Dragon Valor has quite a lot in common with the D&D arcade brawlers Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara; beyond its identity as a beat-em-up with some rudimentary RPG mechanics, it also features branching paths (that all converge at the same end boss), shops where you can buy gear to power yourself up, a small selection of spells you can cast in real time, and a satisfying repertoire of moves you can use against enemies. Dragon Valor's moveset is one of its undeniable strengths, with a good range of moves ranging from a rising slash (for flying enemies), a downward smash (for small enemies), and a versatile 3-hit staple combo that you can cancel into either a dodge or a jump kick. The combat has good game feel, with everything feeling appropriately weighty and beating up on monsters feeling satisfying.
The overall game experience isn't a very strong one though, and in many ways Dragon Valor is a victim of the trends of its era. The 3D graphics and shifting camera angles - to be expected from a game of this age - overcomplicate the platforming and some of the combat because you often have to react to hazards and enemies coming from offscreen. The devs were aware of this and chose to include one of my least favorite examples of fake difficulty - hazards that take advantage of blind spots in the camera's positioning to score cheap 'gotcha' hits on you.
The other trend of the mid-PSX era (which in many ways carries over to today) is the need to include lots of content in order to make the buyer think they got a good deal. Dragon Valor is pretty long by beat-em-up standards, and features a Phantasy Star III-like generation mechanic that gives the player up to three different paths through the game depending on who the main character of each chapter ends up marrying. While this sounds great in theory, plenty of the assets are reused across paths, and the game seems to run out of new ideas pretty early on. When I play a game with branching paths I tend to replay it at least once to experience as much of it as possible, but one single 8-hour playthrough of running around uninspired dungeons with haphazard enemy/hazard placement is more than enough for me.
Dragon Valor does have a few other niggling flaws - a lack of co-op play, an overabundance of boss i-frames resulting in poorly-paced boss fights, a script that takes itself way too seriously, and dialogue that reads like it was written by an alien who'd read about people but never actually met one - but the nuts and bolts of a good game are all here, if only the devs went more with quality over quantity.
The overall game experience isn't a very strong one though, and in many ways Dragon Valor is a victim of the trends of its era. The 3D graphics and shifting camera angles - to be expected from a game of this age - overcomplicate the platforming and some of the combat because you often have to react to hazards and enemies coming from offscreen. The devs were aware of this and chose to include one of my least favorite examples of fake difficulty - hazards that take advantage of blind spots in the camera's positioning to score cheap 'gotcha' hits on you.
The other trend of the mid-PSX era (which in many ways carries over to today) is the need to include lots of content in order to make the buyer think they got a good deal. Dragon Valor is pretty long by beat-em-up standards, and features a Phantasy Star III-like generation mechanic that gives the player up to three different paths through the game depending on who the main character of each chapter ends up marrying. While this sounds great in theory, plenty of the assets are reused across paths, and the game seems to run out of new ideas pretty early on. When I play a game with branching paths I tend to replay it at least once to experience as much of it as possible, but one single 8-hour playthrough of running around uninspired dungeons with haphazard enemy/hazard placement is more than enough for me.
Dragon Valor does have a few other niggling flaws - a lack of co-op play, an overabundance of boss i-frames resulting in poorly-paced boss fights, a script that takes itself way too seriously, and dialogue that reads like it was written by an alien who'd read about people but never actually met one - but the nuts and bolts of a good game are all here, if only the devs went more with quality over quantity.
FallenGrace
6 months ago