Dead Dragons Review

Dead Dragons is kinda the bane where the last game I reviewed (Crystareino) was the blessing. The yin to that yang. Both are made by the same company, Kemco, but the two games could not be any different.

Story

Dead Dragons character development and storyline is just god-awful. You start off as a guy with little to no emotions, with people telling him he is boring and aloof. He finds a dragon, gets told he is going to die unless he kills one, and goes off on an adventure. He turns from this aloof and boring person into a highly talkative, kinda dumb, and moronic person. And the text-based story usually goes on forever and often contradicts itself.

Like in the beginning when he is told that if he decides to kill the dragon, that they will kill him here and now. Then right afterwords he decides to kill the dragon they don't kill him. Instead, they teach him how to use the curse to his advantage and follow him, allowing him to grow stronger in his search. This games character development to the storyline just sucked immensely. It would definitely do better if it was portrayed smoother.

Mechanics

Unlike their other game, Crystareino, this games mechanics fall short of mediocre.

Controls:

The analog stick feature is buggy and hard to control, so you are stuck with the touch-screen version, meaning you can only take a couple of steps at a time. You cannot hold your finger on the screen for continuous running.

Nurture:

This sounds awesome, but it probably the biggest deal breaker. This mechanic allows you to improve magic, healing, attack, defense, speed, etc to customize your character. Combining equipment, the nature raising of stats as you level, and now Nurture, giving you 30 points per level allowing you the ability to raise the stats at most 3 times per level. This creates a character that is kinda Over Powered in relation to the monsters around them.

This helps to make it far too easy to defeat bosses and enemies, which you can blow through quite easily. The monsters also give you quite a bit of experience, which makes the issue much worse.

Battle: The battle mechanic on this game is... odd, to be honest. Instead of being spread out, your characters form a line, which means that the ally in front will be the one that gets the most damage, unless the enemy uses a skill that attacks more than one enemy at once.

Weak points are also a mechanic in this game. During a normal attack, you have a 1/3 chance of hitting the enemies weak point, which gives you a critical hit. But since the enemies are not as powerful, and since it takes up a lot of time, you might as well autoattack.

There is also a mechanism called Battle Cells, which, if on, raises your stats even more. The enemies themselves are pretty weak, and the bosses are about as strong as the typical enemies should be. In each move you also have the ability to rotate or change, but due to the weakness of the enemies, even using skills is pointless. Let alone the Ruin Gauge, which enables you to make full use of your dragon abilities.

Other:

I hate to say this, but there are far too many treasure chests in this game, and they barely give you anything useful.

Also, this game takes every single avenue to make sure you won't die. There are healing pots before a dungeon, and right before the boss of the dungeon. Healing skills require little AP usage. Healing items are pretty much in about half of the treasure chests you open Enemy attacks are not that powerful. You don't even have to purchase new equipment. Raising a level also brings your HP and AP back to full health as well.

So you get full HP and MP with each new Level, Equipment, Nurture, Battle Cells, Items, Healing Magic, Weakpoints, and Healing pots at the entrance and ending of each level. If you die, it'd be a miracle.

Graphics/Audio

The graphics on this game kinda suck. Yeah, there seems to be more detail in the textures, but that seems to go against what they were trying for. The sprites in this game are always in animation, which is annoying, because they always look like they are marching in place. The enemy sprites are almost lacking, outside of the bosses, there must only be 5-7 actual enemy sprites, all recolors of the last, and none with anything special about them.

The music is pretty generic. All towns use the same song, all dungeons use the same song, events have no new music, it's all just, the same. Opening chests is the same sound effect for menu options, so you get tired of certain sound effects quickly. Nothing really stands out in this game.

You can purchase this game if you want from Amazon