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Of Dragons and Slimes...

A well presented game...on the outside. Let me break it down for 'ya.

Dragon Quest: Legacy of the Lost is a story about a hero named Aldain (or Achii in my playthrough). His mother is sick and you go on a quest to get her healed and eventually get recommended to the king.

Story

Okay, I'm starting with the story since that's the easiest right now. The story is ...definitely not for someone like me. the intro felt slapdash as the king goes out in the front gate of his castle instead of a castle balcony or something like a true royalty does. Then he gets zapped by a wraith/whatever that bad guy is again. It just felt random.

Then that's not the only one. It's the mother's sickness that makes me want to bang my head on the table. Allow me to elaborate+summarize:

Sarah:
It's me, Doctor Rothberg. I have come down with a terrible sickness.
It's a sickness I fear I've never had before.
Rothberg:
I see...Well, my dear Sarah. Could you describe the symptoms?
Sarah:
Well... I don't feel that bad right now, really don't. It's just that every day I wake up with less and less energy than the day before. It's scaring me doctor. It seems my sickness worsens every day.
Rothberg:
Hmmm... My my... It sound's like quite the disease.
May I ask, if there are any other symptoms present?
Sarah:
That's just it...that is my only symptom.
Rothberg:
My dear, from what you are describing, I fear the worst. Sarah, I do not believe you to be sick. But instead cursed!

You know doctor, she could've been, idk, depressed, could be lacking sleep and so on and so forth. This is just too vague and general that I just went wtf. So anyway, moving on. I was asked to retrieve a moon flower and get a holy water.

Except when I went to the general store there's a moon flower there. Weird. But moving on, I went to the forest got stuck for a while since the forest doesn't even drop any clue on what I should be doing.

A few dungeons later, my mother is healed and suddenly she recommended me to the king and the king believed her. I believe that isn't the right way to recruit someone but I can pretend my mother is a super important person. But anyway, I get this mission by the king to go to this shrine. Talk to all the guards to get a boat or something and go there. Except I talked to all the guards and didn't get to proceed at all. All I know is one of them used to be a seafarer etc.

The game also talks about a Shrine. Something about creationist theory that is obviously a foreshadowing but...I didn't reach there because onto the next section:

Gameplay

Okay, I have a huge beef about this game's gameplay. Here's some of them:

In the intro, the game asks you some pair of questions. One of them is either you want to be a physical character or a magical character. Being the magey person that I am, I decided to be a magical character. Except...You don't start with a magical spell at all. Which is like, rule of RPGs man! I went to battle just mashing attack and getting bored. Which is chained with:

The whole saving only in the town. I swear, you can't save on the world map, there's no save points in dungeons and you can only save in the town. SAVE.ONLY.IN.THE.TOWN. This game was frustrating for that one. I can accept the dungeon, BUT WORLD MAP? Dude, some of us have responsibilities to go to, and I would like the ability to save anywhere in the world map just in case an emergency comes by. But nope, I end up using my warp wings to go back to the town and save and trek all the way again to know where I'm supposed to go. Not fun. Which leads to another chaining point:

If you're a character with those STR seeds, this is not a problem I guess? Just mash attack and move on. But as a Mage? It takes a while longer and it isn't until Lvl 3 you get Heal and Lvl 4 you get Frizz (Fire). This was annoying I swear to you. And because a lot of times I am almost dying, I end up going back to town or my house, heal and walk again to go wherever I'm supposed to be. It feels like GRINDING. I know DQ is all about GRINDING but by gods this is arghhh.

Aside from mashing attack on the first 3 levels and me screaming bloody murder fighting 4 slimes, 2 birds and a dragon, or some variaton at once and do nothing but mash attack and heal. I am glad that this game DOES have some nice battle small number damage formulas. I loved that aspect of the game.

At least flee is effective.

Another thing I have beef with this game is the "puzzles." Dude that forest dungeon sucked, change it. It did nothing but randomly teleport you 5x and a huge guessing where the right teleport might be. I rather have pushblock puzzles or some sort.

The other one is the marsh. I can't evade some areas with the marsh so what the hell? Good thing I bought ten herbs that majestically got decreased to two since I was fighting at the same time (I was lvl 3 when I got here 8|).

Moving on...

Music and Sounds

One of this game's good features is that the music collection and the sound effects are fitting and cute. I can't say I heard any of the BGM music before, but anyway, nice choice. It might have come from the old DQ games or something, but really. They're nice and fitting.

Graphics

It uses CUTE enemy graphics such as :


I like how it's like DQ3 (The only DQ aside from 1 and 2 that I played lol). And well, it feels like DQ. The other thing though is that I wish you went the extra mile and changed the battle animations. It was just really weird to see high res special effects on 8bit/16bit??? sprites. It broke that DQ illusion for me.

Overall

At first I thought the game looked solid. Then I saw the intro and my hopes plummeted in terms of story. Then how the gameplay was presented made me want to scream bloody murder. I think this game still can be improved on since it has a lot of nice aspects. So I can't really give this a rating. I don't like giving ratings to games that are obviously incomplete and can do better :) Good luck bro.

Posts

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Thank you for the review! I'll definitely take your suggestions into consideration. I had meant to change the forest up some before I released the latest demo, but forgot to do it!

I do wish you had managed to find the shrine and unlock the past though. They king should have given you a key and told you to do to the cave near Erdrich Castle. :)
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