On the tin Dragon Village Collection has everything I like about a mobile game (pets, collecting, good art, a spot of funny writing), but ultimately this one hasn't stuck with me. I thought it would but certain aspects of it chafed the more time I spent in it.
Having never played any other Dragon Village games before this, I was surprised at how feature-rich the game already is despite it being a relatively new release. There's dragon collecting, raising, customizable personalities, functional abilities, secret/rare dragons only accessible through certain methods, town building and customizing, buying/selling/trading, fishing, quests, idle mechanics, crafting, combat, dungeons, events, there's multiple maps, and it's also kind of a mini MMO (maybe???). It's towing the line on being too much and more features get added all the time. I'll hand it to the team working on this game though - they're always hustling and they're not afraid to scrap and rework entire features if the players don't like how it is. In the time I spent with this game, there was rarely a dull moment. If you like to have an app that you can check multiple times a day and see what's going on, DVC is a great candidate. And if you're put off by gacha mechanics, never fear as those are not in DVC.
As for why I'm not really keen on it after playing for a few months, it might be because of this bloated ever-changing nature. The primary gameplay revolves around collecting dragons. Organizing dragons is technically possible through a custom tag system, but it's not great. Dragons have Personalities that determine their "aura" or the colors they have around their pixel art and it can be influenced by how the dragon was raised. The Personality system was recently entirely reworked and much improved, but it's still difficult to influence a personality with any guarantee even if you hit the requirements for it. Another recent update also introduced crafting to the Village and its screen takes priority over the Garden, which is what you can customize. So you and other players now have a harder time seeing the thing you put effort into making look cool. Also I hate crafting, simple as that. It appears to be an optional feature but they certainly put it front and center in the Village menu so it's hard to ignore.
There's more to it, but explaining why I'm not in love with this game would involve going into specific mechanics and it's not really important to do that. What it boils down to is that DVC is a complex game for something of this size and having as many ever-changing features as it does, there are some that are bound to not be to my liking. At the moment, there is just enough stuff that's not to my liking that I feel my mobile game time is better spent elsewhere. This may change in the future so I'm not deleting the app from my phone just yet. Maybe in a few months the vibe will be different in there.
Having never played any other Dragon Village games before this, I was surprised at how feature-rich the game already is despite it being a relatively new release. There's dragon collecting, raising, customizable personalities, functional abilities, secret/rare dragons only accessible through certain methods, town building and customizing, buying/selling/trading, fishing, quests, idle mechanics, crafting, combat, dungeons, events, there's multiple maps, and it's also kind of a mini MMO (maybe???). It's towing the line on being too much and more features get added all the time. I'll hand it to the team working on this game though - they're always hustling and they're not afraid to scrap and rework entire features if the players don't like how it is. In the time I spent with this game, there was rarely a dull moment. If you like to have an app that you can check multiple times a day and see what's going on, DVC is a great candidate. And if you're put off by gacha mechanics, never fear as those are not in DVC.
As for why I'm not really keen on it after playing for a few months, it might be because of this bloated ever-changing nature. The primary gameplay revolves around collecting dragons. Organizing dragons is technically possible through a custom tag system, but it's not great. Dragons have Personalities that determine their "aura" or the colors they have around their pixel art and it can be influenced by how the dragon was raised. The Personality system was recently entirely reworked and much improved, but it's still difficult to influence a personality with any guarantee even if you hit the requirements for it. Another recent update also introduced crafting to the Village and its screen takes priority over the Garden, which is what you can customize. So you and other players now have a harder time seeing the thing you put effort into making look cool. Also I hate crafting, simple as that. It appears to be an optional feature but they certainly put it front and center in the Village menu so it's hard to ignore.
There's more to it, but explaining why I'm not in love with this game would involve going into specific mechanics and it's not really important to do that. What it boils down to is that DVC is a complex game for something of this size and having as many ever-changing features as it does, there are some that are bound to not be to my liking. At the moment, there is just enough stuff that's not to my liking that I feel my mobile game time is better spent elsewhere. This may change in the future so I'm not deleting the app from my phone just yet. Maybe in a few months the vibe will be different in there.