Heroes of the Lance
| Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of the Lance |
|
|---|---|
NES box art
|
|
| Developer(s) |
U.S. Gold Natsume (NES/Famicom) |
| Publisher(s) |
Strategic Simulations, Inc. U.S. Gold Pony Canyon (NES/Famicom) |
| Composer(s) | Brian Howarth (computer versions) Iku Mizutani (NES version) Seiji Toda (MSX version) |
| Platform(s) | Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, FM Towns, MS-DOS, MSX, NEC PC-8801, NEC PC-9801, NES, Sega Master System, ZX Spectrum |
| Release | January 1988 Nintendo/Famicom
|
| Genre(s) | Action-adventure game |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of the Lance is a video game released in January 1988 for various home computer systems and consoles. The game is based on the first Dragonlance campaign module for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game, Dragons of Despair, and the first Dragonlance novel Dragons of Autumn Twilight. Heroes of the Lance focuses on the journey of eight heroes through the ruined city of Xak Tsaroth, where they must face the ancient dragon Khisanth and retrieve the relic, the Disks of Mishakal.
Heroes of the Lance is a side-scrolling action game. The game uses actual Dungeons & Dragons statistics, with statistics for the characters exactly as they were in the rule books. Eight heroes from the Dragonlance novels series must be assembled for the quest, and only one is visible on the screen at a time; when one on-screen hero dies, the next in line appears.
While Heroes of the Lance is a faithful representation of the books it is based on, it was a departure from the usual role-playing video game style of most Dungeons & Dragons games, with a gameplay interface which consists of using one character at a time in horizontally scrolling fighting. Each character has different types of attacks and spells making them more suited to fighting different enemies but they merely act as "lives" for the player as in more traditional fighting games, removing one of the main strategies of role-playing games from the game.
The eight heroes that make up the party are:
Heroes of the Lance was based on the Dragonlance novels by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.Heroes of the Lance was not part of the Gold Box series; the nickname for these other D&D titles were "Silver Box" games. The NES version was developed by Natsume.
...
Wikipedia