Review of: Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun - Sega Genesis

Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun

1992, Sega of America

Genesis game review

by Fausto Chavez

Overview: Dungeons & Dragon was the original role playing game, starting back in 1974 as a board game. I never played the board game, so this review is unbiased as to how faithful it is to the original. Also, this game is not a replica of the board game, but a 1990s style RPG based on the board game. It was an honor playing D&D knowing it is the grandfather of all RPGs, the one that started the genre.

Story: I didn’t go much into the story, something about a war lasting 13 moons. Your typical RPG plot, you are to save the world from evil and prevent the people from going mad and destroying their civilization. You take orders from the Duke as well as someone named Marmellion, both of whom you return to often in the castle and receive new directives as the game progresses.

Graphics: The graphics have aged well and still look nice today. The city, its buildings and characters were bright, detailed and colorful. The overhead world was similarly detailed and lush in color for what the Genesis can do. Your characters are big and detailed enough. The enemies in the overhead view are OK, but the dungeons are much better with vivid characters, light and dark contrasting effectively. The viewable dungeon screen is small but (surprisingly) works well, with dungeon enemies being well drawn and detailed, some of them large and actually scary!

Music/sound FX: The music in this game is really great. One of the best parts of the game. The town's music is quite enjoyable, as well as the title theme, and some of the dungeon tracks were impressive, even the outside world music was thumping. After playing the game, I’d go and listen to the soundtracks on Youtube on a stereo.

However, the sound of the bows and slings were terrible, especially in the dungeons where you can shoot rapidly, making unpleasant ‘boing, boing’ noises that sounded menacing as if under attack.

GamePlay: This is where the game really shines, though with some issues. You start out selecting four team members from different classes of characters, customized by naming and choosing their attributes. From there, you must explore the world and achieve different objectives, some of it non-linear. The bulk of the objectives are achieved in the caves and dungeons that are scattered throughout a confined world, with the city and castle being at its center serving as a base. There are two game systems, one overhead in the outside world (including the city), which include battles in this mode, and a first person dungeon crawler mode.

In the overhead view you can move rather quickly, and you have a map. The battles in the outside world were tedious. They are turn based, which is Ok, but your attacks miss most of the time and the enemies miss too, lucky to land 1 out of 3 attacks, really slowing down the progress of the game. These overhead battles were by far my least favorite part of the game, being frustrating. Ordinary battles that in other games would take a minute or even seconds, are long drawn out affairs here. Thankfully it’s easy to avoid enemies in the overhead world. Battles don’t crop up too often, and when they do, if you ‘save’ when the enemy appears before the battle begins, then reload the game, the enemy disappears and you can continue. This works because you can save at any point outside of the dungeons (mercifully). Without this save feature the game would slow to a crawl. You can also walk away from enemies to avoid battles.

You will be saving and loading often, since there is no ‘revive from the dead’ magic or potion, and you do not want to fight with dead party members, as it can be a long way from the city shrine where you revive your members. However, the lack of enemy battles in overhead view can be a problem when you want to level up without going far from the castle, you may wander around with nothing happening.

The dungeon system was actually great, the only problem being that the map generated as you progress is lost when you exit and re-enter. The dungeon battles are engaging, you can move around and attack quickly in real time. It's the best part of the gameplay to destroy the enemies in the dungeon who were quite interesting mythological beasts and creatures.

Your healing potions don’t do much, and your cleric's healing magic is weak, this along with lack of revive ability means the game is rather stingy with magic; though you get a lot of spells, magic power runs out quickly. You can "rest" in the dungeons to regenerate health and magic if you clear an area of monsters, just as you can in the outside world, and this really turns things around for the better.

The menu system was troublesome because magic had to be equipped to use (each character having two equip slots for either weapons or magic). The magic does not last long, sometimes spells only work once, then you have to re-equip another weapon or magic. During a battle with hard enemies, you will be re-equipping a lot! Then, after a battle, you have to use the ‘rest’ function to regain your magic, as well as your strength. All the aforementioned means you will be accessing the menu system A LOT! Almost after every battle it seems (especially in the beginning when you’re weak) you have to re-equip, rest, and save. Also, when you die, your characters revive without any weapons or magic equipped. Rarely have I encountered a game spent so much time in the menus, equipping and tinkering with items, weapons and magic. Oddly enough, this was somewhat entertaining as you had to think deeply on how to best utilize the objects and magics at your disposal, although this could have been more generous and frictionless. Also, nowhere is it indicated how much magic you actually have left, leaving you in the dark about magic power points.

As for Hit Points, you start out with a useless graph meter to measure your Hit Points. However, in the options menu you can switch to a number based HP system, which works much better and is standard for RPGs. 

Experience Points are not distributed evenly, the character who lands the death blow will receive all the experience, which makes leveling up cumbersome and your character levels may end up unbalanced if you don’t pay attention. You can choose who will attack next (skipping characters) and focus leveling up a character that way. Also, it's important to order your team from strongest to weakest (by accessing the options menu) to better survive battles. 

Replay Value: When I first played this, I got to about halfway, reaching the Azcan cave. By then, I wanted to start all over again, having followed a walkthrough’s bad advice and selecting for my team a Cleric, Magic User, Elf, Elf, thinking that the extra Elf's magics would come in handy later in the game (as stated in walkthrough) which turned out badly; seeing how cumbersome and stingy the magic system was, I’d rather have had the weapons based fighter in the beginning. I sorely missed the strong fighter's offense and my team felt weak for it, making the game feel broken. 

Also, another mistake I made was not paying attention to the numbers when generating randomized character strengths in the beginning. I made a Magic User with low intelligence (big mistake!). 

So I started all over again, and chose a Fighter, Elf, Cleric, Magic User as my team. This worked out much better, with the added offense.

Leveling up is hard--but there’s a trick using the Lighting Wand to level up in the beginning, then after leveling up around the castle, avoid overhead battles which take too long, and level up in the hidden cave on the way to the Beastman Caves, using Entangle magic to freeze the strong enemies there then kill them, gaining big experience points, then go to work through the other caves/dungeons. If you try to level up in the outside world, it will take forever; if you try to work through the dungeons without leveling up, you may simply die deep inside, over and over again.

Conclusion: This is a fun game that provides satisfying RPG gaming once you figure it out. Everytime I played there was something new happening, either a development in the story, acquiring new items, weapons, magics, or leveling up. There are an amazing amount of items and spells. The developers tried to pad the game's length by making it hard to hit your enemies, making it difficult to level up, and being stingy with powerups, which brings down the fun factor; but you can solve these two issues by leveling up with the Lightning Wand and again in the secret cave. (Also, there is another secret cave in the southwest, hidden in a tree, that contains some powerups, which most walkthroughs miss--it can help. To enjoy the game more, I recommend using the Perfect Game walkthrough at IGN to level up, also OpusGames.com has some great dungeon maps.) A few changes could have made this a great game, rather than a very good but flawed game. Also, this game gets overlooked because the Genesis had many RPGs that were excellent. So that’s my review of D&D—I give it 4 out of 5 stars.