Introduction

While, redwall10 I have a somewhat less then illustrious history. I'm happy to say that this is easily his best game to date.

Story
Summary: Dragon Cult's story revolves around a few humans joining a cult dedicated to a dark dragon after receiving a flyer in the mail. Though, they quickly come to realize that joining the cult was a bad idea since it plans to offer them up as human sacrifices to the dark dragon in order to grant the cult's leader the power of a deity. Suffice to say the group quickly makes a break for it and manages to escape thanks to a little aid from some warriors that had been looking into the cult for sometime. Afterwards the group informs the queen of Black Wood of what is going on and accepts her quest of destroying the guild. A task that will require the player to traverse trap laden bases as well as face-off against fearsome adversaries.

Greatest Strength: Oddly enough the greatest strength of Dragon Cult is that the story is straight-forward and simple. As such the game isn't focused on meaningless bells and whistles to make the story seem more complex then it is.

Weaknesses: One of the biggest problems with the story of Dragon Cult is that the heroes suffer from rather poor characterization. A problem that comes about because of numerous problems such as their being six playable characters in this game, the minimalistic nature of the dialogue, and the overall length of the game.

Spelling and Grammar: Sadly, redwall10's usual problems with English crop up in this game. Which means you can expect a lot of spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and improper word selection for what he is trying to convey. While a lot of these issues can be sidestepped if you take the time to read through the dialogue carefully. At times the dialogue is an almost indecipherable mess. As such, I'd suggest redwall10 ask around for some help in translating this game into proper English.


I think any good English teacher would cry if a student handed in a homework assignment witht he above sentence written on it.

And, even if I wasn't concerned about the game being a little difficult to follow it times. The sheer number of errors contained within the dialogue seriously hurts the games overall presentation.

Gameplay
Combat: On the combat side of things the game is a bit on the easy side seeing as how you can stun lock most bosses with Gabriel's sweep kick, but this is extremely preferable in comparison to most of redwall10's games where the bosses and regular enemies are maddeningly difficult because of improper balancing.


Hammering away on the anvil in the weapon shop offers an easy way to earn 70 Silver and 50 experience. So the player can both grind for cash to purchase food while also gaining levels.

Hunger System: I find myself both agreeing with and disagreeing with Clangeddin about the hunger system. On one hand the initial cost is extremely high. On the other hand there is a shop in the initial camp where you can stock up on more then enough food and water to reach the first town. And, once your there you can spend time performing jobs that don't fill the hunger gauge in order to gather the money you'll need to purchase a large amount of food in bulk. A task which can be completed in roughly 10 to 15 minutes of rather mindless tapping on the z key. At the same time this approach to getting around the food problem in the game does make Dragon Cult feel needlessly padded, but the overall grind time is easily manageable in my opinion, but I can understand why players that would like to advance the plot as quickly as possible would find this annoying.

Graphics
Mapping: On the mapping side of things Dragon Cult does alright for itself in my opinion, despite the developer shamelessly reusing a few maps in the game. The best example of this problem easily comes from the cult's secret outposts in the forest. All three of these hidden bases share the exact same initial room upon entering them as well as include traps hidden in the exact same location on the floor.

Bug: A lot of graphical mistakes happen in the cut scenes in this game if you switch Daewon out of the first position in your lineup. Thankfully the game doesn't freak out if you have two copies of Fabia on the screen at the same time, but it does hurt the game's overall presentation once again. Sadly, I'm not exactly familiar with the capabilities of RPG Maker VX Ace. So, I don't know if it's possible for redwall10 to lock Daewon into the lead position or not. Though, if it is possible it would present an easy fix for this issue.

Overall: Overall, I'd say Dragon Cult has a rather unique flavor in terms of its tile sets, character sprites, and enemy artwork. A fact, that will probably change overtime as more people create games with the high fantasy resource bundle, but as it stands this game definitely stands out from the usual sea of freely available games on this site.

Sound

On the sound side of things redwall10's usual level of skill is on display which is to say this is easily the game's strongest aspect. And, I'm not merely being a patronizing jerk here. I honestly wish he'd lend his talents in this area out to other developers.

About the only bad thing I can say about the sound track is that one of the audio tracks is owned by the Studio Ghibli which resulted in me having to mute the game's audio in the second episode of my Let's Play for this game. But this issue is entirely secondary to the review itself.

Conclusion

Despite all of the issues I brought up in the review this is easily redwall10's best game so far in my opinion. While, it does require some mindless grinding in order to beat. It's at a rather reasonable level in comparison to say "Nightmare School". And while the game does contain a lot of the usual spelling issues and grammatical mistakes; they are mitigated to a large extent by the straight-forward nature of the narrative. Overall, I'd say this game does make for a decent way to kill time if you aren't in the mood for a game that is particularly deep or just want to slay an evil dragon.