So, I'm still working my way through Dark Queen of Krynn, and it is a slog. I'm definitely not having as much fun as its parallel high level game Pools of Darkness, and I can see why I never finished this game back in the day. There are a couple of reasons for this.
1. The overall plot is very vague, and not linked very much to the previous games of the series. The first two games of the series had linked plots, with story lines and NPCs shared between the two. In DQK, I'm suddenly over on another continent, and I'm having to stop draconians and (I think) stop Takhisis from re-entering Krynn, but that hasn't been made particularly clear. I'm mainly running around doing a bunch of fetch quests to find the next McGuffin that will give me a clue to the next group of fetch quests, etc. Not particularly thrilling for characters around level 20 or so. Conversely, in PoD, the opening sequence gives you the plot: Bane is mad at you for messing up all his previous plans, and he's going to punish you and the entire region you've saved multiple times in the previous games as a result. The story line continues from previous games and NPCs you've met before re-appear. You're emotionally invested in the game not only because it's personal, but also the people and places that are now endangered are ones you are familiar and have helped in the past. As I said before, all this is definitely not the case in DQK.
2. The fights are just tedious and over-tuned. In PoD, you'd have a lot of relatively challenging fights, interspersed with the periodic really tough one. In DQK, just about every fight is really tough, and a large number of them are set up that unless you get the luck of the roll, you're going to eat several delayed blast fireballs and have characters unconscious or dead in the first round. Multiple re-loads for run-of-the-mill fights aren't particularly fun. Basically, every wizard already has mirror image, protection from normal missiles, fire shield, and globe of invulnerability pre-cast before the fight, and there are usually several of them, usually in the back where they are hard to get to (and if you can, your poor melee get zapped for massive damage from fire shield, while your archers just slowly pick away at mirror images). The best you can hope for is to get close enough to cast power word kill on them, or cone of cold if you can get the right angle. Again, this would be fine if this happened in boss fights, or even just periodically, but it's like every... single... fight. And it's very tedious. The only bright point is that at least it's fun when dragons appear with two dragonlances ready to go...
I'm still slogging through, and about 2/3 of the way done.
