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