Quest: Gateway To Hook Coast

Summary: Activate the ancient Cullis Gate that leads to Hook Coast.
Money: 4200
Renown: 500

The Ancient Cullis Gate, you’ll remember, is in the Darkwood, so warp to the Barrow Fields and walk back to it. All you really have to do here is kill a certain number of Undead, so start a-choppin’ until the Gate activates; it’ll warp you to the town of Hook Coast.

By this point in the game, you should be able to find a wife with ease, should you want to.

The first thing you’ll want to do is to bust into the lighthouse here in town to find the last Silver Key and nab another Legendary weapon. Feel free to loot the rest of the items in the town, if you don’t mind taking a few Evil points onto your conscience. There’s some decent stuff, including tattoos and a Sharpening Augmentation.

When you’re ready to move on, examine the force field at the north end of town, then warp back to the Guild Hall to meet up with your mother. While getting captured again - not much of a Hero, this one - she’ll point you to a book on a lectern nearby. Grabbing it and giving it to the Guildmaster will start the Return to Hook Coast quest, but this will also start the endgame, and prevent you from completing any of your other quests for a while, so be sure to tie up any loose ends that you may have dangling before accepting the Guildmaster’s offer.

Quest: Return to Hook Coast

Summary: Bypass the barrier at Hook Coast with the Guildmaster’s help.
Money: 16000
Renown: 1500

When you warp back to Hook Coast, you’ll find that it’s under attack by a new kind of enemy, the Screamer. These guys (or gals) count as Undead, and should be rather easy to kill at this point in your career.

When you get past the barrier, you’ll come across a shocker: Maze has been working for Jack all along! Mind-blowing! Ok, well, you probably suspected Maze was up to no good since the end of your training or so, but now you can actually do something about it.

If you need to rest, wait until Maze warps down to the shore, then hide here from his magical attacks.

Truth is, Maze isn’t all that difficult, although his defensive capabilities are excellent, mostly thanks to his Physical Shield that he constantly casts. After a short melee scrum, he’ll retreat into the town and resort to magical projectile attacks. Screamers will also appear in small numbers to harry you, but you should be able to easily dispose of them with spells or physical attacks. As you pound on Maze, he’ll keep retreating, eventually winding up in the Lighthouse. Bash in the door and finish him!

Quest: Try to Stop Jack of Blades

Summary: This one’s pretty obvious, folks.

Jack of Blades now has the means to find the heralded Sword of Aeons; it’s your job, and indeed the job of every citizen of Albion, to stop him. You’ll have to track him down to a number of different Focus Sites across the game world and disrupt his plan in whatever way you can.

There isn’t too much to this segment of the quest. At each site, you’ll have to fight your way through seemingly endless numbers of enemies until you reach Jack, who invariably has already activated the Site that you were trying to reach. If you don’t feel like fighting, just run past the enemies towards the quest markers, using Force Push or Assassin Rush to clear your way.

Some Hero you are!

You won’t be alone in your battle, though, if you do decide to fight, as a number of guards and pals from the Heroes’ Guild will be along for the ride. They won’t stick around after each site, though; you get a different friend at each one. Thunder has an especially good excuse for not helping you track down and kill Jack, something along the lines of: "Save the world? Well, I would, but I’m pretty tired."

At any rate, you’ve got four Focus Sites to hit before you get to the endgame at the Heroes’ Guild. Each time you reach one, Jack will have activated it, so there’s no rush to proceed. When you do finally reach the Heroes’ Guild, you’ll have a bit of time to rest and recuperate your mana and health before proceeding to the final fight.

There are three phases to the Jack fight. In the first, he’ll summon Minions while he meditates behind a shield; do whatever you have to to kill off the Minions, because you won’t be able to hurt Jack at all until they’re all in the ground. Next up is a bit of melee combat. As you might expect from the boss fights thus far, Jack is an excellent defender and will block most of your standard attacks. If you have even a single rank of Berserk or Multi Strike, now would be an excellent time to use those abilities.

You’ll be denied the pleasure of finishing Jack off with your melee weapon, as he forces you to resort to ranged attacks.

After you pound on Jack for a bit, he’ll go airborne and be beyond the reach of your melee attacks, so you’ll need to fall back on your bow or any magical abilities that you might have. You can’t dodge many of Jack’s attacks, so if you’re doing good on health, just lock onto him and use Multi Arrow to shoot him down. For the end boss of a game, Jack isn’t all that difficult to defeat.

Choice: Keep the Sword of Aeons?
Good: Cast the Sword of Aeons into the vortex.
Bad: Kill your sister to fully power the Sword, and keep it.
This is the final choice in the game. Your ending cinematic sequence depends on your choice here, as well as your alignment, making for four endings altogether. If you wait for the credits to finish rolling, you’ll be able to continue on with your character, but you might be better off starting a new game and trying to play as the opposite alignment.