This was the first D&D computer game I've ever played. I only played P&P D&D once for a few hours many years ago, so can't compare the two.
I really hope this is the worst version of the game, as so many things are either completely useless or outright broken. Things like needing successful "die rolls" to do things like Appraise items for a better price is rendered pointless when you can just very quickly switch back and forth between characters until you succeed, or just repeatedly pick locks until successful when there is no danger when you fail. The game became a tedious trek through 10 floors with extremely simple tactical battles where all the combatants miss a LOT, as well as spells failing to be cast way too often if the character is wearing any armor that adds a percentage to fail (there were a couple times where I had to reset because after about 20 rounds, my 6 characters had connected less than 5 times total). With one exception, the only thing to do in the game is find keys and other items to open doors and pathways to get to the next floor.
For being such a loot heavy game (there are 2 shops in the entire game, so except for outfitting your party with slightly better equipment at the first shop, much of your equipment will be acquired via Chests and monster drops), the equipment has very little variation in effectiveness to make it exciting for me. Having no music beyond the game intro and credits, except for the same short little tune when you win a battle or level up, wasn't an issue for me. There were random sounds when walking around that serve absolutely no purpose, other than maybe adding a little ambiance to the game. Apparently, if you use your lock picking or strength skill to open doors requiring keys too often, you can actually make it impossible to complete the game since there is a limited amount of space for important items, one of which is found right before the end of the game which you MUST acquire, and you can't get rid of these items other than by using them.
I played it on a Game Boy Player, which might a good thing since during battles, the D-Pad was a pain for moving the cursor around the battlefield (maybe it's fine on an actual GBA or backwards compatible DS), while the analog stick worked great. Outside of battles, analog was very sloppy for traversing the dungeon and navigating the menus, so I used the D-Pad then. Not being able to scroll through the characters in the menus is a pain if you are, for example, checking out everyone's equipment since you have to back all the way out to the starting point, change the character to view, then go back through the sub-menus and pages therein.
I don't like the only way to save being by successfully resting, and it saving automatically if you are successful. If you get attacked while resting, it will not save at the completion of the battle, so you have to keep trying to rest until you don't get attacked in order to save. Also, you level up while resting, so if you make a mistake in what skills/attributes to increase when you level up (and the max level being 7 doesn't give you a lot of opportunities to correct any mistakes you make) you cannot undo it with a restart. I do like how you can create multi-class characters as you level up.
I just really hope the SNES and Sega CD versions that I own are much better than this.
