Playing every PS1 game - Dragon Valor, Dragon Warrior, DragonHeart, Dreams

Dragon Valor

I came into this expecting a rather weak RPG (based on no evidence rather than my own vibes), and discovered I was slightly off - it’s effectively a sword-toting beat-em-up with weak RPG elements.

Get used to it.

The game invites you to take a stereotypical taciturn wiseguy character with a big sword - who is actually a bit of a pillock, really - on a journey to rid the world of evil humongous dragons who seem to be causing chaos, but not through setting things on fire and eating people as you might expect, but actually by manipulating regional politics by giving local leaders un-sound advice. An interesting narrative gambit. In gameplay this manifests as jogging through a series of screens, whacking your way through enemies in a way that sort of bridges the gap between old-fashioned beat-em-ups like Streets of Rage and soon-to-be new approaches like that taken by Devil May Cry. The game itself is as good as neither of those, though.

Use MP to pull off various magic moves which usually miss.

It’s actually really bloody hard. After a few opening segments where you are slowly taught the ropes against some limp enemies, it suddenly, without giving you a chance to save or anything, chucks you straight into a boss fight against a dragon which is so difficult that I honestly thought it was one of those things where you were actually supposed to lose, in order to teach you something about the power of these beasts or whatever. Nope, dying results in a game over and you needing to start again.

You can only sell things to this shopkeeper. If you need supplies, tough luck.

If you do manage to get past that bit, the game itself starts more properly, where you get to use a rather rudimentary world map to move from place to place and beat things up. It’s still difficult; your HP is low and doesn’t regenerate between areas, and the only way to heal your wounds is to randomly come across a healing item in-game. I found a shop, but it wouldn’t sell me any either. In fact, some shops seem to only want to buy bits of tat from you, and others seem to only sell one thing. It’s all a bit like asking someone with only a vague memory of reading about RPGs to try and put one together.

Most correctly proportioned head in boss history.

The action itself isn’t half bad if you can stay alive. It would have been awarded a distinctly middle-of-the-road 5/10, but it drops a point due to the inability to fast forward through dialogue text or skip cutscenes. With no voice acting, it makes cutscenes drag out for painfully long and resulted in the use of emulation fast-forward being a necessity.

Kept my attention for: A couple of hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

Dragon Warrior VII

Dragon Warrior is the North American localisation of Dragon Quest, which was the big competitor to Final Fantasy before Enix eventually merged with Square and they rather ironically became stablemates.

Er…excuse me?

Having its origins around the same time also means that you do get a totally different spin on the JRPG ‘formula’, which by the late 90s had more or less been embedded in concrete as ‘do whatever Final Fantasy does’. The truth is that the Dragon Quest approach is worse, at least in Dragon Warrior VII. Being released in 2000 after all three of Final Fantasy VII/VIII/IX, the gulf between the two series at this point in time is at a truly continental scale, and actually a bit embarrassing. FFIX engulfed four CDs, had two hours of FMV, used full 3D models over intricate pre-rendered bitmaps, and was effectively the manifest perfection of a slowly evolving formula. Dragon Warrior in comparison just looks like a tired Super Nintendo game with concepts and mechanics which had barely moved on at all since the 80s. Visually, one could argue the SNES games still manage to look better.

How one envisages their opponent in every internet argument.

Playing Dragon Warrior VII is a slog, but it’s not a ‘bad game’. I’ve not known a game take so long to get going since I played Kingdom Hearts II - there is honestly about 2-3 hours of not-much-in-particular before you even do something as fundamental to an RPG as bang a monster over the head. The scene-setting is actually good, and the exposition and dialogue rather indulgent, but it is all conveyed via lengthy textual tête-à-tête, which in a mostly 2D-sprite based game with extremely limited animation comes up rather lacking in the excitement department. You really do spend a large amount of time just schlepping back and forth between places and across the world map in order to do little more than have another conversation with the next person in the plot chain. Every time you think that it’s going to pick up; every ‘right, we’re into the game now’ moment that comes, it just sort of fizzles out as a sort of storytelling false dawn, and nothing really happens.

Was he playing Dragon Warrior VII?

There is much that is good within the drudgery, though; many things that Final Fantasy never did and as such are still mechanics that you don’t come across often. The player isn’t signposted via pointed cutscenes or “The King demands you do X” orders which make it abundantly clear what your next goal is - this ‘what to do next’ aspect of the gameplay is typically something you need to work out yourself through context, like speaking to townspeople or putting two and two together in your head and working out what that might mean from what you already know. Some might say that this makes things unclear, but I think it makes things a bit more interesting. You can also at any point just use the ‘Talk’ function to speak to your party members, who offer suggestions.

Be ready to walk miles back and forth through the same identikit dungeons.

Unfortunately it’s all just too damn slow. The combat is also quite ropey. The only thing that isn’t slow is your speed of movement, and transitions between screens, which are as zippy as you are going to get on CD-based media. And thank God it is, as otherwise I would never have got as far as I did, which seemed to be about a quarter of the way through the game before the pace dropped below ‘prone crawl’ into ‘stirring out of a coma’ and I got bored with it. Oh, and I didn’t see a single dragon.

Kept my attention for: A few days
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10

Dragonheart - Fire and Steel

What the hell is this?

Chuck Norris and a very butch Xena: Warrior Princess face off in a pathetic struggle to the death.

A 2D side scrolling beat-em-up where you extremely slowly trudge from left to right and press X and O to waft your sword around at enemies (or square to do some sort of weird backward stab move that never seems to come off?) and triangle to perform a tepid and semi-controllable hop.

Duck, and still get hit anyway even as your foe visibly swings over the top of your head.

This is dire. It seems you can use R1 to block with your shield and press down to duck (and therefore aim a swing at an enemy’s shins), but it’s all too slow and unresponsive, so you’re all but guaranteed to continually take a sword to the face at the same time as you connect with your own wimpy slash.

Plunging into the sweet release of a watery grave.

I got midway through level two, before being confronted with what would become an insurmountable foe - a shallow creek a few feet in breadth. Trying to jump over it just meant falling in and immediately dying. Trying a bit of a run up first before jumping meant falling in and immediately dying. I retried a few times and realised that this was actually Ahura Mazda giving me a sign that this was an excuse to stop playing this Miniclip.com flash game. I did.

Kept my attention for: Fifteen minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10

Dreams

I have no idea what this is supposed to be. Platformer? Action game? Weird flying simulation? A tech demo?

The game quite literally begins like this, with no real introduction. Duck!

It’s bizarre. You start the game immediately being ganked by a handful of royal-blue-tinted horned demons, and have to work things out on the hoof. Circle swings weak punches, square shoots strange sparkle bullets from your blocky hands, and X jumps. Press R1, however, and you can just fly off into the distance. So is there any point in combat? I don’t think there is.

It’s like an early AI image of a video game.

Fly around, picking up cheeseburger powerups and accidentally missing a landing spot and plummeting to your death. There is some mechanic where once a minute you are able to morph into two other forms. That’s all I could work out. It looks like a smacked arse, and controls just as poorly. What a weird experience.

Kept my attention for: 15 minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10