A playthrough of FCI's 1991 action-adventure game for the NES, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of the Lance. Heroes of the Lance for the NES is a port of U.S. Gold's 1988 PC action game based on "Dragons of Autumn Twilight," the first novel in the D&D Dragonlance series. Hoping to restore balance and peace to the land of Krynn, a party of eight adventurers known as The Champions of the Lance have entered the destroyed city of Xak Tsaroth. The city is a crumbling maze teeming with traps and monsters, and it's your job to help them retrieve The Disks of Mishakal, a sacred relic, and to slay its guardian, the black dragon Khisanth. Given that it's the first NES game to carry the AD&D license, you might expect Heroes of the Lance to be an RPG. It makes a few attempts to pass itself off as such - there are plenty of menus, stats, and magic spells to fiddle with - but at its core, it's a combat-heavy platformer. The party is represented in-game by whomever is in the lead position, and fights play out in real-time. You can use magic and items at any time from the menu, and combat mode kicks in whenever an enemy draws near. In these moments, you attack by holding down B and pushing the d-pad in the direction you wish to attack. Whenever you're not grunting and flailing at the bad guys, you'll be busy collecting items as you chart your course through the labyrinths that make up the three main areas of the city. Some items can improve your performance in combat, but the majority do nothing but increase your score ("experience") when it's tallied at the end of the game. Though it's a reasonably accurate adaptation of a well-received computer game, Heroes of the Lance is often cited as one of the worst games on the NES. I don't think that it's a great fit for the platform, but I also don't think that it's as bad as it's made out to be. The key to harvesting any enjoyment from Heroes of the Lance is to not approach it like an NES game, and that's a big ask given that it is indeed an NES game. It inherits the PC version's awkward controls, RNG-based battle system, and the constant need to juggle menu screens, and though these design choices fly in the face of the console gaming crowd's expectations, everything works as intended. The soundtrack is pretty good, too. Overall, Heroes of the Lance is a decent port of a decent game, but it holds too close to its PC roots to feel at home on the NES. Natsume was responsible for a good many NES classics, but this was one time they fell short of the mark. _____________ No cheats were used during the recording of this video. NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!