We’ve covered both Might and Magic 6: The Mandate of Heaven, and Might and Magic 7: For Blood and Honour already, so why not time travel once again and conclude the unofficial trilogy with Day of the Destroyer. Get this; we’re not going into 1998 again like with The Mandate of Heaven (my personal favourite, by the way) or even 1999 again, the year of vast technological inventions and also the release of For Blood and Honour. No, this time we’re going even further back into the not-so-distant future, comparatively speaking. This time it’s the year 2000. Whoah. What happened in this mystical year?
Y2K obviously never happened as it’s not really a big deal for 90% of computers if they can’t count past 1999 and the ones that could cause any issues were pretty easily worked around, a bunch of reports about unexplained falling sky ice in parts of Spain began to crop up, a weirdly high amount of famous plane crashes occurred such as Kenya Airways Flight 431 and Air Philippines Flight 541, George W. Bush Junior is elected as the 43rd President of the United States, the UN designated the year as the ‘International Year For The Culture of Peace’ which was a very short lived pipe dream given some specific events the following year, torrential flooding of the Mozambique lead to widespread chaos across Africa and the unfortunate deaths of about 800 people, the Human Genome Project finished a very early draft of potential DNA sequencing, the ancient Kadisoka temple is discovered in Indonesia and thought to be of Hindu origins, the perennial Nokia 3310 cellphone is released, Faith Hill’s pop-country ballad ‘Breathe’ dominated the number one spot on the Billboards for weeks while the angelic tour-de-force of Sisqo’s ‘Thong Song’ only placed at 14 in some real robbery, the Summer Olympics are held in Sydney to much international attention and success, and true Hollywood cinema entirely peaked with the release of the Jim Carrey led How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
It’s all been downhill from there.
But, just like the last two articles in this Might and Magic review series, none of that matters as the year 2000 is when Might and Magic 8: Day of the Destroyer was released to some pretty mediocre sighs, the first critical eh the series had really received. This first poor reception for the series would unfortunately continue after this game with the next two games.
It had some sick magazine ads, at least. Also spoils that you can recruit Dragons, which I also just spoiled.
The most common complaint it faced was in regards to its now dated game engine, considering it hadn’t received any real changes since Mandate of Heaven, especially graphically speaking. You have to consider the games competition from the year; 2000 saw the release of the entirely 3D powerhouse PC games such as the second Thief game, Soldier of Fortune, Counter-Strike, and everyone’s much remembered and favourite action game, Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K 2. It had some pretty significant competition in the graphical department, and its charming digitized 2D sprites on some pretty rough 3D environment assets weren’t going to cut it anymore for the majority of the PC gaming base. Other than that, the gameplay itself was getting called out for it’s failure to keep up with contemporaries, but mainly the Infinity Engine games which were all the rage at the time with particular comparisons done with PlaneScape: Torment which released between this and the previous For Blood and Honour.
One standout review, really encapsulating the general consensus, was from NextGen’s Kevin Rice who really minced no words here;
Them’s definitely fightin’ words.
Do I agree with this general consensus? We’ll get into that of course, but I got to say that I don’t quite understand the frequent comparisons to Baldur’s Gate or PlaneScape the game was facing. They’re all PC RPG’s of course, but also entirely different types of games within that genre. I don’t agree with comparing an isometric CRPG with a first-person dungeon crawling ‘blobber’, essentially; they’re not really comparable to me as they’re an entirely different gameplay experience.
Before we really get into my personal review score, let’s go over what the game is, what it changes and loses from the previous games in its unofficial trilogy.
The game follows For Blood and Honour very closely in the gameplay department, but does change up some pretty important and fundamental aspects. The most important changes are the alterations to the party and character class systems. Previously, Might and Magic 6 and 7 had you create up to four characters to make up your adventuring party of psychopathic murder hobos right from the beginning. In Day of the Destroyer, this has been changed for the first time in the series’ history.
This time around, you make only a single character to begin with as your main character who will never leave, and you have a max party size of five now. Starting out entirely solo, you have to find other adventurers to recruit on your wandering journey. They’re not hard to find, as every major town has an Adventurers Inn building that will fill with characters sporadically popping up over time, and the very first lizardman (**** yeah) island you start in has two lower level characters available right away. It never costs you anything, which is nice if maybe a little unrealistic considering every adventurer is obviously a mercenary sociopath at heart. There’s a few scattered around the various dungeons in the world as well who will spring themselves on you as soon as you enter, like vulture salesmen in an open air market. You can also find others to recruit from their houses in various towns of higher level, who will look down upon you and make fun of you if you’re not high enough level to recruit them yet; I love the Might and Magic sense of humour.
‘Thorne Understone’? More like ‘Thorne Under-****-You-Stone’.
You can hire characters, and also dismiss them as well if you want to replace anyone for a later weirdo. Any dismissed character will go to the closest Adventurer's Inn, ready to be hired again should you choose to at a later date for whatever reason. This is a fairly divisive change amongst the series community, but I personally don’t really have anything against it. I like the real old-school vibe it brings, capturing and playing out the energy of an old TTRPG campaign when the player characters would just bump into each other then immediately start slaying things together. I can see the complaints, though, as it does remove a formerly integral aspect of the series with its party building; you have less control this time around given that you have to rely on only pregenerated characters outside of your main one.
And so begins the saga of the Dark Elf Coolest Toni. Why’s she so cool? She has a cool little tiara thing.
The other change that Day of the Destroyer makes to the character system is also a negative one.
Gone are the majority of previous character classes, with only the Knight, Cleric and Sorcerer (name changed to Necromancer this time around) returning. Instead, the rest of the ‘classes’ are actually just races, generally replacing roles that the older classes held; you have Vampires, Trolls, Minotaurs, Dark Elves, and Dragons. You don’t make, say, an Archer in Might and Magic 8. Instead, you make a Dark Elf, who have roughly the same skills and vibe as the Archer. It’s not really a very interesting system to me, as it doesn’t really make for much excitement and downgrades the previously great separate class and race system from 7. It sucks that you can’t make any of the three returning classes any race other than human as well, as the race options are locked to their ‘classes’.
Definitely points subtracted here; it’s a pure downgrade from the previous entries again perfect system. There are a few fun things added in with these race classes, such as Vampires being able to turn into mist form to avoid all damage at master skill level, and it is still somewhat interesting to have a Minotaur hanging out with your Dark Elf, but it’s just strange why these couldn’t have just been a separate race choice without also being tied to classes. I also can’t deny that I miss the funner and more niche classes from 7 like the Monk and Thief, or Druids; the game kind of just has a lack of fun character wise, other than the Dragons. Have I mentioned there's Dragons?
How it started, having to slowly kite like ten pirates.
Hours later, slaughtering an entire ogre tower with a dragon and a lich. These games are great, man.
With almost everything else, the game so closely follows 7 that you could easily mistake it for an expansion. You crawl through dungeons, get that sweet loot, build your spellcasters into nigh omnipotent reality destroyers, and go through the usual storyline. This time around, a series of environmental disasters have struck the people of Jadame and its various cities after a hooded wizard showed up, and now there's some portals to elemental planes around. I have no idea what really goes on in this game’s narrative, to be perfectly honest, as it feels much more tied into previous entries and the spin-off Heroes of Might and Magic series this time around. I does still keep the customary mixing of sci-fi and fantasy that the series was known for in some decently exciting ways near the end of the game I won't spoil.
They also removed something fairly small, but something that took a bit of soul out of the whole experience; the hirelings. You can no longer wander into a town, talk to some peasants with some randomly generated titles and bonuses and have them follow you around for a cut of your treasure. It just takes out some of the je nais se quois. Something relatively minor, but I felt the difference. The cities this time around feel that much more lifeless, partly because every wandering peasant is simply ‘[Insert Race] Peasant’ and it combines with the much smaller overall scale of everything to make them feel kind of lame, honestly.
Only in the Might and Magic series is it acceptable to walk into dank caves and drink odd coloured liquids found in barrels to get stat buffs.
In Might and Magic 7, you got to choose to either become a good party and hang out with angels, or evil and hang out with vampire ladies and liches. This sort of story decision mechanic kinda returns in 8, but it's a little different. A little bit into the storyline, you have to form an alliance with some of the factions in Jadame. There are five, and you can secure deals through doing specific quests for them before the game decides that's enough and you move on to the next part of the story. One of the factions, the minotaurs, is entirely neutral and you just gotta kill a lot of invading mermen for them. The other four however are two pairs of opposing factions, and so you must choose between them.
I mean, Dragons; Dragons. Why would you not side with the Dragons.
There are the Dragon Hunters opposed by, well, the Dragons and there are the Necromancers opposed by the hippy Priests of the Light. They will have you do quests for them against the other faction, and to get them into the alliance you will generally have to actively combat the opposed one. I appreciate how it's not quite a simple binary choice of will you be evil or good now? like in 7, but it's a downgrade in every other way unfortunately. They have no effect on gameplay at all save for giving you a recruitable companion that's not even really exclusive to them; you can still weirdly get a Dragon for example even if you kill all the dragons, you'll just get an extra Dragon if you side with them. The gameplay effect is so non-existent that it doesn't even really affect the town or even the quest opportunities of the faction you’re currently ****ing with. I had a quest to kill every Dragon Hunter in Garrote Gorge (sick region name by the way) given to me by a Dragon obviously, and after killing every single soul in the town, every guard, mercenary and crusader, I could still walk into the inn and use it no problem. I could still even talk to their leader in his castle about doing his quest to join my alliance after I literally killed every guard directly outside of his door. The Necromancers and the Sun Hippies are the exact same deal; I sided with the Sun Priests, and was still able to turn my Necromancer into a Lich as the town itself was entirely unaffected. Until you complete and turn in the quest to officially have one side join the alliance, the other side is still perfectly game to work with you. It's all rather strange, and just shows how rushed this game was to me.
****. Yeah. Dragons.
The overall level designs and dungeons this time around are more exciting I think than 7’s kind of lackluster offerings, and more in line with 6’s benchmarks. There’s some great variety and more exciting murder venues this time around; you get to travel to some different elemental planes of existence and battle said elementals, raid a tomb of gogs, choke point some tritons in an underground flooded minotaur city that also sees you have to work some switches to unflood it, slay some oddly dilophosaurus-esque looking basilisks in a hippy forest, slaughter some disgusting wererats in a smuggler cave, and declare open war on an enemy nation composed entirely of pirates at the halfway mark of the story.
The towns definitely have less soul this time around, but at least they still have that charming look to them.
The maps are once again smaller than Mandate of Heaven’s, but it is still an improvement over 7’s again disappointing environments. There’s about the same amount of general quests and dungeons to clear out as in 7, but even less storyline quests to go through. The game is really, really short if you just want to go through the main content, to I would say a detrimental level.
Oh, and the best game-in-a-game also returns, thank the New World Computing gods. Mother****ing Arcomage, hell yeah.
I really don’t like card games in real life, but Arcomage? **** yeah. And so I once again lost more hours of my time this playthrough.
Luckily the fantastic skill system has been kept intact. The same skills return, minus some of the class specific ones from 7 such as Unarmed and Dodging and luckily Stealing, and the system works the exact same. There are some new additions, but only tied to some of the fancy races as previously mentioned; ‘Dark Elf’ is a skill only Dark Elves have, tied to the same levels of Expert, Master and Grandmaster. This is where their silly nonsense comes from; by being a Master level Vampire for example, you can turn into a mist form that makes you entirely invulnerable but also unable to attack for a few seconds. It’s an interesting idea to tie the racial bonuses to skills to make it fit into the format of the game.
I mean it makes sense that this is the elemental Plane of Air, but I think there’s a very obvious reason the developers decided to make it just some floating buildings and an open skybox.
The classes are also atrociously unbalanced. The series never had perfect balance mind you, as there's always been some very exploitable things you can pull, but this time it's much easier and doesn't really require system knowledge like it did prior. The Dragon's are fittingly entirely overpowered (rightfully so), and coupled with them being potentially recruitable very quickly even if you don't quite know what you're doing makes them very silly. You can get one quite easily, and there is another you can get almost right after if you know where to look. Even just one Dragon almost trivializes the game's difficulty, honestly.
I have no idea what this means storywise, but I do know it looks ****ing sick.
Vampires too are the next busted class, as what they get in comparison to some of the others is absurd. They can become Master rank in Body, Spirit and Mind spells which is great, still have Grandmaster dagger and Master rank Sword which is an insane combination for martial fighting damage, and with one of their racial spells they can cast lifesteal on their weapons meaning they will literally never die (again). Trolls? They get…regenerating health of an eh amount after becoming Grandmasters in the Regeneration skill? Not really very comparable.
Day of the Destroyer is a real mixed bag, just teetering slightly more on the side of ‘disappointing’. It still has that fundamental mix of fantasy adventure and dungeon crawling with the simple but effective mechanics that makes these early 3D Might and Magic games so captivating, but the series, and engine, was definitely showing its age. The majority of the issues I think can be explained with obvious reasoning; the game was rushed. 3DO wasn’t doing so hot by 2000, and New World Computing with it.
Sometimes, you just have to fly over Naga armies and reign Meteor Showers and indiscriminately annihilate entire family lines. Just me?
They were really trying to hammer out Might and Magic games considering they often did very well commercially. There was only a year between this and the previous game, and even back in those days when a PC RPG selling 200,000 copies was a monumental achievement, that was still a measly amount of dev time. Considering New World Computing were also developing a bunch of expansions to Heroes of Might and Magic 3 at the same time as this, not to mention having just developed For Blood and Honour, and also were working on the Counter-Strike rip-off Legends of Might and Magic, it makes sense why this was a tired feeling release, complete with more than a few reused sprites and far less love and effort put in.
This guy walks into your town, with his dozens of empty bottles as I had yet to actually start making potions, and starts casting Armageddon and Meteor Shower. What do you do?
It’s also prone to some glitches and inconsistent and unclear quest progression. I encountered a few quests where the journal description was just incorrect, or something wasn’t very well explained. One quest, the Dark Elf promotion, sees you have to find people who have been turned into stone by basilisks and turn specifically one of them back into not-stone. You get some scrolls of ‘stone-to-flesh’ by a guy in town, but they don’t work at all like you think they would and it took me a bit to figure it out as it's not consistent to how you'd use a scroll in any other circumstance. Also, stone-to-flesh is also an Earth magic spell, but it does not work at all if you cast it as a spell; you have to use only the specific scrolls given to you. There’s even a few progress locking issues I luckily never encountered, but had read about pretty frequently.
Pirate Wizards are ****ing adorable. Look at their little peg legs! They got a little staff!
One last thing I have to mention here. Might and Magic 8: Day of the Destroyer did bring us one monumental achievement, indirectly and many years later; the basis of the Might and Magic merge mod. I mentioned this in the Mandate of Heaven review, but I think it deserves another mention here at the end of the trilogy. This mod fully recreates 6 and 7 in 8’s engine, letting you play across all three games within one unified game, with some of the improvements that 8 has brought. It’s a lot of fun, especially as a fan of all these three games. You can power across the areas of 6 with a party of five characters like in 8 (but this time you can actually create them), mix and match many of the classes across either three games, finally be a Vampire Knight or have a Dragon right from the beginning, and through as minimal of a way as the mod creators could make it, can freely travel between the three games with the same party as one long adventure. I highly recommend it, but only after you’ve played through 6 and 7 first as the mod does absolutely alter the game. I would say play vanilla 8 first, but I feel like you can just not do that pretty safely; the merge mod to me entirely fixes the various shortcomings of Day of the Destroyer and replaces the original version as the definitive way to play it.
Overall, I would really only recommend this game if you’re a fan like I am. To answer the question from way back in the beginning; while I think contemporary reviewers were being a little silly constantly comparing this to the Infinity Engine games, I more or less agree with the common consensus they came to; this game is tired, and the cracks are showing. It’s not so bad that you can’t get enjoyment from it, but compared to the glory of Mandate of Heaven and the still great enough For Blood and Honour, it’s a few substantial quality notches below. The classes are far less interesting save for the Dragons who just entirely break the game, the game’s world feels a more lifeless and empty, and the whole thing has a vibe of ‘I was squeezed out very quickly!’. It's glitchy, feels a little half-baked particularly with the alliance thing in the storyline, and the much shorter length of said storyline and less consistent quality of the lesser content makes it hard to all square together.
But, it has Dragons, so I mean…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: two identical Dark Elves, a Dragon, a Lich and a very out of place Cleric walk into a bar…
Despite the lukewarm at best critical reception, this game was not the end of the mainline Might and Magic franchise. There in fact was another game that came out two years after this one which implies that maybe they actually learned to not pump out 3+ games per year. Might and Magic 9 (it doesn't even have a subtitle) was the first mainline game to finally fully go 3D with the LithTech engine, so they also clearly were listening to criticism of the ancient framework of these games. Was it any good? Well, I’ve never personally played it, but I have heard horrid things and critically it did just about the same as Day of the Destroyer (also, I already foreshadowed that fact earlier). Why do I bring this up, as if maybe an article on it will come?
Until next time.
Pros
- + Five-man parties brings a little more wiggle room in your party compositions.
- + Some great dungeon aesthetics and environmental variety.
- + There's Dragons.
Cons
- - Class changes took a lot of the previous party making fun out of the game.
- - Greatly imbalanced classes.
- - Rushed feeling content and a very short main story runtime.
- - Prone to bugs, and unclear quest directions.
6
out of 10
Overall
Might and Magic 8: Day of the Destroyer is still a decent enough dungeon crawling blobber, but pales in comparison to the prior entries in the series. It's decently fun dungeons and nice environmental variety can't make up for it's rushed and blaise vibe, or the lack of fun the game brings to the character classes (outside of Dragons being insanely broken).
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