Two consecutive non-game-related articles in a row after joining Game & Love didn’t seem right, so I figured I’d throw together a few quickie reviews for pre-Fusion Earth games starring dragons in a new bit called:
Same rules as my “Dragons as Protagonists” (Prodragonists?) series apply:
1. The main player character must be a dragon (with exactly one exception I'll be getting to later). No dragon riders allowed.
2. NO SHIFTERS. Shifters do not count as dragons. To define a shifter: a shifter is a dragon that can take on human or mostly-human form. Dragons taking anthro form is fine, so long as it's an anthro dragon like in real life. Exceptions can be made for games where 100% of the actual gameplay loop is spent as a dragon (a la Dragon Spirit).
3. I must finish at least one round of gameplay before starting the review.
4. Given that these are video games, I'm not going to knock them for being inaccurate. Back then, there was no "inaccurate". As long as the game itself is solid, I will look over any breaks from reality.
For each of these, I’ve adapted The CRPG Addict’s [link: https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/] GIMLET system, in my case called DRAGONET.
Categories 1-6 are given a score from 1 to 10.
1. Dragon Factor
How dragon-tastic is the game? Do you feel like a mighty, handsome, badass dragon, or a puny little lizard? Does the world around you accommodate your status as a dragon? How dracocentric is the game, really?
2. Replayability and Content Volume
Is there a compelling reason to pick this game up again? How much content is in there?
3. Aesthetics and Presentation
Are the visuals and sounds up to scratch? Is the acting (when applicable) professional, or b-movie level? Does it have a kickin’ soundtrack?
4. Game Design
How easy to pick up is this game? Do you feel like you’re accomplishing something, is there enough variety to keep your interest? Is the world around you cleverly laid out and a fair challenge, or is it lazily slapped-together and unfairly difficult/insultingly easy?
5. Overall Gameplay Loop
The general set of actions a player will be repeating over the course of the game. Is it satisfying? Is it something that would compel you to finish the whole thing, or is it so tedious that it makes the first stage alone a chore?
6. Narrative
Is the story interesting? Is it well-presented, are the characters engaging?
7. End of Review
The final verdict. Is it worth your time? Is it at least interesting? Or is it just a waste of bytes?
8. Total Score
The final score gathered from points 1-6.
Now then, let’s get draggin’!
Choice of the Dragon (web browser):
An ubiquitous part of many 20th century Earth childhoods was the Choose Your Own Adventure book series. The central conceit is simple: your start the story, and every so often you’ll be prompted to choose between several options and turn to the corresponding page.
Like a heavily simplified version of Fighting Fantasy in a way, and a predecessor of sorts to the Visual Novel.
Amazingly, none of these (to my knowledge) casts you as a dragon, so this game sought to rectify that. Is this an adventure worth choosing, or should you turn to a different page?
1. Dragon Factor
This has to be the game’s high point; the entire game is designed around the fact that you’re a dragon living in a D&Desque high fantasy setting, and you get customization options aplenty, up to and including: your scale color, number of legs, head and wing types, and of course gender and sexual orientation.
All this stuff is just cosmetic, of course, but it’s a nice feature.
You get to do plenty of dragonly (to a 21st-century Earthling) things like flying, breathing fire, destroying villages(!), enslaving local monster populations (!!) and running a protection racket with nearby villages (okay, that’s just feudalism, but you know).
Oh, and managing how your hoard will be guarded while you get some beauty rest, which is a nice feature to consider.
8 points.
2. Replayability and Content Volume
Replayability-wise, you will need several playthroughs to see everything.
As far as the volume of actual content goes, however? You’ll be repeating a lot of the same content over and over to get to the new stuff, which often amount to a paragraph’s worth of text.
You certainly will be replaying this, if you want to see everything in the game, but the question is whether you really want to.
4 points.
3. Aesthetics and Presentation
This game is presented entirely through text, no music or sound effects. The interface is competently made, they chose a decent font, and that’s about it.
I feel like it’s unfair to knock a text-based game for lacking a fancy presentation, but even text can be decorated. A background made to look like ancient parchment, for instance, would’ve been lovely. Maybe buttons that look like dragon heads.
3 points.
4. Game Design
Each choice you make shifts the balance of the three stat tiers:
Brutality vs. Finesse (do you use brute force to resolve conflict, or do you prefer precision strikes and swiftness?), Cunning vs. Honor (are you clever and deceptive, or honorable and trustworthy), and Disdain Vs. Vigilance (this one really just amounts to how thick-skinned you are, so are you a Hideki Kamiya, or your average Tumblrite?).
One thing I like about this system is that it means every choice you make has long-term consequences; outcomes are always dependent on what stats previous choices gave you. If you try to think your way out of a situation after you’ve spent most of your time bashing through everything like a dipshit, you’re going to fail.
This also ends up encouraging you to roleplay a consistent character; if you’re a dick, it’s in your best interest to stay a dick (just don’t be stupid about it). If you’ve been relatively nice (as much as this game lets you, anyway; you WILL at the very least bully a few people no matter what you do), then having a sudden bout of nastiness will bite you in the ass.
The choices generally make it clear what kind of character you’ll be building if you take them
The way the writing works, however, can often be misleading: often, actions I thought would have my character do one thing made him do another (e.g. what I thought was a peaceful solution ended up with my guy killing someone). However, it’s seldom enough to completely derail your character.
Problem is, while you’re given plenty of options, in the end events will always happen in a set order, with no way to decide when you want to do what (e.g. you only go looking for a mate when the game wants you to).
Alter Ego, as a counter example of a similar game, opened up new tasks for you to pursue as the game went on, but let you decide when you did these things. To be fair, however, there are points where you decide what order you tackle events in.
6 points.
5. Overall Gameplay Loop
The basic loop is: text is displayed, player is given options, player chooses option. The secondary loop is dictated by the individual scenario, but the general idea is: survive threats, acquire resources, manage resources.
Enough thought is required to keep things interesting, so I’ll give it a 5.
6. Narrative
Hardly the worst out there.
One thing that bothered me was the fact that, no matter what you do, you will be railroaded into being a dick to some extent. If you’re like me, and tend to always pick the nicest choice possible in any given game, you’re going to have a hard time with this.
Also, romancing a mate is relatively shallow, more in line with an animal’s mating rituals than a real romance. You could argue this is a common problem with romance as a mechanic, but it's no less egregious here.
The biggest problem is, what feels like the main conflict is such a small portion of the game. By the time you get to it, the game is almost over.
The fact that the outcomes are all fixed, depending on what choices you previously made, means it wouldn’t take too long to exhaust them all, especially because of the game’s short length.
6 points.
7. End of Review
Overall, it plays like a worse version of Alter Ego. I can’t knock it too much, though, since it’s a freeware game that makes for an engaging 20 minutes at the very least.
Give it a shot, you might like it.
8. Total Score: 32 out of 60
Reign of Fire (GBA):
 |
| You have to wonder who the hell was tempted by that offer. |
The key plot twist, for one, bears too much of a resemblance to Terhimach for comfort.
The game itself is neither particularly competent, nor very engaging in the ideas it tries to present. It’s made to cash in on a cheesy movie, and that’s that. In truth, the only remarkable thing about this game is what sold me on it in the first place: the dragons have their own campaign.
My first thought was to assume that the humans would be an afterthought. Any Earthling readers, I ask you: given the opportunity, who among you wouldn’t want to be a sexy, badass dragon? We both know the answer.
Yet, not only do you have to finish the entire human campaign to unlock the dragons, but the dragon campaign is a mere 6 stages to the human campaign’s 10! That’s as asinine as a Godzilla game where you don’t play as Godzill- ah, wait, those exist and are as awful as you’d expect.
Even at the mere $3 I got this game for, I feel shortchanged.
1. Dragon Factor
Well, dragons are certainly omnipresent throughout this game, but the portion in which you actually control them is unsatisfying, and ends abruptly. The dragons in the human campaign do at least have a few different varieties, but no such luck in the dragon campaign.
3 points.
2. Replayability and Content Volume
A total of 16 stages, only 6 of those being dedicated to dragons.
You do have a ranking system at the end of each level, so you could in theory chase after a high score, should you be so inclined (you won’t be).
2 points.
3. Aesthetics and Presentation
This part’s competent enough; none of the background music is awful, though certainly not something I’d order the OST for.
In the human campaign, the dragon death animation is fun to look at, but it gets repetitive very quickly.
The tiling is a wonky, garbled mess, bordering on bad rom-hack level sloppiness.
As for the individual sprites, they're mostly alright, but still maintain a "low effort" feel to them. In particular, note how Asher’s portrait sprite is a very obvious edit from Ashley(hur-dee-hur)/Imperia’s.
 |
| (Left) Ashley (Right) Asher |
3 points.
4. Game Design
It’s very easy to get lost in this game, and often you’ll find yourself backtracking. Objectives are often hazy. And I don’t know if it’s a problem endemic to isometric games, but navigation is difficult, as everything looks nearly identical. Making this worse is the small GBA screen making your FOV restrictively small.
3 points.
5. Overall Gameplay Loop
For the human section, you change between on-foot and vehicular combat.
Problem is, the vehicular controls are only slightly less sluggish than walking, and you’re being hounded by enemies as this happens, so vehicles feel more like a chore than anything else.
Meanwhile, dragons have a much simpler loop: fly, walk, breathe fire.
Both campaigns effectively amount to “kill things, collect things, kill more things”. Granted, this describes a lot of games (including Spyro), but good games don’t make it feel so damned banal.
Everything you do becomes repetitive very quickly, which becomes especially agonizing during the segments in the dragon campaign where you burn down the humans’ crops to collect the ash. The wheat takes a solid six seconds to burn, and when you have to stop and wait six seconds every time you find a crop, that’s unbearably tedious.
2 points.
6. Narrative
As shallow as it gets. While the above entries are hardly Shakespeare, the characters have comprehensible motives, however simplistic.
Unlike its console counterpart, this game attributes sapience to the dragons.
So, now that we see things from the dragons’ eyes, what are their reasons for fighting humanity?
The dragons want to destroy humans just because. Humans haven’t visibly done anything to incite the war; the dragons see them as “pests”, and thus must be exterminated.
I won’t insult your intelligence by drawing parallels, here.
The dragons aren’t a punishment of man’s rape of the planet, there’s no ecological niche that humans are preventing them from filling.
In other words, coexistence is never even brought up as a possibility. From the moment the dragons arrived, conflict is portrayed as having been the only possibility. If these dragons are sapient, as depicted here, then shouldn’t there have been some attempt at communication?
To humans, dragons would likely only be seen as animals at first blush (as was initially assumed in real life), so it would fall to the dragons to try and establish communications. Since they resorted immediately to full-on genocide, the dragons are actually morally evil, unlike the majority of creature feature monsters.
The dragons in this game are Imperialist, not for any stated ideological reason, but because it’s just assumed.
Another thing to consider is the fact that all the dragons we see are female. All the humans? Male. This could easily be seen as a gender war, as well.
One strange thing on display is the bowdlerized language used: blatant mass-murder is referred to in the dragons’ dialogue as “kicking butt”, as if they’re afraid to say the word “kill” in a T-rated video game that bathes in dragon viscera, based on an R-rated movie.
 |
| You mean "let's go murder people for literally no reason". Sounds like a good time to me. |
 |
| Comma, Gosh darn you! |
 |
| Congratulations, you just committed genocide. Are you fucking happy with yourselves? |
If you pick “Try Again” after seeing this stopgap ending, you’re dropped into an empty, lifeless hellscape. Despite this being the product of a glitch, it’s really the only way this game could end; Imperialism’s ultimate goal is assimilation and destruction, robbing the world of color and chaos in the process.
While in real life, an empire collapses long before this goal could ever be fully attained, the dead world surrounding you is all too logical a conclusion, and all too reflective of imperialism’s real-world aftermath.
2 points.
7. End of Review
So, while I consider the inherently awesome premise of “fight against/as dragons!” wasted, an effort does seem to have been made. The dragons act like the stereotypical Earthling conception of dragons did/do, so you can’t say the dragons are tacked on thoughtlessly.
Unfortunately, the game itself is not well-designed or fun. Nothing about this game is truly noteworthy, apart from the loathsome narrative implications.
Truth be told, however, a game wherein one side is about blatant mass-murder doesn’t deserve to be fun in the first place.
8. Total Score: 15 out of 60
Dragon Spirit (Arcade/NES):
 |
| Kudos to The Arcade Flyer Archive for this scan. |
Ahhh, Dragon Spirit, showing up in any 21st century conversation about games starring dragons. But, is it a game that truly deserves to be mentioned in the same conversation as Spyro the Dragon, or is it just a matter of there being few other options?
 |
| "Good lord!" Cried the sentient volcano. "He's going to chop up the Nintendo Seal of Quality!" |
 |
| This tool shows up on both covers of the game, despite only being in the intro. No matter which region you pick, neither of these dipshits are actually facing the guy they're supposed to be fighting. |
Note that I’ll be reviewing the NES version at the same time, as it’s the most noteworthy (and best, arguably better than the arcade game) port. It also has a lot of changes and additions.
1. Dragon Factor
Right away, I’ll have to dock points for the fact that, like it or not, storywise the protagonist is a shifter. Of course, this game is still qualified because of the addendum to Rule #2, which I admit to adding in precisely because this game is just so damned good.
 |
| This looks so much like an album cover. It just needs a little something... |
 |
| Bellissimo. |
You spend the entire game as a dragon, and not only that, but a wyvern! AND you grow extra heads as powerups (I hope the heads aren’t supposed to have separate personalities, or this could get problematic pretty quick), so technically you get to be a hydra, too!
No matter what kind of dragon you are at any given moment, however, you’re always a badass, kicking tail and taking names.
The bosses in this game are also impressive, and taking them down makes you feel appropriately heroic and dragonly. Hell, you even fight a dracolich that attacks by exploding his bones and turning his soul into bullets!
 |
| "Rotting Pink Dragon Corpse" is totally the fifth song on Butt-Fucked by Fate. Okay guys, go ahead and get those "boner" jokes out of your system. |
8 Points.
2. Replayability and Content Volume
Like most Arcade/NES games, this is meant to be beaten in a single sitting, and takes roughly 40 minutes, give or take a few retries. That said, this game does offer a good challenge, so it’s likely to take you a few attempts before successfully finishing it.
On top of that, if your skill threshold is low enough that you have to rely on the Gold Dragon on your first time playing the NES version, then you should be able to squeeze a little more playtime out of it trying to master the Blue Dragon.
Not to mention, the idea of going for a deathless run, or trying to speedrun or score attack the game extends its lifespan significantly.
Lastly, the NES version has some added bosses towards the end, which is nice.
6 Points.
3. Aesthetics and Presentation
Graphically, the presentation’s great, with plenty of detail on the sprites, and a respectable number of animation frames. Airborne enemies burn to cinders, land enemies will crumble to bones, shatter into pieces, or wilt away.
Meanwhile, when you die (and you will, plenty of times), you burst into flames, and there’s a few frames of your carcass burning to ashes as it plummets to the ground.
Metal.
 |
| "Crushed Bones by the River of Fire" is the second song on that album. |
Subtle things like the way your dragon leans in the direction you’re flying help breathe life into this game. The locales the game presents range from typical but well-presented to utterly bizarre.
 |
Are we then to take the Paleozoic Era as just a still-extant place in this unstated high fantasy setting?
The NES version is no slouch in the presentation department, either.
We take things like "the ability to tell just what everything is supposed to be" and "palettes that don't make your eyes bleed" for granted in modern games, but they were precious in the NES days.
Thankfully, this game's NES conversion has both.
Soundwise, the SFX are pretty competently done, and the soundtrack is great on both the arcade original and its NES conversion, though the latter is missing two of the boss themes.
7 points.
4. Game Design
Controls-wise, the game is very much akin to Xevious, wherein you have one button that fires shots straight ahead, and one that shoots bombs at the ground.
The game makes good use of this mechanic, placing plenty of enemies on both planes, and Stage 3’s boss makes you carefully alternate between aerial shots to deflect its bullets, and ground shots to actually damage it.
One major sticking point a lot of people cite with this game is the dragon's huge hitbox, which combined with the fact that you can only take two hits makes the game's difficulty brutal.
The NES conversion makes a lot of concessions in the design to accommodate the hardware, and most of these turn out to be for the better. One key difference between the NES and Arcade versions is the fact that the NES version’s sprite for the dragon is smaller, and the hitbox has been adjusted to accommodate, making dodging much easier.
This alone changes the game from "gruelingly hard" to "mostly fair but challenging", making the game much more enjoyable in the process.
The NES version is also more forgiving about how many hits you can take before dying, further alleviating the frustration of the arcade original. While it does take away your power-ups with each hit, you’re never stuck in a Gradius situation where you desperately need those items to win and are better off restarting the level.
To counterbalance this, the NES version hides the round select behind a code, and repeated failure is punished by being forced to restart the entire game. The fun of this is watching your skill level grow as the early game becomes increasingly familiar, and over time you master the game’s intricacies.
Overall, not too bad a tradeoff.
The NES version of Stage 6 changes the stage's core gimmick from giant icicles that need to be shot back into the wall to a section wherein the screen scrolls faster as you weave around the level terrain and hastily shoot past walls of ice.
Other smaller changes involve the change of one powerup from a shot that roams around the whole screen to a powerful three-way shot, and changing Stage 3's boss to have two sets of pods to blow up instead of a rotating set.
For the most part, the stage designs and enemy patterns are fair, and bosses’ patterns can typically be figured out on the first attempt.
Stage 8, meanwhile, has an irritating gimmick that differs between versions: in the arcade version, you have a limited cone of vision in an otherwise completely dark map, while in the NES version you have full view of the room, but the lights flicker on and off for no apparent reason.
Regardless of which version of this stage you’re playing, you will suffer plenty of “what hit me?!” moments.
It’s sad that this game is plagued by what I call “late-game design collapse”, where balance gets thrown right out the window as the endgame approaches.
6 points (Arcade) 8 points (NES).
5. Overall Gameplay Loop
Shoot, Maneuver, Switch fire type.
Enemy patterns are generally varied enough to keep you on your toes while being predictable enough to be fair.
I say “generally”, because the later stages throw this whole notion out the window, as I mentioned in the above point.
7 points.
6. Narrative
No points for originality in the frame story: you rescue a damsel in distress from Mr. Kill, and that’s as deep as it goes. The addition of the dragon being a shifter feels unnecessary; Thanatos didn’t need a human form.
Indeed, the frame story is so much of an afterthought that it's mind-boggling. No explanation for why or how the hero inexplicably travels back in time for the first level.
No mention of just why Amul needs a sword to transform into a dragon, whether it only works for people of a particular bloodline or any old shmuck could pick it up and get a species upgrade.
 |
| By the power of non-specific magic swords and cliffs with faces on them! |
But this framing device exists purely as a means to implement a rather unique and interesting tutorial; like The Dragon’s Trap and Symphony of the Night are both known to do, it starts where the “previous” game ended, scaling (no pun intended) down the actual difficulty to let you get acquainted with the gameplay.
Another clever thing this framing device allows is, if you die during this tutorial segment (in which case you must REALLY suck), the game will cut to a scene of our protagonist waking up from a nightmare, saying that, nah, his dad totally beat Mr. Kill that day.
 |
| Dig the toy Amul and Zawel in the background. |
If this happens, you begin the game as the much more powerful Gold Dragon, but the game cuts off partway through with a joke ending.
 |
| The cliffside face's mood improved between versions. Guess it's glad about the dragon having a smaller hitbox this time. |
 |
| I'd be scared of a giant girl with soulless green eyes and a gaping toothless maw, too, Lace.(screencap courtesy of VGMuseum's Rey). |
I’ll take it over Streets of Rage 3’s fucked-up false ending, at least.
3 points (Arcade) 4 points (NES).
7. End of Review
Overall, it’s hardly a Recca or Crisis Force, but as far as NES vertical shooters go, you could do much worse than this.
If you haven’t guessed by this point, the NES conversion benefits from what I call “Contra NES Syndrome”, where the added content and design refinements make it the superior version, despite the drastically lower-fidelity hardware. If you only play one version of this game, the NES one is it.
Here’s a fun(?) bit of trivia for the road. According to The Cutting Room Floor: “In the Japanese version, press Select 20 times at the good ending scene where Iris is riding on top of the Dragon's head to lift her skirt up.”
 |
| That’s your sister, you degenerate dragon! Dragenerate! Dergenerate? (Screenshot courtesy again of Rey from VGMuseum) |
Stay classy, Japanese entertainment.
8. Total Score: 37(Arcade)/40(NES) out of 60.
So, none of these games have even broken 50 points, yet.
Maybe next round, we'll find an extra-dragonly game to sink our teeth into.
Until next time, keep draggin! (I need to come up with a better catchphrase...)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Rules:
1. Be civil. No misogyny/racism/general bigotry, no flame-baiting. If you wouldn't say it to my face, don't say it here.
2. This site is hosted in Earth's past (thank you, Mikks), so please don't notify me about the dates being screwy. I already know. Also, Earthlings from the past will likely comment here and be a little confused, so please show 'em a little patience.
3. No anonymous comments. Click the "Name/URL" option, enter a name, and leave the URL blank.