Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra

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US box art.

Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra is a turn-based 3D fantasy role-playing video game developed and published by New World Computing for MS-DOS in 1991, and then for several other platforms. It is the first game to use the Might and Magic III Engine which was also used for the next two games in the series.

My brother borrowed this game from a friend shortly after it was released and I played it on my family's 386SX Packard Bell. I was really blown away by this game. It looked far more impressive than any game I had seen before. I was even more impressed when I played it with my Sound Blaster, which not only added music, but speech.

As a child, I didn't get very far into to game because I was too creeped out by the Screamer monsters to venture far past Baywatch. Instead, I tried recording the stats of every item I got in the game. I had a stack of papers and never realized that I only needed to record each individual prefix and suffix! After discovering that Fountain Head had a place where you could work odd jobs for a week to earn gold, and that the bank earned you interest over time, I spent hours making my characters work over an over again. I ended up with millions in the bank, but all my characters ended up dying of old age! I tried a couple other times to beat the game, but I keep getting bored with it. I think I've finished about 1/3 of it.

Status

I own the game for MS-DOS in a Might & Magic collection. I have not beaten it.

Reviews

Good

  • The graphics are state of the art for a game from 1991.
  • The combat system is simple enough to not be an obstacle, but complex enough to handle different tactics.
  • The prefix/suffix system for items was a great way of creating nearly countless variations of items.

Bad

  • The music and sound is pretty bland.
  • The dungeon traps are pretty obnoxious. Even though they're clearly visible, they're often unavoidable and only serve to slowly weaken your party.
  • In-game map sections are pretty small, and enemies are not rendered until you enter the section which often causes unrealistic ambushes.
  • The overworld game map is extremely artificial and blocky.

Ugly

  • The original release had a pretty bad game-breaking bug that made it nearly impossible to win.

Media

Box Art

I don't really like any of the boxes used for the game.

Documentation

Titles

Language Native Transliteration Translation
English Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra
Japanese マイトアンドマジック3 Maito ando Majikku 3 Might and Magic 3

Links