I know, here we go again, another D&D game. I have a type, what can I say? I’ll be hard at work playing something else, then suddenly I come to, huddled in a dark room, playing Neverwinter Nights or Dark Alliance without even realizing it. Also, I do play more tabletop RPG’s than just D&D, just for the record, it’s just that the fantasy classic has way more (and better) video games than pretty much any other one. Unfortunately, both the two Shadowrun games are of very questionable quality, and don’t even get me started on the Anima: Beyond Fantasy games.
Shadowrun on the Genesis; high tech, low quality.
Anyways.
I had never heard of Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone until I stumbled upon it while doing a bit of research on the Dark Alliance games for that retrospective. Similar to Spawn: In the Demon’s Hand in the first entry in my From The Depths series, it fascinated me how I couldn’t have heard about this game before. Why isn’t this a From The Depths entry? Well, apparently a bunch of other people have heard of this before, and I was just very late to the party. I found numerous threads and articles with a cursory search, and it is often lauded as an unsung classic of the sixth generation hack and slash titles. Not only that; this game was nominated for several awards by the British Academy of Films and Television Arts (BAFTA) upon release, which is definitely not something I expected to read. Spawn: In the Demon’s Hand was not getting BAFTA nominations, that much is certain so I don’t think this game counts as an obscure title. Forgotten, maybe, but not obscure. Don't worry though, I have some plans for the next From the Depths entry…
Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone was released in 2004 for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Windows. It has a surprising amount of star power in its voice cast, combining the talents of Hollywood talent like Patrick Stewart and Michael Clarke Duncan with veteran video game voice actors such as Robin Atkin Downes and Vanessa Marshall. How have I never heard of this?
It debuted to some mostly positive reviews at the time, including from some actual major news publications, which again is not something I expected to read. I think the reason a PlayStation 2 hack and slash video game was covered in the Detroit Free Press is due to the story being written and designed by R.A Salvatore, who was (and still is) a pretty big known name in literary fantasy stories. Author of various novels set in the Forgotten Realms D&D setting, he’s probably most known for his character of Drizzt Do’Urden, the uniquely heroic drow (evil, dusky blue skinned elves; Zhai, a character in this game, is half-drow) adventurer featured in many of his novels. How big is Drizzt as a character? Well, his name was actually recognized by my spellcheck when I typed it out- that’s how you know you’ve made it. Of course, Drizzt appears in this game too for a whole level- you even get to play as him for said level.
Drizzt Do’Urden, aka the elf your girlfriend tells you not to worry about.
Developed by Stormfront Studios who were a ‘working man’ developer from California, creating everything from various ESPN sports titles to a Star Trek video game to Neverwinter Nights (not that one, the 1991 one) to The Legend of Alon D’ar.
Never thought I’d be able to name drop The Legend of Alon D’ar.
Enough with the preamble, let’s get into the game itself.
The game opens as any D&D campaign should; with the weirdo player characters bumping into one another through random chance. An orc warband has attacked a village, and each of the three main characters stumble into the fight and quickly do what they do best, and what they do best is use simplistic combos to hack and slash endless waves of enemies. There is the human warrior Rannek, the half-drow rogue Zhai, and the human sorcerer Illius. The set-up itself is well done, as it follows the golden rule of ensemble fantasy storytelling; it’s simple. Simple is always good, because simple stories and set-ups give more room for the characters themselves to play off one another, which this game does feature in its snarky early 2000s cutscenes; more on that later. There are some things about this set-up/tutorial level that I didn’t enjoy, however, which was everything associated with the gameplay aspect.
The tutorial plays out by jumping from character to character as they are encountered and introduced, starting from Rannek then Zhai then ending with Illius, then all three at once as you can freely switch between each of them. The issue is that you start off with no combos or upgrades for any of the characters, with each only having the same basic combo; X, X, X. Each character still has their ranged attack of course, but there is only the one melee attack combo which is the meat of the game for anyone other than the sorcerer. The only real direction or explanation the game gives you is ‘Press X to attack’. The tutorial definitely felt like it dragged on longer than needed, as you simply mash your one button over and over again on too many orcs. The orcs, they don’t stop. They jump over fences, spawn behind boxes and man, they just want to die to your three hit string as they run up to you and just let you hit them. When I first started playing, I honestly almost tapped out around the time the 532nd orc ran at me from behind a box and all I could do was hit the same button over and over again, thinking that this was all the game was going to be. It was a bit of a bizarre tutorial, and I’m not sure why each character couldn’t have started with at least one or two other combos or abilities for this.
I persevered, and I beat the tutorial after what felt like an hour; and, sure enough, the game then showed me the character upgrade menu and all was again right. I’m not sure why it couldn’t have featured this menu in the first level, but I digress; I suppose I wasn’t a designer at Stormfront Studios, and I’ll never know their reasoning. It's not difficult or deep stuff to grasp, so there was no real reason to need to ease players in so slowly.
Each character has their own upgrade tree accessible at the end of each level, but it’s mostly the same idea for each of them. You can learn identical combo strings utilizing circle at different points in the combo, upgrade their health, attack damage, and maybe one or two unique things per character. As well, you collect gold as you play the game and can spend it to upgrade each character's weapons and armour, complete with unique armour models for the different sets you can buy. You can also buy enchantments for their equipment, such as Zhai being able to buy magic stealth enhancing armour or Rannek getting a wicked fire sword. The whole system was definitely more than I was expecting, but I wouldn't quite say it impressed me. Rannek can get a flaming sword, sure, but it’s functionally just bonus damage which is identical to Zhai getting poison daggers. Each of the character’s combo strings are standardized, meaning they each have the exact same ones done with the same inputs; each of the three weirdos has a ‘knockback’ string done with X-O-O, and each has a ‘damage’ string done with adding R1 to the end of one. It would have be very welcome to see some more unique things per character, as there is very little individual things to them outside of one or two gimmicks.
The all white robe is a time honoured classic- it just conveys ‘archmage’ energy.
Speaking of character gimmicks, let’s get into them before we go further. They each feature some unique ability outside of the same basic combo strings. Rannek is the fighter, dealing the most damage and having a lot of multi hitting cleaving sword swings. Zhai is a dual dagger wielding rogue, and she can hide in the shadows and strike from the darkness…in specific spots only scattered around the levels. It really only comes up in specific scenes that feature this pseudo-stealth system where you stab a lot of braindead orcs in the neck after jumping on their back. In any other circumstance, she's just like a weaker Rannek really. The most unique character is Illius the sorcerer. He’s also apparently multiclassed into a monk as he can weirdly roundhouse kick and palm strike orcs with his combos, and he has apparently reinvented the classic D&D spell ‘Burning Hands’ from being a fiery explosion into literally meaning he gets fire hands. Not sure what’s going on there, but I’m down for it. He also has unique spells, such as various different offensive ones you have to charge for a few seconds to being able to put enemies to sleep after an unusable amount of time charging the spell. Each also has ranged attacks, with Rannek and Zhai having limited ammunition of axes and daggers respectively, and Illius of course has his spells. What they also have is some serious early naughts style.
Just look at Zhai, man. I didn’t know the fashion of the Forgotten Realms, or medieval fantasy in general, includes 'tactical knife holster halter tops’ but here we are.
The gameplay sees your trio of wildly different personalities bicker and banter across levels while mowing down numerous enemies. Each character builds what is essentially a ‘super’ meter as you defeat enemies, and once it's full can unleash a room clearing special attack. If more than one character has their super, then you can combine them into a highly damaging multi character special; this specifically is nearly essential for defeating the various bosses you’ll encounter, as any other attack other than a full 3 character sync special does so very little damage to them that you may as well have not done any damage at all.
After getting a few levels into the game, it all started to come together after the disappointing and atrociously slow opening. I got some more combo strings so I wasn’t just hitting X over and over again; I was also hitting O, too. Each character at a certain point early in the game gets a unique ability related to progressing through the levels. Rannek gains the ability to smash boulders with his gloves of ogre strength, Illius gets ‘beads of force’ that he can place then explode like magical C4, and Zhai gets a ring that lets her jump which is something no other character can even think of doing apparently. Clearly she got the best of the items.
The game's story is fine enough. It brings you to a variety of different areas such as the Underdark, a wood elf village, Yuan-Ti temples and you even get to fight with some weirdo githyanki. It's never going to impress you or anything, but considering it's a hack and slash action game it never has to. It made me question how this game got nominated for awards specifically for its story, but like I said in the beginning: R.A Salvatore. His name carried a lot of weight clearly. The voice acting talent is impressively stacked as mentioned earlier with Hollywood actors, and I didn't feel that any were ‘phoned in’ like you sometimes get with big names at this point in video game history. The three main characters bicker and exchange sassy remarks to one another, of course, and they are well delivered and earnestly written, never getting to be too ‘quippy’ or overwritten and overly dramatic. They are adorably cheesy and hokey, and just reminded me of a simpler time in video game writing history.
Roundhouse snakemen into the pavement. Throw snakemen into garbage cans. Stab snakemen through the chest with a flaming magic sword. Spin snakemen around until- you get the idea.
Something I was surprised to find out is the game is a singleplayer only affair, despite having the perfect setup for some cooperative multiplayer. It's made weirder by the fact that Stormfront’s previous The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers had seamless co-op and was all the better for it. Does co-op make an action game? No, but I think it definitely can improve one if it makes sense to have it. Just look at a very long lasting and arguably most successful long term hack and slash franchise, Gauntlet; its focus on co-op is what elevates the majority of its games beyond their simplicity. Demon Stone also has one glaring issue that co-op could solve- the AI of your computer controlled weirdos is atrocious. They get stuck on the environment frequently, and they are utterly incapable of fighting more than one or two enemies at once. Even worse is how they behave in boss fights. Once a big guy shows up, they behave like their extras in a bad action movie fight scene and simply stop attacking entirely while the boss then focuses on whichever one you're currently controlling.
Speaking of bosses, they're not the most fun or well designed and range from either being boring to downright frustrating. A troll boss you fight with Drizzt is the former, as it just sees you hack and slash him to death while moving out of range of his very slow attacks. As for the latter ones, quite a few apply but a standout one for the frustration factor is against a dragon in a hallway near the end of the game. Between the dragon's entirely uninterruptible attacks, his immunity to Illius’s spells and the sheer length and grinding repetition of the fight, a potentially cool boss and classic fantasy boss fight was essentially ruined. Most of them follow a strange trend where they have some uninterruptible attack that stuns a character for a decent amount of time which they will use with no mercy against whoever you're not currently controlling, resulting in you being forced to play as only a single character at a time. It's all rather strange.
It’s a shame the fight itself is pretty rough, as the set up here is perfect.
Now that we’ve started criticizing the game, let's dive in because this game has some flaws. First; the combat is rough. It's functional in the sense that it controls well, but in actual applied practise it's a mess. The range of your melee attacks are hard to gauge sometimes so I often would swing and hit the empty air in front of a monstrous slaad when I was pretty sure I was close enough to hit him right in the ugly face. Whenever an enemy blocks a melee attack, which will happen very frequently with most enemies, they entirely deflect you away which breaks any momentum you have; and as far as I was able to figure out you have no ‘guard break’ maneuver or anything of the sort, leaving you essentially powerless against blocking enemies unless you want to waste your super attack. Now this wouldn't be so bad if enemies didn't seem to be able to then immediately cancel their block into attacks, that's where the real jank comes from. This combination frequently creates a strange, awkward and very frustrating dance against a few of the enemy types that’s hard to break once it begins- you attack, they block which you can't do anything against, then they counter attack before you can really do anything back and the whole process starts over. You do eventually get a counter strike that you can do after blocking an attack, but weirdly it sometimes gets interrupted by the enemies’ inevitable counter attack, thus defeating its purpose really. None of this is even factoring in that there's never just one enemy and instead approximately 23 on you at any given second, which leads into the second worst issue with the game's combat.
Just look at this mess, there’s too many extra-dimensional frogmen in this room currently. And of course, they are all dead focused on whichever character you’re currently controlling.
In Demon Stone when you get hit, which will frequently happen, you have no invincibility or at least so very little that's its impossible to notice. This constantly causes issues when you're fighting even a small group of enemies where one hit will take off a large chunk of your health due to the enemies buddies deciding to slap you at the same time. A few times I've even gotten stun locked to death where one enemy's attack perfectly chained into the next 10 before I could recover until I died. Large chunks of the game are spent in fights with so many spawning enemies that I would entirely lose track of the three player characters, and being unable to see anything going on, I just resorted to spamming the basic X-X-X attack until the enemies were dead, or I discovered that I died after getting chain-slapped to death.
Remember the age old adventurer adage- “when you come to a fork in the road, always go left for treasure.” It’s never wrong.
The worst issue of the game's combat? The repetition. It's all too easy to make a game like this and fall into that deadly trap, as there are only so many snakemen you can cut down without end before you maybe feel your eyes starting to glaze over. Some games break the fatigue through having puzzles, environmental obstacles or other kinds of non-action content to break up the monotony, some do it through having RPG elements where getting new skills and having elements of character progression can keep things fresh, deepening the core combat loop. Unfortunately, I don’t think Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone overcomes its repetition. There are some very light environmental puzzle solving elements in it using the characters’ unique loot-given progression abilities, but not enough and they are all incredibly basic; there's a log in front of you, you must use Rannek to smash it. Sometimes you have to jump up something to hit a switch as Zhai. The combat, while featuring the character upgrading system, doesn’t quite offer enough for me to break through the fog that overtook my brain while playing; and in the end, while I can get some fancy weapon or try out some new armour or something, I’m still hitting the same three attack buttons for the 2,512th time. There’s nothing wrong with being a more simplistic action game, but you need something to put some spice in it before it gets boring and I don't think Demon Stone has any spice in it; by a few hours in, I was getting pretty bored and yearning for some zest to improve the bland meat I was being served.
Is Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone an underrated gem? My final verdict: no. It has some good characterization and some serious 2000s energy, but also too many issues with the basic combat that can't be ignored. It’s not unplayably bad, just filled with mediocrity; it hits the right notes, but has no real thought or effort put into its design. In the realm of PS2-era hack and slash games, It's no Dark Alliance, that's for sure, nor is it a Gauntlet or even a Nicolas Cage movie tie-in Ghost Rider; but it's definitely not a Legend of Alon D’ar, so it could be worse. None of those games had Michael Clark Duncan’s legendary timbre or got nominated for BAFTA awards, though.
Squad goals.
Seriously, how'd they get Sir Patrick Stewart and award nominations for this?
Pros
- + Nostalgic hack and slash action.
- + Some good characterization in the "storyline."
- + BAFTA nominated. Seriously, how?
- + Good voice acting.
Cons
- - Badly designed core combat mechanics.
- - Frustrating boss encounters.
6
out of 10
Overall
The game hits the right notes of a fantasy action game, but doesn't put much effort or thought into them. Despite some strong 'vibes', there are far too many problems with the core gameplay and it suffers from the inevitable frustrations of repetition.
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