Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun
Developed by Westwood Associates for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, 1992
The Mega Drive/Genesis was never really well known for it’s RPG’s, but like most Sega consoles, the few roleplaying cartridges it did have were usually top notch. One of these is Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun by Westwood Studios, one of the very few video games based upon the basic rules as opposed to the AD&D system (the only other BD&D game I can think of is Order of the Griffon for the TurboGrafx-16, a game that’s slightly similar in tone to WotES). This is a game I never owned until much later in life. As a kid, I rented the thing from our local video store approximately 17,643 times though, so I had plenty of experience playing through it. In later years, after repurchasing a Genesis off ye olde e-bay, I picked this cart up and still found the game to be thoroughly enjoyable.
Warriors of the Eternal Sun is set in the Hollow World campaign setting, although the strange basin it takes place in is a previously unexplored area of the world. The premise is thus: the armies of men (and their dwarf, elf, and halfling allies) are battling for survival in a war against goblinkind. The goblins, outnumbering the human armies, have pushed their opponents back to the brink of extinction. As they prepare to make a final push towards the castle of Duke Barrik, the ground shakes violently as a swirling void appears and sucks both armies off into the sky. The castle appears in a bizarre looking valley with a scorching red sun overhead. The good Duke, without the men to spare to do any exploration, employs your party to discover just where the heck you are and what the heck is going on…
Now, I’m not saying other D&D related computer and video games are bad or anything, but WotES seems different to me in that it’s one of the very few D&D games which actually feels like the tabletop experience. Maybe it’s the wild, mysterious setting and the ludicrous amount of dungeons, traps, and wandering monsters. Maybe it’s the strict adherence to the BD&D rules (clerics do not receive their first spell until 2nd level, for example). Or maybe it’s that old-school “you versus the unexplored wild” feel that so many of our early experiences with D&D seem to have been like.
One thing that certainly helps recreate the tabletop feeling is the turn based combat whilst exploring the overland map. However, when your party enters a dungeon area, the style changes to a first person ‘real-time’ type of game, much like another famous series started by Westwood Studios — Eye of the Beholder. For my money, the overland exploration is the superior of the two game styles, but somehow the developers were able to integrate both modes without dragging the whole thing down. This variety certainly helps keep the game fresh, especially towards the endgame. However, players should be wary: there’s no saving in the dungeons, and the ‘real-time’ moves a helluva lot faster than your average EotB clone.
Character creation is simple enough. Roll your dice, select your class from Cleric, Fighter, Magic-User, Thief, Dwarf, Elf, or Halfling, give ‘em a name, and pick a color for your character’s clothes. The last choice is purely aesthetics, but it’s neat to have, I suppose. You can have four different colored characters or have them all wearing the same colors to show some ‘party unity’. Heh. I also really like the fact that you can’t ‘cheat’ like many other games and alter your own stats. You want a perfect 18 in some stat? Keep a-rollin’ those dice, buddy. It’s said that both the thief and the halfling classes are mostly useless in this game, which doesn’t really surprise me all that much. The thief FINALLY became useful for the first time in Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon, after being nothing more than a weak hamster in leather armor for pretty much every D&D game beforehand.
Inventory and options are pretty easy to navigate through once you get the hang of it. Thankfully, since this was made exclusively for a console instead of being a port of a PC game, there aren’t 100 different text menus to navigate through when exchanging items between party members or changing your march order (see NES ports of Wizardry or SNES ports of the Ultima series for a good example of this problem). The A and B buttons confirm things for you, C usually cancels, and the Start button takes you back to the previous menu, or back into the game. Simple enough. The only slightly annoying thing here is that you have to ‘reequip’ your spells after resting. A minor annoyance, but still… they could’ve just had your previously selected spell in there by default, unless you decided to wipe it from your memory and learn a new one for the day.
The only serious flaw I can find in WotES is the background music. Sound effects are pretty standard and inoffensive, but the tunes, apart from the catchy title screen (which you’ll only hear for about ten seconds anyway), is atrocious. You may not think so at first if you’re new to this game, but trust me, the BGM wears itself thin after it loops for the 49th time in a row. To make matters worse, the music only changes when you enter a new area, so sometimes it pays to actually leave it switched on so you’ll know that you’re entering a potentially dangerous new area. Me… I can’t take it. I usually switch it off and throw on the soundtrack to Conan the Barbarian by Basil Poledouris. Perfect adventuring music.
Oh really? Yeah, one neat feature is that if you have party members with appropriate stats or skills, you’ll get status messages, which are usually thinly veiled warning signs from the game. Kinda like the DM telling the players: “you know guys, I probably wouldn’t venture down to level 2 just yet…”, but when do we ever listen to those silly DM’s? Onward! Let the dice fall where they may!
Ah… bummer. I got ambushed by a hill giant. I died. After a rather pathetic attempt to flee I might add.
Double bummer. That’s a pretty crushing game over screen. I love it!
4 / 5
6 Comments
August 4, 2008 at 06:03
It would have been better if the game over screen said, “Rocks fall, everybody dies!”
August 23, 2008 at 12:04
I don’t know, the end was (and still is) a major let down, also the fact that you can kill drow with normal slings should say something about how silly the dungeon system is.
October 14, 2008 at 03:35
classic…I didn’t know westwood was responsible for this game nor Frank did the music on this (me being a devoted C&C fan)..such a gem to know I loved their early work as well as I did the latter.
October 23, 2008 at 19:25
Having had the benefit of owning the box set upon which this game is based, I can tell you the game doesn’t make sense unless you own the box set. This strange new world the game has you in? It is the inside of the planet, the Hollow World.
Those elves in the game aren’t drow, in fact they aren’t really dark elves at all, although they are evil underground elves. They aren’t especially powerful. Of course, there was no way to know that unless you had the aforementioned box set.
Also knowing the box set allowed me to anticipate how the endgame would work, since both Ka and the Burrower are far greater powers than mere mortals.
February 13, 2009 at 19:01
I was playing this recently (I still like this game) and I decided to play 4 thieves, for a challenge. I discovered that thieves are *not* as useless as you might believe. For instance, if you’re hidden when you enter a dungeon, you stay hidden, and do double damage as long as you’re down there. Also, they make that annoying Azcan pyramid much, much easier with their trap-finding skills.
June 10, 2009 at 18:22
Oh man this is the game of my teen years. I absolutely loved it then. The funny thing is, I never managed to get above lvl 1, (b/c was new to the whole RPG and D&D thing) and now I got this running on my modded PSP and PC Gens emulator and it looks and sounds amazing. Still SO much fun after all those years.
After this, I’m playing Exult Ultima VII, runs great on Vista!! Now that’s a classic masterpiece. BG and SI!! You can get it free at sites like Abandonia.