Just sharing. I put 30 hours into M&M I before realizing it's nearly impossible to beat without a walkthrough. So, having put in the hours, I switched to using all the aids I could find to finish the game, tired of the grind after a month of play. It's novel, fun, but horrendous at a certain point when after all those hours I had a party at level 8 which is nowhere near enough to finish the game. So, I resorted to a trainer. ONLY to get to the end, not to cheat the whole game. I was about to quit and figured, why not? It will be fun to see the actual end. Which was kind of silly but I enjoyed finishing it.

Personally, I don't think this game can be beaten without a trainer and maps and etc because the ending is ridiculous. Just my opinion. I'm looking forward to playing Book 2 now.

Many years ago I played the two Xeen games and loved them. I had played 2 but never finished it. Then I got 6 when it came out and that was all. So, now I'm going through the series sequentially. It's going to be fun!

Congratulations on making it through! I finished it without a trainer, but I did use the hintbook a little. I suspect the experience will be different based on how one approaches the game... if you are just trying to complete the main story, only doing the critical quests, your party will not be powerful enough. But if you focus on exploring the whole world of VARN, even when you don't have an explicit reason to, you'll find lots of interesting things and end up with a more powerful party who can handle the end of the game. It was a weird experience for me having so little direction, but once I started exploring and mapping things out for its own sake the game clicked for me. My party didn't really grind for levels much, but just tried to explore everywhere, and I ended up much higher than level 8, maybe level 15 or so? I don't remember exactly. Definitely high enough to get the most powerful spells, which make a huge difference.

Anyway, understandable if all that isn't your cup of tea. Sounds like your experience of the series was similar to mine... I also played the Xeen games first, and then MM6. Then with the GOG release I decided I'd go through in order, but I only played the first two games before I got distracted by other things. I still intend to go back and play MM3 and Xeen again. And maybe I'll even replay MM6 and continue on to its sequels.

MM2 is a lot like MM1, but the outdoor areas are much more open, and there are many ways to make your party absurdly powerful. I liked it but enjoyed the exploration in MM1 a little more. Many players prefer the second game to the first though. I'll be interested to hear what you think!

Yesterday my son and I started MM1. It's hist first experience with PC RPG's from the 80's but he's done all of the Final Fantasy games from the 80's. For me it's a long overdue return to Varn. I played the game when it came out and finished it with level 24-26 characters. It was a game that took well over 30 hours, probably hundreds of hours to complete.

OP, 30 hours is nowhere near enough to finish an old school RPG. 60-80 hours was par for the course for the lighter ones. I know that I missed a TON of quests back in the day, so I hope to complete them on this run-through.

MM1 was one of my all time favourite RPGs of all time. Others were Ultima 4 and Wizardry 7.

MM2 will follow after we complete MM1 (which may take months), I recall some cool time travel in that one. :)

I recently replayed the first Finfal Fantasy game, and it was really interesting to compare it to MM1. They came out close to the same time (at least Final Fantasy did in Japan; it was several years later before it came to the US) and the difference in technology was impressive. Final Fantasy is much more colorful and has full music, compared to the barebones MM1. It was also interesting to see the influences of early computer RPGs on the first Final Fantasy, which is a far cry from the direction the series eventually took.

But, playing MM1 is rewarding in a completely different way. Final Fantasy is cleverly gated such that players are funneled through in a linear fashion, but exploring MM1 is completely open and much more of a challenge in and of itself. The environments and dungeons are bigger adversaries than the enemies sometimes, with sneaky traps that confound mapping attempts and other cool details. I had never played MM1 back when it came out, but was really impressed with it when I finally tried it some years ago (oh man, was it 8 years ago already!?). Especially with what it was able to achieve with such limited technology and graphics. Its locations were so full of character.

I will say I don't think I got my party as high level as you did. There were a few extra-tough challenges that I didn't tackle. Not sure how many hours I spent but I think I finished faster than your estimate. Still enjoyed every minute though. Yes! Although I admit I didn't like MM2 as much as MM1, perhaps partly because MM1 was such a pleasant surprise for me. MM2 felt like more of the same, with a little better presentation, and an overworld that was less interesting to explore. Outdoor areas are mostly fully open, without "walls" like in MM1, but that means locations were less memorable. I never found myself stumbling lost through enchanted forests like I did in MM1. But it was cool to import my party and continue their adventure.

That might be true on your first attempt at the game, but quite a few of them can be beaten in under an hour, sometimes even under 10 minutes. Speedruns of many old school WRPGs (and it really is generally WRPGs, not JRPGs, that are this short when speedrun) are really that fast. The wide-open worlds make it so that, if you know exactly where you need to go and what you need to do, the game can be beaten very quickly. Also, there's the whole issue of what is required and what isn't.

For example:

In MM2, there's a major quest that only provides a piece of information needed to beat the game. If you happen to already know it (for example, you looked it up online, or you already know from a previous playthrough), you can skip that entire quest. Also, choosing your party carefully can also reduce the number of quests you need to do, and there is a feasible way to raise your character's level into the 20s quickly.

The Ultima games can be mostly beaten somewhere on the order of a half hour, due to the lack of need to learn things like the mantras and knowing exactly where things are. Ultima 4 is actually an outlier, taking over 2 hours to speedrun, because of the need to increase your virtues.

Morrowind, despite being a huge game, can be beaten in less than 4 minutes. Even the "all main quests" category takes only around a half hour.

By contrast, the original Final Fantasy takes over 3 hours to speedrun (assuming that arbitrary code execution is not used), and that's if you're lucky. Thing is, you actually have to do most of the tasks in the game, and you need to be a high enough level to defeat the bosses that you encounter. (That's one other notable difference; early WRPGs don't always have final bosses, but JRPGs always (or nearly always; can't think of any counter-examples at the moment) do.) You might also want to try playing the original Dragon Warrior. It is another game where you can see the influence of early WRPGs, and it's actually quite different from most JRPGs. Consider the game's dark dungeons (you need a torch or spell) and the need for keys, as well as the fact that the game is open-world, with your exploration only limited by your ability to survive encounters.

I could also recommend Final Fantasy 2 (Famicom, not SNES) as another interesting game to play; it's somehow both open world and linear. You can reach most of the towns right away, but you can't actually do much there until you progress the story. It also has, shall I say, some bizarre balance properties; for example, heavy armor is worse than useless. (Also, there's the non-traditional "learn by doing" growth system, which is an interesting idea, but maybe not the most well executed.)

There's also the original Phantasy Star on the Sega Master System, which even has first person dungeons. (How come Phantasy Star got them while the SMS version of Ultima 4 did not?)

That's already on my list to play! I intend to play through the early entries in both the Dragon Warrior (aka Dragon Quest) and Final Fantasy series. I should have mentioned that I've played the early Final Fantasy games on release, but only the ones available in the US (we only got 1,4 and 6 before Final Fantasy 7 noramlized the numbering scheme worldwide), and back then I didn't have as extensive a background in other RPGs, especially early Western RPGs. So replaying these with more context will be interesting. I'd dabbled with the original Dragon Warrior back then but never got far, and only ever tried one other game in that series (Dragon Warrior 4). The open world sounds intriguing! Sounds interesting! I've never played the ones that were originally Japanese exclusives, so I look forward to that. I'm also really interested to play the Phantasy Star games. I never had any of the Sega systems but a friend did and I think he rented one of the Phantasy Star games once and we tried it out. It seemed cool, but I otherwise know little about the series. The one we tried was sci-fi, but I think the series as a whole is a mix of fantasy (or at least medieval-level technology) and sci-fi with futuristic technology, depending on which game it is. I hear good things!

Of course, my ambitions to play all these games far outstrip the amount of time I have, so it will take a while before I get to all of them.

Of course, I come up with another couple of early JRPGs to try sometime after making that post.

Final Fantasy Legend 1 (SaGa 1 in Japan) (GB): This particular RPG is interesting because of its unusual growth systems. You have three possible races for characters; Humans, who grow thorough the use of buyable permanent stat boost itmes; Mutants, who may gain stats or abilities at the end of the battle as determined by the RNG; and Monsters, who change form when eating meat that enemies sometimes drop. This game is known for having bugs in the combat system that make it so that having higher stats is not always better; the RNG is also known to be faulty (which has interesting implications when it comes to Mutant stat growth). The game manages to be fun despite (or perhaps because) of these little bugs, and it is actually very short by RPG standards (I remember reading that the game was designed to be playable from start to finish on a single flight between Japan and the US).

Sweet Home (Famicom): This Japan-only RPG could be said to be a predecessor to the survival horror genre. You have 5 characters, who you can split up if desired (and who are permanently dead if killed), an extremely limited inventory (but, unlike in most JRPGs, dropped items stay where you put them), a metroidvania-like structure (as opposed to a linear path), puzzles that need to be solved, and a finite supply of the game's only healing item (which is the only way to heal as there isn't anything like an inn).

You can't have explored much of the game world if your party was only lvl 8.
Some of the puzzles/quests in MM1 can be a bit obtuse, but with normal play (that is, without any grinding) it's the early game that is hardest combatwise, until your party is about lvl 5.
Did you find the Merchant Pass that gives access to the Lords' Castles, and thus to their quests?

A friend of mine had that game, and he liked it a lot. I never played it though. I remember him talking about his monster character who would transform into all sorts of cool creatures. I'll check it out. I've never even heard of this. Is it possible to play it in English? A fan translation patch maybe? Sadly I cannot read (or speak) Japanese.