Eye of the Dragon (Fighting Fantasy) Paperback – March 31, 2005

PROS: Is that it does allow a person who has tried to follow a continuity of just the sword & sorcery books in Fighting Fantasy (as I have).This story starts off in a tavern in Fang (which pre-dates Deathtrap Dungeon by a few weeks) and sends our heroic adventurer to the Darkwood Forest.To have this book is a plus to flush out the continuity for FF gamebook players.CONS: The book is so convoluted,it is really a huge slap in the face to loyal FF gamebpook players.In my opinion,this book is such a tremedous let down!!!If this was the very first FF gamebook,I would probably recommend it because of its uniqueness and novelty and having nothing to compare it to.But this isn't the '80s and after 30 years of "perfecting" his craft on these books,I would have expected Mr. Livingstone to have given his loyal followers both old and new a book of serious quality,not fluf.I have honestly tried to be fair and give every allowance to justify this horrible book but can't.Maybe I'm way off base here and others my really like this book,but I have no desire to ever open this book again when there are so many other quality FF books to choose from.

I was fooled into buying this poor excuse for a gamebook by having read in the  25th Anniversary Edition of "The Warlock of Firetop Mountain"  that it reflected Ian Livingstone's "experience gained over fifteen years in the world of computer and video games", presumably making it his pièce de résistance. Pièce de garbage more like. I played it once through, found the dragon but not its eye, and there my quest ended. And what a relief that was! Judging by this book, what Ian Livingstone has learnt during over fifteen years in the world of games is:"If I put my name on any old piece of crap I churned out while sitting on the toilet, people will buy it." (He's right, I did; and more's the pity.)The whole premise of the book stinks: an unsympathetic and poorly-described non-player character tells you to go on a quest for a metre-high dragon made of pure gold; as if that weren't lame enough to start with, you then swallow a bottle of slow-acting poison (this, like much else in this stinker, has no effect on the actual adventure) in the name of some kind of poorly thought-out justification for why you're bothering to go on this quest at all, and head off into the random dungeon that houses the golden dragon. And I _mean_ Random with a capital R -- the old-school role-playing expressions "Monty Haul dungeon" and "zoo dungeon" could've been minted with this sorry mess in mind. Traps, encounters, items, treasure and monsters all nestle next to each other in a kind of cosy apathy lacking any rhyme or reason. You live or die on the whim of whatever Ian was thinking (if he was thinking at all) when he churned out this sorry mess, and if the sheer randomness and arbitrary nature of the encounters fails to put you off, then the growing sense of ennui surely will. However good it may have felt to Ian when he was writing it, it's boring. _Anyone_ could have written this. There's no point to it, no real choices, no reasons to make any given decision, nothing. But what comes across is just a kind of lackadaisical, pointless, nice, masturbatory exercise which is at times angering in its self-indulgence and in its covert nods to other gamebooks. To make matters even worse, unlike many earlier Fighting Fantasy masterpieces, "Eye of the Dragon" is actually surprisingly poorly written, and all in all there's really no reason to waste your time on it. Not even the illustrations, which are mostly quite excellent, save it. I tore them out for use in one of my own role-playing games and threw the remaining pages into my paper recycling bin. Save your money and don't bother.

Part 69 has an error, and without spoiling too much of the story, It gives you the basic option of turning either left or right. Left is part 186 and Right is part 88, but upon turning to the desired part you are met with the opposite action of what you wanted. So if you want to turn left, you should actually turn to part 88, or 186 to turn right.Might be a printing error or an actual writing error, It's no biggie, although disappointing.It's the only error I have found so far, but It's an enjoyable book and still recommended.

Meet a stranger in a bar and agree to drink his poison (?) and then set off for a dungeon only he knows exists (!) and find a statue only he knows is there (WTF?) and then bring it back to him and he'll give you an antidote (you hope). Oh, don't worry, the poison is slow-acting (how slow exactly we never get to know).Apart from all that it's typical linear, unfair, nonsensical, poorly-written, not-playtested Livingstone rubbish.

Excellent fighting fantasy book.

Excellent

At last Fighting Fantasy returns with a new title! As a long-time fan I am glad to see the series return. This said, this is not among the best of the adventures available - though like most of the books, it has its moments.The strengths of this book are its dungeon design and the huge array of items available. Many of these are red herrings, but a surprising number have some use in the game, meaning that, even after several plays, the "right" course through the dungeon is unclear. The dungeon is complex enough to require substantial mapping, a joy for those who like this aspect of mastering a gamebook. Expect, too, a return to basics for the genre, with dragons, goblins, thievery, mercenary warriors, dungeons, mysterious strangers, magic items and all the rest.The downside is that (like Livingstone's Crypt of the Sorceror) it is almost impossible to beat. Even with a maximum in the randomly-generated stats, a player will have trouble completing the quest, which requires beating a monster with similar stats and another which drains skill. In other words, you're not going to complete the book without "cheating" at some of the fights, or else being extremely lucky. I find the fun of the books to be puzzle-solving, and I like to beat them fairly, so it's frustrating when the combat scenarios are set up to make the book near-impossible.Most of the word-count of the book goes on the dungeon section, so the story is correspondingly minimal, but expect a few plot twists nonetheless.