Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Hillsfar

Developer: Pony Canyon/FCI	Publisher: FCI
Release Date: 1992	Also On: Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS

And yet again NES fans are dealt a subpar Dungeons and Dragons title when there was so much room for possibility. I don't even need to say more than that, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Hillsfar is one of the worst, most ridiculous and redundant games I have ever played. Yet again, the game designers tried to do something different with D & D concepts and it turned out awful. Face it guys, the standard RPG is and was the way to go for something like this. I have yet to see an example to prove this theory wrong, but to prove it right, let's look at Hillsfar. Keep in mind I'm well aware of the fact this was released in other formats, but I don't care because they all suck just as much.

Graphically, Hillsfar is incredibly bland and uneventful. The original had a very lush opening screen and this was it's strongest area, but on the NES it's been stripped down to almost nothing with such a small number of colors it feels as though the programmers were working under a small budget. This goes for the main screen as well, which displays a single, lonely character staring into the embers of a fire in depression at having been placed in such a mess. The main action screen, the city of Hillsfar itself, is a drab brown all over with little detail, making it impossible sometimes to tell what building is what without referring to the map. They added a little man walking around instead of an arrow as in the original, but unfortunately removed the first person view so you can see what's coming and have a better feel for the environment. The riding scenes are terrible, well below what the NES is capable of, which is sad because the original look could have easily been pulled off, or at least close to it. Your character has turned into a lifeless, worm-like creature on top of a stub-footed horse that is animated well, until you jump and magically fly through obstacles or fall when you aren't even close to them at a speed that defies physics. Other animations, however, are atrocious, such as the maze segments where the screen actually skips and you can lose track of where the walls are. The general color scheme here is brown, nothing but brown with light green for distinction so you can read. I don't think I've ever seen this much brown used in a single game, nor have I seen such pitiful creations from a time when the NES was almost off the shelves and most programmers had learned to milk it's capabilities to the extreme. Hillsfar looks terrible, a complete travesty. There's a bit of detail here and there but so much room for improvement that the score drops to the floor in this category. The only times you really see any usage of color and any significant amount of detail are during segements where you talk to people.

Sound? Does Hillsfar even have sound? Wait, I think so, just not much. The opening theme is a lame, medieval tune that is very familiar but I can't remember the name of it. Decent programming and it sort-of fades out after you press start, though awkwardly as though from a casette that's slowly breaking apart. After this, however, you have almost no sound whatsoever. The music is nearly nonexistent and the sound effects are worthless. While walking along the city, they programmed this odd, bouncing ball sound that skips. Other than this, you have a few strikes, locks, traps and such that have some effects, just none of which stand out or really sound any good. There's pretty much no in-game music whatsoever other than during the arena battles. Even the riding scenes, where you'd expect something, throw out nothing other than the pathetic trot of your horse, the almost inaudible tweet of a bird that comes by that also sounds the same as the occasional arrow and the sound when you fall. Wow, took a lot of time I'm sure and the rest of the game doesn't fare any better. You get some little tunes here and there when you enter certain areas or switch to riding, but really the only significant song you ever hear is the ending. Not the greatest thing either, but at least it's there. In addition, sometimes the transition from song to silence is incredibly off. You hear no fading or anything, just a sudden break that skips into the next scene. Another low blow for Hillsfar.

And now the worst part of all as I like to say, or something like that, the gameplay. Hillsfar was an attempt to do something different with the Dungeons & Dragons universe. That's fine, there have been other attempts at doing different things with different games, the Ultima series presents a nice collection of titles with many variations on the RPG genre. Hillsfar, however, is a failed attempt at making something I'm not even sure how to categorize. Let's get the basics out of the way. The controls are responsive enough, but at times actions don't seem to respond when they should, so there's a problem. The basic arrangement here is that you make a character, only one, get your attributes and such, pick a class, name them and go on your way to the city. At the city, depending on your class (there are four total), you can go to one of four guilds where you get quests to complete. From these quests you move around the city looking for items or people, moving out of Hillsfar to find things, fighting at the arena, buying potions to heal yourself and so forth. Really isn't that bad of an idea, but of course it didn't come out so well.

First problem is that aside from your class selection it doesn't really matter what your attributes are so long as your strength is 18, which I'll explain a bit later. The only reason you select a class is to essentially select which adventure you want to take on. You can select your alignment, for example, but it makes no difference whether you decide your character is evil or good, which makes it simply a superfluous addition to try to stay as close to D & D rules as possible. You don't raise levels, though for some strange reason you gather experience, and regardless of what class you pick the game boils down to the same thing over and over with just variations on what words you're reading.

Here's why. Hillsfar first involves you making your character and entering the city. Before you enter the city, you have to ride your horse. This is the most aggravating and ridiculous portion of the game. First off, the road is littered with randoms obstacles, which at times are impossible to avoid. Sometimes a bird will be flying at you only after you've already pressed jump to make it over a mysterious pile of hay, and you consequently get knocked off. Usually, it's easy enough to get through this part but at times you'll fall more than four times and then you struggle to the trading post, where you can buy another horse and try again or try to walk the distance. These riding segments amount to nothing more than a bizarre, poorly programmed platforming mini-game with tons of glitches and problems. At least they don't last very long. After this, you find your guild based on your class and they give you assignments. The riding scenes crop up again any time you're leaving the city to go somewhere.

The assignments, though different for each class, really only vary by the words you read, to state that again. The fighter may have to go locate a letter in a house or the thief might have to locate a poisonous mushroom in the sewers. Either way, what happens next is the same thing for everyone in that you enter into an odd, quasi-three dimensional maze crawl where you wander around opening up randomly placed chests. Usually, these chests are pointless other than to collect money and healing potions. If you've made sure to have 18 strength, the majority can be opend with physical force or knock rings you find lying about. If you're unlucky enough to be the thief, you have to attempt to pick it, which takes way too much time and has about a 95% failure rate either because a pick breaks or you don't have the correct pick or time. Either way, just wait for the timer to go down, which is a wick goes out with no explosion or anything, and you'll be back to the maze and can try to open it again, only to discover the tumbler has magically changed to another lock. The good part is the chests that contain what you're looking for automatically open, but even then you don't really see anything, the game just announces you've found a letter, a mushroom or whatever. You have a timer that goes down and when it reaches half way guards enter wherever you are and if they trap you or touch you when the timer reaches zero they just throw you out, take your gold and you can try again. Hmmm, that's kind of strange considering that you are essentially breaking into everything regardless of your class, not to mention the fact that you're stealing money. Even stranger is the fact that the 'guards' apparently guard everything in the land including the rock quarry, hermit's hut (why does he have personal guards?), ruins, abadoned ship and so forth. It really makes no sense but what makes it annoying is that whatever you're looking for and wherever you're going, usually you have to do this same maze crawl over and over again with little variation other than how the mazes are arranged. Every quest you get where you have to go to a location other than the archery range or the arena involves a maze with treasure chests and something to locate, even the old tree in the middle of the forest. Why is there a maze here? Why are there guards? What is going on? Tedious and boring to say the least, but surprisingly this is how the game was originally programmed, but that's not all.

The next bummer in Hillsfar is that the only two unique aspects to be found are just awful mini-games. Sometimes you may be called to the arena or wind up there accidentally, and then you have to engage a few different monsters in a staff fight. At times, this is part of a quest and you have to defeat a certain fighter, but other times it's punishment for something or just something you can do to increase your meaningless experience points. Whenever you have to finally fight a particular creature, you'll often find the programming so random and without a particular pattern that it becomes beyond tedious. I almost stopped playing the game entirely on the fighter quest because there's a point later on where you have to beat a powerful lizard man who has no pattern whatsoever and the fight ends up being a lucky button mashing fest that you'll finally win if you can manage to stick it out for about five hours of play. The movements here are slow and hardly capture any feeling of a real battle or anything exciting. Other than this you have an archery range where you have to get a certain score depending on the quest, or just to win money if you want, but it amounts to nothing more than moving an aimer around after you select a weapon to use, not that it matters, and shoot at targets to get points. It's probably the most well programmed aspect of the game, but nothing even remotely enjoyable.

So after you complete your battles, archery matches and mainly the maze crawls and 'quests', you get your ending and that's it. So you have quests to complete with riding segments if you need to leave the city, paragraphs to read, a few battles and yep that would be all. I can't explain how boring this game is to complete and it's even made more depressing with random actions you can perform that have no meaning. For example, to collect five gold should you so choose my liege, you can enter a bar and arm wrestle. All you get is a sentence that says something like 'your opponent is suprised after you slam their arm down, you collect five gold'. Wow, a whole five? Considering that potions cost $250, healings cost even more and anything I need to purchase that's worth anything is well above that, I have no reason for doing it in the first place. Or, you can carve your initials into a table, which results in the bar tender telling you no. Wow, such spice of life and reality, I can't bear the way this game so accurately displays random elements of life. I assume that was the point, but these things had no reason to be here. After awhile you see how repetitive everything becomes and it's nearly impossilbe to not shut it off and forget about it. Just bad all over, Hillsfar has no gameplay value at all.

I have to give a bit of credit for creativity because the programmers and game designers made an attempt at creating something new using Dungeons & Dragons rules and story lines. However, at the same time the attempt to use D & D rules is fruitless because for the most part none of them matter. It doesn't matter what class you are, you'll still have to maze crawl, it doesn't matter what your stats are other than your strength to open traps, magic users don't really use any magic, clerics are out of their element and thieves have almost no chance opening chests. So they tried, but they failed, and in their failure they've effected the creativity score because being creative is only worth points if something decent comes out of it, at least a little something.

I would never in my life play this game again, I have no reason to and I shouldn't have had one in the first place. It does have a good save feature where you can save pretty much anywhere in the city and start right where you left off, so thankfully you can come back in spurts when you feel up to it. But why would you want to? Hillsfar is the same thing over and over for only a single picture with accompanying text for an ending. They're all posted online, so do yourself a favor and don't even play. As for game length, for a Dungeons & Dragons title this is surprisingly short, believe it or not. Once you get the hang of the hideous thing you can complete your entire game in a little under an hour, whereas something like Pool of Radiance, which I'll get to in the future after I complete it, takes weeks to complete. Hillsfar is definitely not long enough, but considering how tedious it is perhaps it's not short enough either.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Hillsfar is one of the most disappointing games in the franchise I've ever played, NES version or otherwise. It has almost no value for gamers whatsoever, even hardcore, old school fans will find absolutely nothing here of merit. It's tedious, boring, silent, poorly constructed and just downright horrible. What's even worse is that this was released near the end of the NES' life somehow, making it all the more shocking FCI even bothered releasing it. It's actually fairly rare in terms of NES releases from this time period, but don't make that a reason to pick it up, I strongly recommend that anyone other than someone who's trying to have a complete NES collection should never purchase or play this game, ever. Enough said.

Graphics:	2.5
Sound:	1.5
Gameplay:	2
Creativity:	4
Replay Value/Game Length:	0
Final:	2
Written by Stan	Review Guide

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