This is part four of a four part playthrough of the 2004 PlayStation 2 hit, Champions of Norrath: Realms of EverQuest. All four parts will be available at this link.
As Pelys’ blast from the Horn of Ill Omen sends us hurtling through planar barriers, Firiona Vie contacts us once again to tell us just how very close we are to rescuing her. She calls us her champion, and says that win against Innoruuk or lose to him, this new age will become called the Age of Hate.
Nobody remembers that by the time of EverQuest, but it was a big deal at the time apparently. Hey, I got confirmation from other sources that the Pit of Ill Omen is indeed in Kunark and is probably also called the Lake of Ill Omen, so we are skipping around Norrath quite a lot.
We land in the City of Karthuun, which appears to be built on the back of (and inside of) an extraplanar beast, a creature drifting somewhere just outside the Plane of Hate. Gol Nazyn (long zag), our Captain Exposition for this act, explains where we are and that he is also a humble purveyor of goods not worth buying, but that he will sell to us for an exorbitant markup. If only we would do him a favor, though, he would maybe bring the prices for his useless trash to something approximating their true value.
His favor is for us to delve into the creature Karthuun and remove from it seven “curiosities” and return them to him. He also might be able to help us move along in our quest to find and kill Innoruuk.
The gaping wounds that lead inside Karthuun bring us to pulsing tunnels filled with tentacles, eyes, and eyeless creatures that serve as antibodies fighting against our infection, but we kill them all and eventually find the seven curiosities (pro tip: two of them are in the city on top, and not within Karthuun itself. That took a long time to figure out).
The dark elf ninjas that prowl around Karthuun aren’t too happy with us, but they were excellent experience.
Teaching us not to accept gifts from strange blue men in bathrobes, Gol Nazyn presses upon us a “simple stone”, which, by virtue of the power of the seven “curiosities” is now ours forever. He’d been cursed with it for sometime, and now he is free. The stone is a piece of Innoruuk himself, and is one of the two shards of Hate necessary to open the portal of Hate to the next stage of our journey.
The other shard must be won in the Arena, which conveniently opens up just then. First up is Hate’s champion, who doesn’t give us much trouble.
Just after this fight, Pelys pops up to let us know that while we’ve been slurping through the belly of extradimensional beasts, he has been using the Horn of Ill Omen to bring his undead army to Norrath, and is even now killing everyone we hold dear. But we were listening closely and heard him say nothing about Halas and Everfrost, so maybe our particular home is safe, so yay?
As he leaves, he sends in a dinosaur.
Wow, that critter just looks like it might be carrying the second shard of Hate! Thanks, Pelys! Did us a solid there. Didn’t know where we were going to get it and then you give it to us.
Adding the two shards into the strange portal we’d found in Karthuun opens up a portal and we step through into the Hanging Gardens, a necropolis of twisty passages through forgotten graveyards and occasional bosses. Undead come at us from all sides, eager to level us up. At the end we fall into a portal and into Act V. (I apparently didn’t take any screen shots in the Hanging Gardens but honestly there wasn’t much to see).
At the edge of the Plane of Hate, Pelys rambles on for awhile about how death and destruction are even now being rained upon Norrath, when he suddenly killed by Innoruuk himself.
Innoruuk says that if Pelys had stopped with his pointless monologues and hadn’t bothered with his orc commander cosplay, then the job would be done already and Hate would reign supreme upon Norrath. Pelys had forgotten to suffer or something.
Interesting bit of lore, here, in that Innoruuk implies that becoming a child of Hate (and gaining the title of T’yvl) is something you work up to. So Llanys would have, in the future, succeeded where Pelys failed?
Setting aside the facts that this is not what Innoruuk looks like, and that the developers seem to be confusing the Plane of Hate with Hell, this is a nice bit of lore.
With that bit of world building out of the way, Innoruuk summons the Guardian of Hate, who rips Pelys’ soul from his body, then uses the soul like an arrow in an immense bow that he fires at us, killing us.
We awaken in the Plane of Air, where Natasla of the Carefully Arranged Hair explains that she has rescued us and healed us. Also, she has a select offering of useless trash that she would love to sell us.
She urges us to take as much time as we need, as long as it isn’t MUCH time, and then return, with her blessing, to once more fight the Guardian of Hate and free Firiona Vie.
The Guardian falls, like everything else, to a combination of kiting, blocking, and button mashing.
With the Guardian dead, we have to weaken the barrier to the Cauldron of Hate by rescuing souls and bringing them to the Plane of Air.
Six souls (two runs) seemed to do the trick. Each run, devils would pop up to torment and re-kill the souls. Saved and restored a lot. This would have been super hard on the PS2, but I’m running this on an emulator… there are no permanent mistakes.
Once the barrier is down, we zip into the Cauldron and find Firiona Vie and her jailer, Innoruuk, there. We run around breaking the seals that hold Vie there while avoiding Innoruuk’s hammer.
After Vie is freed, she portals us to the Plane of Air to prepare for the final fight.
She explains that we have no chance to defeat Innoruuk without a weapon made of planar steel, and that we must forge it ourselves here in the Plane of Air. But we are too full of Hate ourselves to do it, and we must therefore purify ourselves, forge that weapon, and then instantly move to the final battle.
Note: I didn’t actually get any new weapon. Was just my good old trusted Ice Flame swords.
We get purified and sent directly into the battle with Innoruuk, where he strikes us down. The epilogue that plays tells how our failure led to death and ruin and the downfall of mortal life on Norrath.
Thank God for save points.
We get purified and sent directly into the battle with Innoruuk, where he claims that our struggle to find him and face him and strike him down has filled us with Hate and that we are now his and our fight is futile.
Sorry, dude. Just got purified.
My boyfriend was feeding me tips and hints he was getting from the interwebs on how to take him down because his health bar just wasn’t moving. I was trying to take him down from range, but my range weapon wasn’t that great and aiming while avoiding his hammer wasn’t working for me.
In the end, I remembered I was playing a Barbarian and rushed in, blocked, parried, then mashed those buttons until he exploded.
The epilogue says all is good now, and everything will be good forever, etc. Or will it?
Champions of Norrath: Return to Arms picks up once more in the Plane of Air, where Rallos Zek urges war upon the world…
We’ll pick up where we left off in another playthrough!
