right about this.
2. Combat in the game begins to be quite tedious at least against hordes of lesser enemies that are not dangerous. It is not possible to flee from a fight. The enemies will haunt you over the whole map so you must kill them all. 
3. One of the major problems is the limiting carrying capacity. You can pick up several different containers, each able to hold a certain amount of stuff but you have to keep track of your total weight allowance which seems to be affected by your brawl skill. Regardless, it is always a limiting factor and my group are hardly able to carry anything more which means I have to leave much potions behind. I could choose to use lesser armour but that is not an option for me.
4. I have yet to find an NPC that have anything important to tell me. Most common NPC:s just say ordinary stuff. There exists no sidequests in the game as far as I know. The only reason to talk to NPCs are to learn if they sell or buy stuff or if you are lucky could tell anyting about the surroundings but I have yet to see any dialogue options outside of pure bartering. Still I have been fooled several times when meeting NPC:s with special names in caves or as prisoners etc. But they have nothing whatsoever to add which confirms that this game was rushed in the end.

Smugglers guard dogs

Exploring the lighthouse

Another cave...

With some goodies

After taking a look at the overland automap and compared it to an online map of the game I found I came to the conclusion that I have spent around 1/5 of the time required if I am to cover the whole map and visit every place. Since my playing time is limited I don´t think that time will be wisely invested for me. I have the same feeling as I had when I quit Wizardry VII. Faery Tale Adventure II have something there, deep buried but it is hard to reach and requires a good amount of effort. I am satisfied with my revisit to this game and think I am qualified to review it. The review will come up in my next post.