As far as third-person graphic adventure games go (from the early years of CD-ROM games), this one is very good. And among the three (pure) adventure games that MPS created, this was definitely the best one.
POSITIVES
Inasmuch as MPS created a relatively unique player interface that is surprisingly easy-to-use, it's a shame MPS didn't keep making adventure games. However, in all fairness, starting in 1993, CD-ROM point-and-click adventure-game offerings exploded on the market with a flood of genre-changing titles that were in a league of their own, so I can understand why a computer-game company that didn't specialize in this type of game would want to bow out.
The overall design of this game, especially the animated third-person view of the player's character, is a style that became very popular in the late 80s and early 90s, when image-data files were still limited by the storage capacity of floppy disks. The interface, which has trace elements of early text-adventure games, represents the final pre-Myst-era stage in the evolution of graphic-only adventures games from their text-only origins to the subsequent first-person total-immersion games of the late 90s. Therefore, Dragonsphere captures the best of what text-adventure games were attempting to create (but without the clumsiness of keyboard text entry) while also highlighting the magnificence of hand-drawn (rather than computationally-rendered) graphics. Artistically, it's an outstanding work that is positioned near the end of a software-development era (for personal computers).
The one thing this game does really well is that it tells a rich and complete story, rather than merely throwing out disjointed fragments of barely-navigable mazes and randomly-populated monsters in a treacherous swamp of baffling and incongruent puzzles. It's an actual adventure game, not just a game that has been loosely classified as one. Nor does it ever stray into the scriptless murkiness of the RPG genre either (like MPS's BloodNet).
NEGATIVES
Having said all of that, I have to admit that this game also isn't perfect.
The middle third of the game, right before the underwhelming battle between the primary protagonist and the primary antagonist, falls a little too far on side of being overly-complicated, and in a mostly unbelievable way. To save time, I played the entire game with a walkthrough, but I didn't really need it during the first third of the game. Most of the "puzzle" solving in this game follows fairly common-sense rules until the player reaches Hightower. After that, honestly, anyone who dares to solve the middle third without a walkthrough is going to be burning up a lot of time trying to make sense of which obscure inventory items need to be used in combination with other equally obscure action and/or dialog sequences.
And speaking of dialog, immediately after the not-so-climactic climax, the dialog becomes painfully long and tiresome. I repeatedly found myself screaming at the characters to shut the [bleep] up so I could finish the game. I love how the dialog is the mechanism by which the story is told, but there could've been a little judicious editing applied before the game was released. And if the chatty text and monotone voiceovers didn't have such a strong "ham & cheese" flavor (to the point of turning the whole game into a B-movie cult classic), I might have given the content and delivery two thumbs down too. However, despite my own eye-rolling, I have to admit that the sheer dorkiness of the dialog can be a bit charming at times. This game is so convincing, in it's unrelenting determination, that it sells it's own shortcomings as though they were laudable features.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Definitely purchase and play this game (with a walkthrough on standby). It's one of the last best examples of what post-text graphic-adventure games were trying so hard to achieve before the first-person puzzle/adventure games took over. There are other Hall-of-Fame titles (like the King's Quest series) that rate higher, on average, but within the MPS mini-universe, this one is a classic.
