Destiny of the Dragon Lord

My playtime: 06:21:21 (game completed, all challenge except the last challenge has been beaten)

Intro
Destiny of the Dragon Lord is a game where you control the dragon lord in its conquest to conquering the world. The game is just your usual turn based RPG with the ability to recruit other monster's to your ranks.

Music
The game uses retro musics. The game page mentions about dragon quest a lot, so i'm sure some of the music comes from that.

Graphics
The graphics are also using an old 8-bit color graphics. The mappings are decent, except for some areas that has been destroyed since it looks very bland.

Story
The game is focused on the main story. I love how the main character is just so relaxed, to the point that it just do things whatever it wants, and how the other characters have their own objectives and things to do after the end of the story. However, there are still some part that hasn't been explained completely after the story ends (i'm talking about who shot the package that contains the special weapons).

The game
You'll gain control as the dragon lord at first with your advisor, Da'at. You'll be given out some pointers at what to do at the start, although i somehow forgot about most of them since there are too many information to grasp at once. I don't really mind about it at the start because the map and objective are quite straightforward, but the objectives becomes unclear at some point with too little information and that makes me stuck several times. I ended up having to watch a youtube playthrough several times just to figure out how to proceed since i don't feel like to explore the whole continent.

The continent is quite huge, with some places that you can visit and destroy (and loot the items inside). There are also some recruitables that will join your party after you kill them after you progress in the game.

Exploring in the area costs some food, which will depends on your party level and number. I have some problem at the point where i'm about to raid Cantlin because i have to keep up with the food costs; I have to rely on those Gold Golems to be my source of income since they drop a lot of gold. Also, the game's random encounter is very high that i keep on fighting an enemy after a few steps. This makes me very lazy to explore the area, especially the areas that i have explored before.

Since you can recruit party members, there will be a lot of people that you can choose for your party. However, you can only bring up a maximum of 7 people and make a party with 5 people. The battle will be your usual turn based with tough enemies in it; you'll need a lot of hits to kill the enemies, especially if you're underleveled with junk equips. There are also an All-Out button that will make battles faster by commanding all party members to attack a random enemy. It'll be a blessing if you can choose which enemies to attack though.



Aside from the normal party members, there is also a Strategist position that will affect your spell usage. In battle, your party will have the same spell pool as your Strategist and you'll be sharing TP, MP terminology in the game, with all of your party members. The best thing is, you don't have to put your Strategist as your active party members. This is quite good since the party member that has a lot of good skill pool is usually weak.

There are also crafting option in the game. The crafting is quite easy to do and most of the materials are easy to get, although the ultimate weapon and armor needs a lot of grinding to craft.

There are also some challenges where you can kill some tough opponents after you beat the game. You might need to max your level first though as they are very tough to beat. I finished all of them but the last boss since i don't think i can beat it without crafting ultimate weapon, which will take a very long time to do since the material to craft it is a very rare drop.



You might need some items to help you with the challenge since they're quite tough. However, the HP restore items don't restore at lot of HP, and they're single target. Plus, you can only carry a maximum of 6 items at once, and once you run out of item and TP, you're basically dead meat since you don't have heals anymore. I'm having a trouble with the last challenge because of this. I'm still enjoying the other challenges though.

Pros:
- Recruitable party
- All-Out button to make battle faster
- Crafting

Cons:
- Some objectives are hard to keep track
- Very high random encounter rate
- Items aren't very useful

Conclusion
This is turn based RPG game with a very high random encounter and some challenging boss challenge.

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Here's the area where i'm stuck before:
- After beating Enix
- When you're supposed to recruit Aether (i don't know about the secret passage where you get a Silver Harp)
- When you're supposed to look for the lost weapons (i don't know that you have to consult the notes; i thought the contents have been read beforehand)

It might be able to be resolved by:
- Telling which bridge or area to go to next
- Having one of the servant says about a secret passage in the city next to the grave
- Saying that you have to read the notes in order to find the weapons (i think it has already mentioned before but i'm caught off guard by the text with quotes somewhere in the dialogues; i thought it's what written in the notes instead)