You have got to give it to these old-school games. So long even I don’t want to spend insane amounts of hours grinding it out to see what is next. Thankfully I did not go into this series with the mindset of seeing each game till its end.

Sometimes you just have to know when it’s time to move on to another game. While Might And Magic 1 was quite an interesting one I have rather lost interest in it. The grinding till the next level is just too long and well I don’t care for the content loop of this one.

It was at least worth checking out and seeing what started it all. I’m rather glad Might And Might went as far as it did back when fell in love with the game series with Might and Magic Vi. That title, however, had much more fun of a grind.

I think that is what I do not like so much about Might And Magic. Any step and it’s suddenly an hour of my time lost in grinding. The deaths can also really just rub you the wrong way. You could have just defeated a quite massive creature and be almost dead yourself. Then you go and rest and get a random encounter that wipes you out before even being given a chance to recover.

I have also found the loot to be just lacking in so many ways. For me, an ARPG is often about the loot. This game came with a guide which you need to consume just to understand basic things. I can already tell I have some decently powerful weapons and they are not getting that much powerful from here.

To me, that is mindblowing that I'm not even that far along in the game. I have just a couple more upgrades unless items are missing from the included table. Even when I fight lower-level creatures it’s my new spells unlocked on my casters carrying the weight. Nothing with the remaining items I've yet to loot can or will catch up with my melee classes at this point.

If I wanted an easy win in this game. I swear all I should do is create a group with one tank and the rest being sorcerers. Forget having a cleric, a ranger, or anything else. While it would be quite the struggle session early on after I got enough levels the sorcerers would level everything in a single round of combat it would not matter.

To me, that is just not a very fun way to go about things. I was hoping to enjoy the different classes of this game in their way a lot more. I do feel that has always been a struggle even in Might and Magic IV. As such anyone who was set up to be a ranger is just not up to par with everything else. At least in IV everyone could have a bow and do range damage making it a bit moot to think of any single character as a ranger.

I also just find the general lack of an in-game map to be rather not my kind of thing. It’s true I could get lost in a shoe box in real life and it ends up being the case a lot in Might and Magic IV. I don’t know how many times I'll enter a city and take a wrong turn by mistake and I'm just stuck spamming going all over the place with the gaming being 2D trying to find my way to a location I know I can go from there.

Sure, my sorcerer can cast a location spell. That spell, however, just gives you in-game X and Y. I’m sure if I wanted to go super nerdy and create maps to line up X and Y it would become easier to navigate through the game.

It was tempting to grind though to my casters level up a bit faster. I was perhaps a level or two away from unlocking not only the ability to fly but also to teleport back to town. I do believe that spell alone would reduce a lot of the fatigue I have when trying to get around in this game. Even more so the endless runs back to town to save the game and offload my bags just to go out and return to the same area to regrind all the same stuff again.

Even thinking about it now. I’m half tempted to go back in and just grind things out. I just to see if getting those spell unlocks would improve my quality of life in this game. However, I don’t want to think just how many hours of grinding it would take to reach that point. Not to mention all the times I'd be close to making it back just to have some nonsense things happen to me making me lose any unsaved progression yet again.

I’m also just not a fan of graphics. When it comes to video games, I'm the kind of person who rarely cares about things needing to have instantly good graphics. I’ve played enough old-school and indie titles at this point to have a certain appreciation for not only different art styles of clear things people would flat-out call ugly or even mud at this point. It seems even this game is just not for me.

Final Thoughts

It was at least interesting to get to experience this game. I was rather thrilled to pick this up in a bundle at quite a deep discount with quite a few other Might and Magic games.

At some point, I'll be moving on to another one. I can only hope it has some kind of better map or at least in-game graphics so it’s easier for me to understand where I am so I'm not getting lost in the woods hoping to come across a certain pattern of titles that separates my location from the rest.

As far as why I wrote things. I know I just have a habit of not posting an ending sometimes when it comes to any series of games I write about. Sometimes that is due to a bug or an issue with the save folder. This time I felt a proper sendoff was in order. As I know many people enjoy the golden days of gaming. It’s kind of funny right now they are not as amazing as we might recall them being. It was a different time back then and things don’t always end up being so great when looking back.

Other Content

• Might And Magic 1 | Massive Mistakes Made

• Trapped In Sorpigal

• Cavern Under Sorpigal

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Might And Magic 1.