Dragon View – Exercises in Mediocrity

[Dracos]

Dragon View is a late era SNES game produced by Kemco that is decisively mediocre.  It isn't bad.  It isn't good.  It's got some neat ideas but most have never heard of it largely on the virtue that it had no ability to stand among many of the great games that were coming out at the end.  How do I know of it?  Well, it has dragon in the title and I have a bad habit of purchasing games with dragon in the title.  It is actually a reasonably original title in several aspects compared to its contemporaries, but is middling enough that the originality doesn't actually take it to becoming anything special.

   Dragon View plays like a bad fanfic, in a lot of ways.  It's the type of game folks point to when they're referring to clichés.  You've got your sword-wielding orphaned magic casting hero in armor named Alex who was raised in a small village by the village elder and trained as a warrior.  You've got your romantic love interest who is totally helpless and innocent and gets captured because she turns out she's the descendent of some great mage.   You've got your evil wizards.  You've got your ancient dragons with their advice and power and all that.  The dialogue is even written like a bad fanfic, all done in prose despite the fact the characters are right on screen and could be doing the reactions themselves.   You start your quest pretty much finding an evil wizard attacking your town while you were out on a chore and taking your lady love, seeing you off on the quest to recover her.  Yes, this be the cliché story here.

   The sound effects, while not horrible, weren't anything impressive.  No one goes out of their way to get Dragon View music.  It did its job but little else and it didn't do that with tons of grace.  Again, a mediocre offering here.  Passable, but not good.

   The gameplay is where you see a lot of the original stuff coming out.  It is an odd half-breed of 2d side scroller and 3d first person perspective.  When you're in a town, dungeon, or battle scene, you've got this 2d plane with a little bit of a z-axis for moving around on.  2d vertical that is, as it allows jumping, and a plane of motion.  Town travel involves these small 2d towns with generally 2 'roads' and some people to talk to and buildings to enter.  Dungeons are more complex, but moved about in the same fashion, only with your sword out to slash things.  Alternatively, you can pick up a Hauza, which is a kind of axe-boomerang that was sort of neat, even if it works just like a boomerang.  It even does more damage than the sword, though it doesn't have the ease of hitting folks on different z-axises than you are on.  The gameplay is pretty strictly action-adventure type deal in combat, feeling strongly like any of the 2d side scrollers popular in that area, despite being an RPG.  It does have a bit of a leveling issue  (being underleveled results in massive damage, while a slight overleveling will result in powerful blows doing 1 damage), but overall it sticks decently to this type of thing.

   The overworld though is all first person with a fully 3d, if simplistic, world that you travel through, dodging mist (enemy encounters) and hunting for various secrets on the overworld.  Thankfully, they do give reasonable maps for the most part that cover 'almost' all off the world by the end and additionally have characters that will mark many of the important power ups on the map, though exhaustive searching is still a generally idea way of doing things since the difference between a few power ups can be quite great.  It's definitely something that throws one a bit in the beginning and the fact that it is bound to a poor key and you cannot go to map from menu did cause me a fair bit of "GRAWR" moments.

   Generally, this is a game that you can have fun with if you've got a tolerance for fantasy clichés and like 2d sidescroller combat.  Otherwise, there's lots of better offerings, both then and now, to take a look at.