Live up to the Legend - Myth II: Soulblighter

Myth II: Soulblighter is a great sequel in every sense.  It finds that so oft-missed sweet spot of keeping enough of the original product while bringing in new content, smoother gameplay, and nice little touches that flesh out an already well realized world.

All this said, it was hard to see exactly where they would go in making things fresh in the threat department.  The original Myth had a terrific sense of overwhelming odds.  The armies of Light, battling against the undead hordes of the Fallen Lords, were consistently outmatched and outmaneuvered.  At the beginning of Myth II, the survivors of Balor's apocalyptic turn as the Leveller of legend have settled down and have rebuilt many of the great cities of man:  Madrigal, Tyr, Muirthemne.  Sixty years have passed since the defeat of the Fallen Lords, and the population has grown complacent in the long-lasting peace.  However, Alric, the last remaining general of the Light and the king of the realm, is troubled by nightmares of the only Fallen Lord unaccounted for:  Soulblighter.

And soon enough, the titular villain resurfaces, back and just as mutilated as ever.  Keen fans may notice that the art style in the cutscenes has changed significantly.  Where before characters in cinematics had a kind of Don Bluth-esque cartoon cheer to them, here they have a grittier, more realistic style reminiscent of dark anime.  The mood has definitely darkened.  Still though, despite these touches, the opening levels show your forces to be pretty handily in control of the situation.  There's a lot more pulverizing of the shambling undead here than there was in the previous iteration, and a lot of setups where you can gleefully detonate your enemies into finely chunked hamburger. 

Then the Myrkridia show up.  The Myrkridia, mentioned in hushed tones and occupying the realms of legend, are only spoken of in Myth: The Fallen Lords.  They are described as a horrifying race of muscled beasts that terrorized the land in an age long past, running rampant and bringing humanity to the point of extinction.  The only thing that stopped them was the Tain, a powerful artifact wielded by the hero Connacht.  The Tain is essentially a magical prison, a pocket dimension of limitless depth and complexity that can be carried in the palm of the user.  There is a pair of missions in the original Myth that take place in the Tain, where your troops must fight their way to freedom after being imprisoned by Soulblighter.  They do not, by good fortune, encounter any living Myrkridia.  But they do stumble upon one of their trademark structures:  a platform of skulls, described in a journal entry:  

"thirty feet high, and a hundred feet across, each skull arranged with a mad precision that was terrifying to behold.  Many of the skulls were human, or at least humanoid, but among these were others which were certainly not, whose shapes and curves I have tried to forget ever since.  In the center of the platform, far above our heads, rose the ancient battle standard of the Myrkridia.
We left immediately."

The setup for the Myrkridia is absolutely terrifying, and when Soulblighter ultimately releases them from the Tain partway through Myth II, boy oh boy do they deliver.  The first mission in which you encounter them starts off with a brilliantly done flyover of the city of Madrigal as the horrifying monsters run amok, ripping apart the defenders with barely any effort.  As the last soldier crumples to the ground in a bloody heap, they howl in a ghastly chorus and raise their clawed hands high.  The camera then sweeps to your troops, as if to say "OK, tough guy, let's see what you've got now."

On even normal difficulty, the usual tricks just don't work against the Myrkridia.  They can soak a hit of your toughtest Dwarven artillery, and don't even flinch when struck by arrows as they tear towards your troops at startlingly fast speed.  A one-on-one matchup between one of your basic warriors and a Myrkridia is laughably one-sided.  You'll be lucky if they get in a couple solid hits before being ripped to shreds.  Indeed, for the most part the game advises you to avoid them, and it's not until much later that you are given a unit - the Heron Guard - that can possibly take on the Myrkridia head-on.  And your first mission with Heron Guard is also coincidentally when the game thoughtfully thinks to introduce Myrkridian GIANTS.

Myth II: Soulblighter is the rare smart sequel that understands that when it comes to keeping things fresh, you don't just up the ante in gameplay, you up it in legend.  When I played Myth, I had no way of knowing that they'd eventually deliver on the promise of making the Myrkridia live up to the legends and stories described in the journal briefings and the flavour text.  Making these creatures the new enemy units not only gives players a fresh gameplay challenge, but it's a great, evocative way of throwing the storyline into a whole new level of high stakes.