I've played dos, legend, armored princess, crossworld and I'd say Dark side has the more interesting story and writing than the rest, while remaining difficult throughout the game. There are many drawbacks however. Sometimes quests don't give much clue, so you need to write things down rather than read the journal. Then the game is buggy, right now playing I still get bug with metamorph's quest, and there are bound to have many other bugs. The worst problem is not every area is equivalent (questwise), some will just have you fetch around like one of the dwarven city and one of the elf island. They may just give you instructions to collect 4 things or go collect materials then you're bound to fetch things, while in previous island you may have some minor choices and can skip many fights (or forced to fight depend on your character) Game balance wise, the 3 major race orc, undead, and demons are pretty imbalanced, especially orc start with no rage, poor spells, and poor units. There are also no lizard men despite artifacts often mention the race, wish there were dinos along with my orcish army.
The system itself is good and story serves it with adequate graphics, but kingdom management usually turns into a death spiral. Also what if people don't want to have default followers to solve the kingdom problems? The game also became quite imbalanced with huge modifications to many monsters. You would see monster equivalent to a threat that is supposed to be dealt with a level 14 four man party when you're about level 7 in main story line. It's like the encounter designer decide to say screw it and add random stat modifications to enemies as if this is a diablo game. There is also huge nerf to exp gain so players get to grind more monsters. Toee didn't require this nerf and worked well enough. The player cannot also see what's in a random encounter unless they decide to tackle it through brute force. Would be good if they actually stick to pnp rules but it wasn't. Many abilities also feel like an after thought such as the wild shape. Travelling through the throne room to outside also took forever without a shortcut. (unless it was added later but I quit the game already)
