My Favorite Gaming Hidden Gems, Part Six: Dungeons & Dragons: Eye of the Beholder (2002, Game Boy Advance)

I've been playing and collecting video games since the early 1980's, and while there's something to be said for enjoying the greats of the gaming world, there's no better feeling for me than picking out something I'd never heard of, throwing it into my system, and being unable to tear myself away from it because it was just too damn fun. With that in mind, I thought I'd start up a series about my own personal favorite hidden gems of the gaming world to let people know about the unsung, the overlooked, the ignored, and the downright weird niche titles that had no chance of achieving the heights of a Mario, Sonic, or Zelda.

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As a card-carrying member of the Dungeons & Dragons Grognards guild, I can officially say to all you young whippersnappers that you've no idea how good you've got it with your D&D today. Pawing through the latest incarnation of the rules, I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, at how wussified and hand-hold-y the game has become. So many races, so many classes, so many prestige classes, full HP at first level, massive spell bonuses, feats, special abilities, expanded racial powers...the list goes on. Some 1st-level characters I've seen for later editions are the equivalent of 3rd-level PCs from earlier editions. It's nuts, I tell ya, nuts, and the video games...don't even get me started on Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale and all their sequels and spin-offs. I love me some Dark Alliance, but that's not D&D, that's Diablo-lite.

You want the true Dungeons & Dragons video game experience, boys and girls, you need to harken back to the days of the "Gold Box" era of the late 1980's and early 1990's, where true Grognards feel their eyes begin to frost over at the mention of titles like Dark Queen of Krynn and Curse of the Azure Bonds, where you take a whole party through towns, into dungeons, and across the wilderness in search of monsters to slay, secrets to uncover, and treasure to procure. So, yeah, you could go through all the trouble of setting up DOSBox, finding a floppy disk drive, and mucking around with code wheels and other forms of copy protection (or, alternately, just buy the collections on GOG.com), but that still requires you to sit in front of your computer for hours. Suppose you want that experience on the go, in convenient cartridge format, and without all the tedious journal entries and other relics of the MS-DOS days? And suppose you aren't all that familiar with 1st or 2nd Edition AD&D rules, but 3rd Edition is right up your alley? Well, prior to reading this column, you might have shrugged your shoulders and muttered some variation on "That's just the way the Gelatinous Cube wobbles." Today however you know better, for today you will play Dungeons & Dragons: Eye of the Beholder on your Game Boy Advance.

Well, actually, I'll play it and you'll read about it, but you know what I'm getting at.

This incarnation of Eye of the Beholder is a slightly updated and reworked version of the 1994 Super Nintendo game which itself was a port of the 1990 DOS original. It was mainly released as a way to introduce gamers to D&D's 3.0 rule set in the hopes they'd put down the consoles and pick up the handbooks. I'm not sure how successful it was in this regard, but it sure brought back memories as soon as I popped it into my GBA SP and realized I was playing a modern-day Gold Box game.

Eye of the Beholder is not for gaming lightweights. Even if you love RPGs, the D&D video games have always prioritized adherence to the pen-and-paper rules. Final Fantasy is meant to be picked up and played easily, but Eye of the Beholder assumes basic familiarity with the rule set, and is not kind to the 'learn as you go' crowd. If you aren't a fan of pen-and-paper D&D, Eye of the Beholder is going to crush you mercilessly before you figure out how everything flows together. Don't expect anything like Elder Scrolls or Dragon Warrior either. You get a first-person view while travelling through the world, while combat is handled in a top-down tactical grid format where you and the enemy move into position, trade attacks, sling spells, and retreat as the situation calls. It's similar to Ultima: Exodus on the NES if you need something to compare it with on another console.

If you are a fan of D&D though, and don't mind the challenge, Eye of the Beholder will give you a few solid months' worth of entertainment. The limitations of the GBA hardware mean there's not a lot of room for a massive world-spanning adventure through the Forgotten Realms. The dungeon you explore only has ten floors, and your characters all max out at seventh level. This may sound small, but in the D&D world this is quite impressive. Levels are not just handed out like candy the way other RPGs do, and with six members in your party (four to start, with an extra two that can be picked up in the first area), four basic classes, and six possible races not to mention a laundry list of skills, spells, and feats, there's plenty of stuff to learn before you'll wind up fielding a team capable of taking the fight to the titular Beholder down on level ten.

I wish I could say the game's perfect, but there's more than the challenge keeping this one firmly on the 'hidden gems' list. With no tutorial or hand-holding of any kind, an instruction manual that's all-but-useless in explaining how things work in the D&D world, a quest with very little replay value, and (the worst sin of all in my opinion) some skills and feats that are either completely worthless or of so little use as to basically be so, Eye of the Beholder is only going to appeal to a very small cross-section of die-hard RPG nuts, and there's no overlap with the Dark Souls crowd of gamers who love a challenging game for the sake of the challenge.

Despite this, I have to admire what Pronto Games managed. Looking at the list of skills, it seems like maybe their design document was too ambitious for what they were able to squeeze out of the GBA hardware, or else Wizards of the Coast had a list of things they required for inclusion that the developers couldn't figure out any use for. The 'Forgery' skill, for instance, speaks of the potential for covertly replacing orders or identifying fraudulent documents as ways to get around obstacles, but there's not a single instance within the game where you can apply it--a waste of both potential and skill points. Similar skills like 'Bluff', 'Diplomacy', and 'Intimidate' are likewise next-to-useless...there are a few places where the option of talking your way through or out of a problem are possible, but when weighed against the other, more useful, skills there will never come a time in your adventure where you'll say to yourself, "Man, am I glad I maxed 'Intimidation' for that encounter!"

So yes, Eye of the Beholder is a hidden gem for a very good reason, but I still feel a strange fondness for it. Maybe Pronto Games had bigger plans for the franchise, or publisher Infogrames was considering a two- or even three-part series. For whatever reason, portable D&D didn't catch on with the Game Boy Advance generation. Third Edition didn't completely fail on consoles, as the Xbox-exclusive Dungeons & Dragons Heroes did just fine a year later, but the best old-school D&D games are still found in those old gold boxes with "SSI, Inc" stamped on the cover.

YouTuber McGammer put together a lovely 38-part Let's Play for this game, starting with rolling up your characters all the way up through the final confrontation with Xantham at the end of the game. If you're trying to decide whether or not to part with the $5 it will cost to add this one to your library, you can start episode 1 right here:

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Looking for the previous entries in this series? Let me help you catch up:

• Part One: Snoopy and the Red Baron (2600)
• Part Two: Dark Summit (PS2)
• Part Three: Metal Marines (SNES)
• Part Four: Theresia (DS)
• Part Five: Obscure (PS2)