Dragon Wars

I have fond memories of playing Dragon Wars. I originally picked up the game back in the days of the C64, as it was the spiritual sequel to the "Bard's Tale" games, including the ability to copy your beloved party from Bard's Tale into the game. A feature which was pretty common among old school RPGs and which I miss today (despite some efforts to recapture this in Playstation titles like Hack and Xenosaga).
Dragon Wars takes obvious inspiration from the "Wasteland" game also produced by ECA/Interplay around the same time.

Dragon Wars was one of the first Fantasy CRPGs to include a skill system, and an element of actual puzzle solving. In this game you had to not only level up, but find spells, and raise your skill with various schools of magic. Puzzles included doing things like creating walls to prevent the flooding of "The Village Of The Yellow Mud Toad", and a (at the time) memorable starting environment where your first task was to escape a sealed city. You could do this through various methods such as escaping through a secret door in the town walls, winning citizenship in the Arena, or even selling yourself into Slavery (which unlocked an otherwise inaccessible dungeon so was oddly the most profitable route in my memory).
The plot is a fairly inspired variation on the "Kill Foozle" plot recycled through most RPGs. Your quest is to kill an evil Demi-God called Namtar. The biggest problem involved in this task is that he's more or less invincible, and the method of ridding the world of him is a little more involved than just finding some magic sword he stuck in the bottom of a dungeon.
My major complaint with the game was one that probably won't apply to those who download it here. In Bard's Tale 3 your characters kill the mad god Tarjan and ascend to godhead. I found the conversion from BT-3 to this game to be rather unsatisfying as you’re tossed into the slums of a sealed city with no real explanation (despite it being a sequel of sorts), and your abilities totally gone except for your level, which makes learning skills incredibly difficult. I was actually impressed with the later wizardry series (Bane Of The Cosmic Forge, Crusaders Of The Dark Savant, Wizardry 8), which in my mind are the best RPGs of all time, in part due to the fact that they seemed to put a little thought into the character transfers.
If you like Old School RPGs, this one is great. It actually functions best as a stand alone game, but if you’re up for hours and hours of retro-gaming fun, you could grind a party through Bard's Tale 1-3 and then transfer for the sake of continuity. Something you just don't see too often nowadays.