Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of the Lance (NES)
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 You're better than this, Natsume...
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Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of the Lance is a game based on the Dragonlance novels, which were made to promote the eponymous Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting. The game was originally released for various platforms in 1988, and ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System by Natsume and Released by Pony Canyon / FCI in 1991, While the other ports are decent, the NES version is considered not only the worst of them all, also one of the worst games of all time.
Why It Sucks
- Unresponsive controls and input lag. Good luck trying to jump over a pit!
- Bottomless pits permanently kills a character, and they cannot be revived.
- Your starting character is Goldmoon, one of the more frail characters in the game as she is the party's cleric.
- Your characters move very slowly, comparing to every ports and every NES games, most of them move faster than this.
- If Goldmoon is dead for good, then the game is completely unwinnable because she is the only character that can defeat the final boss.
- Combat incomprehensibly bad, dull and frustrating. You can't block and most weapons approximately have the same reach as a butter knife. Casting a spell or using the spear requires spending several minutes in the menu, which gets boring pretty quickly. This is exactly the reason why most recent D&D video games have quick access menus.
- Drab graphics and unimpressive presentation. You'll be tired of seeing the same gray hallway in the beginning before long.
- The music is as lifeless as the game's graphics, and quickly becomes annoying.
- The game doesn't really have a plot unless you know about the very niche Dragonlance novels. The game is supposed to take place halfway through the first Dragonlance Chronicles novel, when the heroes have to go to the ancient city of Xak Tsaroth to retrieve the disks of Mishakal. This isn't really explained and only mentioned twice, when you start the game and when all your characters are dead.
- The intro of the NES version doesn't have character descriptions, which, again, leaves you unable to know what is going on unless you read the manual books. At least, the PC version told you who was who.
- The lack of a proper storyline results in some elements of the game being really cryptic. For example, there is a huge pot in one of the backgrounds, which is a reference to the book, but that isn't explained. The same goes for enemies: You never know what you're fighting, and the graphics really don't help, with half-dragons looking like gargoyles.
- No dialogues between characters, unlike Dragons of Flame. This is really a shame, as the party's wizard, Raistlin, was a sarcastic antihero in the novels and his sociopathy was frequently showing in the dialogues.
The Only Redeeming Quality
- Its sequel, Dragons of Flame, was developed by Atelier Double, the latter of which is a different company from Natsume, is a improvement of this game, but it was released only in Japan.
Reception
The game was panned by both critics and fans of Dungeons & Dragons, when they comparing this game to computer ports, this port is even worse than Sega Master System port, which was developed by Tiertex Design Studios.
It was listed #2 on Seanbaby's worst NES games and #11 worst video game.
On GameFAQs, the game has a rating of 1.00 based on 27 reviews and a rating of 1.67 based on 134 users, making it was #7 lowest rated NES role-playing game (and #78 on NES).