Here comes a review! We were lucky enough to obtain review codes for Muteki Corp's pair of RPG titles, Dragon Fantasy: Book I and Dragon Fantasy: Book II. What follows is a novel review of the former - expect my side of the latter in a few days or so.
First, some disclaimers
- I thrive on gameplay, mechanics, and functional stuff; as such, I can be pretty critical or dismissive of anything not of those realms, for better or worse of the game under scrutiny.
- There will be spoilers; I won't mark every one of them directly in context, because I am lazy, and I do not get paid by the word (or at all, for that matter).
- I love retro-styled games; I spent a great deal of my childhood (and beyond) immersed in 2^n (2 < n < 7)-bit virtual worlds; so it is fair to say I trip heavily on nostalgia at even the slightest hint of retro-y goodness.
- I don't like number-based reviews; the idea of boiling a full game, of any size, down to a single quantitative-cum-qualitative value (or a set of values) on an arbitrary scale is insulting. If that's what you're expecting, expect that no longer.
Good? Good - let's get to it.
Background
Dragon Fantasy: Book I is a 8-/16-bit-styled traditional RPG first released in 2011 for iOS (then to PSN, PS Vita, PC, Mac, and Android). It follows the travelings of Ogden (former hero and retired Captain of Westeria's Royal Guard), Anders (Prince of Westeria), and Jerald (thief and...thief), with a brief, intermission outside of canon as a crossover with Minecraft. What you see is what you get - there are very few surprises to be had, and if you put together some very obvious pieces, you'll see a lot drawn from classic RPG titles in both the Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior / Dragon Quest series.
Story and writing
The hero's journey is a well-established trope, even outside our relatively new medium of video games. It comes as no surprise that said journey is the focus of Ogden's story (chapter 1). You start in Westeria, a major city, during the coronation of a new king (Prince Marlon, Anders' brother and fellow royal). As is wont to happen, disaster strikes, in the form of a very generic 'Dark Knight' leading a force of monsters. Marlon is captured, and Ogden disappears into a portal, only to find himself...in a forest well south of Westeria. So you go on a journey to return to Westeria, cure the disease rampant there, and set off again to recover the legendary equipment of a former hero. Heavy shades of Dragon Quest here, without the benefit of using the legendary equipment when you find it. About a third of the way through, you discover that there's a demon lord behind the crisis, a mysterious woodsman (dubbed 'Woodsy' later on) knows more than he should, and an artifact called a 'voidstone' formerly held the demon lord. So many tropes exploited that you can almost write the rest of the story from here.
I would have expected a similar setup for later chapters, but here the progression is muddled. In Anders' story, you start in Westeria (some time between the onset of the Dark Knight's attack and its conclusion), fight through a few caves, and end up in pirate town Bluefin across the sea. The chapter ends there, rather abruptly, with little fanfare or major conflict to really drive the separation between the former and later chapters, or pull them together in a comprehensible manner. The one cross-over point occurs at the very end, as you realize Anders' arrival in Bluefin explains his presence there about mid-way through Ogden's story.
In Jerald's story, you start in the barren desert empire of Sandheim, conscript Ramona (his niece), then fight a few generic battles, end up a captive, and Ramona stows away aboard a pirate ship. That ship happens to be same one that both Ogden and Anders are currently traveling on, accompanied by their pirate friends(?). And...that's the end of that chapter. Literally - brief, non-controllable cutscene shows Ramona boarding the ship, scene cuts to black, credits roll.
The final chapter, dubbed 'Intermission M', is a strange gem apart from the cobbled-together main story. Ogden, Woodsy, Anders, Ramona, and their friendly pirate crew make shipwrecked landfall on a non-descript island. Ogden and Anders are injured, so it's up to Woodsy and Ramona to seek out a magic hat so that a curiously-familiar Swedish man can send them on their way. If you have no idea what Minecraft is, then you may consider this just another generic fetch quest - and it is, really, because as soon as you retrieve said hat, chapter over, credits roll.
Writing throughout is superb - many tropes are acknowledged with some level of tongue-in-cheek humor, the directness of which generally does not detract from the presentation of the game. Battle messages (attacks, effects, intro/outro text) is similarly well-written and tailored to the participants to great effect. Reading books stashed throughout towns offers some of the better humourous 'hints' I've read.
Visuals
See disclaimer, point two - 8-bit styling means something is already going in Dragon Fantasy's favor. The classic low-pixel count / low-frame count sprites are charming in their own right, and the entirely tile-based world is what you would expect from that era. The game delivers entirely on the 8-bit promise here.
Not all is perfect, however - a fairly recent patch brought the option to enable 16-bit-style graphics. Lifting the tight palette restriction is a good thing, but not without consequence; with the same sprite and tile sizes, mixing the two bit-eras is a little funky at first. There are some areas (especially on the overworld) where tile transparency is either an afterthought or foregone entirely. In 8-bit mode, those are easier to overlook / forgive.
Movement in general is smooth, though the overworld itself is unusually cramped, to the point that it doesn't loop over itself at the edges, instead jarring your character into moving off-center when you near the borders. This is an unusual artifact, considering even the very first Final Fantasy managed looping without issue.
There are also a few oddities when dealing with collision, mostly due to unexpected events (like a precisely-timed NPC moves into your destination tile), but these are few and of small enough impact to be humorous (and retro-charm) rather than anything else.
Audio
Fewer bits are not kind, in general, to anything audio-related - this can be said with relative certainty about anything below modern standards. Dragon Fantasy, for its part, is largely unaffected when in 8-bit mode - the blips and bleeps are entirely characteristic of the era and serve it well. Even the music is fine and dandy here, and every area has a unique track to it. Every town, every dungeon...though all minor battles share one, and all semi-major battles share one, and the final battle has its own.
Swapping over to 16-bit mode is...disappointing. There are plenty of ultra-popular melodies and rhythms originating from the 16-bit age, and those attained their fame through clever use of bad-to-mediocre MIDIs and sound fonts (if those existed); but, unfortunately, Dragon Fantasy cannot be counted among them. Though the 16-bit music is nearly a straight translation to higher bitness, it does not weather the translation well, and MIDI rears its full, ugly, tinny head. Even the sound effects lack any sort of punch, and what was once quaint is now cringe-worthy. Do yourself a favor and leave the 8-bit mode on here.
One thing especially difficult to forgive is the audio lurching. Between any change-over of songs - entering a town, joining a battle, even between the battle introduction and the battle itself - there is a not-insignificant length of zero-level audio. The noticeable skip is jarring at first and downright grating as you progress. Neither bit-mode solves the issue, and it makes the flow of the game that much harder to maintain.
Movement / travel
Traversing the world is a direct split between an overworld and discrete areas of interest - caves, towns, dungeons, castles - traditional RPG through and through. There are a couple instances where you travel by boat, but you are never actually in control of said boat - disappointing, considering the first Final Fantasy (and every title beyond that) gave you not only a boat, but also an airship.
Battles and major mechanics
The meat of a classic RPG is generally the battle system. Here, there is nothing to really bring you down...but there's nothing to really bring you up, either.
Ogden's story, chapter the first, is straight-up classic Dragon Quest - one party member, discrete pools of HP and MP, learn spells as you go. All the other chapters pull more from Final Fantasy and whatever Dragon Quest started using multi-member parties. That is the only distiguishing characteristic here, internally, the rest is the same throughout. An added bonus in the intermission chapter is the ability to 'capture' weakened enemies who then join your party and fight alongside you.
Common amongst all remaining chapters are the HP/MP pools, money system, and death system - if / when you die, you return to your last save point (all story progression / items intact), sans half of your accrued wealth. This only applies to cash on-hand, though, as any money you have stored (each city has a bank) is untouched. A nice perk, if a little unnecessary thanks to the sub-par difficulty (described a bit later).
Battles themselves are unremarkable affairs - you hit monster, monster hits back, repeat until one side dies. There's a thinly-veiled illusion of variation here, in the form of magic and items, but even something as rote as the classic fire / ice / lightning elemental triangle is curiously under-played. In almost every situation, a basic physical attack is most effective; once your level reaches a certain point, the battles become one of hitting 'X' as fast as you can. When you have more than one party member, the magic-focused invariably have a single purpose (usually healling). Even major / boss battles are underwhelming and easy to predict - fight, fight, fight, heal...and so on. No critical thought necessary.
Ultimately, the mechanics come down to accurate homages of classic RPG elements. Comforting, but not much else; certainly expected of the classics, but less relevant for a modern title.
Difficulty
One thing I often remember about really early RPGs is how difficult they were - you started off incredibly weak, gaining even the first few experience levels was a sketchy prospect without some awareness, and death meant either losing your progress since the last town, or (possibly worse) losing the money you were saving for that sharpened stick. Not so here, at least for Ogden's story - you start fairly high, and with the greatly-reduced or -mitigated penalty that once followed failure, you can button mash your way to victory. And there's plenty of excess loot to sell for cash.
Level grinding, now considered poor form, is not exactly necessary, though it's also not exactly prevented, or frowned upon here. Thanks to this, every chapter is easily completed; each one being so short means you'll likely spend significant time, unnecessarily so, in battle. It took about 5 hours to complete Ogden's story; while it is the longest chapter, overall, it probably didn't require the last hour and a half of leveling. The other chapters are short enough to not require much out-of-band leveling anyway, but pay the price by way of very abrupt endings.
Story-wise, you can pay a minimal amount of attention and still progress; there's only so many areas you can access, and if you get there early, you're often given a pretty big hint about what you need to do. This isn't exactly a bad thing - hunting down that one NPC you forgot to engage in conversation is probably the worst form of gating ever. Still, going off the beaten path can be pretty lucrative, and without the attendant danger of losing high-level loot, you become a walking bad-ass quickly. The 'final battles' of each chapter are disappointing, at best - and none of them have a titular dragon (save for the intermission, where you fight an Enderdragon)..
UI
The UI design harkens back to mainstays of classic RPGs - thick borders, solid colors, and an easily-traversable menu. Dragon Fantasy delivers well on the first two, but the sluggish menu transitions and seemingly-disconnected audio triggers really hinder the last point.
I can get behind a simplified UI, simply (haha) because there's very little 'new' to learn in an area where comfort is generally accepted over innovation. At first glance, then, the menus are great - simple boxes, well-labeled and laid-out options, clear separation of purpose. However, such a UI also requires an immediacy of action and an accurate representation thereof; when I press a button, I expect something to happen right-quick. The fade in/out animation for each change in dialog level is gratingly slow, and the noises indicating a button press curiously aggravate it - I hear the noise, but the action I want - say, heal - hasn't happened, or (worse yet) the menus are still transitioning. Being of average impatience for the typical gamer, I tend to press buttons more to get things sped up, and count them out for oft-used actions, so when something doesn't register right away, I usually get in 3-5 presses and summarily expect 3-5 actions to happen. Hugely disruptive to flow, especially in battles where an extra action fights the wrong enemy, or prematurely chooses the wrong spell.
One other control-based problem that stood out was ignoring the previous direction when entering a nev area. If I enter a town from the south, I expect my first direction will be north, so I hold 'up'. This doesn't register until I release 'up' and press it again, rather than respecting the present input. A strange artifact that applies even beyond directional control - like the 'dash' button - and though minor, is again disruptive to flow.
Let's wrap it up, huh?
Part of my love for independent developers is that they, as a whole, can afford to take any aspect of any game or any genre in a wildly new direction. And thanks to so many great successes across the board (both recent and a few years old), there's plenty to expect from them. So, perhaps my experience with other independent games has skewed raised my expectations, but Dragon Fantasy failed to meet those expectations. That's not to say Book I isn't an experience-worthy game - it was, truly - but it is a firmly average experience. Setting itself up as a homage to such well-known series as those directly alluded to in its title is a bold move, and generally delivers, but there are some not-insignificant disappointments.
Overall, Dragon Fantasy: Book I is a large collection of traditions, tropes, and quirks from RPGs of bygone eras. There is plenty to love from the past...but there's also plenty to be improved upon, as well. Sadly, I saw very little improvement where due, and you end up with a mixture of back-references and artifacts of the classic age, some of which should have remained classic. If you don't already have prior dealings with traditional RPGs, you may miss references and nods to prior art and be that much poorer for the overall experience. That's a large risk itself in isolating some of a potential audience.
Taken as a gamer, play Dragon Fantasy to scratch that traditional, classic RPG itch that has been building since 1991; prepare your expectations accordingly and have a good laugh due in full to its great writing.
Taken as a dev, recognize the areas that need additional work and testing, and understand that even the most tried-and-true classic RPG experiences deserve new efforts.