Dungeons and Dragons :
Warriors of the Eternal Sun
Super Obsessive Game #2
Type of Game
An epic quest with no head or tail, seen from above, coded with feet, and yet brilliant in spite of it all.
Release date on our machines
August 1992 in the USA, but nobody seems to know what month it came out in France. Poor little unloved cartridge.
Developer
Westwood Associates. When I made the connection with Command & Conquer years later, I got shivers of happiness.
Publisher
Sega Enterprises Ltd. And er, well, that's OK, I think we've heard of it.
Warriors of the Eternal Sun: available on... absolutely no official platform. I thought so, how ungrateful.
For once, I remember very well how I got this game. I was shopping with my mother in the super mega-big Auchan store in Le Havre (the one that sells the most Pastis in France, or at least sold the most in the 90s and 2000s), on a weekday evening. Maybe she felt sorry for me, so desperate in a shop full of food and washing machines, but she did allow me to choose the cartridge of my choice, as long as it didn't cost more than a hundred francs. After a few minutes of rummaging around, putting aside the hits costing almost twice the allowed price, I found something in the eighty-five francs range. The image on the box showed a proud warrior about to fight a dragon (or be eaten without seeing it coming, as the case may be). As a kid who lived more in his head than in the real world, this outdated design went straight to my brain, section ultimate hype. I ran to my room and switched on the console as soon as I got home. What I saw on the TV was nothing like the pretty design I'd fallen for.
The true cost of good things
I even thought it was really ugly. Although I almost gave up on it ten minutes after buying it, I agreed to give it a little chance. This little chance evolved into being totally stuck to this strange video game object until I was fifteen or sixteen, like a moth could glue to an old camping lamp in Ardèche (no disrespect to the Ardéchois). And all on my own, on top of that. Because neither my mates nor my sister have ever managed to transcend their distaste for graphics. I don't blame them. In fact, I'd like to thank them, because I really enjoyed embarking on this adventure behind closed doors. Oh yes! Nelson and Mortimer Paprika, my mega-friendly neighbours, were kind enough to give it a try. They even unlocked my saved game when I'd been going in circles for days without making any further progress. I had to lend it to them for a while, but in exchange I got Dragon's Fury, so... I didn't complain too much.
Fascination number 1
Without a moment's hesitation, the role-playing aspect got me hooked, as the other guy would say. I didn't know it yet, but I was getting my hands on my first real RPG. Team building, character progression, levelling up, buying or looting better equipment, learning new spells... My little geek heart couldn't resist the emotion. That day, I began to classify games into two categories: those without an evolutionary system (which deserve little attention from me) and the others (which are entitled to all my love and free time). The idea of bringing a Dungeons & Dragons storyline to console seemed incredibly brilliant. In practice, however, it gets complicated, with shaky mechanics and features that only work halfway. There are dozens of ways to get to the end of the story by exploiting loopholes in the gameplay.
You can literally cast a single spell, free and unlimited, and never get hit once in the entire game. Whereas three-quarters of the magical powers to be unlocked or discovered are useless. Still, I had a blast the whole way through, probably because I'd never played an RPG before in my life. Thanks to Warriors of the Eternal Sun, I became familiar with the ‘start the game in rags, struggle against grass snakes, then end it by slicing up hydras and fire giants with your eyes closed, using just one finger’ scheme. In 1992-93, nothing sounded more exciting to me, not even the Dragon Ball cards flying everywhere across the playground. We move our group of valiant soldiers across a large region in isometric view.
You can see the monsters and avoid them if you want. If you get too close, turn-based combat starts. Logically, we should send our armoured warrior into hand-to-hand combat with the monsters he encounters, allowing the wizard and other weaklings to use magic or whatever. But this most logical of techniques was still far too dangerous for my cowardly nature. I soon realised that anyone could equip a ranged weapon, and that if you hid for a bit, you'd be able to shoot your enemies with nothing at stake. Of course, the creatures turned out to be too stupid to get around a bush barely camouflaging four idiots armed with slingshots.
The other facet of the gameplay takes place in real-time, first-person caves, in the style of Dungeon Crawler, Lands of Lore like, to which it bears some form of resemblance (of course, it comes from the same studios). But this time around, it's no longer about being clever! There's no way to protect yourself behind ferns. If a monster comes from behind, you can't hear it until it's too late, once it's started devouring you. Worse still, you can't save your progress in the tunnels, making defeat all the more time-consuming. These claustrophobic expeditions are among the most terrifying moments of the 16-bit era...
Inner Beauty
It's hard for me to admit it, but I can't lie without sounding like a big, steeped in bad faith phony fraud: Warriors of the Eternal Sun doesn't have much going for it. Mediocre graphics, wasted potential and frustrating content. To this day, I can't explain why I loved it so much, even going so far as to develop a kind of Stockholm syndrome towards it. A special atmosphere, the desire to finish the adventure like you'd finish a book, even if I couldn't understand a word of English... Frankly, I don't know, but I didn't just play the game. A supernatural energy drove me to dissect every pixel, to try and unearth all the secrets, as if my survival in the real world depended on it.
The mix of old-fashioned RPG clichés, where an elf and a human mage are part of the ‘character classes’, and outlandish fantasies, notably the teleportation of an entire castle to an unknown dimension where the sun never sets, has given this title a unique identity, no doubt by some miracle. You may visit a swamp and a jungle in addition to the basic region, but the scenery doesn't change much. That didn't stop me from enjoying the exploration of the map in its entirety. Or from freaking out in the caves, where any giant beetle can ruin your journey by eating the team's healer.
The two phases are perfectly balanced, perhaps thanks to an unexpected twist of fate. I'd try to relax during the outdoor phases, and I'd get another shot of adrenaline every time I entered a cave. This duality got me hooked for a lot of years.
The early days of a genius
I already loved the soundtrack before I learned that a certain Frank Klepacki had composed it. He was just eighteen when he joined Westwood Studios, according to his Wiki page. What a move! Using all my objectivity, I can admit that sometimes the music does seem a little grating and moony. But that's just an illusion! It does, however, herald the man's immense potential. Like everything else in Warriors of the Eternal Sun (and Command & Conquer), I fell in love with it straight away. Even during the slightly ridiculous moments, when the choice of instrumentation isn't always very relevant, for example some very, very angry guitars, or a particularly funny voice sample. But the rest is pure grace. The reason I spent so much time tweaking my characters' stats on the team-building page was largely due to the music that accompanied it, which made me feel like fabulous crap. I wasn't hanging around the castle just because I was afraid to face up to external threats, when all the citizens couldn't look after me any more. No, I couldn't get enough of these loops that were three quarters depressed and one quarter disillusioned. And what about the theme of the region surrounding the fortress, the first notes you hear when the adventure really begins? Its little transverse flute promises both beautiful discoveries and terrible dangers; one of the most fantastic creations on the Mega Drive.
An eight-year relationship
I remember being a kid, alone in my room on winter evenings, making my characters walk along miles of walls in the hope of stumbling across a hidden cave. The exact opposite of an entertaining experience, on the face of it. And yet, when I relaunch the game on the emulator once in a while, I get the urge to go through the same ordeal all over again. I've had my mother come dozens of times to translate the English messages of totally useless NPCs for me, convinced that I could influence the course of the game if I solved puzzles that only existed in my head. Example of a fantasy: a resident has lost his cat.
I told myself that if I could find the pet, the guy would give me an object that would allow me to open a passageway into a cavern that would lead to an even bigger world... I could go on and on. I would cast spells against impenetrable walls in the hope of creating a breach in them. I convinced myself that if I rested as little as possible (the action that allows you to recover life and recharge the spells you've used), people would like me and wouldn't kick me out of the castle. I persisted in discovering a mysterious area that had to exist. The cleric could cast a spell to protect against the cold! I'd end up finding the snowy region! And maybe by doing that, I'd save the village from being destroyed! No? There's no frozen world? Hey, devs! What a bunch of scumbags for getting a kid's hopes up like that!
Basically, I was wasting my time trying to see beyond the game rather than playing it. Never has a title made me perform so many meaningless actions. Not even Worms, or Toejam & Earl, where acting in random ways would have followed a certain logic. Surprising as it may seem, I always gained incredible satisfaction from these sessions of pure misery. What were you doing when the United States had just suffered an unprecedented attack on 11 September 2001? I was playing my twelfth game of Warriors of the Eternal Sun, levelling up my characters in the hope that it would unlock the +2 bow in the shop (spoiler, there's no +2 bow in this game, just like the bloody snowy world).
But perhaps the best moment was this one: on a summer's day (I used to play it in the summer too), I left the cartridge lying around on the floor of my bedroom. Sun through the window + lino play mat (the one representing the city and the streets, the one everyone knows) = maximum overheating. When I realised this, I immediately launched the game to see if it was still working. And there it was... the secret world I'd been coveting was finally revealed!
​Well, my party had landed on top of an inaccessible mountain, as if teleported there, fighting invisible and ultra-strong monsters, while my warriors themselves were acting on the ground while appearing dead in the interface. Add to that textural bugs all over the screen and voila! It was impossible to win any battle with those non-existent things. I think that as soon as the fight started, I automatically lost (since my characters had already died, which makes sense). So the game was just a case of turn up, walk for three seconds and die. I repeated the operation three or four times before deciding, with a heavy heart, that the cartridge was ruined. Then the next day, I turned the Mega Drive back on and everything was back to normal, including my saves and everything. It was as if I'd dreamt it all.
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