YMMV / Eye of the Beholder

• Anticlimax Boss: The Big Bads of all three games are relatively easy to handle because of level design. The first game's big bad becomes much more climatic if you defeat him properly with the quest item Wand of Silvias.
• Contested Sequel: Assault on Myth Drannor was almost universally panned for a long time, but today it is just divisive. Some fans feel it is the weakest game in the trilogy due to its monotony and worse dungeon design, other fans feel it is a perfectly good game that has the best optional party members and the most climactic story. Many also argue that most of its more glaring flaws (confusing dungeons, cheap enemies) are overstated and just as prevalent in the previous two entries.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • In the first game, applied literally with the Giant Spiders. You meet with them in a part of the dungeon where you're unable to backtrack and must find the way out, while too low-level to have any spell that durably neutralize their venom, and thus dependent on the few counterpoison potions you can find.
  • In both games, thri-kreen (mantis warriors). They're incredibly fast, hard to kill, and have a paralyzing bite that makes it pretty sure one of your meat shields will be incapacitated before having even a chance to strike. So tough they are, fighting them one-by-one is actually a less favorable option than facing a swarm of them — at least then you can spam offensive spells more efficiently.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The optional party members of the third game. Even fans who hate the game tend to agree it has by far the most interesting and memorable party members, which include an eccentric fairy and an honorable lizardman.
• Even Better Sequel: Most people agree that The Legend of Darkmoon is the crowning achievement of the series, by allowing players to import their party, limiting backtracking and increasing the maximum level.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • The third game is generally considered the weakest of the trilogy, its reputation has bettered overtime but some would still rather pretend it ended with the second game.
  • The ending makes Florin Falconhand invite the party to join the ranks of the knights of Myth Drannor. It could sound a great honor, but the Knights are just a band of Level-7 adventurers that goes by that name, and Florin, their leader, is just a Level-9 ranger. Your party could easily be at Level 12 or more at the endgame, and performed in a few days what the knights have been trying to do for years (restoring the daemon-infested land of Myth Drannor) so if anything, YOU could let them join your party as junior members!
• Game-Breaker:
  • The stoneskin spell in EotB1. Once a scroll with this spell is found and a magic-user is of high level enough to cast it, the whole party can be basically made invulnerable to physical attacks. Only monsters that can do magical attacks still stand a chance. This is because the spell has no set duration, but will only fade once a character has suffered a certain number of blows. Hence the magic-user can cast the spell, then the whole party can rest so stoneskin is memorized again, and so on until every member is protected. The protection can be quickly soaked up in a fight for the front-rank Meat Shields, but it can just be cast again as soon as dispelled... and for the Squishy Wizard or The Medic behind their lines, one casting may last very long since they are rarely hit. Not surprisingly, stoneskin completely disappeared in The Legend of Darkmoon, even for a party coming from the previous game, an exception to the Old Save Bonus.^note This spell was largely considered a Game-Breaker in the second edition of AD&D itself (of which Eye of the Beholder is based) for the same reasons. It even spawned a lengthy discussion in Dragon magazine about how to circumvent this problem. Of course, in RPG the Game Master can always arbitrate and decide to change the spell description or prevent its use altogether. Video games don't have this luxury.
  • In The Legend of Darkmoon, though they are both five-level spells, the combo "wall of force + cone of cold" can be quite effective. To clarify: a wall of force stops all the monsters and every attack spells — except cone of cold which can be used through it, and covers a wide area to boot. May be a Good Bad Bug since that shouldn't be possible by AD&D rules (unless you have very creative players).
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The aid spell can raise a character's hit points total above the max, but only temporarily (unless cast right before a fight, it's unlikely to be of much use). However, damage from a fall mucks up the calculation, and you can end up with more hit points than before for a while, even above your maximum, including after the expiration of the aid spell.
  • The second game has a section where you are meant to relinquish all your spellbooks and cleric holy symbols and get through relying only on physical combat. However, you can open a character's spellcasting menu, then drop the items, which will still leave the menu open and allow you to use some spells. You can also keep one such item by holding it with the mouse pointer when entering the section (preferably a holy symbol for healing).
• Porting Disaster: Though there already was a good port of the first game for the Super Nintendo they could have just brought over, the Game Boy Advance decided to make a game from scratch and it didn't go well. The GBA remake left out all but the four basic character classes and much of the gameplay. Also, instead of the first-person combat of the original, it uses an isometric system like the gold box games.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The tiles that spin the party around.
  • A delayed one is the games lack of an automap. Today in an age where automaps are now expected in dungeon crawlers, it can be incredibly difficult to go to a game that does not have one and be forced to draw your own map, an already cumbersome task made worse by the trilogy’s love of featureless mazes with teleporters. There is a good reason mods now exist that add an automap to all three games.

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