And suddenly the roar of battle ceases, and the ranks of warriors part. Atop a mound of human bodies, right at the centre of the fighting, is the Lizard Man Champion. Nearly three metres tall, four-armed and splattered with gore, the immense creature is swinging a barbaric war-axe and a huge knife larger than your own sword. The Champion howls insanely, drunk with blood-lust, calling on any brave warrior to challenge him to a fight. Will you step forward to take him on (turn to 26), or take advantage of the distraction to break through the lines (turn to 213)?
So section 333 of Battleblade Warrior sets the scene for the only notable error in the thirty-first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, originally published in 1988... an error if, were it not for the fact that I find it quite funny, might not be covered here.
If you do happen to pick a fight with the Lizard Man Champion, you discover that he not only has a full SKILL 12 (the highest possible SKILL score you yourself can have), STAMINA 18, but he is so huge, and equipped with two weapons, that he gets two hits to your one in each attack round. The book itself points out how incredibly fortunate you would have to be to beat him, but if the LMC manages to hit you three times in combat, the fight ends immediately, and you are sent to three paragraphs in a row (in order: 96, 144, 162) which see you staggering around the battlefield in a daze from your injuries, and all of which only have one choice of where to turn to next (so from 96 you have to turn to 144 because there's no other option, and so on). And 162 then loops you back to 333, where you can have another crack at the Lizard Man Champion. In fact, you could theoretically stick yourself in an infinite loop, although it is admittedly unlikely. 144 and 162 can be accessed from multiple other points in the battle, and the curiosity of three sections in a row with only one outgoing choice suggests that author Marc Gascoigne may have intended them to connect together differently, but it's equally possible that he just figured someone actually trying to fight the Lizard Man Champion a second time was so unlikely as to not be worth accounting for (although I would also draw the reader's attention to a minor mistake in section 113, where your horse dies during the night and you have to continue on foot, but the very next section has a reference to you still "riding").
If by some miracle you actually manage to kill the Champion, you are sent to section 213, which you may note is the same one originally offered as an alternative to trying to fight the thing in the first place -- perhaps further emphasising that Gascoigne never intended you to seriously try and take it on, let alone kill it. But if you try to escape on foot (rather than on lizardback) whilst breaking through the enemy lines from that section, you are sent back to section 144, which of course eventually loops you back to face the Lizard Man Champion again -- so that's definitely an error which Gascoigne should have accounted for, if only to avoid an enemy coming back from the dead, and the number of sections with only one outgoing choice means he could have used one of those to re-engineer the book!
A less obvious flaw in the book is that the player may only eat Provisions when specifically allowed to by the text, they may only eat one portion at a sitting, and the book provides a lot more portions of Provisions than it gives opportunities to eat them.
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