Dragon's Crown (PS3): Buxom, Bruising, Beautiful, Bad-ass.

If you'll remember (or probably don't) back in December I wrote a review of what I thought was the last great game in the PS2 in Vanillaware's Odin Sphere. After playing the ever loving shit out of both that and Muramasa: The Demon Blade I have been absolutely chomping at the bit for Vanillaware to produce a new title. I knew they had a PS3 one in the works, so I waited.

For 2 whole years. Delays, production issues, funding issues. Anything that could have gone wrong seemed to go wrong. Once things were finally underway the game managed to come under massive scrutiny because of the art style, but through all of it, it finally has been finished and released, and now I finally get to enjoy....

DRAGON'S CROWN:(PS3)

In the world of Dragon's Crown you play one of six adventurer's who arrive to the kingdom of Hydeland, a place where numerous labyrinths have been found and linked by magic in order to find the legendary Dragon's Crown. An item with the power to control dragons and possibly be a pivotal item in turning the tides of war to whoever can get their hands on it.

You arrive to town to seek your fortune by searching the labyrinths for treasure but find yourself getting caught up in the search for the Dragon's Crown for the kingdom's royalty in the hopes of preventing war and stopping an ancient dragon from awakening..

So that's it. That's the story for the most part. As you can see, not much to it but ultimately that's not a huge factor in this game for once. It does go with a fairly interesting storytelling mechanic that I haven't seen very much in games. I guess the best way to describe it is if the story was being told by a dungeon master. Since none of the playable characters actually have names, he refers to "you". He will also chime in through out the level to explain the setting or what is happening just as you would in a game of D&D. For a classic fantasy set piece like this one, it works pretty well.

As mentioned previously, you can pick from one of six adventure classes to start the game: The Fighter, who has high defense and strength, but slow speed. The Dwarf, who has high strength and can throw enemies into each other. The Amazon, who has high attack and agility, but low defense. The Elf, who is the melee/range hybrid and is the most balanced all around.  The Wizard who is the full blown glass cannon, huge damage but easily killed. And the Sorceress who uses attack/support magic, and has a massive rack.

The game pretty much tells you when you start who is good for new players and who is good if experienced players so if you think you wanna start off with a magic user, you might be in for a bit of a rough road. I went with the Amazon because after looking at another review she seemed like one of the classes that most fed into my desire to have endless combos.

If you looked at any of the screenshots, trailers, or videos on Dragon's Crown  then the gameplay should be pretty self explanatory. This game is a wonderful throw back to those fantastic arcade style side scrolling beat em up's a-la X-men Arcade, Simpsons the Arcade game, Crime Fighters, and so on. You could draw a comparison to console beat em ups like TMNT: Turtles in Time, or say Streets of Rage but I think the whole presentation of the game feels more acradey to me. Something I thoroughly enjoyed.

But its not just a plain ole walk right and mash attack game neither (well it is, but there's more). Each of the characters have their own unique strengths and weaknesses, and they all have different abilities to unlock as you play through the game that caters to these unique strengths. For example, I'm currently using the Amazon and many of her abilities play into the ability to keep attacks coming. Her swings are slow and sluggish, but the more you land hits the faster they come and harder they hit. With the right additions to her jumping attack, combo extensions, and ability boosts, she can go from slow swings to a lighting fast axe cloud of death in a matter of seconds with enough enemies on the screen.

Also, in addition to the character specific skill trees there is also a series of common skills that all the characters can use. These are simpler but still effective things like increase vitality, get health from coin drops, carry more stuff and so forth. This is a game where you can power level the hell out of character and still probably not max out all of their skills. It leaves me with the paranoia of never wanting to use my skill points in the event I'm a level or 2 away from something better. 

Typically, for the main story portions the narrator will guide you along the town map to direct you where the next portion of the story will take place. For the first nine or so stages it does this to introduce you to the 9 levels where the majority of the game will take place. The majority of the levels are reasonably short, taking you through a few breaks of fighting before giving you a boss to fight (thank christ). Also during stages you can accept side objectives that you can claim for additional experience or skill points.

But after you complete these first nine or so levels, the game lets up on the reigns and really starts to knuckle down with you. It forces you to go through them again under the guise of searching for dragon talismans, but it gives you extended versions of the levels you have played and gives a new and more difficult bosses to fight. It also ramps up the difficulty of the monster level, gives more monsters on the screen, and provides a much faster paced experience over all.

When you have a full team banging on all cylinders, the screen can get kinda hectic.

Good thing too, because if you are like me, you might be started to get bored just before that point because until you hit that the game seems pretty easy and monotonous. Once the difficulty starts to ratchet up you will spend too much time trying to fight your way through waves of enemies to worry about being bored with the game play. 

You have to go this somewhat lengthily tutorial section before the game actually opens up the online play. Its annoying, but makes sense in a light because that means by the time everyone gets into online mode, you don't have to worry about anyone really being a new player. Everyone will be familiar with the game and the character they are using by that point. You can't match make in a lobby in specific rooms though. You can drop into random games or drop into a friends game, so at least you can probably organize so you and friends can all be in the same game.

Although its not an issue if you have local multiplayer, as on a single screen you have up to 4 people from the word go. Which is certainly helpful because the game can certainly get a bit hairy to play single player if you are going it solo. It also features a mechanic to where AI bots can take control of characters to fight along side you. As you go through the levels you will find discarded bones throughout the stages. These bones can be picked up so when you return to town you can revive them, and have them fight with you. You can also bury the bones in the hopes of getting a free item.

The bot mechanic can work one of two ways. When you are in town, you can go into the tavern and cherry pick which of the characters you revived to help in the next stage you choose. You will go through a number of these because they cannot gain experience, nor can their equipment be repaired. But as you find more bones their levels will increase as you do. Or should you chose to go it alone, unless you specifically locked the join feature, there is a chance a random character from your available pool will drop in sporadically to help you as you go. This is often how I will play unless a level starts to get too frustrating for me.

There are a small couple of headaches in this game though, as no game is perfect. One of my biggest irks is the support character that follows you around, Rannie. He's basically an NPC thief character who basically follows you around to collect the spoils that drop from the baddies you kill. He also unlocks the chests you find or the doors to advance the stage or hidden areas. If that were his sole mechanic, I'd be ok with that.

Unfortunately though, he is controlled via mouse click. This is annoying for the PS3 users because the mouse guider is used with right analog stick. Even with maximum sensitivity set it never seems to move fast enough for me to get him over to a door or chest. And it requires you to be fucking precise as shit when you click it. I can't think of how many times in the heat of combat, or really even after combat, I'd try to move my little hand to the door or chest I want him to open, just to have a dumb NPC get in the way or find myself clicking on wall next to what I wanted.

Fun trolling tip, you can steal other peoples food out of their pot.
(So don't be a jerk, stay with the pot in front of you.)

This is especially frustrating in the heat of boss fights, because this same mechanic is used to revive your teammates if they die one to many times. You have to move the mouse to the top and click their face, or name, or counter, or SOMETHING. I've yet to figure out what fucking spot I need to click to bring them back, and when I have a boss monster wailing down blows on me I don't have time to piss around trying to figure it out when I have 3 hero's to revive.

The other feature that uses this is the Rune Magic. Through the stages you will find runes scattered about the walls. if you click on them, they will glow. if you can come up with the right combinations with the runes you've collected with the ones on the walls, they can have various effects, again though, this is something that requires you to be precise, which means I'm not doing it in the heat of combat.

This might be something that is easier to do in 4 player mode, but by myself I usually have to wait till I've cleared the room only to unlock a spell that would have helped me in the fight prior.  Because I'm constantly struggling with remembering the runes, and take too much time guessing, a majority of the time I just don't even bother.

Speaking of the multiplayer, there are an handful of hiccups there too. First off, there are 6 character types. The PS can support up to 7 controllers. This seemed to be begging for a 6 player Co-op a-la X-men the Arcade game. But whatever, only 4. That's OK, its still fun. But as previously mentioned, the actual online multi-player is actually locked off for the first 9 levels. You can have bots join you, but not actually players. This seemed kind of strange to me but I guess it makes sense since the beginning functions as a tutorial before getting thrown into the main game.  You can still play it local though....

But there is problems with that too, actually. For some reason, unlike on the 360, the PS3 doesn't allow for multiple profiles on the same system to be logged in at the same time. So like in the case of one my guest writers (Big Sister) She had her game on her profile and so did her boyfriend on his, but they couldn't join those two characters because you can't log into two profiles in this game. So in order to play together, one of them had to start over. That's kinda stupid, and it goes by a game by game basis. You can log into multiples in Scott Pilgrim vs the World on the respective arcades. It's a bit of an oversight but I guess ultimately not a huge issue. Hopefully this gets patched.

Then of course, There is the "controversy". Most people know what I am talking about. Vanillaware founder and lead artist, George Kamitami came under quite a bit of scrutiny by a number of reviewers and video game community members from the over exaggerated endowments of some of the characters. Most specifically, the Sorceress character and her previously noted cartoonishly large breasts. He got into a bit of spat with a writer from Kotaku about the design, and this character has become the image of why all women are completely objectified in the game world. It eventually did bring out intelligent debate, but to me it was a pointless firestorm.

First off all, has nobody seen any fantasy? Nobody remembers Morrigan's half a shred of a shirt in Dragon Age? Nobody played God of War, a game based in mythology where clothing was pretty much optional? Soul Calibur, where Ivy basically fought in a chain mail open one piece? Or even his previous game Odin Sphere where Velvet basically wore a red hood that covered the naughty bits and her hair. All of these characters a presented in equally oversexualized ways and it didn't cause half the stink this game did. News flash, the image of the young "Witch" in fantasy is always been oversexualized and has been for years, does that make it OK? Probably not, but is it really something to complain about? Yes the Sorceress' chest is ridiculously large, but its not like they are bare. Do women get mad at other women for having large chests because its offensive? Who fucking cares? They are lumps of fat.... that are imaginary..

The sidequest rewards feature art from the various contributors from the game.
They are all incredible.

Secondly, Dragon's Crown is an equal opportunity objectifier. Every character is an overblown cartoon of itself. the Amazon's endowments are hulking half naked muscles, with a pair of legs I'm not entirely sure aren't just a pair of obtuse triangles. The is an old man you meet who is so withered and decrepit he could be a skeleton, but no seniors groups offended by that. The dwarf basically just rocks a helmet and loincloth and then we have Roland, one of the games barbarians. Who when he appears on the screen is about 8% background, 10% head, and about 82% rippling man chest (see video). Completely ridiculous and unattainable images of masculinity. Don't see any men's rights groups or reviewers complaining about how offensive that is. Know why? Cuz nobody gives a shit, and you shouldn't either.

Thirdly, if you fuckin laid off with the pseduo-pretentious crusades and actually looked at the visuals, you would see that this might be one of the most visually stunning games you'd get your hands on. Kamitami has this ability to take watercolors have them all blend and pop so complimentary that it produces this level of vividness that makes every little detail to everything shine through. Everything is beautifully animated to extensive levels of detail that you just don't see in games today. Its a wonderful break form this depressing age of video games where colors are shunned for palettes of brown, grey, and black grit. Honestly, in my opinion the characters all take a back seat to the spectacular monster designs. The fight with the Gazer is one of my favorites.

D'aww... so adorably deadly.

Even when you complete missions are you treated to rewards of still pictures of the quest you completed by the various artists in the game and every single one of them is impressive to behold, and this is coming from a guy who for the most part finds art museums to be a bore. If you seriously don't think this game is beautiful then throw on a dunce cap, go out and hold a stick like a gun, crouch in front of a brick wall, and stare at it for 60 hours. That's the majority of the games in the past 5 years right there, and if that's what you want? Fuck you, we need more games with spectacular art design like this.

Gimme a sec to get my blood pressure back down.....  OK. So if I had to say the game had a major flaw? it would be that it can sometimes be a repetitive and monotonous at times. Each time you start a new character you have to go through that 9 level tutorial again each time. And while having a strong leveled character is fun, building a new one from scratch can be a bit of a drag (especially if doing local multiplayer). It's also a bit of a grind, you're gonna be seeing the same levels a lot, but as the difficulty increases you get newer monsters to fight. And its a Looting game, so those Diablo types who like to continuously fight for marginally better equipment should be right at home here.

Guess it would make sense to have a dragon in the game, huh...

Typically when you find yourself waiting for an extended length of time for a game, you will find yourself disappointed because it just won't meet up to your expectations, (See Duke Nukem Syndrome). So far this summer, I'm 3 for 3. The Last of Us and Hot Shots Golf: World Invitational met up with all my expectations, and now Dragon's Crown has too. Its the first game in like fuckin' ever where I've actively texted folk to set up online and local games. Those games have been a blast, and for a simple arcade style game? I have like 45 hours and counting on it. that's pretty damn good replay value for game with about 9 stages.

I really don't know what else to say about it. I really like this game, a lot. Sure, it has some oversights and issues, but so far I haven't found a reason to put it down. Its a solid play and anyone who's begged their mom for a few quarters to play that arcade standup at the store will get that nostalgic feeling from this game. To use an awful, awful analogy that I swore I wasn't gonna use: Dragon's Crown is sweet as tits.

You may now write counter blogs about what a horrible sexist pig I am.
And I will respond with images of my middle finger.