Dragon Kingdoms V

Storyline- 2/5
An evil overlord trips a 100 foot teenager who crushes a small village, killing all his friends. He's so depressed that his flood of tears destroys the entire world. What? You need more?

The story begins with a tutorial, which is a little jarring since it explains in detail game mechanics you won't be seeing for quite a while. After which you take control of William the giant, who proceeds to accidentally destroy the world. The game cuts ahead to some point far in the future where you take control of Chosen One Joshua, who is living on the last broken fragment of the world. You are informed by William, who has apparently been serving as a guardian for the last remaining city, that in order to restore the world to its former state you will have to gather various magical shards that contain the broken fragments of the world he destroyed. Most of the game is spent wandering around every area available to you, collecting a shard that will expand the game universe, and then exploring those new areas to find the new shards they contain. This process is repeated until the entire world is restored, though in natural RPG style you'll come across a multitude of different barriers that will require you to slay some giant monster or collect some random artifact to progress with your journey.

For the most part this kind of storytelling works well for an exploration based game. Where it falls apart, however, is when it fails to tell you where to go next. Often after defeating some monster or collecting a shard the scene will end abruptly, never telling you the significance of what you just accomplished or what new area has become available as a result of your actions. Churches in the game function as little hint stations which usually give you the general direction of what you have to do next. Unfortunately, the church guidance does not keep track of which town you are in. So when the game tells you something like "it is in a mountain pass near this town" you might be at the wrong starting point and not even realize it. Additionally there are many points in the game where they offer no advice and towards the end they stop showing up entirely. As a result you spend a lot of time guessing just what you're supposed to be doing next.

Battle System- 2/5
It's all pretty standard, though it could have used a bit more balancing.

General gameplay basically plays out like your average NES era RPG. You start the game with a single weak hero with crappy equipment operating out of his hometown. You beat on slimes for a while until you gain a few levels and gather enough gold to upgrade your equipment, at which point you can venture out a little further to start gaining gold and experience a bit faster. This part of the game is balanced fairly well and growth is quick enough that you won't be spending too long in any one area. The balance instantly explodes the moment you find a boomerang sitting on the ground, however. This weapon attacks all enemies with a basic attack, and on top of that it's strong enough to one shot all of the early enemies in the game. It's not hidden in some secret cave or guarded by a horde of monsters, this is a weapon you literally just find sitting in the middle of an area you're going to end up walking through sooner or later.



As a result the next hour of the game is a complete breeze, and you'll be racking up easy gold and experience until the game decides to ramp up the difficulty to compensate for the boomerang and other gear that becomes available. At this point you'll start recruiting a few characters and the game will start to throw bosses at you, and the battle difficulty mostly stabilizes although there is the odd hiccup when you'll find enemies that are far too easy or others that suddenly hit much harder than you're used to. Overall combat is pretty simplistic and doesn't require much more than blasting things with your strongest attacks while keeping your hp up. Elemental attacks do become effective towards the end of the game, unfortunately the ones you learn early on are so laughably weak that you're better off spamming normal attack or status effects (which are surprisingly effective, even on bosses). The difficulty ramps up at the end of the game as monsters become vicious and bosses scale in difficulty, eventually requiring you to be near the max level and have the best gear available to stand any chance. The final dungeon consists of a gauntlet of about 8 bosses before culminating in a battle against the last boss who has 4 forms, all of which you have to defeat without getting a chance to restore yourself.

My biggest problem with combat, however, is the frequency in which you'll be seeing the battle screen. I'll go into this in far more detail in the level design section.

Characters- 3/5
When it comes down to it William just towers over the rest of the one dimensional cast.

Your two main characters are Joshua the Chosen One and William who is a giant behemoth that the entire world seems to love, despite the fact that he once destroyed most of it. You'll spend most of the time playing as Joshua, while William just sort of follows you around and occasionally helps you out by throwing an obstacle out of your way or smashing a giant monster far too strong for you to handle. Joshua is basically an arrogant jerk who is slowly going made with power over the course of the adventure. He manages to get on the wrong side of everyone he speaks to in record time, and as the adventure goes on his reputation spreads until the point where he gets insulted the moment he steps into a town. His Chosen One label does count for something at least, in that he is by far the strongest character in the game aside from William. William is basically a gentle giant, constantly watching over your antics and threatening to step on you anytime you do or say something stupid, though in the end he's too nice to go through with it. He's a pretty entertaining character and although you don't take control of him often it's always fun when you do. Basically he's an omnipresent authority figure who keeps your easily distracted hero focused on the journey by constantly threatening to crush him like a bug at every opportunity.

Along the way you'll pick up several other party members, most of which you find trapped in a dungeon requiring a bit of help from you. These characters aren't particularly interesting. They tend to have a single character trait at best, and all of them come to hate Joshua rather quickly. Once your party picks up to a decent size a good portion of the game's dialogue is Joshua being a jerk and the entire rest of the party calling him on it and insulting him relentlessly. Although this is occasionally funny, it happens so ridiculously often it quickly loses its effect. In some towns you can have long conversations with NPCs, but when every exchange turns into a long Joshua bashing section you eventually begin to skip talking to non essential NPCs whenever possible. For nearly the entire adventure villains are completely absent from this game. You'll deal with the occasional mindless beast terrorizing a town and there are a few mini villains which are quickly dispatched the moment you meet them, but the game has no major antagonist until the very end. He's your stereotypical ultimate evil and you don't really learn much about him, but it works well enough in a game that is about restoring the world instead of saving it from some impending threat.

Level Design- 1/5
I'm lost and a swarm of angry dragons are chasing me!

Sadly, the game really falters in this category. Most of the maps are simple and functional, but the real problem comes up when you are trying to figure out where to go next. The game uses a dual map system, which is kind of weird but early on it works quite well. In certain towns there exist large patches of dirt which indicate they are a point you can use to call William, who will bring you to the world map. While on the world map you can traverse freely between dungeons and towns that you have unlocked without the inconvenience of running into monsters. However you never have to use the world map at all, and in many cases you're forced to explore the world from up close as Joshua. He explores a wilderness of several hundred maps swarming with monsters. Since the game uses touch encounters and the maps are absolutely littered with them, combined with the fact they move almost as fast as you, walking anywhere becomes an extremely stressful affair. Since the places to call William are extremely limited and only show up in a few specific towns, you'll spend most of the game trying in vain to dodge swarms of monsters while you navigate the huge landscape.



Generally the way things go is you run around dodging monsters for a while until you run into a dead end, at which point you are confronted with the giant swarm you have been eluding so far. Since escaping from a battle does not remove a monster from the field, getting caught once when you're trying to avoid combat usually means you're going to have to fight a whole bunch of enemy groups in a row. Since there is no delay of movement after defeating an enemy, the next group will often rush you the moment you return to the map screen. This is a lot more bearable in the early parts of the game where the monster ranks are a bit thinner and you're still poor and weak, but when you're nearing the max level and have enough gold to build seven castles sometimes you just want to get from one area to the next without dealing with a swarm of angry demons.

The level design has a few other big issues as well, one of the most prominent being that there's no indicator as to which spots you can walk on to reach other areas. Occasionally it follows the rule of squeezing between two trees at the edge of the map to move on to a new area, but a lot of times even this does not lead to a new map. Since the wilderness between areas is so massive you'll spend a lot of time wandering around map looking for the next exit point while being chased by a swarm of monsters, and most of the time even when you do make it to the next map you have no idea if you're moving closer to a town or dungeon or wherever you're going, sometimes you're heading out into the empty wilderness or worse an empty dead end. Shortly into the game you can purchase a map which will help a bit in navigating the wilderness, but since towns and dungeons aren't marked on it basically all it helps with is keeping you from running into an ocean or mountain range. Although you can display this map on screen while exploring it takes up a decent portion of the screen and if it ends up on a map edge you need to traverse it quickly becomes annoying.

Town and dungeon design is rather simplistic but also functional. Dungeons also thankfully tend to have much thinner monster swarms, so even though the areas are less open it's a lot easier to evade encounters you want to avoid. Around the midpoint of the game it begins introducing 'icons' which are basically custom made tiles that allow you to perform special actions. Generally they are just glorified switches which let you pass over new areas, but occasionally they do something creative like make you ethereal for a few moments and let you pass through enemies unchallenged. These icons are also used at points which you can call William. This really feels like something the creator came up with halfway through the game since they suddenly show up and are used in almost every following area without being added retroactively. This is kind of a shame since it could have added a consistency the game really needed, especially at the points which you can call William which are very unclear in the early part of the game.

Maps have the occasional issue with tile passability, such as not being able to walk behind large trees, and toward the end of the game the levels sort of come apart. Passability issues become more frequent, teleport events are missing, and you'll start running into events that don't turn off properly resulting in you watching the same scene over and over again if you happen to step on the wrong tile or talk to an NPC that triggered an important event earlier. These kind of errors do only appear in a relatively small portion of the game nearing the end, but since they make it extremely difficult to progress they're likely to cause you to quit unless you're particularly patient.

Graphics- 2.5/5
RTP, except when it's MSPaint

For the most part this game sticks to the RTP, but when a custom graphic is required for some unusual NPC or new monster, drawings that appear to have been made with MSPaint have been included instead. The drawings are messy and simple, but the real problem is they completely clash with the overall style of the game. Thankfully these inconsistencies appear very rarely out in the field and are not overly common in battles either, so despite the fact they're kind of annoying they don't permeate the entire game. The battle backgrounds appear to be low res photos and basically clash with every other graphical choice in the game, and this is really unsettling at first.




Music/Sound- 3/5
A whole lot of easy listening.

Music is all over the place in this game, but generally there's a relaxed feeling to everything which fits the easygoing story of the game. It mixes RTP with various popular NES and SNES soundtracks as well as the odd PS1 midi. You'll hear everything from Act Raiser to Illusion of Gaia to Alundra. Most of it doesn't stand out much and contributes to the relaxed feeling of an adventure that is for the most part without villains. Sounds are standard RTP and they are used competently enough.

Random stuff I liked-
Basically any time William is called into action. There's just something inherently fun about stomping enemies with a 100 foot monstrosity.

Your character blinks. Sure it's a worthless feature but I always enjoy little details like that.

Random stuff I hated-
Bringing up the menu does not stop enemies from moving. This is pretty annoying when something is barreling towards you and you want to heal yourself before getting into another battle.

Stats are not listed when you are buying gear. Although this is an engine limitation it's easy to get around by including values in the item description.

When enemies die some kind of animation is played before they vanish. Some of these work fine, others take up half of the screen and make you wonder how smacking something with a sword caused this.

The teleports to other areas occasionally don't work. It's a relatively rare bug and they'll work fine if you try to step on them a second time, but it was still annoying.

There is the occasional cheap game over. They tend to be caused by you doing stupid things like trying to break into a bank, and since the game has a save anywhere feature the frustration level is rather minimal but...I hate these in any form.

There are a few weird situations where it seems like the game is in a hurry to move past something going on. Such as one point you come across two guards blocking your path and your solution is to wait for them to take a break. When the screen fades back in the guards are gone and you wonder why they were standing there in the first place.

Occasionally you'll go through the first floor of a dungeon only for the game to tell you that the monsters further in are too strong. I wish it had just told me that at the entrance and saved me 10 minutes of slogging through monsters.

Any time you load the game it hangs for about 5 seconds before you can move.

Final Thoughts-
Despite all of the issues I described, I actually had fun playing this game. It is pretty hard to recommend it in its current state, the end of the game is littered with bugs and most of the time I had no idea what I was doing. But when I did know what I was doing I was generally enjoying the ride. If you like old school adventures and don't mind dealing with what often feels like an unfinished product it's worth checking this game out, if only to see William in all his glory. If not, you should at least keep an eye on the upcoming sequel (as announced during the end credits).