Dragon’s Crown (PS3)
I hadn’t seen my good college friend Jacob in over a year. Between studying abroad, finishing school, and living in different states, my collegiate social life was taking shotgun to my own growing domestic issues and poor financial standing.
Dragon’s Crown was my first step toward recovery.
Jacob, his room mate Shaowen and I got together in July to partake in some Space Dandy, a little bit of Sharknado, and some rum. It may have not been in that order. Somewhere between the rum and watching Things at 5 AM was about seven hours of Dragon’s Crown for the PS3. Developed by Vanillaware and headed by Atlus, Dragon’s Crown is a fantasy-style side-scrolling RPG. One to four players choose classes and undergo quests to earn money, new equipment, and level up. There’s a hub town in the realm of Hydeland where you can recruit more adventurers, upgrade your abilities, take on quests, and advance the plot. Wash, rinse and repeat.
Something like this.
All in all it’s pretty fun. Diving into dank dungeons and enigmatic towers is great when you have comrades right next to you, allowing for strategy. Although I imagine it’s probably boring as hell in single player. Without the teamwork aspect, what else is there?
Dungeon crawling through linear maps with the AI who do as they please and are incapable of coordination? I played a mission on my own while my friends were making dinner. And yeah. It was pretty boring. It’s a tepid beat-’em-up at that point. It’s animated elves, dwarves, and mages swinging and hexing haphazardly.
As a concept, Dragon’s Crown isn’t that original. However, there’s enough customization in these classes to give you plenty to play with. You still uncover new abilities throughout, like runes. Runes in Dragon’s Crown are symbols in the walls that allow you to cast spells that have special effects in the field. Buff defense. Extra fire damage to your weapons. Fruit. Runes can do anything, it seems. All this is uncovered through the game’s story.
And what RPG is complete without a town of people walking in circles?
I almost forgot there was a story. You see, it’s told by a disembodied narrator. We hear that a story happens. We don’t actually see it or experience it. There’s a story going on somewhere but the game doesn’t seem very interested. Fire Emblem may just be mostly dialogue, but at least we see characters interacting. The Last Story has narration, but that’s just in transitions. Dragon’s Crown’s story consists solely of animated drawings blinking at you while text scrolls to tell us that an artifact was recovered. Or that someone was jailed for conspiracy. Or whatever random fantasy stuff happens. I can barely remember. It might have been the booze.
The soundtrack is passable, save for the main town. That’s a very pretty song.
Presentation is a mixed bag. Environmental detail is colorful and full of depth, like Legend of Zelda. Interiors are full of consistent color schemes and clear detail about what you can and can’t interact with. Every place looks great. Every person doesn’t.
Seriously, the character art is atrocious. I’ve never seen more repulsive people. Remember that PR fiasco last year about the Sorceress and her bust? You could argue that this is fantasy; it’s not meant to look realistic. That’s the point of fantasy. But it should at the very least look good. Bodies, heads, arms, legs of all our heroes and many other NPC’s are disgustingly disproportionate.
The thing is that even in a not very realistic setting, people have to look a certain way. Human eyes are used to seeing tons and tons of people. We subconsciously know what human bodies look like. And when a body doesn’t conform to a wide range of standard features, we tend to find that unappealing. In real life, a person may be considered ugly. In a piece of art, we’d say that the drawing doesn’t look right. The details and dimensions of many characters in Dragon’s Crown are so miscalculated that it burns my retinas. It’s visually repellant. It violates our brains’ sense of human proportion without having some sense of style (e.g. chibi anime).
Engaging traditional RPG action with no other real flair. Kind of a beat-em-up with a fantasy theme, but nothing really unique to show for itself. Good enough to play with some good friends. Just conceptually boring. It also contains some very bad character art.
3/5
Okay
Credit to Eurogamer, IGN, learntodraw.com for these images. Do I need to even credit image sources?
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