There’s no point rewriting Dungeons II. I say that, but actually looking at the mechanics of the missions and writing a plot to go with them from the ground up sounds like something I might do sometime. But a Dungeons III rewrite is much less an exercise in creating an entire story from whole cloth. While Dungeons II had a bunch of references to other games’ protagonists and told you that they were a party of heroes who had wronged you so you should go stop them, Dungeons III has an actual plot. Unfortunately, it’s a plot with one beat that it repeats over and over again.
The one beat the plot has is that Thalya the dark elf is an evil creature but has been raised to be good by the paladin Tanos. The Absolute Evil – the disembodied hand of evil that you play as – sends a shadow to corrupt her, and she instantly becomes the general of the Absolute Evil’s armies. Thalya does a Gollum and Smeagol thing with her good and evil halves arguing with each other, and Tanos beams in to tell her she must return to the light, and evil Thalya tells him to fuck off while good Thalya bemoans that she is not in control.
This is a perfectly serviceable premise, but the problem is that there’s twenty missions, voice acted dialogue for every single one, and we’ve gotten these beats out of the way by the end of mission three, leaving nothing to do but repeat them seventeen more times. But the game does have something else going for it: A total of four heroes rule the realms you’re sacking, with Tanos as the ultimate king/hero but with three allied rulers, who pace the game out, with the first five missions ending with a fight with Grimli the dwarf, the next five ending with a fight with Yaina Overproud the sorceress, and so on. And these could be used to shine a lot on the reasons Thalya has for choosing evil over good. Even in the game as it exists, the good side of Thalya does slowly get won over to evil, but it seems to be more out of exhaustion than actually reconsidering just how heroic these heroes are. They went this way with Grimli, so the lack of it for any of the others to instead repeat Thalya’s rebellion against Tanos over and over again was a huge missed opportunity.
The Grimli arc barely needs revision. Its first three missions are dedicated to setting up who Thalya, Tanos, and Grimli the dwarf king are, as well as that Grimli is racist against Thalya once for being an elf and twice for being a dark elf. Even in the existing game, evil Thalya brings up that Tanos never defended her against his dwarf friend’s insults, so it’s really only in the next arc with Yaina Overproud that the ball gets dropped.
Yaina Overproud’s schtick is that she is vaguely capitalist, and this game released in 2017 when Bernie Sanders was at about the peak of his popularity. It’s not super clear how exactly she is being capitalist in any kind of hypocritcally evil way, the game just mumbles something about banks and then has Yaina carry a bunch of completely unrelated Sailor Moon references for no reason. I always wonder if there’s some WoW meme (or worse, in-studio) in-joke that would explain the connection. In any case, Thalya opens the game by opening up an orphanage, which she then burns down after being possessed by the shadow of the Absolute Evil, and you could make something of that by having Thalya be angry that she wasted so much time putting a pretty face on Tanos’ regime while Yaina raked in all the gold to lead a life of champagne dinners and glamorous excess.
Elric the Pretty is a narcissistic paladin. Doubling up on paladins since main antagonist Tanos is also one, but whatever. In the game as it is, Thalya’s good half falls entirely silent for this arc, which I guess might count as a second beat in her character arc if you’re generous, but rather than just going quiet, I’d have her actually get won over. Elric is vain, selfish, and self-aggrandazing, and good Thalya can wonder aloud how she ever thought of him as heroic. Put under the pressure of the Absolute Evil’s invasion, all of Tanos’ heroic companions have revealed themselves to be selfish cowards, throwing wave after wave of their own men at the Horde hoping to find their programmed kill limit and never fighting themselves until the dark armies have smashed through the gates, torn down the walls, and scattered all the defenders.
Other than desperately needing line-by-line editing to remove all the redundant lines and give Thalya more than one joke (she has a bit where she gives commands to do three evil things, where the first two are some kind of cartoon mayhem and the last is some kind of nonsense, which isn’t particularly funny the first time and then gets repeated on an almost per-level basis), the last arc basically works as-is: Thalya has a confrontation with her adoptive father Tanos, and put under pressure, Tanos goes full authoritarian psychopath.
There is one mission in particular that needs to be pretty much completely rewritten, where the premise is that you summon the Absolute Evil by sacrificing lots of captured heroes and then it beats up Tanos, which is bad for two reasons, first, this isn’t even close to the final mission so they have to contrive a reason why the Absolute Evil doesn’t just do that again in future confrontations with Tanos, and second, I’m supposed to be the Absolute Evil, the disembodied presence running the dungeon and directing the minions. Sure, it’s not a 1:1 representation, Thalya is implied to be taking on way more of a leadership role than the game depicts directly, but mostly the Absolute Evil is the player character, and when you get summoned, the subsequent battle is entirely in a cut scene, so it doesn’t at all feel like you’ve taken a more hands-on approach to the fight than before. Did the game just think the players would be disappointed if not reassured that they could totally beat Tanos up?
Chamomile Has A Blog 