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Dragon's Crown
PlayStation 3
Sorceress Boobs Are Not Controversial
4/5 stars
“Dragon’s Crown” (“DC”) is the 7th game by Vanillaware (including the Japan-only release of the Saturn game “Princess Crown” before the team took on their current Vanillaware moniker), a development team lead by director George Kamitani, who also worked on the old Capcom Dungeons & Dragons based Beat ‘em Ups that make up the “Chronicles of Mystara” compilation. After his work on those arcade titles, Kamitani developed the idea of a non-D&D based Beat ‘em Up with more in-depth RPG trappings. Nearly 13 years after his initial idea, Kamitani was able to bring this game to life at the tail-end of the 7th Generation. As a huge fan of Vanillaware’s dedication to the perfection of 2D graphics in a gaming culture dominated by polygons, I have been following “DC” since it was first announced way back in 2011. After numerous delays, I was eager to get my hands on “DC” and see if it fulfilled all of the promises that the “Chronicles of Mystara” games – due to their arcade nature – failed to do.
Presentation
As a Vanillaware game, “DC” looks absolutely phenomenal. The company’s talented team of artists has, once again, delivered a 2D game that looks unlike anything available in the polygonal world, with multiple layers of scrolling and still scenes with small animated details that look like a gallery painting brought to life. Of course, the main controversy surrounding “DC” (and, I’m convinced, one of the major causes for the multiple release delays) is the character designs. While the back of the game box touts ‘over the top’ character designs, when it comes down to it, none of these designs are terribly different from what Vanillaware has done in other games, like “Odin Sphere,” “GrimGrimoire,” and “Muramasa: The Demon Blade.” Vanillaware’s artists create men who look like men and women who look like women… in the classic style of pioneering fantasy artists like Boris Vallejo or even Larry Elmore. Yet one of the writers at Kotaku decided to be a feminist White Knight and generate controversy (and clicks for Kotaku) around the designs of the female characters. Yes, the Sorceress has huge boobs and the Amazon has a large, lumpy ass. Are two physical features of two game characters, who – and I must emphasize – look pretty par for the course when it comes to Vanillaware’s art, really worth stirring up a controversy, insulting George Kamitani (who has admitted to liking the Sorceress’s visual stylings the best (an opinion I share)), and potentially preventing Vanillaware from considering localization for their future games, since Americans (in this case ONE American) can’t handle a little bit of cheesecake in a fantasy game? I say, NO. “DC” is a testament to Vanillaware’s unique artistic vision, and I wouldn’t have them censor it for our politically correct, puritan American eyes for anything.
Unlike the graphics, the soundtrack in “DC” didn’t generate any controversy. But it is just as good. There are a handful of tracks for the stages and a couple of town themes, but the most memorable track for me is the stage selection map theme. It’s good stuff. There isn’t a lot of voiceacting in “DC.” The characters do say some things in combat, and are well voiced. The story and cutscenes, however, are voiced by a single narrator instead of having the individual characters speak. The narration aspect is a significant step backwards from a voiced dialog between multiple characters and relies far too much on the passive voice, which makes it sound weird. The game includes a free day-one DLC option that allows the player to substitute narration by any of the playable characters in place of the default narrator’s voice. This option serves to break up the monotony of hearing the same lines over and over in the same tone, and some of the narration can be downright amusing when read by certain characters (the Elf reading the Hermit’s lines is always worth a chuckle).
The main problem affecting “DC’s” presentation is the fact that, despite numerous delays, the game was pressed to discs with some obvious design flaws that have been removed in a handful of patches. These patches include minor things like simplifying searching for hidden treasures, as well as major, game-breaking things like allowing all of the players in a local co-op game to advance through the story simultaneously. While all of these issues have been fixed at the time of this writing, the fact that Vanillaware didn’t see these flaws for what they were before allowing the game to go gold shows that someone in the QA testing department wasn’t paying attention.
Story
“DC’s” story follows a diverse group of generic fantasy adventurers, a Fighter, Amazon, Dwarf, Sorceress, Wizard, and Elf, as they make their way to the kingdom of Hydeland. As each character pursues their own goals (which are kept secret until each character’s ending scene), they get wrapped up in an international imbroglio with a neighboring country and the evil Cult of Morneon.
After the King disappears, the characters are compelled to work with the Hydeland royal family to ensure the accession of the next ruler cannot be challenged by any other nation. In order to solidify the new monarch’s rule, the characters will need to track down the titular Dragon’s Crown, an artifact that was said to grant fantastic powers to its wearer. Yet the Dragon’s Crown is in the hands of the Cult of Morneon, who wish to use it to unleash a terrible power from the ancient past upon the whole of Hydeland.
Along their journey, the characters meet a variety of stock fantasy characters who closely resemble icons of the genre, including a Conan-like barbarian and a Gandalf-like wizard. Unfortunately, there is very little character development as the story progresses. Each non-player character is presented as a stock personality with no real depth.
I was somewhat disappointed by the lack of multiple towns or character development among the entire cast, both PC and NPC. Vanillaware has written far more interesting stories in their past games. While “DC’s” narrative is reasonably good by the standards set forth by the Beat ‘em Up genre, it doesn’t live up to the developer’s reputation.
Gameplay
“DC” is, in essence, the spiritual successor to the old Capcom arcade games, “Tower of Doom” and “Shadow Over Mystara.” However, “DC” does a much better job of incorporating RPG elements into a Beat ‘em Up framework, and includes significantly more content and depth than those old arcade games. At its core, “DC” is a traditional side-scrolling Beat ‘em Up. Characters navigate 2D stages with pseudo-3D vertical movement and must clear out groups of enemies to progress through each stage. Like the “Chronicles of Mystara” games, “DC” features branching paths, only instead of occurring at the ends of certain stages, the branches in “DC” occur in the middle of every stage, allowing players to follow an ‘A’ path or a ‘B’ path, with a different boss monster at the end of each.
In addition to beating up enemies, the player can also control a color-coded (for each player in a multi-player game) cursor with the right analog stick in order to poke a variety of sparkles, runes, and object that appear in the background. Sparkles turn into treasure that adds money to the player’s total, runes can be combined in “Chronicles of Mystara” inspired abbreviations to activate a variety of effects, and objects usually tie into a sidequest of some sort. Unfortunately, the sidequests can sometimes be maddeningly vague about how to complete them, at least until the player realizes that poking objects with their cursor finger will always do the trick. I found the cursor controls to be a little bit sloppy, even as someone who regularly uses Xpadder to create a similar control scheme in cursor-heavy PC games. It almost seems like Vanillaware initially intended “DC” to be a Wii game, with cursor integration tied to the Wiimote pointer, yet went with Sony for unknown reasons and didn’t bother to incorporate PS Move support.
Each character has a unique fighting style, with significant differences even between the three melee characters. I spent most of my time as a Sorceress or a Wizard and, while they all have similar spells, there are subtle differences in the way they move and the types of bonus skills they can access. Melee characters dish out and absorb large amounts of close combat damage, magic characters dish out freakishly large amounts of magic damage but need to stand still every once in a while to recharge their MP, and the lone ranged character launches volleys of arrows but must constantly venture into the fray to recover those same arrows. Each character also has access to a unique pool of skills (along with a common pool of skills shared by every character) and can spend the skill points gained by leveling-up to unlock limited-use special attacks or defensive skills. Gaining levels also increases a character’s overall stats and allows them to wear higher level equipment.
Unfortunately, it seems in the 7th Generation, something happened in the world of game design that suddenly changed the definition of an RPG to mean ‘a game with random loot.’ By far the most involved portion of “DC’s” gameplay is the loot system. In each dungeon there are a number of treasure chests that contain a random piece of equipment with a rank ranging from E to A, with the traditional Japanese S rank sitting at the very top of the quality scale. Upon returning from an adventure, the player can pay an appraiser to identify the items or just sell them straight out if they are low rank and have a small number of ????’d special abilities attached. There is no way to buy equipment in the game either – it must be found randomly. However, the game does a good job of dropping loot that is the right level or slightly above the level of the characters, so they don’t need to worry about finding nothing but low-level vendor trash. However, acquiring good enough gear to play the game on the higher difficulties can become extremely grindy.
Going on an ‘adventure’ in “DC” is also handled a bit strangely. Since equipment degrades as it is used and must occasionally be repaired in town (if it breaks, the character just loses the bonus and can still repair the broken gear in town), the game provides random incentives after completing a stage to encourage the player to keep going, such as a bonus to experience, money, or loot quality. However, the most questionable part of the adventuring process, which only becomes available after hitting a certain part of the story, is that subsequent stages are selected randomly. It is also possible to register a number of sidequests at the Adventure Guild before setting out, but it’s only possible to register 5 at a time, which makes the randomness of the stage selector incredibly annoying. While it is possible to select the initial adventure destination, this process also costs money and doesn’t ensure that subsequent destinations will have any relevance to the player’s active sidequests.
Perhaps the biggest flaw in “DC’s” gameplay is that it is intentionally repetitive. The Normal difficulty has a level cap of 35, while Hard has a cap of 65, and Infernal – the hardest difficulty - finally removes the cap, with each cap unlocking on a character-by-character basis upon completing the game. Yet nothing changes between the three difficulties outside of how tough the enemies are and how high the characters can level. Instead of capping out at 99 and forcing players to replay the same stages over and over, grinding to max out the cap each time, it would have been far better to just cap the entire game at level 20 (as the traditional D&D level cap has always been), remove the repetition, and just unlock the 99 stage bonus dungeon for players who want more out of the game. It takes about 20 hours to play through each of the first two difficulties, but I didn’t even bother with Infernal because I didn’t feel like replaying the same levels and grinding for experience and loot was particularly engaging anymore, especially once I had completed all of the sidequests.
The other huge flaw in “DC” is that it is an intentionally multiplayer game. While it is possible for a single player to play through the game with AI companions, these companions must first be found as skeletons in a dungeon, then revived (for money) at the temple. Once revived and in the party, AI companions are morons who fight ineffectively and die constantly. Even worse, they can’t repair their gear or level up, so they are essentially disposable, but only if the player continually gathers skeletons and wastes money reviving them. Instead of relying on AI and having a solitary experience, “DC” wants players to team up either via PSN with drop-in-drop-out co-op, or via local shared-screen co-op. While this is perfectly reasonable, considering the arcade inspiration for “DC,” I would have really liked the ability to create my own AI companions, equip them myself, level them with my actively-controlled character as a party, and set their AI routines.
Overall
“Dragon’s Crown” is as aesthetically pleasing as one would expect from a Vanillaware game. It also merges the worlds of arcade Beat ‘em Up and RPG far more successfully than “Tower of Doom” and “Shadow Over Mystara” ever did. However, in relying far too much on repetition and grinding, and essentially requiring at least three human-controlled characters to be playable, “DC” unnecessarily limits itself to being a co-op party game.
Presentation: 4.5/5
Story: 3/5
Gameplay: 4/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5
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