Warriors of the Eternal Sun: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

It's a little late for that.

          

Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun

United States

Westwood Associates (developer); SEGA (publisher)

Released 1992 for SEGA Genesis
Date Started: 18 June 2023

Date Finished: 12 July 2023

Total Hours: 20

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)

Final Rating: 39

Ranking at Time of Posting: 422/508 (83%)

         

Summary:

        

The only Dungeons & Dragons title released for the Sega Genesis, Warriors was developed by the same studio that had previously created Eye of the Beholder for PCs. The game re-uses a lot of mechanics and assets from Beholder, though most of them are simplified for the nature of console play. It's still a reasonably fun game, set in the Mystara campaign setting. The player controls four characters of the standard basic D&D race and class options. They're servants of a Duke Barrik, dealing with the ramifications of the duke's castle having been teleported wholesale into the "Hollow World" interior of Mystara, where the central sun never sets. The unique part of the game is the two combat systems, one for indoors, one for outdoors, though neither completely satisfying. It's a bit too easy to exploit the indoor combat system, and other aspects of the game (economy, equipment, role-playing options) are limited. But if Warriors isn't as good as the best PC D&D titles of the era, neither does it do anything terribly wrong. It offers reasonable entertainment for a reasonable length of time.

     

****

     

This session began with me cursing my past self for ending the last session in the middle of a jungle instead of taking time to go back to town. That journey alone takes about half an hour. 

   

When we got back, the town was in worse shape than we left it. NPCs said things like: "Stay away from me! I know you just want to hurt me!"; "This is all your fault!"; "Get out of town you lousy bums!" Even the shopkeepers were rude.

     

This is the city's cleric.

     

Fortunately (given what happened next) we visited the shops before visiting the duke. We bought +2 leather for the thief, a +2 mace for the cleric, and a +2 dagger for the mage. I salivated over the +2 plate mail and a Wand of Fireballs, but they were too expensive.

    

I'd rather have too little money than the opposite.

    

In the throne room, Marmillian was claiming that we had gone back in time to the "ancient civilizations of the Azcans and the Oltecs." Merciful Mictlāntēcutli, I thought "Azcan" was lazy. Whether "Olmec" removes the t from "Toltec," changes the m in "Olmec" or crams together "Olmec" and "Aztec," it's still pretty lame. Are there Olcans in this setting, too? Azmecs? Inctecs? Maycans?

 

In any event, Marmillian was also clearly going insane. The Duke was worse. He was furious at us: "I will not tolerate this incompetence any longer! You will walk through the flames and find the caverns of which I have been told or you will perish in the attempt! The next time I see your faces, they will be before an army or on the end of a pole! Guards! Take them away!"

      

I still prefer him to Lord British.

            

This was followed by the guards literally escorting us out of the city and barring our way back in. This whole episode was later presented as the baron not being in his right mind, but he's not wrong. We have failed in our missions to find allies. I'm just not sure why he thinks he needs them.

    

The next step of the game was clear: walk through the lava on top of the northwest plateau and apparently find some more caves. The Rings of Fire Resistance protected us from the effects of the lava. We fought fire giants, fire elementals, salamanders, and hellhounds as we explored the plateau.

       

The first creature in the penultimate dungeon.

     

Unfortunately, the rings didn't (or didn't always) protect from the breath of the red dragon that we found lurking on top of the plateau, nor the one that guarded the first room in the cave we entered. Both dragons were curious. I spent some time wandering back and forth between them, trying to grind a little, so I got used to their tactics. Nine rounds out of ten, they would choose a physical attack, which was damaging but survivable. If we got unlucky, though, they'd breath a fireball and kill two or three of us. Very rarely, we would make some kind of saving throw and only take minimal damage from the fireball, but otherwise, the game might as well have been set to auto-reload every time a dragon formed an image of a fireball in his head.

   

I saw the dragons as a grinding opportunity not only because they delivered about 2,500 experience points but because the outdoor one dropped nearly 2,000 gold. This turned out to be a spectacular waste of time because, as we'll see, gold had no more use in this game from the moment I got kicked out of the castle.

    

The outdoor dragon wastes his time on a physical attack.

      

I didn't spend too long at my grinding attempts. Although the experience rewards were high, so were the experience points I needed for the next level. I calculated I'd have to kill about 50 of them to level everyone up. After a while, I moved forward.

   

I noticed another interesting thing while fighting the red dragon in the caverns, though. He started some distance away from the party, and I could nail him with a couple volleys of missile weapons or spells before he reached the party. Sometimes, he'd dodge out of the way, and after about 20 seconds, the interface would register that we had hit something. I didn't realize until this dungeon that missile weapons could damage enemies off-screen. They do in most games, so I don't know why it didn't occur to me. In this case, the missiles were hitting a group of hellhounds about 15 spaces away. For the rest of the game, every time I found myself facing down a long corridor, I fired off a salvo just to see if I hit anything. If so, I kept firing until I heard the sound indicating an enemy kill. I don't even know what I was killing some of the time.

         

Registering hits for shots I fired a few minutes ago.

       

The dungeon that kicked off with the red dragon was three levels. It was annoying because the doors transitioning to new levels looked like regular doors, so several times I lost my progress on a level (it resets when you leave) with no warning. When that happened, I started taking advantage of the opportunity to race back to the exit (I had to fight or evade the dragon every time) so that I could save. In the long run, this turned out to be a good thing.

   

The first two levels had gargoyles, fire giants, hellhounds, zombies, giant ants, fire beetles, rock statues, trolls, ogres, and giant scorpions. Most of them were in rooms, so I developed a habit of bursting in, assessing the situation, backing out, and then figuring out the best approach, including spells. I found that if the room was bigger than 2 x 2, the mage's "Entangle" was a great resource. It would hold the enemy in place while I backed off and shot arrows and stones at it. I found "Lightning Bolt" at some point, but I never got comfortable using it; there was always too great a danger that it would bounce back. "Fireball" was the usual life saver, and the great thing about it in this game is that it continues past enemies after damaging them and continues damaging anyone else along the path. "Ice Storm" also proved very useful when I found it.

       

A large force of trolls.

    

Between this dungeon and the next, I found higher-level spells, including "Cloudkill," "Death Spell," "Anti-Magic Shell," "Stone to Flesh," and "Disintegrate," but I never achieved the levels necessary to learn them. All my characters ended the game at Level 8 or 9. Level 9 requires between 160,000 and 300,000 experience points (for the characters I had), depending on class. The highest level in the game for my characters would have been Level 14, which requires between 700,000 and 1 million experience points. I can't imagine doing that much grinding. Is there an obvious place that I overlooked? It is spectacularly unnecessary--though part of me is sorry that I didn't get to experience higher-level spells.

    

Speaking of spells, the interface for spellcasting is one of the worst aspects of the game. You have to assign them individually to one of the two attack buttons. Once they've been cast, you have to go back and re-assign your weapon or another spell. It's annoying enough that I often didn't cast spells even when they would have been useful just because I didn't want to have to go into the menu twice and make the selections. Spells should have been called via a different command. If I had to play the game again, I'd play with two clerics and two fighters (cleric spells are important, but mostly for in-camp healing).

     

Giant scorpions were a bit of a problem because they poison characters, but fortunately poison isn't equivalent to instant death here the way it is in the Gold Box games, and by now I had several potions of "Cure Poison" and the cleric's "Neutralize Poison" spell.

      

Level 3 is where I ran into trouble. I opened a door and ran into a pack of wights. Before I could blink, they had swiped two levels off my fighter. There are many things I'll suck up and deal with in an RPG, but level draining isn't one of them. I reloaded from outside the dungeon and lost about 30 minutes of progress. I re-entered and hustled to the room, this time with my cleric's "Turn Undead" ready. I opened the door and blasted them with it. I wasn't sure it would work at her level, but it did, killing all of them instantly.

       

Destroying some undead.

       

I moved on to the next room, opened the door, and immediately got level-drained by two wraiths. Hearing what she did upstairs at that moment, I think Irene nearly called the police.

   

I decided to use the doomed party to map the area and learn what I'd face in each room so that, after a reload, I could make an informed attempt to get through it. The level has lots of level drainers--wraiths, wight, specters, and a "shadow"; I'm not sure if the latter was a level-drainer or not because it died so quickly. The good news, I discovered, is that most of these enemies guarded fairly useless treasure. To get to the one place that I absolutely had to go on this level, I just had to get through a room of non-level-draining ghouls.

     

There's a path from the stairs (DWN) to the special encounter (highlighted) that avoids almost all the undead.

        

The place I had to go, which I cleared on my third attempt at the level, was a small room containing an Oltec merchant. She offered an alliance with my people "in exchange for opening this new trade route." I'm not sure what that meant, exactly, since the only thing I "opened" was the way to a one-room cell, and that route respawned with monsters the moment I left. But I took the win.

     

The Oltecs look a bit Greek.

       

In the excitement of finally completing the duke's quest, I nearly missed the error tone that indicated there was something on the floor but my inventory was full, so I couldn't grab it. I discarded something and picked up the object, which was a medallion. It turned out that I needed this later. I played a lot of the game without my headphones on, so I'm very lucky this wasn't one of those times.

     

Excited to tell the duke the news--and perhaps even win the game--I hustled back to the castle. A sense of dread overtook me when I didn't see any guards or NPCs at the entrance. The shops were trashed, their tables broken. The well was wrecked and leaking water into the courtyard. There was no one to be found, anywhere, even on the duke's throne.

      

That's not really how wells work.

        

Fortunately, Marmillian was still in his tower. "The duke beat me and left me for dead," he said. He went on to say that the people went insane, trashed the castle, and fled into the forest. "I was wrong about time travel," he said. "We are inside a huge zoo that houses lost civilizations of our previous world." This particular valley has an ancient evil called the Burrower living beneath it. "It drives all life forms crazy." It hadn't affected us because we kept traveling outside the valley.

    

Our only hope, he said, was to destroy the Burrower. To reach it, we would have to travel through the Caverns of the Evil Elves. He gave us detailed directions, but I was sure I remembered the right place from having discovered it earlier. He gave us a scroll to read when we encountered the Burrower. "It will summon the immortal Ka who will destroy the beast." I'm curious how he figured out all this stuff, and acquired this scroll, while he was insane.

     

I wonder if that's what they call themselves.

      

Let me pause to note the ramifications of these events. From the moment you get kicked out of the castle, about two-thirds of the way through the game, you can no longer spend any of your money, get any equipment upgrades that you don't find, or get healing and resurrection--except by hiking all the way to the lizardmen's swamp or the jungle and using the magic pools. It would have been nice if opening the Oltec trade route had stationed a merchant wagon somewhere on the map or some other replacement for the lost city. The game keeps giving you gold rewards even after it knows they won't do any good. If you plan to grind in this game, I guess you want to do it before you go to the lava caves; after that, you lose your chance to buy weapons, armor, and spells tied to your higher levels. I wonder how high the weapons go. If I grinded all the way to Level 14, would the store sell +4 swords?

    

We walked the long way around the valley to the cavern, fighting a number of combats along the way. The medallion let us pass the location where a voice had previously said, "These passages have been sealed by the ancients!" Another message warned: "You now enter the realm of the Dark Elves!" Why does every setting have to have dark elves?

           

They could have avoided a lot of death with a toll plaza set up here.

      

The ensuing dungeon was three levels--a dirt cavern, a stone city, and another dirt cavern. A player prepared with maps could reach the endgame in about five minutes. I explored the entirety of all three levels, which did nothing for me since I found no new valuable items and gained no new levels. 

      

A warrior and a wizard.

       

The first level was a mix of dark elves--warriors, lieutenants, captains, magic-users, and wizards--and animal monsters such as basilisks, rock pythons, cave bears, tiger beetles, gelatinous cubes, giant bats, stone giants, and a new monster for me: a kind of dragon called a "flapsail" (at first, I thought it was a regular dragon whose name was "Flapsail"). I was naturally worried most about the basilisks, having no way to heal petrification, but there were only a couple of them and I was able to outmaneuver them and kill them quickly. 

    

A Malazan character's origin story.

        

Level 2 was a large, sprawling dark elf city with combats in almost every room. Most of them were laughably easy, but occasionally a wizard was able to pull off a "Fireball." I had to reload once from outside the caverns--stupidly deciding to run through the first level again, for the experience that it turned out I didn't need. (At this point, I didn't know the end was nigh.) I made a lot of use of my "fire blindly down the hallway" strategy.

         

Easily the largest map of the game.

    

The city had a kind of "pyramid" in the northeast corner that took me up to a single room, which took me to the final level: a sprawling cavern full of large, open rooms and long hallways. The enemies were pretty scary, including efreet, chimeras, and at least one medusa and one vampire. I was worried about getting killed and having to do the whole dungeon again. But the open nature of the level gave me plenty of room for all the tricks I'd learned, and I got through it without even getting seriously injured, mostly by hitting enemies from afar with missile weapons and spells. 

       

I don't know what that is down there, and if I'm lucky, I won't have to find out.

         

When I was about halfway through the dungeon, I saw an enemy down a corridor. I fired a dozen shots at it, and none of them connected. Curious, I inched forward. The foe was the Burrower--a large, one-eyed, tentacled creature. When I reached a step away, the game took over.

       

They probably call him that because he burrows.

     

"You use the scroll to summon Ka!" it said. "Ka" turned out to be--wait for it--a Tyrannosaurus. Cue the absolutely cheesiest endgame "cinematic" in RPG history. (You can watch it here.) It featured pictures of the dinosaur and the Burrower floating around the screen and colliding together to indicate their battle. It ended with Ka's foot on the Burrower's ruined body.

      

Quality movie-making here.

        

Ka was an intelligent Tyrannosaurus, apparently, because he spoke to me. He congratulated us, said that he'd healed the minds of our people, and "told them of our achievements."

      

I'm picturing a Tyrannosaurus wandering into town, saying, "Hey, guys, I wanted to tell you about . . . where are you going?"

         

This transitioned to a much better endgame sequence (reminiscent of Questron), showing the party marching triumphantly through the gates of the castle, past clapping guards and cheering townsfolk, and into the duke's chambers, where the duke apologized and, as a reward, made us the "leaders of your guilds." I didn't even know we had guilds. "We will rule this land together and try to make peace with our neighbors," he said. The game ended with the credits rolling over a bucolic scene of the Eternal Sun shining over a peaceful valley.

      

Greeted as we come into town.

The throngs continue to cheer as we approach the throne.

      

And thus the game ends without any explanation for why the duke's castle got teleported here in the first place. I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

     

This looks claustrophobic.

      

I took a look at the hint guide, and I see that I missed several side dungeons, including a hidden one in the castle cemetery that would have provided a shortcut to the final dungeon. The guide answered my question about equipment. +3 items become available at higher levels, but that's as high as it goes. You can also apparently buy Rings of Regeneration and Rings of Protection after crossing some level threshold. The cleric doesn't get "Raise Dead" in this game; her only sixth-level spell is "Cureall," which removes the effects of just about everything. 

       

I also watched a couple of speedruns, with players winning the game in less than half an hour, most of that spent walking back to the castle from the various far-flung dungeons. When you know where you're going, the game is relatively quick. However, the speedrun characters seemed to do a lot more damage in combat than my characters; I'm not sure what the players may have done to rig that. They also took far less damage from the traps in the Azcan pyramid than I did.

    

I realized something while watching it. For interior combats, it really doesn't matter how many party members you have. Action always cycles to the next character, with no cooldown, so a single character is as effective as four. In fact, a single fighter is arguably more effective than a party of four characters, some of whom are inevitably weaker. If I had to play the game over again, I might try it with a single fighter and a single cleric (letting the other two die early and keeping them dead). They'd get all the experience and would level up faster.

        

Long entry, but I don't want to spend a separate one on the GIMLET, so here it goes:

   

• 5 points for the game world. The backstory, though not successfully resolved, is at least original. The setting, though silly, is at least unusual. I like the way the plot advances, with the castle denizens devolving over time.

• 3 points for character creation and development. Games with more advanced character systems are starting to ruin Dungeons & Dragons for me. I know that leveling gets more interesting in later editions with perks and feats and weapon specializations and such, but in this edition, you don't change much unless you're a spellcaster, and spellcasting is a minor part of this particular game. I suspect an agile Level 1 party could win this game if they found the right gear quickly. [Ed. Maybe not. I forgot about the Azcan pyramid and the need for a high hit point total to survive the traps. I also meant to mention here that the thief seems terribly under-utilized, but note Rujasu's comment below about the "backstab" ability.]

    

I didn't realize "CHKSUM" was a D&D statistic.

    

• 4 points for NPC interaction. I was on the fence between 3 and 4 here and decided to be generous. There's no interactivity, but you do learn about the world from NPCs and their evolution over the game is amusing.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. You get the usual D&D menagerie, which itself is varied enough, but the monster variances are less interesting here than in more tactical titles. There aren't really any non-combat encounters or puzzles. [Ed. As commenter Mat Stephenson notes below, one improvement of this game over Eye of the Beholder is that you face more than two enemy types per level. I didn't think this was quite enough to adjust the score, but it's still worth noting as one of the few things that didn't degrade from Beholder.]

     

This was the last combat of the game. The developers really didn't understand what a "hydra" is.

    

• 4 points for magic and combat. You get two combat systems here, one adapted from Eye of the Beholder and one more reminiscent of Dark Sun. Both are simplified and thus less interesting and less tactical. The small selection of spells adds some interest.

• 3 points for equipment. The selection is more limited here than in most D&D titles, and it's almost all generic. I don't like tying its availability to your level.

         

Encumbrance was a problem throughout the game.

       

• 4 points for the economy. It's great for just over half the game; you're always trying to save up for the next equipment bump. Then the plot makes it useless for the second half.

• 3 points for quests. You have a clear, linear main quest with no options. There are no "side quests," but there are at least some optional dungeons. 

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. Graphics are adequate; sound effects are a bit sparse; movement and attacks work fine with the console controller, but the menu is a bit cumbersome.

• 5 points for gameplay. It has some mild non-linearity (in exploration if not in plot), mild replayability, moderate difficulty, and it's only too long by a couple of hours.

       

That gives us a final score of 39, a respectable showing. In many ways, it's an average game, but it's at least average across the board. Most PC D&D games are exceptional in one or two areas and completely fall apart in a few others. This one gives you a nice, even, perfectly pleasant experience throughout.

    

I don't know what magazine back in the day was the go-to for Genesis players, but MobyGames directed me to the May 1992 Electronic Gaming Monthly, which offered four different quick takes on each reviewed game from four different guys. Warriors got two 7/10s and two 4/10s. The two low-scorers admitted in their paragraphs that they just don't like RPGs. The two 7s noted that despite its name, the game is unlikely to please hardcore D&D fans, with which I would agree, but that it offered some enjoyable if not spectacular gameplay. The June 1992 GamePro similarly found the game a mixed bag. The reviewer praised the interface, graphics, and quest but criticized the "one-dimensional" storyline and NPC interaction and the simplified combat and lack of role-playing. The reviewer said that he looked forward to the next D&D title for the Genesis. There were, alas, no more.

       

"The DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game"? Wouldn't anyone who played the game just say "Dungeons & Dragons"?

            

The making of Warriors was covered last year in the British magazine Retro Gamer. The author interviewed Louis Castle, Westwood co-founder and Warriors lead designer, which makes it all the more disappointing to me that the article elides a lot of key points. For instance, we learn that the idea of creating a D&D title for the Genesis originated with Sega itself, who initially approached Strategic Simulations. This makes sense, as SSI had the license from TSR to produce D&D titles for both computer and console. "Westwood's history with the Eye of the Beholder series made us a natural fit," Castle is quoted as saying, without explaining how and why SSI passed the offer to Westwood without even requiring that their name be mentioned in the credits. Maybe they just did them a favor. It's also not entirely clear whose idea it was to set the game in Mystara, but it seems to have been Castle's. The article mentions the porting of the combat system from Beholder but not the other assets. Then we get this utterly mysterious paragraph:

      

"We used a proven combat model for the dungeons," explains Louis. "But the outside world was a bit more difficult because we wanted a massive open world--with a party of characters following behind the leader, often resulting in less than ideal unit placement when ambushed." Consequently, Louis's team experimented with a timed turn-based style for the external environments, similar to the dungeon combat. However, player frustration, increased by the distinctly laborious need to reposition characters on the fly, led to the final format of third-person turn-based combat for outside, first-person real time inside the game's many dungeons and caves.

       

I can't tell what's different between the "final format" here and the original format that left players frustrated. Certainly, in the final game, the outdoor combat is turn-based, requires positioning of characters, and often starts in a non-ideal configuration. I would have also liked to know if there was any Ultima VI influence on the outdoor exploration and how the outdoor combat system ended up so much like Dark Sun's even though the latter game came a year later from a different (if related) developer.

    

In any event, the article concludes that the game faced mixed reviews but sold reasonably well. There were vague plans for a sequel, but Westwood was acquired by Virgin the same year and got busy with other games, so nothing ever materialized.

    

Playing very long games like Serpent Isle and Ambermoon often gets tedious even if they're good, so Warriors has been a nice, contrasting diversion. I'll probably be looking for another one as those games drag on. I've never emulated a TurboGrafx game, so Griffon might be just the thing.

****

Ed. I'm keeping the text below so that anyone reading the comments isn't confused, but the problem is solved. Thank you!

Looking for help from anyone who's ever emulated a Thomson T08 or T09. I downloaded the DCMOTO emulator and figured it out. Downloaded Les Chevaliers de l'An Mil from this location (the only one I could find). Figured out how to type the commands . . .

    

LOAD "0: AN MIL.BAS"

RUN

. . . in the emulator. I get a "bad disk" message. I don't know whether to take this seriously or whether there's some emulator setting that I've missed. It doesn't help that the emulator menus and instructions are in French, and I have some conversational French, not technical French. If you have an idea, please let me know. Otherwise, I'll move it to the "Missing & Mysteries" list after a few days.

   

Further information: The site I linked has three versions: FD, SD, and EXE. The EXE version, even if I was willing to run it, wants a user name and password to download. The FD version is the one I tried. I can't figure out how to even reference the SD drive in Thomson's BASIC.