Game 22: Mortal Glory 2

There doesn't seem to be much of a story involved so I have no compunctions about playing Mortal Glory 2 without having tried the original Mortal Glory - from screenshots they could easily be mistaken for each other so I get the sense that MG2 is more or less the same game but (I assume) has more content and improvements. I originally picked this up for the Switch on a whim but I found that I was enjoying it enough to be frustrated that I was trying to play it on a controller when it felt like a mouse was the intended interface, so I have re-bought it on PC and will be playing it for the blog. In this game you control a leader who can buy some additional companions and equipment to try to survive a series of tactical battles against similar groups to ultimately make it to the end of a run. If you either lose a boss battle or lose two regular battles then you have lost the run and must start over with a new leader.

Our adventure begins with a Minotaur named 'Mutha' who has dreams of beating everyone else to a pulp, forming the Bruisers of Obliteration 'team'. Which is currently a 'team' of one.

You can re-roll stats at the start here so I did that until Mutha was irresponsibly strong and unspeakably stupid.

This is one bad Mutha

The battle interface is basic and serviceable - you fight arena battles against opposing characters who so far as I can tell are build from the same character / skill / equipment options that you have access to.

The first battle is 1v1 and, being the first battle, it's easy.

I immediately have a problem with Mutha and no, it's not that she can't count, it's that she only has 1 agility which leads her to have just one action point per turn and can't move far at all. In this first battle that turns out not to be a problem as the enemy used a tentacle-skill to pull me in close to them, doing damage. Right next to Mutha the Minotaur is the wrong place to be, and the fight ended shortly thereafter.

Between battles you get to advance up this scenario map with battles, events, and shops.

At the first shop I have a decent amount of gold and the characters that I can buy there (you purchase your additional party members beyond your leader) are on a 35% discount. That sounds like a good deal to me so I sell everything I've got - including some of Mutha's early equipment - to be able to afford two of them and have a 3-man party right off the bat. Say hello to Mutha, Skruuk and Thombi.

Actually a 1-Minotaur, 1-Tengu, 1-Gnome party.

Fortunately Mutha's starting equipment included 'Bouncy shoes' which gives her the ability to leap three spaces (on a cooldown) without ending her turn, so once the enemy wanders close enough she can jump / minotaur charge / beat someone up despite her otherwise glacial movement. Without those mobility skills she'd be dead meat to any wizard / archer that stands off and hits her with ranged attacks, but with them she's real solid in a fight.

That's a very good thing because my discount companions... not so much. Skruuk doesn't do much damage and has a heal that doesn't heal much, and Thombi doesn't hit much harder but rarely survives a battle, at 12 HP he's extremely fragile. Good thing for him you automatically heal / revive after a battle - I can just imagine Mutha: 'Damnit, Skrunk, pick up the Gnome. Again.'

Give the man your blood Skruuk, we need the money.

There are two things that drew me into this game, and one of them is the combat system. The arenas themselves are littered with obstacles and sometimes barrels filled with various substances, a lot of skills can create terrain effects such as acid clouds or fire, and there's a knockback mechanic where you can push characters around. Mutha singlehandedly wrecked the enemy here by leaping in front of a pair of them and pummeling the poor Elf in front, knocking them repeatedly into the Tengu behind them. This left the Elf dead and the Tengu nearly so.

Using an enemy as your weapon is one of the great joys in life.

For that battle the already-powerful Mutha gets an amazing weapon. Now she's really tear things up.

Prepare to be clubbed to Death

Now, unfortunately for the Discount Duo I find that the game rewards XP based on how much each party member contributes to the battle. That's not ideal when Mutha is dishing out serious pain while Skruuk is plinking away and Thombi is dead, again.

Mutha hits level 4 while Thombi views level 2 as an aspiration.

As we advance the battles are going to get harder and I don't think Mutha can do this alone, I need the others to start contributing more but that's made more difficult when they can't level up! Or maybe we'll just ditch them at some point - looks like you can hire higher-level characters at the shop.

If you're rolling in gold, that is. Osaki is not within reach of my wallet... but that devil girl on the other hand...

Izenia, welcome to the party! She brings some ranged magic attacks to the fight and rounds out the group.

A Minotaur, a Tengu, a Gnome and a Fiendling walk into a bar...

As soon as Izenia joins up we have to face the first boss, a floating monstrosity that bleeds clouds of acid, Gorloth.

You know what'd be great against something with big eyes and no hands? Pocket-sand.

I made a minor mistake by killing the boss' companion which let it heal almost to full by eating their friend's corpse (dude!), but Mutha just beat it down a second time and we're on to the second map. Some of the shops don't sell additional characters, they sell potions that can increase your stats as well as the usual assortment of equipment and skill books.

With enough gold you could easily rule the world.

The second thing that drew me into this game was the customization of your party. You can change party members, as well as their skill set and equipment - and the equipment are not just a set of stats. The gladius in the above shop is an excellent find - it grants 36 HP and a Crippling Throw skill that hobbles the enemy, and thus gives Thombi both much-needed durability and a better function in battle - he can use the skill to target an enemy and slow them down enough to try to keep them out of the fight while Mutha is wrecking shop. Characters don't have pre-set classes and I don't think there's any equipment or skill restrictions on anything, so what you make of your characters is entirely up to you and the skill books / equipment you obtain. If you're party is strong enough you can reap additional rewards by activating optional challenges for a battle. These challenges are varied and their level of added difficulty has a wide range - I've seen 'Enemies get smarter' which didn't do anything I could discern, and I've seen 'Enemies get two additional party members' which is a huge difficulty spike that I declined to attempt.

The enemy getting a randomly cloned unit is perfectly fine as long as it's not Mutha, so we'll do this one.

Goddamn it!

Here's how the Bruisers of Obliteration are shaping up at this point, midway through Map number 2:

Everyone's finally got a full set of skills and equipment.

Mutha is still doing what she does best and Bruising / Obliterating the enemy with straightforward charges and melee attacks - we've improved her by adding some agility so she now has 3 AP every turn. AP is important because it's your movement AND your attack, so at 1 AP she could only move 1 space OR attack which was very limiting - at 3 plus her movement skills she's mobile enough so I've been pumping her vitality up because if she drops (Which did happen once) we'll have trouble finishing off the opposition. Also she randomly became 'enlightened' from an event which gave her a lot of extra magic points despite still being dumber than a rock so I might swap out one of her skills for something that costs MP.

Skruuk is wearing a lot of MP-adding items and I've loaded him up with healing skills, he's currently acting as the party's cleric. He's doing.... all right with it, we haven't lost a battle yet but he alone can't keep up with the damage the enemy can dish out. Thombi has improved quite a bit and now has some good survivability / utility on the battlefield, he can swap places with an enemy and then cripple them and take a melee or short-ranged foe out of the battle for a couple turns, as well as having a couple AOE damage abilities that can cause bleeding so he can help soften up an enemy group. Finally Izenia is a ranged damage dealer, she has a spell that will do 20% of the target's HP in damage to help with killing bosses and a tome that regenerates her MP every turn - by default in this game there's no MP regeneration, you go into battle with what you have and you don't get any more as it gets used up so you really have to think about your ability MP costs for a fight. So far it's all working well enough but I'm really afraid that if Mutha goes down early or catches a bad status effect we could lose, this group is very reliant on her for doing the damage needed to win. There's a couple places in Mortal Glory 2 where I think the user interface could be improved somewhat. The first is in the way it does movement - instead of popping up an area you can click on to move a character to that place, you instead click on arrows on the lower right to move the character one space in that direction each time. This is perplexing because targeting a character or area of effect skill works as you would expect - you simply click on the target or space you want to hit. This has resulted in a couple of mistakes on my part because due to equipment swaps the number of spaces a character can move continually changes, and Skruuk is currently ambling around with 2 action points and I keep forgetting he has to stop after moving 1 space if I want to use an ability. Instead I inadvertently use both of them on movement and that's the end of his turn. The other is that the enemy / ally indicator circles just don't feel visible enough, at first I was confused about which units were my party and it took me a second to even notice them. I would prefer if the health bars were different colors or something to that effect.

The red circles blend in with all the blood or hide behind objects. Also the numpad does not trigger the movement arrows.

This pit in the arena is wonderful, shortly after this was taken Mutha moved up and used a tentacle pull skill to tug the enemy healer right down into the pit. Of course the enemies can do that right back, and in the next battle with a pit it was Mutha who ended up in the pit. Thankfully Thombi and Izenia now put out enough damage that they were able to wrap things up. Skruuk though... Skruuk just isn't working out. In the shop prior to the boss I have the opportunity to hire other characters, and it's time to say goodbye to our aspirational Tengu friend.

Skruuk is forcibly retired and he can pay me for the privilege.

Skruuk is being forced out to make room for the newest member of the Bruisers of Obliteration: Heisoa the Undine.

She's expensive but I've been raking in the gold on this map.

Already coming in at three levels higher than my best character, she's clearly going to help more than Skruuk ever could. She's the total package - she can actually dish out more damage in melee than Mutha (though is slightly less tough), good movement, an area heal and the ability to clear terrain effects she moves through (most of which are bad). She'll be right up on the front lines with Mutha. Thombi now has a neat trick where he can hit an enemy with a small attack and continue his turn, and the poison inflicted lets him do double damage with his main attack. Izenia picked up a Giant's heart that limits the total amount of damage she can take from any attack to 33% of her maximum HP, so I actually removed all her items that increased HP to intentionally make it low and she's got a book that regenerates 14 HP per turn, with the max damage from any attack being 11 HP. As long as she doesn't get ganged up on she should be pretty survivable with that setup, though I had to give up MP regeneration for it. Not to be outdone, Mutha found a club that lets her use some of that big MP supply to cast 'Mirror Image' which makes three 1-HP copies of her - they die easy but if they don't get killed they hit pretty hard, they just don't have Mutha's equipment. The next boss is Thunk, an armor golem.

Less HP than I'd expect from an 'Armor Golem', but it hits hard.

Thunk is the leader of the... uh.... 'Lovers of Indulgence'. I'm not quite sure what indulgences the Armor Golem is into, but you do you. I guess his indulgence is pounding Gnomes because he kills Thombi in two hits. Izenia thankfully cracks Thunk just afterward with spells while Mutha and Heisoa beat up his two helpers, and we're on to the final map! I got a bookie event where I was allowed to bet gold on my own team to win the next fight. Unfortunately I think the event is bugged - having confidence in my team I bet the full amount, and the bookie went and paid for an additional enemy to be added to the enemy team. That's fine, but then after I still won the fight I didn't get the money.

I like the event but if I ever see this bookie again he's not making it out alive.

Happily the developer (this appears to be a solo-dev project - nice job man!) has a feedback / bug reporting form linked right from the main menu so I reported it. Update: The developer took the time to respond to me personally on Redbeak's discord and he clarified that the event is not bugged, but it's not necessarily intended to give you gold - instead it adds to the total value of the loot you get from the battle. I very much appreciate the response and it shows that the dev takes care of their games, but if a bookie walks up to Mutha and explains that her winnings consist of a fancy hat and less money than she gave the bookie, that bookie isn't walking away. Or maybe they can, given that Mutha's wisdom is still 1. One of the final stage battles is absolutely wild and it's a great example of why this is fun. It starts off as a 4v4 - most enemy groups are now fully equipped parties of four like mine, but I've been doing well so I accepted a challenge of having one of my units cloned as an enemy.

Yes it cloned Mutha. Again.

One of the enemies has an item that spawns an additional ten barrels into the arena, and another has some chaos hurricane power that blows everything in random directions. This quickly turns the arena into a burning, smoke-filled catastrophe with tornadoes added just for fun. Mutha and Heisoa run up the left side and kill the enemy Fiendling. One of the other enemies teleports next to Thombi and smacks him, but Thombi takes the hit and responds with his dagger / poison strike combo and drops the teleporter right away. Izenia moves up to hit the enemy Illithid and almost kills him, but the Evil Mutha and Undine pair rush in and bludgeon poor Izenia to death - her giant heart / low HP thing still leaves her vulnerable to getting ganged up on. The battle is now 3v3.

I like how the spectators change as you progress, we have a king watching the fights now.

I assumed that the fire would finish off the Illithid but I'm wrong - he heals and sticks around so Heisoa has to finish him off. The other two go after Thombi who throws shards that cause bleeding just before succumbing to the flames. Mutha charges after the enemy and is trading blows with the Undine when Evil Mutha uses their mirror image spell, creating three additional Evil Mutha illusions, and all of a sudden it's cows, cows everywhere. After Mutha takes a beating from her clones Heisoa appears to help and swipes the illusions away with a whirlwind melee attack. Mutha, enraged, summons her own mirror images.

Total Cows in this battle: 9

It ends with three illusions of Mutha beating Evil Mutha to death in the corner.

Such is our Mortal Glory. Oh hey, I just noticed that you can tell what the shops are going to sell by the little sub-icons that appear on them on the map.

The lower shop here sells characters, and I'm pretty loaded.

Thombi has been doing better but still isn't amazing, and I've found a really nice summoning skill along with other gear that would make for a good summoner... I'll head here and see if I can find someone to use it. Unfortunately there's not a magic-oriented character in the bunch.

I could replace Mutha with Wangus here but that just feels wrong, it's her story!

After being briefly tempted to just stick Thombi in a summoner's dress and roll with it, I note that there's one last chance to get a character right before the final boss. We forge onward as we are. Before I reach that final shop I find two pieces of equipment that gives Thombi an entirely different role - a Ghost Root automatically gives him 'sneaking' at the start of each turn so he can't be targeted directly if he doesn't attack, and a Telekinetic Cowl knocks back adjacent figures five spaces at the end of his turn. With this combination he can wander around impervious to direct attacks and blow enemies every which way. Thombi's been with us since the beginning and I'd hate to just ditch him on the eve of the final battle, so he stays and we buy out the shop of all its stat improvement potions instead.

Thombi bravely sneaks forward and hopes an enemy is unwary enough to move close to the pit.

The day is at hand. We have reached the final battle.

Mutha is just happy to be here.

As the hour of battle arrives the crowd gathers. Bookies take bets and excited murmurs run through the throng - this promises to be a hell of a match. The anticipation of the announcer is palpable as his magically-enhanced In this corner, make some noise for our challengers, the Bruisers of Obliteration! Don't be fooled by that lithe frame folks - the blue beauty entering now is Heisoa, but every time this announcer sees her walking out she's covered in red. Just behind her you might catch a glimpse of the Master of Toxins and Wind, Thombi! Was he really there just now? Who can tell? But striding into the arena there's no mistaking the magnificent magician Izenia - I'd keep those cheers coming because her magic can reach the cheap seats and she's got plenty to spare! And finally, their leader -The brutal bull-headed bitch Muthaaaaaaa! This team is undefeated folks, but have they finally met their match? Give it up for our reigning champions, the Tribunal of Despair!!!

How about a little more sportsmanship my dude?

Boasting strength so unbelievable we have to replace his club after every match, it's the Prince of Pummeling, Threeeeeze!

You know him, you love it - the walking beard carrying a huge knife almost as big as he is, the Dwarven Devastator Daaaalwiiiin!

One he was the Grand Wizard's failed experiment, but today he's here for your entertainment! The Sorcerer in Shadow - Shinjuuuuuu! But towering over them all, I dare not speak his true name for fear of my soul, the High Demon known only to us as..... The Emperor! I've seen him shrug off blows that would kill ten strong men! Can Mutha really stand up to this fiend from the depths? We're about to find out, because This. Battle. Starts. Now!

I'm pretty sure this Demon boss was a spectator earlier, scoping out my strats.

The Champs go with their tried and true play, summoning flies and snakes to soften up the newcomers, but the Obliterators are having none of it! Izenia streaks across the arena - that girl can RUN - her fingers are crackling and what a shot! Dalwin takes it right to the beard! She must have pissed him right off because he tries to chase her down, she's ducked behind a pillar and Dalwin's axe cleaves a burning oil barrel in two, they're both engulfed in flames!

You can almost smell the beard.

What the hell... what IS that? By the Gods it's Mutha but I've never seen her move that fast! That glow on her neck - she's got a damn Time Amulet, where the hell did the Obliterators find one of those? Dalwin better watch OOOOOHH HE NEVER SAW IT COMING! Mutha's got Dalwin and she's swinging him by the hair into Jinsu! Jinsu hadn't even uttered his first spell and now there's a very angry Minotaur trying shove a dead dwarf down his throat! I can see Emperor - he's sneering at his teammates! You know how the Emperor feels about incompetence, and if Jinsu survives this he'll probably wish he hadn't! The High Demon just strides past the mayhem, what's he doi- Oh! He found Thombi! The Emperor just picks up and slams the sneaky little Gnome against a pillar - Thombi's on the ground! One good stomp from the Demon and it'll be over for him - but Emperor screams as Heisoa slashes him in the back! Thombi's scrambling away and Emperor turns to find a whole swarm of Heisoas coming after him! Izenia's just walking out of that inferno wreathed in flame, and I think those flames are actually healing her somehow, they're burning away her wounds! The champions on are on the ropes here folks! Emperor summons a minor demon to even the odds but Mutha's already crushed Shinju and she's charged over to help the Heisoas corner the big guy. Emperor shrugs off multiple hits but they're starting to add up. Threeze is going after Izenia with that club but he's limping - Thombi slashed his leg with a thrown cutting disc and Izenia's planted her feet, she's calling down arcane hell, I can't even see through the smoke!

Hope you didn't bet on the Champions because those odds are getting pretty long.

It's clearing up - Theeze and the minor demon are down! The Emperor's alone! Obliterators have dropped everyone else, and they're all still up Our newcomers have really proved themselves today, Emperor is gonna need to... are you SEEING this?! I can't believe what I'm seeing! The High Demon, the Champion, Emperor is... running for his life!

Go ahead. You'll only die tired.

The Bruisers aren't giving him a moment to rest, Mutha and Heisoa are darting in to strike, there's a bolt from Izenia, Emperor looks woozy and runs around the corner.... into Thombi! The Gnome's hands are glowing a furious purple and he's jumped up and grabbed the big Demon by the horns - what kind of spell is that? GOOD LORD I HOPE NONE OF YOU BROUGHT CHILDREN TODAY BECAUSE THAT WILL SCAR THEM FOR LIFE! Thombi struck the final blow and finished off the greatest Champion this arena has ever seen and he's laughing, the crowd is berserk, they've won!

Mutha has led the Bruisers of Obliteration to a flawless victory!

Mutha becomes a leader of Champions. She has become immensely strong, incredibly tough, and remains as dumb as a rock. Heisoa proved every bit as good as I hoped for, carrying the team on one or two fights where Mutha either went down or was stunned. Izenia was a glass cannon even with the unusual item setup - if she got ganged up on or pushed around she'd go down quick, but if that didn't happen she had long-term durability and her spells dropped many a foe along the way.

Thombi may have been the misfit of the team, a mediocrity among excellence - but he did what he was able to and there are fights I wouldn't have won without him. I love that he struck the final blow and had his moment.

Unlocks for future runs!

Mutha, Heisoa, Izenia and Thombi enjoyed the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters, musicians and strange animals from all over the kingdom, together with carts laden with treasure and magical artifacts. The champions rode in a triumphal chariot preceded by noblemen and women on fine steeds. Skruuk was granted the honor of standing behind Mutha, holding the golden crown above her head and whispering in her ear a warning:

All glory is fleeting.