Curate of Curiosities

Chapter 1 of Mardek was basically the game's prologue, in a similar fashion to the first chapter in Deliverance. It introduced the main characters, most of its gameplay mechanics, and some major villains. Chapter 2 is where the real game begins.

In fact, It was this chapter that properly introduced me to the game back when I was in high school. Like I mentioned before, it was the very first browser RPG that I played that felt like it had actual substance. If it were just the first chapter, I definitely would not have thought much of it.

In the years since the events of chapter 1 took place, Mardek and Deugan have grown up and joined the Royal Guard.

The second chapter starts with Deugan talking about two other members of the Guard, Emela, a shy mage who Mardek seems to be in love with, and Steele, a brute of a man who almost certainly has less-than-noble reasons for joining them. Just what we needed to start off, a love triangle!

We then receive our first mission from the king and his stereotypically French retainer; a nearby gem mine has been taken over by bandits, who are forcing the miners to dig the place up for them. Okay, fine, start with a bog-standard bandit slaying mission. It'll be a while before we deal with the alien invaders teased at the end of the end of chapter 1.

But first, let's go head back to the boys' old stomping grounds.

All right, looks like there's nothing of interest here. On to the mines.

Now that Rohoph's set up shop inside Mardek's psyche, he now has a basic healing spell through his confusingly named Magic Sword skillset. Better, unlike most instances of basic healing spells in RPGs, this spell scales to it's user's level, meaning that it remains a viable choice throughout the game.

Deugan has a skill too. It's just his basic attack, but it hits the enemy harder.

Who else loves pointing out JRPG tropes?

Obviously, you want to spare him, not out of any moral good, but because even this early, you don't need to fight any more bandits than necessary.

A bog-standard boss to a bog-standard quest, complete with the bog-standard motive of obtaining ultimate power. But then again, this is an homage, it's not supposed to be anything subversive.

That comes later.

For this battle, we are joined by Emela and Steele, two of the fellow members of the Royal Guard. Emela comes with two magic attacks, a lightning bolt (which the game classifies as being Air-elemental) and a water spell, which the boss is weak to. Steele is basically a copy of Deugan, with a similar "basic attack but harder" skill.

One of the major improvements that this game has over Deliverance is that physical attacks are actually viable against bosses (provided the target isn't outright immune or anything). Of course, magic attacks shouldn't be overlooked either, especially now that we actually have access to them.

Being the first boss, he's not particularly difficult. The real shocker comes after we defeat him. Steele, being the wannable alpha male prick he is, decides to beat him to within an inch of his life. Then Emela, in an effort to rein him in, suddenly strikes him down with a bold of lightning.

Because Steele was a party member, even if only briefly, Emela beats herself up over killing him by accident, despite the fact that the two of them have probably killed several bandits on the way there. Though I'm sure it can't have been a lot--the dungeon isn't very long, after all.

Anways, the next mission is to head east, to the town of Canonia.

Along the way, you pass through the Eastern Glens. Nothing remarkable here.

The major prize of this area is the Earth Rod, a new weapon for Emela that grants her the spell Stonesplosion.

And we find out that Emela is cool with killing people, just as long as they deserve it. Well, that's about as much subversiveness as you're gonna get so far.

As you walk all the way around the lake, you pass by at least a dozen of what look like ice sculptures. In case you didn't see anything wrong with that, Deugan will stop you in your tracks to spell things out.

And then, when you're near the exit, you find this little girl who tells you that the statues are actually some random people who, as apparent punishment for loitering by the lake, got frozen by the Lake Hag.

While our party has (maybe) more important things to do right now, the game will simply not let you move forward until we deal with this.

Fortunately, Emela joined us with a spell allowing us to breathe underwater. No Oxyale required.

The cave is a mercifully brief, two floor dungeon, where you can find another Tectonic Sword just in case you didn't backtrack to Goznor to upgrade your equipment.

And here's the Lake Hag. Nothing to say here, just that Stonesplosion and Earth Slash completely wreck her.

Sadly, killing her doesn't turn the frozen people back to normal, but at least, um...there's no more Lake Hag, so we can move on to Canonia.

This is the direct successor to not one, but several games where you get repeatedly accosted by followers of Yalort. Is it really any surprise that we would run into another such follower here?

As you can see, there is indeed a woman here in this house, you just can't interact with her at all.

There's also someone who's seriously considering necrophilia. How did I not pick up on this on my first playthrough?

After picking up some minor armor upgrades, we go to the town barracks and find out that there are monsters in the southern forest.

Welcome to Canonia Woods. I didn't get any screenshots of this area, but it doesn't really matter as it uses the exact same forest tileset that both the previous forest area and Deliverance used.

What you absolutely need to get here is the Fire Rod, found in a cottage to the south. It teaches Emela a fire spell, and will prove to be very useful shortly.

Well, what do you know, it's Vehrn again. Looks like Yalort's protection simply wasn't enough after all.

Our paladin starts off having less HP than our mage. No wonder he could't make it past the entrance.

This dungeon is full to the brim with undead monsters that, Verhn does exceptionally well in defeating, surprisingly.

What's an RPG pastiche without a rival party? Meet the World's Saviours.

They consist of Bartholio, our square-jawed, inexplicably German-accented warrior, Vennie, a Cockney-accented thief, Aalia, a healer who talks in leetspeak in a fantasy world, and Bernard, the taciturn mage.

They're on a similar quest to our heroes, but their goal is the elemental crystals. Now, I know this whole thing is a Final Fantasy homage, but this may be the most overt reference I've seen so far.

Anyways, they fight you, and are surprisingly tricky to deal with. Aalia can not only heal, but provide defense buffs that make the reast of her party harder to take down. In the meantime, Bernard is hammering you with hard-hitting elemental magic, and Vennie is inflicting Blind and Sleep on your party to shut down your offensive.

I decided to do things a little differently from what I usually do with this boss. Bernard is weak to both water and light, and we have attacks of both of those elements, so it's not long before he's taken out. After he goes down, Aalia shortly follows due to her earth weakness. Bartholio, despite being a warrior, isn't very threatening with his physical attacks, though he powers up if he's the last one standing.

It isn't long before we face the real boss of the area. Looks like a typical throwaway baddie who's been granted the powers of darkness by someone called the Reaper.

She's weak to fire and light. Our mage just learned a fire spell, and our paladin starts out with a light attack.

She went down in exactly three turns.

While this boss was clearly a throwaway villain, the being that empowered her certainly isn't. It's none other than Moric, one of Rohoph's buddies. As you could have guessed from the end of the first chapter, they are not too pleased about one of their own fleeing the planet.

This does not look good at all.

And you just let them through? You worthless pieces of...

Yep, a zombie plague, just like in Deliverance, in case you didn't remember.

This may be the only instance so far of a cleric of Yalort actually being helpful, rather than a nuisance.

Welcome to the longest, most drawn out dungeon dive so far. First you have the sewer depths, filled with not only stronger variants of the biomechanical vermin Mardek and Deugan faced as kids, but also all manner of zombie.

The big prize here is the Silver Sword, which does bonus damage to I hand it over to our resident Yalort-devoted paladin, since he starts with a skill that does bonus damage to Dark-element enemies (which most undead enemies tend to be), plus it gives him a skill that damages the undead even harder.

Then you have the catacombs proper. There's another Silver Sword to be found, so Mardek can join in on the undead-slaying fun.

That said, it was around here that I thought to myself: were these dungeons always this annoying to get through? I've brought up how the designs for Deliverance's dungeons were, but honestly, this is not much of an improvement.

While bumbling your way through this maze-like tomb, you come across a locksmith. While bosses that have nothing to do with the greater plotline are common in RPGs, for some reason, Cornwall saw fit to point out, not only in the pre-fight dialogue, but also in the in-game bestiary.

WHY A ZOMBIE LOCKSMITH!!? WHY?! WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING?! IT DOESN'T FIT IN ANYWHERE AT ALL! I JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND!!

Fortunately, you fight a more relevant midboss right afterwards, a Zombie Warrior, being remotely controlled by Moric. And it looks like he has a bit of a history with our incorporeal, healing magic granting friend.

Moric's pretty simple. He just throws feeble undead at your party while trying to snipe at you with magic or hit you with that enourmous scythe of his. He also has the trick of turning your fallen party members into Zombies, causing them to turn against the party. However, on the way here, the party has not only come across chests containing stacks upon stacks of the item that cures this particular status, but also found an accessory that makes its wearer immune to it, so that when he tries, the target gets fully revived, and without our having to use a revival item, to boot.

And one last thing: the revival items in question? None other than the Phoenix Downs straight out of Final Fantasy. There are even stronger versions called Phoenix Pinions.

With the zombie scourge neutralized, we go back to the king, get about as much gold as we picked up over the course of the chapter so far.

But of course, it isn't that simple.

It is never that simple.

While dealing with this new problem is our prime priority, now is an excellent time to track down the super-secret hidden town. To get there, we need to find the four Trilobite Keys.

One we picked up back in the grotto. Another can be randomly dropped by one of the zombies in town.

One more you pick up from that one bandit we spared back in the mine.

And yet another is in the depths of the catacombs, which opened up after we defeated Moric. Here, you can also find undead versions of the generic monsters fought back in the intro.

And while we're here...why don't we take on this chapter's strongest boss?

In terms of pure numbers, the Zombie Dragon (huh, just like the intro again) is the most physically healthy enemy in this chapter. Even with Mardek and Vehrn dealing more than 1000 damage per turn (assuming Mardek isn't stuck on healing duty for that turn), it will take quite some time to bring down this beast. Furthermore it hits hard, and can inflict multiple statuses on you as its health goes down.

Your reward for re-slaying the dragon is the Burial Sword, a weapon for Deugan that deals bonus damage to undead. Too bad we've already killed most of the undead in this chapter.

With all four Trilobite Keys in hand, we can now access the hidden underground village of Cambria, accessible through a cave in the Eastern Glens, which, despite being a secluded underground society of sentient fossils, hosts the most powerful equipment in the game and, more importantly, a monster arena.

The arena consists of consecutive fights against monsters that you've already fought. The only new enemy is this adventurer.

For the very last round, you fight the World's Saviours again, even though they're supposed to be dealing with the zombies back in Canonia. They're not much harder than last time, but you've probably used up quite a bit of MP and healing items getting to this point, so it can be easy to find yourself overwhelmed.

Our reward is the Champion's Sword, Mardek's strongest weapon.

Now, wasn't there a zombie plague that we needed to deal with?

This feels like Deliverance, but in reverse. While there, you start in a spaceship, then get beamed down onto the standard medieval fantasy world to go find your friends, here you start in the medieval fantasy world, then at the end get beamed onto a spaceship because some ghost alien's friends are trying to find him.

I think I saw something like this in Raider Zero.

Did you think that Rohoph was the only one who could transfer his soul into a human vessel. Though now we see that the vessel doesn't necessarily have to be alive. Mastery over death must mean it's even easier to cheat it than is normal for his kind.

This time, he focuses more on physical strength, due to possessing the corpse of a legendary hero (You know? The legendary hero Social Fox, who was mentioned a couple times that I completely forgot to screenshot), and instead of summoning zombies, he summons robot drones, with the same elemental attribute as the zombies.

To avoid further mischief, Rohoph seals the soul of his former comrade away with...Hebrew magic?

But there's no time to worry about the details, it's time to escape the UFO with a really generous time limit!

Right at the exit, we face the dungeon miniboss again. While I still had plenty of time when I got here, I don't expect that every player was this lucky.

Fortunately, Deugan decides to stay behind to give the rest of the party a chance to escape. This reminds me of Final Fantasy IV--specifically, how a good half of the party members in that game ended up getting swallowed by sea monsters, or turning themselves to stone, or dying while trying to cast forbidden magic, or blowing themselves up.

No gold for us this time, however.

Now that one of Rohoph's comrades has made his way to the planet, and subsequently brutally murdered, the rest of them (notice that there were 6 distinct silhouettes at the end of chapter 1) will most likely follow. But for now, you can rest easy, and wait a few years for the next chapter to come out.

After one last cutscene featuring some more 2000s era online dialogue, the chapter ends.

And that was chapter 2. Now, for the most part, this game was enjoyable. A far cry above Deliverance in fact. But I've already finished this game twice (once on browser, and once on Steam) and I've noticed that each time that I play through it, I'm less impressed by it. Now, more than a decade after I've played the game for the first time, I'm beginning to notice just how it's aged. There's probably a very good reason that the style of irreverent, jokey writing present in both much of the dialogue and the flavor text didn't really survive to the present day. But then again, Cornwall was, as far as I'm aware, barely a legal adult when he made this game, so what was I to expect?