Another adventure in a far away land. You and your band of party members, forced to work together through happenstance, are off on a mighty quest to defeat a great evil. Wheeeeeeeeee!!!! You will travel far, fight many foes, and help many people along the way, but in the end you will prevail. Assuming you do not die of boredom first.

The formula above has been the standard background for RPG's since the first days of console RPG's. The challenge that programmers and developers have, then, is how to make the story new and fresh, exciting and interesting. Unfortunately, Alon D'ar does not do it.

After playing entirely too many hours of Alon D'ar, I am still not entirely sure what the main quest is. I have traveled the world, picked up companions, and killed some mean bad guys. And yet, I am still left asking "why?" I read the script (of which there is a lot of), complete the side quests (no end to these either), and still do not feel that I have made any progress. Finally, I just quit playing because I did not care. I did not care what happened to my party, did not care what happened to the world, and did not care to complete the "great quest".

One of the more annoying things (and there are many of these) about this game is the amount of "walking" you must do to get from Point A to Point B. Now going from Point A to Point B is a standard part of any RPG. However, most RPG's are kind enough provide you with some kind of map to help you find your way through the world. Alon D'ar provides you with a compass, but nothing remotely resembling a map. And so you wind up stumbling, wandering and trudging your way from area to area, hoping that you are heading the right direction. Eventually, you will get the ability to teleport from one zone to another. However, this does not save you the wear and tear on your legs, nor does it provide you with any sense of direction. You are still left wandering around, trying to find your way within the zone, and thinking that one canyon looks a lot like any other canyon.

Once you find your way to where you need to go, you think "Great! Now I can finish this piece of the quest!" Alas, no. More often than not, when you find your way to where you are going, and you meet the NPC that you are supposed to find, instead of allowing you to finish your quest, you are sent on yet another quest before you can get the gem, enter the dungeon, or learn the secret squirrel handshake. And of course, the item you need is nowhere near where you are, and you are once again forced to go and stumble your way through the world, hoping you are going the right way.

And then there are the quests that have absolutely nothing to do with the game, but supposedly get you some phat item. These usually involved finding items that have been scattered around the world. The magic number in the game seemed to be 30. Find 30 acorns, 30 eggs, 30 whatnots to fix the whatchamacallit. In the game, these items would just be lying on the ground, represented by the a small graphic. Now, if you don't have a large TV, or a high-resolution connection to the TV (component or S-video) these pieces become virtually undistinguishable from the rest of the world. You are then left to luck and prayer.

One thing that I did like about Alon D'ar is the character skill system. As you kill monsters, you get experience and skill points. Skills are broken out by weapon and magic types. Spending points in the weapon of your choice can increase your accuracy, defense, critical hit chance, or other areas. Spending points in magic will allow you to increase the power of your spells. The downside about this system is that in order to spend points on some skills, you first have to purchase those skills. The places to purchase those skills are few and far between. So, although it is a nice system, it is flawed.

Graphics for Alon D'ar are nothing to write home about. The character graphics are blah. They change when you change weapons, but no real change when you change armor. Spell effects are nice, but have the "been there, done that" look about them. About midway through the game, an annoying bug cropped up that prevented the characters from moving at all. This usually occurred after some mini-cut scene, and it forced you to restart the game and hope you saved it recently. Sound and music are also uninspiring. The cut scenes are blocky 3D animations of your characters, with bad actors reading a bad script.

Overall, Alon D'ar felt like an exercise futility. I was never going to be able to find all those pieces of the pie that the NPC wanted. I was never going to get to the end of this maze of a canyon. And even if I finished one task, I knew that I was going to get 10 more inane tasks to take its place. The main story gets muddied in all the mini-quests that you are sent on to complete the task. I lost interest in the characters, their quest, and their fate long before I quit playing it. I kept playing hoping something interesting would happen. Alas, it did not. Finally, I put my controller down and walked away in search of a better RPG.

Pros - Nice character advancement and skill system
Cons - long, drawn out quests that are uninteresting and only serve to confuse the game; uninspiring graphics.

Final Grade: F