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Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara
PC (Steam)
Bringing the Arcade Home isn’t Always a Good Idea
3/5 stars
I’ve never been much of an arcade gamer. Back in the day, my parents convinced me that arcades were a complete waste of money. Why would I want to play a game machine that demanded money for each play instead of playing a game machine that made each game a one-time purchase for as much play time as I could stand? Despite their complete lack of technological understanding, this little nugget of wisdom managed to be spot on, and has stuck with me to this very day. Yet I still have a special place in my heart for the two old Capcom arcade games included in the “Chronicles of Mystara” bundle. While I never actually played “Tower of Doom” (due to it being a Japan-only game), “Shadow Over Mystara” was the first – and only – arcade game I played to completion, thanks in large part to being bored as a child after a movie I had been dropped off to see with Chris, who never developed a sense of frugality, and thus was willing to share his pile of quarters with me.
Presentation
The games in “Chronicles of Mystara” look almost exactly as they did in 1994 and 1996. Thanks to modern aspect ratios and resolutions, however, the games are letter-boxed into a square wrapper decorated with HD D&D concept art. While it is possible to add two different filters to the games, I found that the ‘smooth’ option looked hideous and blurry while the ‘sharp’ option looked no different than the option to apply no filters. Thus, I played the game unfiltered. The letterbox frame area isn’t completely wasted, either, as it serves as a home for various in-game achievement-tracking boxes. Both games feature nearly-identical graphics for character sprites and many enemies, which is, of course, typical of Capcom and their love of reusing as much material as they can possibly get away with. These character sprites are fairly large, though they looked much larger back in the day, and could benefit from one or two more frames in each of their animations.
The audio is likewise perfectly emulated mid-‘90s fare. The soundtrack isn’t particularly catchy and the limited voiceacting provided to the characters is heavily compressed. For some reason, the elf character in particular seems to have a weird accent (that isn’t Japanese!).
In a day and age when commercial emulations of classic games need to compete with piracy free emulators, it seems that “Chronicles of Mystara” is not very ambitious on the presentation front. True, the games don’t have any bugs or glitches and they run at the correct speed, but where’s the effort in making them look better? Any free emulator worth its salt will have numerous upscaling options that can fill the screen and filter out the pixilation that appears when old CRT-targeting games are played on LCD screens. Yet Capcom took the easy way out… which is the completely predictable action from a company that has deep-sixed its reputation so severely over the course of the 7th Generation.
Story
Neither of the games included in “Chronicles of Mystara” has a particularly epic story. Both games are based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, which means they rely on a lot of the generic D&D mythology to provide an excuse narrative. In “Tower of Doom,” an evil lich has built an evil tower and is sending monsters out to attack people. Our party of heroes must make their way to the tower, climb it, and eliminate the lich. In “Shadow Over Mystara,” a mysterious group of evil-doers (who are never adequately introduced) are, again, sending monsters out from their evil base to attack people. Our returning party of heroes (plus a couple of new heroes) must make their way to the heart of the evil organization and eliminate its leaders one-by-one.
Neither of these stories is particularly long or engaging. In fact, the MeltedJoystick crew managed to beat “Tower of Doom” twice and “Shadow Over Mystara” once in single 4-hour session. I shouldn’t be surprised by the short length of these games, as nobody would want to stand at an arcade machine for more than a couple hours, but “Shadow Over Mystara” sure seemed longer when I played it in the arcade as a kid… of course, most games – indeed, most EVERYTHING – seemed longer as a kid.
In the end, both of these games feel like kind of generic AD&D modules that a hurried Dungeon Master might run for his weekly game group when he doesn’t have time to come up with something more original. The characters and plots are one-dimensional and there’s no real effort made to explain any AD&D rules or lore. Were I not a long time AD&D player, I would have found it impossible to figure out what the characters’ special abilities did, thanks to overuse of abbreviations. During our playthrough, Nick, the only non-D&D-player among us, was completely befuddled by what his spells and magic items did until I puzzled out the abbreviations and told him what they were.
Gameplay
While the D&D license attached to “Chronicles of Mystara” might lead many to mistake it for an RPG, both included games are straight-up Beat ‘em Ups in the most classic definition of that genre. While the games both feature a D&D-inspired leveling system, it is a token effort at adding RPG elements and mostly involves adding a pittance of extra hit points to characters who gain a large amount of experience points from killing enemies without dying (which resets a character’s accumulated experience to 0). Of course, dying isn’t all that big of a deal in arcade games as long as the player has enough quarters. I was initially worried that “Chronicles of Mystara” might prove to be stupidly difficult by limiting the number of virtual credits the player gets. I kept thinking that it might end up like the SNES port of “Final Fight,” with a prohibitively small number of continues. Fortunately, that is not the case with “Chronicles of Mystara.” While the game doesn’t offer infinite credits, it does provide an increasing number of virtual quarters as the player(s) progress through the stages. In the end, we never ran short of credits, even with three people sharing our pile of virtual quarters, and had nearly 40 left at the end of each game. No, we were not that good, the game was just generous.
Each game has a number of playable characters to chose from, ranging from a Cleric, to a Dwarf, to an Elf, to a Magic U(ser). I spent most of the MJ crew’s time with the game as a Cleric (changing to Fighter once by accident while inserting a virtual coin to continue). Chris is our resident Dwarf and Nick is our resident Elf, so they played their respective characters. Each character features a strikingly different set of abilities, though it seems that the Elf is probably the best character, as she has access to decent melee attacks, unlimited arrows (in “Shadow Over Mystara” but not “Tower of Doom”), and wizard magic. The Cleric’s healing spells aren’t particularly useful, as they are too weak, but his Turn Undead ability is almost broken (which is probably why it only appears in “Tower of Doom” and was replaced with a handful of other crappy spells in “Shadow Over Mystara”). There’s a fairly large range of available spells in both games, though most of the good spells don’t work on bosses (no surprise there).
Each of the games’ various stages scroll from left to right, with enemies appearing from off-screen. The players need to kill every enemy that appears to keep scrolling forward. Many of the stages conceal hidden rooms filled with treasures that can enhance the characters’ abilities (magic items such as Boots of Speed and Gauntlets of Ogre Power) or one-off magic items (like rings that shoot magic missiles). Some of the stages have branches at the end that allow the players to choose between multiple paths through the game, while most stages end in towns where players can spend some of the silver coins they’ve gathered on potions of healing or disposable projectile weapons. As a Cleric, I really got screwed on the projectile weapons, as – true to AD&D rules – Clerics can’t use edged weapons, so I was stuck with hammers and burning oil while the other guys got to use arrows and throwing knives.
The new additions in the “Chronicles of Mystara” compilation mostly involve completing in-game achievements to earn points to spend on unlockables. The most important unlockables are the House Rules, named after the age-old AD&D tradition of individual game groups bending the written rules of the game to better suit their playstyles and dispositions. It’s relatively easy to earn enough points to unlock all of the House Rules, but the most important ones are the ones that make the games easier (read: less arcade-like), like allowing characters to regenerate health with each hit they land or preventing the magic items the characters find from breaking in combat. There are other House Rules that unlock more challenging modes, but I’ve never really been interested in those types of modes so I spent my points elsewhere. And what else can points buy? Access to concept art! And old magazine ads for the arcade machines! Of course, the sad part is that none of the concept art included as unlockables in “Chronicles of Mystara” is actually from the conceptualization periods of the included games. Instead, it’s just generic D&D concept art, in many cases from 3rd or 4th Edition D&D with signature dates in the late 2000s!
Overall
“Chronicles of Mystara” is a compilation of two arcade games that were great in the arcade but just don’t translate into an amazing home gaming experience. The two included games are both exemplars of their genres from their time period, but just don’t provide enough length or depth when compared to similar games that have been explicitly designed for console or PC play. For $15, I think “Chronicles of Mystara” is overpriced, especially considering that it’s not all that difficult to emulate these games for free. For $5, however, “Chronicles of Mystara” offers a solid chunk of gaming history and D&D history in a clean, user-friendly package.
Presentation: 3.5/5
Story: 2/5
Gameplay: 3.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
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