Might & Magic II (Apple II) review "Might and Magic II overcompensates wildly for its predecessor's insane difficulty, and the poetry even scans and rhymes. With more organized and rewarding side quests, you won't notice how stupid the two new character classes are. The formula remains intact: FPRPG, five towns, several castles with quests, dungeons that may or may not be relevant, and all manner of weird nooks that give items or raise attributes--temporarily or permanently. While it's not appreciably bigger than the original, MM2..."

Might and Magic II overcompensates wildly for its predecessor's insane difficulty, and the poetry even scans and rhymes. With more organized and rewarding side quests, you won't notice how stupid the two new character classes are. The formula remains intact: FPRPG, five towns, several castles with quests, dungeons that may or may not be relevant, and all manner of weird nooks that give items or raise attributes--temporarily or permanently. While it's not appreciably bigger than the original, MM2 has more to do and it's better organize and much more forgiving in combat. It even looks better!

With your obligatory central starting town and four others in each corner of the map, MM2 establishes how its main puzzles will work. Each town corresponds to an element, and a quest for one element has parallels with the other three. Portals between the towns are available for a modest fee, though the Keep Atlantium Beautiful committee's is one way--dumping you back at Middlegate.

Character improvement is not hard even if you look to map every square--and for a fee of ten gold, auto-mapping helps. Each character gets two skills, which can help them cut through mountains or forests or even bump up their stats. Even character creation is easy, as you can swap statistics for a candidate to get what you want. Combat's usually a breeze, too, as you can hold control-a for the easy ones, and everyone gangs up on the lead enemy. You can even flee most of the time, too.

Traveling through each town, there'll be dungeons, and even some NPCs that can fill the last two of eight slots. These guys, paid when the party rests (and there are ways around THAT) are occasionally handy and fun to find. They're generally hostages, and the tougher the enemy, the better the companion. The first NPCs under the Middlegate dungeon can be rescued by jump spells (2 squares forward) and no combat. Later, Bozorc the Orc and 110 of his underlings guard Red Duke and Dead Eye. Parties that ate the right entree at the town tavern may find other NPCs--or, on other squares, get attacked by vengeful--if weak--monsters.

MM2 also offers an interesting spell-gaining system where, at odd levels, spellcasters gain new spell levels. However, they usually just get the lame ones. Temples and Mage guilds sell the middling ones, but tough monster fights in odd corners guard the toughest ones. The best spell costs ten years of each party member's life--it allows a sorcerer to improve an item from +1 to +2, and so forth. Thankfully, there's a clerical spell to reverse aging. Other spells include Lloyd's Beacon, which lets you establish a place to return. An Archer, who gets some sorcerer spells, can team with a Sorcerer to teleport between safe and dangerous places as needed. Holy Word destroys all undead enemies. Kill-em-all spells can even wipe out the "+38 goblins" beyond the ten monsters shown in combat, as long as enemies start off getting killed.

Many quests from the castles are based on the map that comes with the game; swords will be hidden in the map, and big monsters are rather more obvious. And best of all, there's always more than one way to find the clues for a quest. While MM1 put an obscure, cryptic clue on one side of the world for a quest on the other, MM2 generally has a clue in a tavern or dungeon and another on the outside. The interleaf quests also are more compact; there'll be nine messages that seem to be gibberish, scattered in a 20x20 area. Putting them in top to bottom order lets you read words above to below, but of course, cryptologists can figure the order without the final clue. Similarly, the symmetry of the quests should make it obvious that finding the Air Talon means there's a Fire Talon and so forth.

Most creative, though, are the class-specific quests. There are seven, with robbers able to assist anyone. So only knights and robbers may fight the Dread Knight. Many classes have a fight, and the right magic items make each one easy. Every party member needs to complete a quest to win the game, but if you don't have a ninja, you don't need to win the ninja quest. Here the game's pretty sure you'll need a cleric and sorcerer, so these two are the hardest. Sorcerers must work through mathematical riddles in two different castles or be slowed by encounters, then rescue the wizards Ybmug and Yekop. Clerics must rescue Corak's Soul, which requires finding several items elsewhere and crushing some undead monsters. Each quest also gives the characters five million experience points, so anyone figuring a quick way through can avoid a lot of drudgery.

Eventually the elemental-themed puzzles come together, and the party gains access to a time machine, and they find King Kalohn's Orb in a swamp dungeon. Finding this and outsmarting the game requires clever problem solving even after finding the items to wrest it free--basically, the party can't teleport out or use the exits while they have the orb. Other earlier puzzles for powerful items hint at the solution. Here, at the end, the game goes off the rails a bit--the party goes back in time to help King Kalohn win the fight he lost, and once they solve quests to make them "worthy," bam--off they go to the final cavern, where a cryptological puzzle awaits: solve in fifteen minutes or die!

This makes MM2, played once, a solidly exciting game. But replay it, and see why it's crazy. Castle Xabran in the year 800--a hundred years before the game--provides a bigger time paradox. The castle holds several important items needed to change history, but corridors also describe where to get all NPCs as well as Cleric and Sorcerer spells. Explanations would ruin this neat, if flawed idea. Pools two levels below castles can change gender or alignment, which is handy when finding that +31 golden ancient bow only evil characters can use. Some areas explicitly forbid a certain race or class, and they may add hit points or give neat attribute-boosting items.

Still more fun is starting quickly. But entrepreneurs may target items from town armories as investments. A party can gain temporary levels with skill potions (a bargain at 500 gold) and visit an arena with a ticket for a fixed combat. Fight difficulty/reward is based on a combination of these factors. You can hit control-a to speed through combats and presto, you make X gold! Then, for those who have already played, a teleport orb comes in handy. Locations in simple dungeons improve a party's attributes permanently by ten. Teleport out and back in, and it works again...up to 59. Cue kicking self for sorcerer's initial 20 intelligence.

Later on, in the trickier castle dungeons, you can trade five of one attribute for three of another. And any party can use the fountain outside Atlantium that improves all attributes to 100, or they can hopscotch over tough fights to reach an emergency lever in the Dragon's Dominion that gives everyone a thousand extra hit points. Running through there should allow the party to buy all spells for two million gold, two levels below a castle. A fellow called the Cuisinart may, if you're lucky, frenzy at your young party. This kills him, and survivors split twenty million experience! Just be sure the chest trap doesn't kill your party and you'll get some grossly powerful items. He's also two squares from a sector border, meaning you can exit and return, and the area resets.

All this makes the disk-swapping gold-doubling trick from MM1--necessary, with the gold-to-experience Fountain of Dragadune By level 80 the party needs 16 million gold per level, and trying the trick just rolls the gold over--16 million being 24 bits. Thus MM2's fountain is worthless. Armor class can roll its byte over pretty easily, too, making that +25 shield worse than useless and that super-magic two-handed weapon a win-win.

Yet for all the stratospheric improvement MM2 allows, I seem to stumble on odd things like simplifying the Sorcerer quest (bring a sorcerer and really good robber and hide from fights.) And it boomerangs just as viciously. Even the least risky of four player-controlled play options forces level 80+ parties into fighting 250 orcs, which is tiresome, or eight cuisinarts, which is lethal. Some monsters are immune to magic weapons, some to non-magic. If both appear in a fight, the party's probably toast. While fixed fights quickly get easy, random fights get too crazy if the party gets too good. Every enemy has special abilities like stealing all your gold, spellcasting gems or food, and some even damage statistics.

This only partially dents MM2's jokes, with Burma-Shave type sign sequences even up to the final confrontation with Sheltem in Square Lake. The most powerful NPC, Mr. Wizard, is guarded by a Queen Beetle (38 experience!) The eccentric Murray allows you to steal his gold or drink his Goofy Juice for a quick level boost--each zaps your statistics, one permanently. Each Castle lord has his own eccentricities--one stores monsters, another stashes items, and the areas below are sillier, with oddballs offering you transport to the next dungeon over, and maps that spell out clues. And if it can be a pain to swap among the five game disks--even with two disk drives--the extra attention to graphics makes for a far cheerier game, with animated cripples or blonde (yellow was RARE on the Apple) sorceresses.

MM2, by the end, breaks many rules except for the main one: BE INTERESTING. Technically, MM3 through 5 are superior. They keep the Might & Magic formula but have intricate plots, and there's no magical overnight improvement. MM2's wild excesses, though, give the series what it needs and vindicate anyone who suffered through MM1. I don't know any Apple II RPG I've replayed more than Might and Magic II. It's always fun to try to solve it quicker than last time. It's that crazy drunk game I can take for a brief fling and not feel guilty junking.

Community review by aschultz (December 05, 2009) Andrew Schultz used to write a lot of reviews and game guides but made the transition to writing games a while back. He still comes back, wiser and more forgiving of design errors, to write about games he loved, or appreciates more, now.