Capcom's Forgotten D&D Games | Chronicles of Mystara Series Retrospective Review 

Please review Dragon's Crown.

Your income is YOUR problem. 🤮

Whats the music at 13:50? Sounds really familiar

Yep! Reportedly the anime 'Slayers' is too, but that one is harder to verify!

@@WilliamSRD Slayers certainly captures the spirit of tabletop more than most high fantasy anime. You can practically hear the players behind the scenes arguing over loot or getting pissed at Lina for showboating.

Lodoss crawled so Legend of Vox Machina could run.

@@WilliamSRD Slayers was adapted into two tabletop games though.

Did anyone ever notice that the opening of Lodoss War seems to depict a recreation of that Clyde Caldwell Dragonlance painting where Laurana is chained up before Takhisis? Also, did anyone ever notice that the box art for Castlevania 2 seems to be ripping off the cover of the original Ravenloft module?

yeah, watching this video I was missing the mention that Dragon's Crown is basically the remake of Shadow over Mystara, it features many of the same enemies, player characters inspired by the original cast (plus the sorcerer which is the "witchy" version of the magic caster), a similar idea with the branching paths (although implemented differently probably because it was a console game and not an arcade)... and even a Monty Python parody! Plus the anime style and elements turned up to eleven now that WotC didn't have a word on it

George Kamitani only worked on the first game.

Lodoss also has that video game, right? "Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth" or something?

@@comradestannis Yes, and it’s quite good. Would highly recommend. It also takes a lot of inspiration from Symphony of the Night but in the best way possible.

@@wanderingslacker Yeah, haven't played it, but I heard great things.

​@@comradestannis Multiple games. There's a diablo-like for the Sega Dreamcast.

@@Minnan1 Nice. I'll look into it all.

came here to say this as well. Dragons Crown is an excellent game!

I do find it funny when I noticed Capcom released that after Dragon's Crown. It's not the first time they've done it, either.

Dragons crown is so fucking good, Probably my favourite game that year.

Ah, Odin Sphere, what an incredible idea for a game. I love that more people recognize it nowadays. I'd heard his other projects were also of great quality.

Now Dragon's Dogma is Capcom's D&D

Its amazing how much 3e and 5e Mandela effect has over the game's historical perception.

@@freelancerthe2561 while they do distort, choosing both race and class, as well as some multiclassing, was in AD&D (which ran concurrently with the basic D&D line)

​@OtakuNoShitpost This game has the Dungeons & Dragons license, not the AD&D license.

That is correct; Mystara was originally the setting for Basic D&D, where the "races" were essentially classes (e.g. elf = ftr / mu). So the elf was "canon" for Basic / Expert / etc. D&D. Mystara was later adapted into AD&D (I had the Karameikos and Glantri box sets). As for the video games, I loved Tower of Doom at the arcade--it was a lot of fun. My RPG friends and I would spend an afternoon on the game--completed it a couple times. Hated it when the baddies started dropping meteor swarm...) Good memories.

Soory, both halflings and dwarves were fighters.

Was going to post this.

Well, if they haven't gone mad, they're probably pretty self-absorbed (trying to get more powerful, trying to stay ahead of the competition which is literally every other magic user). Just kind of goes with the territory, no? 😂 Edit: not a dnd player so someone could always play different. But in terms of dnd related media and dnd adjacent media the only wizards that were usually different were clerics.

noice

True, as someone more into videogaming than tabletop I wasn't prepared for the TTRPG history lesson here... but it was all interesting, so I don't really mind the new perspective!

I've spent YEARS trying to remember this game. So many quarters dumped into it at the local Fun Factory. Also started a long tradition of hogging the girl characters in the character select. Elf was my favorite pick.

​@@freelancerthe2561your first waifu? 😂

...oh god, I remember our 4 player stream of this years ago and all I hear is "sticks to snakes" "Magic Missile" "Sticks to Snakes" "FIREBALL" "Magic Missile" on an endless mental loop.

Oh yeah. I remember back in the day one game I played in had one thief (for the 1.0 glitch), two Magic users and an Elf. Synn was stuck in a infinite loop of Ice Storms, Conjure elementals, Cloud Kills and so forth. And in the end, the Thief was the one who got the final kill with a lightning bolt ring glitch. Good times.

This is why playing the game without the "1 credit clear" goal of arcades makes it lose a lot of appeal. Normally, the Magic Users have limited spell slots that are only replenished at set points in the playthrough, so you have to be thoughtful with each casting or you end up having to face bosses with your limited melee capabilities. Whereas when you creditfeed, you just spam magic, die, spam magic, die, etc. and it gets old quickly especially if you are playing with friends.

I never thought there would be a Beat'em up/Dungeon Crawler hybrid. But now I'm all here for it.

Baldur’s Gate 2 has entered the chat.

I mean, its also why orcs being pig men and kobolds being dog people in Japanese media to this day.

I never knew that, I had always wondered why representations of "kobolds" have been so varied.

But up to AD&D 2e, kobold were in fact "little dog men". They are literally described like that in the Monster Manual. Only when 3e came out, they were turned into "little dragon men" for unknown reasons. I call BS your comment, unless you can point me to a source.

@@MedievalFantasyTV I just Googled an ADnD 1e monster manual (Gary Gygax, 1979) and the depiction of a kobold in there is scaled, explicitly described as having no hair.

@@RialuCaos From the moldvay basic rulebook's 1st two sentences on kobolds: "These small, evil dog-like men usually live underground. They have scaly rust-brown skin and no hair." The AD&D monster manual does precede this but it's a bit light on description. The only 'dog-like' indication possibly being the nose.

This is however blatantly wrong. Kobolds didn't look like little dragon men until 3rd edition, by which point DnD had largely been surpased by it's inspirations in Japan. In the earliest versions (Up to Holmes Basic iirc) Kobolds were just described as being similar to goblins. Then they were described as looking like rats and/or dog people with maybe some lizard features (this is why they look like rats or moles or something in Warcraft). The first and most important edition of D&D in Japan was BECMI, which a) didn't even have images for the Gnolls and Kobolds and b) described Kobolds primarily as "doglike humanoids" sometimes adding that they have no fur or have scales instead. By the time 3rd edition rolled around and changed Kobolds in the west, a) the depiction of them as like sleak, maybe-furless-but-you-often-couldn't-tell-because-of-the-artstyle, dog people had already cemented in Japanese fantasy and RPG culture thanks to Lodoss, Wizardry, (Shin) Megami Tensei and probably others, b) D&D as said before had been far surpased in popularity by that point and c) since RuneQuest was proportionally more popular and influencial in the early days of Japanese RPGs than in the US, it's Dragonewts had already entered the Japanese list of stock RPG races as the dragon-oriented lizard-people, making the changes D&D was doing to Kobolds redundant. Also you can see in this video that they had Gnolls and they looked like hyena-men.

I miss the days when you could just walk by and watch the demo screen, and within just a few seconds understand exactly what a game was like to play, and absolutely looking forward to going nuts playing it. A lot of games lost that sense of presentation in the move to home consoles, as there wasn't a need to show off anymore.

Mystera (if you have the source books) is easily my favorite d&d campaign setting. I sold them for at least 50 bucks a piece on eBay. Kind of regretting that now. I would even give Grand wizards of the Left Coast money for a reprint, and I haven't given those scumbags money in at least 15 years.

Wizards Of The Coast didn't exist yet, it would have been TSR that said no.

@@csmead209 thanks I didn’t know what their name was. Just that square soft made the game first then went and asked for a license but the people in charge said no. Since they had a completed game they changed the name of things to be legally distinct and the rest is as they say… history. Also I forgot to add a comma after they said no

Is it just me or do the owlbears look more like...eagle bears? ( :

@@The_Gallowglass They most definitely do, but that's alright. Those are clearly a subspecies of owlbear native to Mystara. *nod nod* I'm joking, but despite looking more eagle than owl, they still look pretty good I think.

@@Syenthros I wonder if they have super sexy anime-harpy uwus

Exactly! It's really quite a natural pairing!

@@WilliamSRD One of my favorite events at an anime convention was actually a D&D 3.5 dungeon building workshop. They made three groups make a dungeon each on the first day and the second day, they shuffled the dungeons so we had to play one made by another group.

Which SSI gold box games were set in Mystara? I though they were mostly Forgotten Realms with a few Dark Sun and Krynn - and Al-Qadim - games.

@@wpasieczny Minor Mistake, it wasn't a Gold Box game, but Mystara was licensed to SSI for the PC Strategy wargame Fantasy Empires. It was also licensed to Westwood for their Warriors of the Eternal Sun RPG on the Genesis, which does kind of undermine my point about not wanting to license the AD&D setting to multiple companies now that I'm thinking about it.

Cool!

Fantasy Empires used Rules Cyclopedia/BECMI rules *not* Advanced.