Secret of the Silver Blades

'The first Gold Box trilogy goes out with a whimper,' is what I wanted to write, but that's not even remotely fair. We get a much less satisfying, more empty experience, but it's still got the same awesome combat with some needed QoL improvements that carried over into my beloved Black Box games.. The continued absence of sound design and graphical tweaks (incremental or otherwise) don't help this game's case either. It still does what these games are supposed to do, but nothing more.

Distinctly worse than its two predecessors due to two key faults: an overreliance on ridiculously oversized, mostly empty maze areas (just use the maps in the cluebook for those), and the mostly linear map progression. The combat and itemization are still good, and some of my biggest annoyances with the series are alleviated (a storage vault! easy Heal spamming! teleportation!), but this one's no classic.