Hello everyone!
"Spirit of Adventure" is indeed Attic Entertainment's former attempt at 'emulating' (copying and adapting) the Bard's Tale formular for the German market. It does actually some very unique things for its time.
However, I am not sure if I would like to return to it, nowadays. I do possess the original German release for MSDOS. Played it quite a bit back then and replayed and even finished it around 2012/13 - which is already ten years ago, again!
First, the atmosphere is really great, if you either dig or at least can bear the art style. Attic did reused the base of its 3-D perspective engine in the first Realms of Arkania - Blade of Destiny ("Die Nordlandtrilogie: Die Schicksalsklinge" in German). And I love those drawings and event screens.
Almost, if not all of the characters and NPC's visible in these games (both "Spirit of Adventure" and "Realms of Arkania" series) were based on fotos and pictures from popular actors of the time. In "Spirit of Adventure" you will even find characters from Asterix comics, like the druid seer!
It has its own charm to find and identify as many references as possible. Heck, the Attic team included themselves in this game in a specific castle, where the player can purchase the character level upgrades.
Second, the labyrinthian maps can be quite huge (significantly larger than any city or dungeon in "Blade of Destiny"!). The opening town of "Spirit of Adventure" is fantastically realised, with lots of details. My favorite details are the individual street and square names, which help a lot in navigating the city scape. You can also enter almost every building and get a response or reaction depending of the location, type of building and circumstance. There is also a realtime time schedule and day-night-cycle affecting gameplay.
One thing that is very confusing and disorienting in the beginning (until you got accustomed to it) is how building entrances are dealt with:
There is a strange intermediate step before entering! Imagine you are in a single-square column/row street with buildings left and right. You turn 90 degrees to either side in order to face the building front, and now, you move forward to enter the corresponding building. But you have to press it actually twice, since there is a half step in front of the door (a 'door step'). And when you change your mind and want to return backwards, your point of view gets turned around 180 degrees without you noticing first, although you pressed only 'down' for backwards!
(I do not remember anymore, if the game does the automatic turnaround also on actually entering with subsequent leaving of a building.)
Third, "Spirit of Adventure" honors its name by giving the player a huge amount of freedom - another user called it 'freeform gameplay'. This aspect can be both a blessing and a curse: it is great in moments you discover things on your own, but it can get rather frustrating when the player does not know where to go next!
And in hindsight of the later "Realms of Arkania" titles, traveling outside the (relative) save space of the city in "Spirit of Adventure" is dangerous, needs to be planned ahead for, and can get a bit tedious with its need for rations and open pixel-wise traversal of the overland map (visible in one of the screenshots here at GOG.COM).
Why frustrating, you may ask? Because no other significant location on the map is visible or rather indicated on the map until your group either gets knowledge of the location's existence and position on the map or encounter it by chance manually. This includes the one and only place, where you can pay for training and level up your characters - and remember the travel back and forth is really dangerous, as well!
I liked the different skills, which are to a degree randomly distributed in the generation of your characters and can be abused! And you had to find and collect rune symbols around the game world, which then can be combined on a specific place to create the spells - there are many possible combinations. However, you loose the runes upon every combination attempt - successful or not! And some runes are found more frequently, easier even multiple times, while others are super rare. (The original German manual had hints about possible combinations.)
(By the way, can someone please confirm if the manual is included in the game's installation folder? It is not listed in the extras on the game card.)
When it comes to fighting, "Spirit of Adventure" 'emulates' (copies) in principal the system from the Bard's Tale Trilogy, where you choose your actions (or repeats thereof) for every character and then the game scrolls down the list of outcomes and results in a sequential and quite descriptive manner. There is however a distance to enemies and row-system for enemy groups taken into account. (For nowadays rather boring and tedious, and very much like Bard's Tale,
fights can take a very long time per encounter depending on enemy numbers and group composition. Often because you are ill eqipped for certain enemies that can only be hurt by the game's second form of attack type!
Besides physical (& magical) attacks, you also need to be able to do mind damage. Some enemies are vulnerable to either or to a varying degree to both forms. Oh, and your characters absolutely will need defense against mind attacks of the enemies, too! (Keep that in mind in character generation and resulting starting skills!)
As you can see, I did played "Spirit of Adventure" quite a lot. And me and other forum users in Crystal's DSA Foren (a German forum focused on the DSA - "Das Schwarze Auge" (roleplaying) computer games including the "Realms of Arkania" series with subsections for other games such as "Spirit of Adventure") had the opportunity to discuss the game and its quirks with one of its developers, Guido Henkel! A nice read, but in German.
Maybe, I am able to find my handmade maps for the game and might add the link to the aforementioned Crystal's DSA Forum.
Kind regards,
foxgog
