Dragons' Descendants

Dragons' Descendants is a dungeon crawler with elements of a traditional RPG made for 2013's RPG Maker VX Ace Lite Cook-Off. The contest had no theme, but entries were forced to adhere to very strict limitations based on what VS Ace Lite is capable of. Despite its limitations, this is a pretty impressive game.

The game takes place in the land of Ryūhō, a magical land based loosely on feudal Japan where all people are said to be descendants of dragons. You play the role of Yamoto Jirou, a disgraced prince who has wandered the world as a masterless ronin, protecting the weak and helping the downtrodden to atone for an unknown crime. After many years of penance, Jirou has returned to the Yamoto Kingdom to present himself to his father, in hopes that his honor and birthright will be restored to him. But Jirou isn't the only one to return to Yamoto, as dragons have also begun to appear and ravage the helpless citizens of the kingdom. Jirou and his allies must discover why the dragons have returned before his kingdom is destroyed.

Right away I was fairly enamored with this premise, especially since highly story driven games aren't exactly what the game's creators are known for. But not to worry, Craze and LouisCyphre haven't forgotten their roots, and this game still lives and dies by its combat.

Despite Craze's propensity to stick the player with a full party and throw them headlong into the deep end of the dungeon and expect the player to cope, Dragons' Descendants takes a much more friendly and well-paced approach to introducing the game. You begin the game with just Jirou and fight a few introductory battles that explain the game's concepts as well as your hero's abilities to you. Before long you'll be introduced to a few new allies and similarly the game gives you a chance to learn how each of them works.

Combat tends to be intense and can punish you severely for approaching battles the wrong way; many abilities in this game operate off of the attacker's HP, so spreading damage around instead of eliminating targets can be very painful for you. Fortunately, the game has a very potent threat mechanic that allows you to control which of your allies are going to take the most damage, and one of your 'tank' characters is effectively immortal if you play smart. Fallen allies automatically revive after a few turns have passed with full HP, so if you're patient, a total wipe-out is unlikely, and almost any encounter in the game can be won with strategy, without excessive grinding, if you play your hand right. You can also run form battles at any time if you're just trying to get through the dungeon.

You also have quite a few ways of dealing damage, and each ability comes with a built in explanation of exactly how its damage is calculated. But man, some of the formulas this game uses are pretty...arcane. This is a hallmark of LouisCyphre's game design philosophy, where games can be won on a spreadsheet before you ever play the game, but I'm not sure how many people actually play games like that. I guess maybe the audience for this game is Theoretical Physics PhDs, but the rest of us mere mortals will likely just be scratching our heads.



So maybe you were hoping this game would offer you something besides math. Well, you're in luck, because despite being made in VX Ace Lite, and despite being a dungeon crawler, and despite being made by Craze, Dragons' Descendants actually has a fully-fleshed out narrative, which is essentially a character-driven drama on the scale of a traditional RPG, with developed characters, personal conflict, political intrigue, and a well-developed setting.

The characters are all pretty fleshed out and most of them are fun and likable. I was particularly fond of the protagonist Jirou and his calm, reserved style. This even carried over to his skill set somewhat, with his emphasis on healing and supporting his allies, and even a water spell, an element often associated with peace and tranquility. I can't think of another hero in any game who uses water magic, and rarely are JRPG heroes known for being wise, calm, or over thirty years old. Jirou really felt cut from his own cloth, a stranger in his own land, and I was really pulling for him to reclaim his honor and resolve his own personal dramas. I personally found the story to be pretty good, and this was one of the few RPG Maker games where I really wanted to push forward and see what would happen next. Man, who made this game again?



The game sidesteps exploring towns and the world map by offering a very straightforward, streamlined approach from one dungeon to the next, and cutscenes are presented in a visual novel style with character portraits set against a backdrop, which fits the game's style well and gives the game sort of a unique visual flair. For most of the game, you'll feel like you're playing a fairly engaging traditional RPG on fast-forward. This is an approach Craze has tried before with limited success, but it seems he and LouisCyphre were able to iron out the approach this time.

So the game has a lot of good qualities, but it also has some weaker aspects. The game's dungeons feel very rough and are mostly featureless, random encounter-filled mazes, sometimes with damage tiles and random wild-goose chases thrown in. Fortunately, none of the dungeons are very long, and they are occasionally broken up by random inter-party chatter, but exploring the dungeons isn't very fun or rewarding.

The game is also riddled with a number of bugs and errors. Characters don't learn skills they were supposed to, some skills clearly don't work the way they should, others don't work at all. It smacks of a lack of thorough testing, a hallmark of LousiCyphre's other games such as Ill Will or Speak No Evil and while I understand this game was made under time constraints, a single pass through the game in its finished state would have caught probably all of these. Fortunately, none of these bugs were game-breaking as I was able to complete the game in spite of them.

The final problem I have with this game is that it ends very abruptly after a period of pretty intense build-up, apparently leaving things open for a sequel that shows no signs of being made any time soon. A great many things were left unresolved and I felt pretty unfulfilled, but I guess I wouldn't have felt that way if I didn't really want to see how it all ended! But as it stands, this game feels painfully unfinished.

Right now, I feel like Dragons' Descendants is a decent game that could be great. If some of its default systems were polished a bit, if its flaws were ironed over, the bugs fixed, and if the rest of the story were ever released, I feel like Dragons' Descendants could become an RPG Maker classic. It's funny because a few days ago, Craze asked how you make a traditional RPG. Well, I feel like he's sitting on a pretty good one here that just needs to spread its wings a little.