"Challenging, with a lively underworld and many side quests"

Dragon Wars is the most coherent and complex of the Interplay adventures, surpassing even the Bard's Tale series, which it closely resembles. In this game, which borrows many concepts and names from Babylonian mythology, you command four characters and can add up to three NPC,and they are not given class or race but rather a conglomeration of skills(lores which expose clues, weapons, healing, magic and other) and attributes; with each level, you get two points to spend on improvement(skills cost 1-2 points but the first magic level costs 10,) and points between levels cap out on level thirteen, by which time you should be close to done with the game. Therefore, you can't develop a jack-of-all-trades until you get good enough not to need one. The object is to find the evil Wizard Namtar and dispatch him and his evil armies. After getting out of Purgatory, there's a large overworld, an underworld with even more land mass, and many dungeons of different sizes, although stairs only exist between dungeons. There are many sub-quests along the way, and while many are not strictly necessary, your puzzle-solving ability will frequently be rewarded with a wonderful item that makes your party much stronger. In Dragon Wars, unlike other early computer RPG's, items are only found in specific places, and it also distinguishes between defense and armor class; heavy plate mail will hurt your defense but raise your armor class. A simple bold stroke for realism! Also, you have the option of restarting a game with your characters' stats intact, but their items are all gone--on the other hand, all circumstances are reset to the beginning as well, so you can retrace your steps. Not that it's possible to get stuck in the game unless you drop a special item, but you can try different angles to winning the game after you've done it once.

The first place you go is Purgatory, stripped of your possessions. You'll probably be able to beat the monsters here pretty easily with your bare hands, although you go to an arena to fight gladiators, which gets you free basic armor and weapons of your choice and, if you win, Citizenship Papers. You can also find Low Magic scrolls for free(you need to read a scroll to gain a spell) although spells for the other magics(Sun, Miscellaneous, Druid and High) can be hard to find; in fact, some may not even be possible. There's also a pool where you can recharge your spell points, and most monsters you face will do only ''stun'' damage, which is not lethal. Dragon Wars makes this distinction between actual hits and pure ''stun'' hits. A character's stun points are recharged each battle, and actual hits take off twice the stun points. So a character will be stunned before he dies, unless an enemy is exceptionally strong or the character has been healed--in fact, it may be bad to get too many hit points too soon, as a character's bandaging skills may not be caught up with another's hit points, making him more likely to die. This is rather clever, as it saves resurrection as a myth, and of course it's an adventure to get there. If this game is in the Bard's Tale spirit, one divergence is that new characters don't get bumped off easily. It still has the occasional humorous shot, especially in the accompanying paragraph book(Namtar may be evil, but he's a bit of a card, and of course there are fake paragraphs although admittedly Wasteland's is still better) and in combat introductions, and you still have the 3-d view where you can see the monsters you're in combat with.

But back to the outside world. Most early RPGs were pretty one-way; there was one way to get into a town and one way to leave it. With Dragon Wars, there were always several ways, and you could use the Underworld, which connected to many towns, as a sort of hyperspace. If you don't want to pass a toll-bridge on one island, you can learn to navigate the underworld. As a result, the game feels interconnected, and the times when you are kidnapped/teleported feel less just like mechanisms to dump you a certain place. Purgatory itself has two exits, to the underworld, swimming to safety, and rushing the gates and walking to safety. Once outside you'll note there are several isles, all of which you must travel. On them, there are a slave camp where the locals might not trust you, bridges with nasty guards and treasure, and a magic wood to go along with cities, each of which has its own striking problem(Lansk is amusingly bureaucratic and the City of the Mud Toad is sinking) even if it's not ruined. There are also ''rumored lands beyond'' which, you guessed it, have lots of valuable stuff for you. You have one critical battle that allows you access to remote areas, and although very little there is strictly necessary to win the game, finding the right places can improve your party significantly. There's a Magic College, a place with dragons, and even somewhere underwater. Perhaps there is nothing so dramatic as the mainland, where entire cities can be wiped out by your actions, and all dungeons will seem trivial compared to the almost-final Nisir, where you can wind up meeting some enemies that escaped you in the city. As for the business after the Nisir, those are nice twists in the plot. Along the way you'll be torn between weaning your party from the pools that recharge valuable spell points and deciding when to burn through your supply of dragon stones, and seeing and improving just how far you can get is a nice compliment to the puzzles you're presented.

Now on to controlling your characters. NPC's are treated like normal characters, only because there are only four total, you might not like what you're stuck with at first. However, you can improve any one character as you please, even holding improvement points in reserve. Navigating the menus can be tricky but you can switch between players to view easily when viewing any aspect--vital statistics and items, skills, or spells known. You have fourteen item slots, which really are plenty, as items are so infrequent. My spots mostly get cluttered up with spell scrolls I don't use anyway when I should be holding the spaces open for dragon stones/eyes(recharge spell points when you're far away from pools or in a long tough combat.) Combat, where you have a text list of up to four groups of monsters that attack from specified distances, can be slightly awkward until you learn to type special combinations to cast spells; you have to type C, the first name of the spell class(S for Sun, etc.,) the spell type(combat, heal, misc) and the first letter of the spell. I preferred the Bard's Tale spells better with their clever four-letter abbreviations, as the descriptions added to them made it easy to remember. Casting ''YMCA,'' is better than Dragon Wars's ''CSCS.'' However, combat does have the option of letting a character retreat, and you can choose aggressive or passive attacks. You can even disarm opponents who just choose to block, and that is useful for getting out of stalemates. Using attributes also requires a bit of memorization, and you learn pretty quickly the key sequence to bandage a character after combat. Although there is an involved cheat that will allow relatively rapid improvement, there are more pedestrian ways to improve your party at a good rate. The failed combat in this game is also less harsh than usual; instead of everyone dying, if some of your characters are stunned, you will receive experience for the monsters you did kill and be booted back a square.

The Magan Underworld, which has forests, statues, a building, a chasm, bridges and pools, is probably has the coolest graphics, although the feature of enemies shown in the 3-d view instead of off to the side is nice; the unused pixels are transparent. There is not a huge variety of enemies, but they all have brief cyclical animations, as the Murk Trees waving their branches, skeletons banging their shields and various turtles popping their heads out of their shelves signify the sort of neat enemies you will find. If there is one downer, it's that your players don't have graphics to show them. This is probably partly due to the no-class character creation, which is overall a good trade-off.

You may not go through all the side quests on Dragon Wars. Some you'll probably get to in solving the game, like the legendary Sword of Freedom. Others may wait until you're too powerful for them to do much good, you may fight past monsters that block your way instead of using the proper item on them, or some places, like the Gaming Preserve, just seemed pointless. You may find a quest, be unable to solve it, and forget it; for instance, the Humbaba, who has a bounty on his head, is the toughest monster in Purgatory. Then there's selling yourself in the slave market may not seem appetizing at first. However, after you've solved the game you can check out that puzzle. You may also have destroyed a city escaping from a dungeon, but there's a way around that to discover. You can even see what happens if you take a course that seems obviously wrong, i.e. destroying a city belonging to the ''good guys.'' There are even two ways to win the final battle. I've found a few illogical causality issues in the game but they are not clearly evident--if you look closely, you'll notice the game is beset by very minor downers throughout(you're never totally sure which items you need) but its compelling story line is what will catch you up. If you manage to buy the Interplay RPG anthology and give this game a whirl, they probably won't bug you either.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 11/05/01