The Top Shelf: The Second Round 039: Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone

by mento

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Extra Note: We've entered Shelftember! In this much-vaunted month, we will be processing one of the second round entries every day. I'll be spending one hour apiece with each game - inspired by DanielKempster's backlog-clearing series "An Hour With..." - and determining its fate from there.

I put Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone all the way down near the bottom of this itinerary because I wanted to play more of the two LOTR movie licensed games first for direct comparisons. There was a certain odd pattern emerging around this time where someone would invent a particular format of action-RPG more conducive to consoles than the traditional kind, with a focus on brawler gameplay and combos and less on strategy and complexity, and then adapt that format for different extant RPG licenses. We saw this with Champions of Norrath, which began when Snowblind Studios developed a Diablo-like engine (named Snowblind, after themselves) for their Baldur's Gate console spin-off Dark Alliance, before taking that same engine for Champions of Norrath - an EverQuest spin-off - while a different studio handled Dark Alliance II. Curiously, Demon Stone went through the exact same journey: its developer, Stormfront Studios, developed a brawler-friendly engine for the second of the PS2 The Lord of the Rings games, The Two Towers, and when EA Redwood/Visceral Games took over for The Return of the King Stormfront used what they had learned and leaped licenses to the Forgotten Realms, which brings us here to Demon Stone. The western RPG market for consoles must've seemed very homogeneous at the time. Fortunately, there were way many high-quality JRPGs floating around for anyone to really notice.

I'm already being way too critical. Demon Stone's a fine game, if not particularly remarkable. It side-steps the problem the LOTR games have with repeating stages as different characters by ensuring that the player can switch between the three protagonists - Rannek the fighter, Illius the sorcerer, and Zhai the half-drow rogue - at any time, with the exception of a few sequences where one or two characters find themselves cut off. In fact, there are usually situations where you want to switch, as Rannek is best in the thick of melee, Zhai is in her element when she has room to melt into the shadows and instant-kill enemies with her backstabs, while Illius has an endless supply of magical bolts for enemies at a distance. The XP and gold earned by the characters are shared across their profiles after every stage, and the player can not only buy everyone new skills through the XP they've collectively earned but also use the cash they found to buy better armor, weapons and classic D&D enchanted items like Rings of Protection. Better versions of the same weapons and armor replace older upgrades, which lets the player pocket the difference; they can even downgrade in one area and use those funds to upgrade elsewhere. The customization factor is much higher here than it is in the LOTR games, though we're still a long ways off from the multi-layered intricacies of standard CRPG character development.

The story's some business as usual for the Forgotten Realms universe: two powerful outsiders (that is to say, extradimensional beings) who had been warring for centuries once popped into Faerun on the Prime Material Plane with the intent to use it as their next battleground, and the wizard Khelben Blackstaff - one of the Lords of Waterdeep - traps their souls in the titular Demon Stone to ensure that the world is not consumed in fire and bloodshed as collateral damage in their struggle. Three heroes inadvertently wake them up again, and are subsequently sent on a quest to find a new Demon Stone and reseal them. While it treads some familiar territory, the dialogue and plotting is decent enough; R.A. Salvatore, the author behind the Drizzt novels, was behind the game's script, and he's assisted by a relatively famous voice cast, including Patrick Stewart as Khelben and Michael Clarke Duncan as one of the two outsider warlords. As is inevitable for any Forgotten Realms game, Drizzt himself also shows up for a cameo sequence where the player has him cut down a legion of trolls far in the north. As I intimated before, for as competent as the story is, it doesn't have too many surprises.

What I'm going to do with Demon Stone is send it ahead to the third round of eliminations and have it compete directly with the three LOTR games. While it belongs to an entirely different franchise, the similarities between The Two Towers, The Return of the King and this game are very apparent from the combo-heavy gameplay to the way characters are customized by spending XP to earn abilities, with more abilities becoming available as the characters gain in levels. All three have a penchant for the cinematic, as you see massive battles rage on all around you, and you're required to stop and shoot catapults and ballistae into the throngs on occasion while dealing with the immediate crowds of aggressors bearing down on you at all times. The game's opening battle against various orcs and bugbears in a besieged town isn't really so much different than the Battle of Helm's Deep when you come right down to it, and I'm not just talking about the green-skinned foes. I'm fairly sure I only need one game of this particular model on my shelf, if any at all.

Result: Progresses to the Third Round.

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