Today I'm gonna talk about the Eye of the Beholder trilogy.
Not the Nintendo GameBoy series, but the "original" series made for MS-DOS, AMIGA and many other platforms of the time.

The EOB series is a series of Fantasy Themed "Dungeon Crawler" type RPG games, released in the 1990s. They were pretty popular at the time.

This trilogy contains (duh) three games. "Eye of the Beholder", "The Legend of Darkmoon" and "Assault on Myth Drannor".
Basically all three games use the same game mechanics, with only a different story (with a few references to the older games), higher level enemies and spells, and a few new features, and that's it, so that's why I'm gonna discuss the series as a whole.

The series is known as an official Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition product. That means the game mechanics are using a (heavily simplefied) version of the actual Roleplay game Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition. In Roleplay I mean a game you don't user a computer for, in which you are sitting around a table with friends, each of them taking on a fantasy character, and one of them playing the "Dungeon Master" leading the game, and telling the story in which you take part. As far as EOB is concerned the computer is the Dungeon Master and you control all characters. ;)

Well, as the "real life" counterparts of the AD&D games, this means you'll have to create four characters to play the game with. And you also need to make "rolls" to determine the statistics. A "weak" spot into this is the "modify" button though in which you can just put all the stats to their maximum values creating yourself a really strong group. Stronger than you should have actually. Then again, the game is hard enough to deal with that kind of "cheating" so the question is if you want a challenge or not.

If you don't like hours of proper configuration to create your "perfect party", installment II and III have a savegame called "Quick Start Party" allowing you to get on the road right way. Of course, the question is if that party will truly help you to get on the road, as you may have characters in your group that do not fit your playing style.

My personal preference was a Paladin, a Fighter/Thief, Mage and a Cleric, but you can decide on your own what fits you best. Having one Cleric is highly recommended though, as they are your main healers and you'll need them bad.

During your adventures you may meet people offering you your services,in other words they want to join you on your quest. Allowing them in your group can both work beneficial or in your disadvantage. Your party may only have 6 members, so you must think well. If somebody joins you and your party is full, the game will force you to dismiss one character.

After creating your party the game will begin

Let's discuss the stories now, shall we?

EOB1 - Eye of the Beholder

In this game your party has been summoned by the Lord of Waterdeep as they suspect a great evil hides in the sewers beneath Waterdeep. After the Lords briefed you, your party enters the sewers, however, it seems that whatever the "evil" is was expecting you and they cause a cave-in to make sure you're doomed, and there the playable part of the game begins.

This games does show that the creators were still in a debate where the series was going to. This is the most "open" game in the series, meaning that there are often more ways to get past certain points, and it is possible to win the game while skipping, say, about 40% of all the content at least. If this is a "pro" or a "con" really depends on who you ask, but I am not very fond of that myself, and it seems the game creators agreed with me on that point as this was really not the approach they took on in the two sequels.

Overall this game is pretty good, however a big let-down is that you can only create one savegame. If you want to save again later, you can only do so by overwriting the old. As the game can get you in a position in which winning is no longer possible (which was not that uncommon at the time). This is also the game with the highest number of "NPC" character who can join the party.

EOB2 - The Legend of Darkmoon

Now that you have beaten the evil of EOB1, you are held in high-regard with the Lord of Waterdeep, and thus you have friends in the "very high" class citizens on Waterdeep. One of them is Khelben Blackstaff, Waterdeep's archmage. Khelben suspects that a great evil lurks in the temple of Darkmoon located in the forests surrounding Waterdeep. He sent forth a scout (An Elfish girl by the name of "Amber"), who did not return from her assignment, and Khelben fears for her life and that her failure to return might also confirm his suspicions. And thus you are teleported to the forests close to Darkmoon in order to inflitrate the temple and to destroy the evil that lurks inside.

This is actually the most famous instalment of the series, even more famous than the series they are part of, and some people do not even know it is part of the Eye of the Beholder series (not even with it imprinted with very big letters in the game's main menu as shown in this review's heading). In my opinion also the best instalment of the series. The game is a bit more liniar than it predecessor and for me that made the game easier to explore. The true challenge lies in destroying the monsters that live inside the temple's walls, and they are quite hard, so you really want to focus on your fighting and puzzle solving more than trying to find out "where the heck you are going". Those are all big plusses. Also the save menu allows you more save slots now, and that allows you more "experimentation", which does work for the best, believe me.

EOB3 - Assault on Myth Drannor

After you defeated the evil in Myth Drannor you are in a local tavern in Waterdeep bragging about your heroic fight in Darkmoon, when a stranger comes to you. He tells you that far away from Waterdeep lies what is left of the once greatest city of the world, Myth Drannor. A foul lich appears to have put the city into its doom, and the stranger wants you to defeat this lich and obtain an artifact from the lich in order to revive the city. Your party accepts the quest and the game begins.

This instalment of EOB3 has met a lot of criticism, and that's, unfortunately, for good reasons. First of all, they dropped the use of the engine used for EOB1 and EOB2 and used the engine AESOP in stead, by Miles Design. This was a bad choice, and Miles Design also recommended against this as the engine suffered a lot of performance issues. Unfortunately that showed. On my "real" DOS computer it could easily take up an hour to get a savegame loaded, not to mention how many times the game lagged because it had to load extra data the RAM otherwise could never phatom. When playing the game in DOSBox, the loading times are significantly shorter than on a real DOS PC, so ironically an emulator is better than a real machine for this game, but still in DOSBox too, lots of loading and lagging are an issue. They also made it not possible to rest at all if monsters are near, even if the monsters could not get to you in any way. This was different in EOB1 and EOB2 where you could, but in which you could get attack during the rest. It makes EOB3 more frustrating to play as you sometimes have to move away from your target very far in order to rest, and finding the way back is not always easy. Some dungeons are real mazes, and that is something you always want to prevent. Another point of criticism I must cast on this game is that you have a lot of spells you can get for your mage and they are really worth something. Unfortunately, level grinding to be experienced enough to actually casts them takes forever, and as this game is a lot easier in terms of fighting than the other two games, not worth your time. The final boss here is a pushover compared to the boss in Darkmoon (as that one is very extremely hard). Truth is that the game's developers began to realize these issues themselves when it was too late to do something about is, as time is money in the AAA industry. As a result this instalment did not live up to its expectations (revenue wise) and also meant the end of a series that could have been great. It's not that surprising many initiatives are taken to make an EOB4 to make the series live again by the fans as EOB3 was not a good way to end it all.

Game Mechanics

Well, let's now discuss the game's mechanics.

The game takes place from a 1st person perspective. The game is tile based, and when moving you instantly move one spot. There is not scrolling animation for this, as you have to take the technology in mind of the time in which the game was written. You can click the arrow buttons with the mouse, in order to move. Alternatively you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard for this, depending on what you prefer. WASD is not supported, and I won't criticize that as WASD was not common in the the time in which the game was developed.

Fighting was done by right-clicking the hands holding a weapon, like the screenshot above demonstrates. A compass is given to you and take good note of that compass as you can occasionally turn around without noticing, but at least your compass never lies, so you can always see it on your compass when that happens. You need to get the hang of these controls, but once you mastered it, it's quite easy to move around and fight.

And this is your inventory screen. Please note you can see the full action "3D" screen and yes that means the game is running and enemies can move while you are sorting stuff out here (in EOB3 you can call the camp screen to block that one one (of of the few improvements that game has), but in the other two you mean deal with it). Aside from your equipped items you have 14 item slots per character. Weight is not taken into account (that is where the game differs from the actual role-play), but still 14 slots per character is not much, so you need to think well about the items you take with you.

Continuation

Well this is also a bug plus of the game series. You can load an EOB1 savegame in EOB2 and thus use your EOB1 characters at the same power as they were in EOB1, with their inventory, equipment and spells. Key items will (of course), not be transferred. And you can do the same in EOB3 with your EOB2 party, although the method to do this in EOB3 is needlessly complicated, but there are ways to get around that if you are a bit handy with computers and file systems.

Playing this game in modern times

DOSBox as a "perfect" support for all three instalments (for DOS). So if you still have the game from the old days, no need to do anything crazy, just install DOSBox and install the games in there, and you're ready to go.
ScummVM also supports these games these days, but I do not know how bug-free that support is, plus Myth-Drannor (EOB3) is due to the engine switch not supported. I also do not know how well the party transfer systems work (as I never tried). ScummVM has however never made it a secret they use a different save format than the original games, making transferring from EOB2 in ScummVM to EOB3 in DOSBox totally impossible, and that's why I am not very fond of using ScummVM for these games.

Now I am pretty sure there are countless websites on which you can download this game for free, but I must impress THAT IS NOT LEGAL!!! No matter what those websites say. What IS legal is to buy them from sites that offer them up for sale like GOG(dot)COM where the series can be bought as a collection of the FORGOTTEN REALMS ARCHIVE COLLECTIONS.

Overall, I've always loved the series, even EOB3 despite its terrible flaws described above. The series does still have a fanbase, and even when you are too young to remember these games from the times in which they were hot, I can recommend them, if you don't mind the game not matching up to today's standards.

One note! This is a transfer of a review I wrote earlier on the forums. A very important reply came it that I need to copy here.