The Might & Magic series is completely alien to me. I can guess what it's about, of course - fantasy, magic, probably competed with Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest and untold numbers of other RPGs that have far more entries in the series than is sensible, but I've always viewed it as 'cheap', as though it were a store-brand version of those more successful series.
One handheld spinoff, first emerging on the Nintendo DS and then sweeping over to iOS and Android and then consoles and computers, serves as the sole Might & Magic entry on the 1001 list, a puzzle RPG by the name of Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes.
Is this an entry point to the series, or merely an entertaining off-shoot to occupy your hands on a commute?
Fun Times
I don't know where I picked it up, but somewhere along this 1001 journey I bought an HD port of Clash of Heroes for the PC, and it most certainly is a stylish looking HD port of a mobile game, if you can stomach the look that they've gone for.
It's an acquired taste, one I've yet to actually acquire, but there is no mistaking the polish that is on display, especially in the background art, the scenery we'll be running across on this weird, almost board game-like puzzle RPG.
A small group of folks have sworn to guard the big bad thingamajig that the demons want to take hold of, and you are Arwen, a highly regarded young elf and the daughter of one of these guards. Capable and skilled, you're a fit heir to the task of protecting the planet from shit hitting the fan, which is good, because of course shit is about to hit the fan.
On your short journey to meet some other guests at a nearby portal, we're ambushed by demonic forces. They've found us, and presumably the MacGuffin we've been protecting. We'll need to know how to fight them then, I guess, and so on to the meat of Clash of Heroes, the puzzle-based combat.
If you form a horizontal line, your units will be converted into a wall, which will obviously defend you a little against incoming attacks. If an attack slice through your defences, whatever shape they take, and hits your back line, you take damage. The last commander standing wins.
Units can obviously find themselves in the way of an incoming attack and will have to bear the brunt of it. Sometimes they're swept aside and you'll take damage, but other times they'll stand firm and absorb all the damage of an attack and keep you safe.
It means you've lost a bunch of units that were perhaps waiting to launch an attack themselves, but you're still alive to carry on the fight, and that's pretty much the puzzle in a nutshell.
Frustrations
The story so far seems to be as generic as they come, and it's a good job the characters aren't voiced because I can't imagine anyone turning these lines into something worth caring about. The narrator is voiced, though, but she doesn't compel me to care either.
As far as I can see, Clash of Heroes is a game whose story is there to string along the combat, so let's see how the combat evolves to give us a reason to stick around.
If memory serves, a dying elf gives us some bear units, and a runaway pixie gives us some pixies. They swap out with our standard archers and, as you'd expect, come with different forms of attack. The pixies introduced us to spellcasting, where Arwen can launch some magical arrows towards the enemy, but how exactly the pixies did this I don't know.
The bears I understood much better: a line of angry bears packs quite a punch.
The first boss fight I found myself in challenged me to break through a defensive wall before I could even think of damaging opposition units or the boss herself (I think it was a female boss, at least).
To aid me, I had by this point picked up some deer, but these were temporary units that I'd only be able to use for a certain number of fights before I'd had to purchase them from the deer shop or whatever with the gold and other resources I'd picked up on my travels, be it from chests or downed opponents.
They take up two spaces in a line but move a couple of the same colour archers or bears or pixies behind them and they're charged up and ready to... well, charge, I suppose. They work just like regular units, and the sooner you can pluck a unit off the end of one line and into a fighting formation, the better.
You can only move units from the back of a line but can remove units from the middle of a line and the space they occupied gets filled by units behind it. If this forms an attack, I think you get a move back, and can then chain together lots of movements to make the most of your turn.
When all else fails, you can repopulate your half of the grid with units waiting to join the fight and then get right back to the action. But I always felt like I wanted to do more on my turn, as though three moves just wasn't enough.
Further Fun Times
I was going to call time on Clash of Heroes after that first boss fight, but the story just kept coming, a warning horn sounding out across the forest and some druids wanting both my aid in stopping the invaders and providing their services in combat.
I neglected to watch the tutorial to see what they actually do in combat, however, so I'm just assuming we match them up as usual and just see what happens.
Also, the invaders are the Griffin Knights, who we thought were on our side, the bastards. Let's show them we don't take too kindly to that sort of backstabbing.
Further Frustrations
What happens when you neglect to understand how Clash of Heroes actually works is that you're presented with challenges that need to be accomplished in a certain way.
Here, two knights are comically sawing through the middle of this humongous tree, their buddies getting in the way so that we don't stop them in their tracks.
It's combat like any other, except that we have two targets to defeat, and I'm not sure how I actually hit one of them.
Mixing up the combat like this adds nice changes of pace and more pieces of the puzzle to think about, but when you assume combat is as simple as 'match three and away you go', it won't be too long before you find out that it is.
There's much more going on under the hood than you might think, looking at screenshots - and that's if you can work out what's going on in these screenshots in the first place. I'm not sure I can, and it's my gameplay that I took them from.
Again, it's a nice idea to mix up combat, but without knowing just how it all works, a novice may well find themselves in exactly the same predicament as I found myself in.
I knew that forming my units up into attacks would benefit me, and I knew that I only have limited moves with which to arrange my troops, so I figure anything I can form into an attack will be a good choice.
But those attacks take time to spring into action. They may get lost to an incoming attack, but at the start of a turn, when their clock has finished ticking, they'll launch into an attack that has been brewing for a few turns now.
Who walks into the line of fine the turn before my attack automatically launches? The one friendly target I can't even think of touching, lest I get a game over.
Oh well.
Final Word
An hour of an HD port of Clash of Heroes was enough to show me that there are many ways you can make a puzzle RPG, but if the story isn't gripping and the combat more complicated than you see on the surface, then it's really only the dedicated who will get much out of it.
I didn't even think to look at the Nintendo DS original, where its battle screens are obviously split across the two screens of the handheld, and the art takes on a more pixelly look, but the changes aren't drastic enough to throw out my opinions entirely.
Clash of Heroes is a puzzle RPG that will appeal to those who find its puzzle combat appealing and want a story to go along with it, though having said that, I'm sure there are modes where you can just fight and not care one bit about following along with a story...
The art style is personally a little distracting, especially the character art and cutscenes, but the actual game itself comes across nicely, but again I'm basing all of that on an HD port, so take that with a pinch of salt or something.
At the end of the day, I'm not amazed by Clash of Heroes, but I like that it's different from a great many things I've seen before. It's not quite likeable enough to get me to try it again in a hurry, but know I know it's there, at least.
Has it changed my opinion on Might & Magic as a series? Well, I still don't know anywhere near enough to know the answer to that. Clash of Heroes might as well be its own thing in my mind. Something to be aware of, but not to lose sleep about not being able to play.
Fun Facts
The game makes use of five factions from Heroes of Might & Magic V, but this means absolutely nothing to me, I don't know why I've even written it here.
Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes, developed by Capybara Games, first released in 2009.
Version played: PC, 2011.