Destrega is one of those games that rocks as hard as you allow it to. You’ll be turned off by the bizarrely paced and awkwardly delivered dialogue, dated and wonky character models, easily exploitable battle system—or, like me, you will find all of this to be instantly endearing. Hell yeah, I want all of my tense emotional moments to be punctuated by Vine booms. Give me more of that!
I am pretty bad at fighting games, so I like when rounds are over so quickly that I don’t have time to mourn my losses. Destrega is generous in that way, being a light and breezy projectile-focused arena fighter with small HP bars and, at least when emulated, pretty quick KO-to-rematch times. (It might be terrible on original hardware. I haven’t tried it yet.) For better or worse, it’s easy to cheat your way through most fights by being the first to button-spam, but I had fun experimenting with the magic cancel and sidestep and the other (barely) more advanced moves. Destrega’s simplicity meant I could quickly work my way up from “I’m barely winning, but I’m just spamming Est” to something resembling adaptable skill. But that simplicity also might explain why this game has virtually no competitive scene, and I don’t know if I can get my brother into this game as much as we both got into Darkstalkers. Oh well.
More interestingly (to me, at least): Destrega’s story mode is endearingly amateurish and stuffed with underdelivered ambition. The underpinnings of the lore seem more fit to a full-fledged RPG: a long civil war strung out by several opposing factions with competing worldviews; political sabotage and assassination plots; families torn apart by duty and deception; a kind of shocking number of character deaths—none of this is explored in any depth, of course, but for a 90's fighter, the story mode feels oddly integral, not incidental. The vocal performances range from fine to inadvertently hilarious, the backgrounds (except the purgatorial green hideout cavern, suspiciously overused in the second third of the game) are decent, and the music is above par. This culminates in a bizarrely great cutscene right before the final boss, the best example of how much potential is in the worldbuilding were this game a different genre, one more invested in its plot...
...Which isn't to say I don't love Destrega as-is, in all its ham-fisted, low-polygonal glory. Long live PS1 jank.
I am pretty bad at fighting games, so I like when rounds are over so quickly that I don’t have time to mourn my losses. Destrega is generous in that way, being a light and breezy projectile-focused arena fighter with small HP bars and, at least when emulated, pretty quick KO-to-rematch times. (It might be terrible on original hardware. I haven’t tried it yet.) For better or worse, it’s easy to cheat your way through most fights by being the first to button-spam, but I had fun experimenting with the magic cancel and sidestep and the other (barely) more advanced moves. Destrega’s simplicity meant I could quickly work my way up from “I’m barely winning, but I’m just spamming Est” to something resembling adaptable skill. But that simplicity also might explain why this game has virtually no competitive scene, and I don’t know if I can get my brother into this game as much as we both got into Darkstalkers. Oh well.
More interestingly (to me, at least): Destrega’s story mode is endearingly amateurish and stuffed with underdelivered ambition. The underpinnings of the lore seem more fit to a full-fledged RPG: a long civil war strung out by several opposing factions with competing worldviews; political sabotage and assassination plots; families torn apart by duty and deception; a kind of shocking number of character deaths—none of this is explored in any depth, of course, but for a 90's fighter, the story mode feels oddly integral, not incidental. The vocal performances range from fine to inadvertently hilarious, the backgrounds (except the purgatorial green hideout cavern, suspiciously overused in the second third of the game) are decent, and the music is above par. This culminates in a bizarrely great cutscene right before the final boss, the best example of how much potential is in the worldbuilding were this game a different genre, one more invested in its plot...
...Which isn't to say I don't love Destrega as-is, in all its ham-fisted, low-polygonal glory. Long live PS1 jank.