Pretty hard to distinguish between them? Cthulu, a love sick chick, a green cat and an anthropomorphic sword? I love D&D, really do, but four young guys with similar interests versus the above? Please!

“the four main characters were rather similar and not very compelling, compared to BoDs and CSTW’s extremely varied casts.”

Lol, BoD7 and CStW have extremely varied casts? This is news to me. Not only did those characters feel flat but it was pretty hard to distinguish between them all. Not the case in D&D.

D&D made very heavy use of tabletop gamer in-jokes (which a lot of Xbox gamers might not get) and the four main characters were rather similar and not very compelling, compared to BoDs and CSTW’s extremely varied casts. I liked the combat mechanics in D&D better than CTSW/BoD, and the graphics are nicer, but the characters were so bland (and the plot seemingly non-existent) that my wife and I gave up on it after about three hours of play.

Agreed; there’s so many people using the stock RPG Maker assets that it gets really old seeing them. A game where the graphics are in a fresh style, even if some of the enemies are pallette swaps, is better than having a game where most of the graphics are simply ripped from somewhere. There’s a lot of people doing pixelart let along art in general, so I find it hard to believe developers would have that much trouble finding an artist to join their team.