- What is it?
- A console-style RPG,
1996,
DOS/VGA.
- What computer or emulator will it run on?
- I played it in DOSBox under default settings.
- Similar Games
- Ultima IV, Dragon Wars, Wasteland.
Aspetra is a strange game, and strangest, in a way, is that it escaped my notice for so long. There aren't that many console-style RPGs for the PC. They are mostly well known. They get mentioned. They get passed around. Sooner or later, you come across them, if you're interested in that kind of stuff, and I have been for six years. Yet, when I found Aspetra on an Italian abandonware site in May 2006, I had never heard about it.
Not that Aspetra is necessarily a very good game.
We read that the makers prided themselves in their story. Indeed, the overall story is interesting. A man who has lost his memory, hunting for pieces of an ancient artefact that should not fall into the wrong hands. As usually, the amnesia doesn't work out well, and the final plot twist isn't new either, but still, interesting. However, for an RPG it's the details that matter, not the overall story, but how the plot—or journey—is advanced. Let's have an example of this.
Aspetra here takes a completely linear approach, nothing bad in that. Usually, every stage has a wilderness, a town, and one or two dungeons. At one point, you reach a wilderness with five exits: In the west, there is a hermit that has nothing to say. To the south, one path leads to a solid wall, another to a door that won't budge, and in the east, there are two towns, one to the north, one to the south. Beyond the southern town there is a forest with no random encounters and no other exit.
At first, you cannot enter the town to the north. Entering the southern town, an NPC right at the entrance will give you an invisible gas mask that allows you to enter the other town. You pass through it to a dungeon, after beating the boss there, you have saved the town, the grateful inhabitants make you the present of a very fine sword.
So far, so good, but what now? Nothing happens till, by chance, you talk to an inconspicuous NPC in front of an inconspicuous building. This is really a tower, and you can visit it for a fee. From the top, you notice an elf being harassed in the previously empty forest. In a cut scene, you rush to help him. He would like to express his gratitude by making you an elven axe, but lacks the necessary metal.
Should you now, perchance, visit the hermit again, he will give you a key in exchange for your fine sword. This key will open the solid wall, the boss that lurks behind it will drop a lump of metal when killed, allowing the elf to forge you an axe, which allows you to smash in the door that previously wouldn't budge and continue to the next region.
The graphics are quite on par. One of the greatest amateur fallacies is that lots of similar colors are a good thing, when in truth, you should try to use few and contrasting colors (that's why the limited palette of the early Windows games was actually a good thing). Here it is taken to extreme. The monsters are often hardly visible against the background, not that you really wanted to see them.
The game mechanics are nothing to write home about either. Just like in Mad Paradox, you usually know in advance how many hits you will need to kill a monster. Spells are mostly useless and towards the end annoying, when the animation lasts no less than ten seconds. There is a completely absurd poison spell that you won't get but that some monsters have. It does no damage during battle, only afterwards!
Having said all this I wouldn't say it's a bad game either.
It did something for me neither Magic Candle or even Dragon Wars would do: It kept me playing. It was the first game since Divine Divinity I really wanted to play. Yes, I played it through right to the end, I even beat the end boss, something I rarely do in console RPGs. I did it mostly to see the credits. I took screenshots all of the time, something around 400 of them.
Then I lost them all in a hard drive crash.
Guess I'll have to play it again. Too bad.
Aspetra is mainly the work of Andy Wood, who wrote his first RPG, The Endless Night, in 1993, when he was fifteen. Some of the level and monster design was done by Andy's younger brother Peter. The game was originally shareware, when sales tapered off, they released it for free.
