Days 6 and 7 are really among my favourite days in this game. As I said, I love the quiet mood in the monastery, as well as the manuscripts to read; the scene between Robin and Marian on the next day is also superbly handled. The puzzle with the gargoyle heads is also one of my favourites; it's really cleverly clued. When I first played the game with my parents, 15 years ago, we of course had no idea how to open the gate at first. And then the prior arrived and got us killed, but not without dropping the name "Vocalis" first, which we knew we had read in one of the manuscripts upstairs. So we loaded a save, re-read the manuscript, and now understood its significance and found how to open the gate. And I'm sure that's exactly how Christy Marx envisioned the player's solving this puzzle. So that was brilliantly handled. (Of course, it might prove a slight problem for those people who only play with a single savegame; then again, no-one was dumb enough to do that at the time, and I have no pity whatsoever for those who are now.)
Speaking of puzzles, those two days show how much Christy Marx had progressed in her design between her two
Conquests games. We here revisit two classics from
Camelot (the fight and the riddles), but both are much better handled here. The fight with the monk is much funnier to play than the one against the Saracen, and part of it is due to its being much shorter; so you either win or lose, but at least you don't have to spend ten minutes on it every time you lose. And now the difficulty slider acts as it should, that is, as a way for the player to determine how hard he wants his action sequences to be, instead of the implementation in
Camelot where you
had to play with the highest difficulty setting (and never get hit a single time, at least in the fight at Glastonbury Tor) if you wanted to get full points. The riddles also play out much better, because you're allowed to fail. In
Camelot, you had those five riddles, and no way to continue if you didn't solve all of them; here, you can skip a few. Furthermore, the game warns you, and encourages you to save, before the riddles start; thus, if you really can't solve the riddles you get, you can always return to that save, leave the screen and get another set of riddles when you return. In
Camelot, you had no warning before the five riddles were randomly chosen, and were therefore often stuck with them.
Copy protection is also an area where
Longbow did things better than
Camelot. The gemstones puzzle is of course just the same thing as the flowers, and I think it works fine. But I'm glad the boring trivia questions about Aphrodite are gone and replaced with more elegant things, such as the hand code.
Another similarity is with the story and the introduction of pagan mysticism in it.
Camelot also tried doing that, but I
argued previously that those elements ended up clashing with the game's theme and making the game look like new-age hogwash. Here, on the other hand, it fits much better within the framework of the story. In all versions of the tale, there's always a bit of mystery about Marian, so it doesn't seem especially shocking that she might be some sort of secret priestess. Also, Sherwood forest has always been a very important element in Robin Hood's stories, so giving it a life of its own, a magic of its own, seems completely fitting*.
I've never been a big fan of innovation for innovation's sake (though I definitely want games to progress and explore new territories), and I've always thought that designers had better spend their time fixing what didn't really work in their previous game rather than just throw new, just as dysfunctional, stuff on top of it. I feel that
Conquests of the Longbow achieves that: the recipe is almost exactly the same as in
Conquests of Camelot, except that this time it is
much more skilfully handled and ends up working a hundred times better (leaving, of course,
Camelot looking in retrospect like no more than a preliminary sketch of
Longbow's brilliance).
* By the way, I'm not sure I completely agree with Snarky's (faster to type, sorry 
) earlier assertion that Celtic magic would be out of place in 12th-century England. The 12th century was when were written many of the early versions of the Arthurian legends (Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, Wace's Brut, Chrétien de Troyes's Lancelot, etc.), and those are full of Celtic influences. Sure, remembering Celtic myths does not mean believing in them. Sure, those stories were mostly written in Celtic lands (Wales, Brittany, France), not in England. But still, the Celts and their myths were far from forgotten in England in the late 12th century. So I'm not saying that England at the time was chock-full of druids howling at the moon, but a small (2 members, one of them retired!) vestigial Druidic cult in the vast Sherwood forest doesn't strike me as especially far-fetched.
