Last week we took a look at the first D&D game, Tower of Doom, in video form. Today, we've got the sequel for your perusal: Shadow Over Mystara. If you had the chance to play this fantastic game back in the glory days of the arcade brawler, consider yourself lucky. It is, in my opinion, the greatest example of the genre ever created.
Dungeons & Dragons Shadow Over Mystara
Read the original Co-Op Classics article
As I said last week, the Dungeons & Dragons series is among the best ever. After playing it for the video, I will go a bit further and declare the second game, Shadow Over Mystara, to be the greatest co-op brawler of all time. It has everything you could hope for: a wide variety of classes, interesting locations, dynamic boss fights, hidden secrets, and gorgeous graphics.
It's also a fantastic example of how to do a sequel. Shadow Over Mystara takes everything that was great about its predecessor and improves it, and eliminates the few problems the first game had. The four classes have been improved to six, and the ability to have two players using the same class was thrown in, too. The inventory system, a bit clunky in the first D&D, was changed to a rotating wheel interface. Almost all of the enemies from Tower of Doom return, but new bosses like the Chimera and Manscorpion will challenge even the most experienced group of dungeon crawlers.
If there were ever a game that deserved a release on modern consoles, Shadow Over Mystara is it. You wouldn't even need to overhaul it at all; I'm thinking a treatment like that of the recent X-Men Arcade release on XBLA and PSN would be fantastic. Give us four player drop in/drop out co-op, let us mix and match local and online players, maybe throw in a few graphic filters and voila, the perfect downloadable game is born! Capcom, if you are listening, negotiate whatever license you need and get Dungeons & Dragons Shadow Over Mystara released. Brave and noble adventurers everywhere will be glad to give you their hard earned gold pieces for it.