In an attempt to breathe new life back into the genre that effectively went the same way as the "arcade" (and dinosaurs, etc.), Vanillaware (famous for Odin Sphere and Muramasa: The Demon Blade, 2D side-scrolling beat 'em ups with RPG elements) has given us Dragon's Crown, a 2D side-scrolling beat 'em up with RPG elements. Quite frankly, they've succeeded, but is this generation ready to take on the task of perpetually walking to the right until you reach a boss fight?
Story
Dragon's Crown takes place in a fantasy world where two warring kingdoms have been locked in a stalemate for years. As an adventurer in the kingdom of Hydeland, you attempt to help restore power to... Okay, you know what? Fuck it. I'm gonna stop right there. The storyline in Dragon's Crown pretty much sounds like it was written by a 3rd grader with an overactive imagination given a creative writing assignment. There's no twist, no reason to care about the NPCs and very little of it actually relates to the gameplay in any way, shape or form. It tries it's best to be an overly grandiose tale of warring factions, sabotage, and an epic quest and it really falls flat on all fronts.
Perhaps I might have paid a little more attention to it if the FUCKING NARRATOR wasn't so goddamn annoying. Here is one of Dragon's Crown's biggest most glaring flaws. In an effort to keep you task oriented, the game's narrator reads your next goal in a story book fashion. The writer in me was frustrated with the regular changing of tenses. I would be informed that I had already walked to the Tavern after exiting the Castle even though I hadn't done so yet, and was regularly told that I was in the middle of adventuring in some zone while I hadn't even left the city. What's more important is that these lines get repeated every time you leave a part of town that isn't directly connected to the storyline. So if you're trying to repair, recruit and activate some blessings before you go visit the Adventurer's Guild to pick up a few quests and then go to the Castle - be prepared to here the same lines 5-6 fucking times.
HOWEVER! There is a workaround to this and I'm going to let you in on the secret that will make the game about a hundred-fold more enjoyable. Pause the game and go to options. Under sound settings, go down to Narrator and turn him all the fucking way down to ZERO. I didn't know this was possible for the first 4ish hours of gameplay and I damn near just gave up and put the game on my virtual shelf. After discovering this little trick, my friends and I had the time of our lives.
Gameplay
Dragon's Crown not only exemplifies beat 'em ups of the past, but it updates them with some pretty excellent mechanics. Enemies have hit stun and various wall and ground bounce effects which can make Dragon's Crown almost feel like a fighting game at certain points. There are combos to be learned, sure. But they're not at all necessary to complete, or even be good at the game.
What is necessary is loot. Dragon's Crown preys very much on the Diablo-minded gamers constantly searching for that next awesome weapon or a slightly better pair of pants. Instead of collecting item drops from enemies (who instead drop score/exp items), you'll have your trusty rogue Rannie pick open chests which contain items graded on a scale of S through E. While most items will be pertinent to your character, you may also stumble across things that you can't use. It's your option to keep them, or to make a new character with which to use them.
Speaking of characters, the game features 6 unique classes to choose from (well, more like 5 since the Wizard and the Sorceress play rather similarly). You have:
The Fighter - a tankish fellow with a sword, shield, and tiny little chicken legs.
The Elf - your garden variety ranger with a bow and quick, but low damage melee attacks.
The Amazon - a female barbarian so to speak. Big on damage and thighs, she gets significantly stronger at lower health. Not so hot on clothes though.
The Dwarf - the burly melee damage class who can pick up and throw objects and enemies.
The Wizard - specializing in large area destructive magics, he's kind of made out of paper.
The Sorceress - kind of like the guy above, except less good and more TnA.
I spent most of my time playing a Sorceress, which I found bizarre since I tend to avoid casting classes in most games. However the area-of-effect magics and fantastic visual effects that accompanied the character allowed me to have a great deal of fun (yes, also tits). Dragon's Crown also managed to remove one of my biggest frustrations with casting classes and that tends to be the lag time between spells. A well-spec'd caster in this game rarely finds themselves wanting for mana and tossing out fireball after fireball with little concern.
The game accommodates up to 4 players, but if you don't have friends, provides CPU controlled allies in the form of bone piles. You can bring these piles back to the Temple, have them resurrected, and add to your party for a nominal fee.
Alternatively, if you DO have friends, both local and online co-op are available. Just know that online co-op does not unlock until you clear each of the 9 stages at least once. It's at this point that the game opens up a quest that requires you to revisit each stage and unlocks it's "B-side" - which is more difficult with a bigger, badder boss. Originally I was kind of upset by this. "You mean I have to play through half the game before I get to have human companions?" Instead, it turned out to be an interesting positive, since this level of story progression also requires you to learn the mechanics of the game and your character's individual strengths and weaknesses. It could be said that the first 9 levels of the game are actually just a really long and highly glorified tutorial.
Once the game does open up the B-sides for you, that's when things get interesting. In addition to being able to jump into the middle of someone else's level, you're also no longer forced to return to town at the end of every level. Instead, you can continue your journey and travel to the next adjacent level (note: the levels are not located in a chronological/difficulty order - you'll find yourself jumping all over the map if you try to play the bosses in character level order). The benefit to this is that your rewards increase, sometimes dramatically, for each level you complete in your "chain". The drawback is that you don't get the chance to repair or restock any of your items. If you use all 3 of your Blizzard spells, that's it until you end the chain and go back to town. In order to ease the pains of stringing many levels together, there is a cooking mini-game placed after 3 of the stages that allows you to restore health and stack bonuses to attack and defense. This sort of level design forces players to think carefully as to how they ration their supplies and how much punishment they can take without destroying their equipment.
Everything culminates in a gigantic, and fairly epic boss fight with the Illusionary Dragon. The fight has a few interesting mechanics, but for the most part it's a battle against a giant head that hits like a fucking truck. Better bring all the healing items and high level NPCs you can muster. After that it's happily ever after and a bullshit forced, unskippable credits sequence.
Afterwards, you unlock Hard difficulty for the characters that completed the fight and you get to start everything all over again. The game perpetuates itself by increasing the level cap for each difficulty - new drops will be adjusted to your character level. This is the side-scrolling Diablo folks.
And speaking of Diablo, the multiplayer needs mention. Dragon's Crown is a game that plays best with 2 people sitting on a couch. The issue with increasing the player base to 3 or 4 is this: each instance of entering the various shops or quest centers is controlled solely by the player that entered it. For multiple players, this means sequencing and ensuring that all players make pit-stops at each individual place in town. When playing with 4 players, this can create a significant amount of downtime, which leads to a significant amount of boredom. Dragon's Crown could have greatly benefited from handling shopping like Gauntlet Legends - in which the screen becomes separated 4 ways, and each player controls their own shopping experience. Players only then leave the shop once everyone has confirmed that they are finished shopping.
Graphics
This segment has to happen. Tsaikotyk and I try not to criticize games based so much on their sound or graphics, but that tends to be because most triple-A releases have such an absurd budget and throw it all into making things as shiny as possible, leaving gameplay for 100 (code)monkeys at Apple II's over the course of Columbus Day Weekend.
Dragon's Crown is pretty fucking gorgeous. If there's one OTHER thing Vanillaware does (besides make 2D side-scrolling beat 'em ups with RPG elements), it's make really pretty hand-painted graphics (which are also seen in Odin Sphere and Muramasa: The Demon Blade). These guys have a niche and they're doing it right.
Though this doesn't seem to be the universal opinion. Early on, before the game's release, Jason Schreier of Kotaku wrote this article, criticizing the character design behind the Sorceress. It then lead to the game's designer, George Kamitani posting a picture on Facebook of 3 burly shirtless dwarves embracing and mentioning that Schreier might like them better. Schreier did a couple follow up articles on Kotaku trying to regain some lost ground (which can be found here and here). That certainly didn't stop Polygon from giving the game an overall 6.5/10. Amongst other issues, Danielle Riendeau claimed that she "found its over-exaggerated art style alienating and gross in its depiction of women" and also criticized the game because "Dragon's Crown's serious liberties with female anatomy are distracting. Two player characters — the Amazon and the Sorceress — are explicitly sexualized, with breasts literally bigger than their heads with rear ends to match, and plenty of the screen real estate is dedicated to their respective jiggles and sashays." (that article can be read here).
I'm not even going to consider debating that point for a moment. What I am going to say, is that Kamitani was kinda right in a way. Yes, the female characters have unrealistically enormous tits. That doesn't stop the men from being equally absurd.
Dropping the Ball
For all the fun I had with this game, Dragon's Crown was not without it's fair share of issues. Some have already been mentioned, but here are a few that need saying:
1. Pricepoint - Dragon's Crown launched for a retail value of $49.99 on PS3 and $39.99 on PS Vita. For a game that looks and plays like a glorified indie title, it's incredibly hard to want to pony up the cash. For me, it just so happend to launch in early August, when I was clawing to find something to occupy my time until Saints Row IV.
2. Missed opportunities - There's no cross-buy for Dragon's Crown, which is rather sad, since there is a cross-save feature that allows you to import/export save games from the PS3 to Vita and back again, so you can always have your character on the go. Which, if you wanted to do so, would run you about $90. Ouch. In addition to that, there's not even a cross-play feature that allows you to game with your friends who only have the other version of the game. Way to drop the fucking ball Vanillaware.
3. Technical shortcomings - I played through the PS3 version of this title and I have to say that while the game was mostly solid - in later levels with 4 players (which you always want, if not need) when things on screen get hectic, the game starts to lag. While I haven't played the Vita version, I've heard it cautioned many times that there are significant frame rate drops during more chaotic scenes. If the PS3 can't handle it, I'd hate to see how it fared on the Vita.
At the end of the day, even though I enjoyed the game, I have to give Dragon's Crown a:
C-
Dragon's Crown had some excellent ideas, not the least of which was returning a forgotten genre to prominence. I had fun with Dragon's Crown, and I even really liked the gameplay. Unfortunately, a cavalcade of missteps by Vanillaware means that I can't reasonably give this game any higher of a grade.
But if you're strolling through Gamestop in about a year and see it poking out of the discount bin, it's definitely worth your $20.
-Nik "Latency" Trumble
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