[PS Vita] Dragon’s Crown ROM Download

Dragon’s Crown ROM Screenshots

Dragon’s Crown ROM Description

Story and Setting

Dragon’s Crown starts you as an inexperienced adventure in a small hamlet ready to take on the world. The story and characters are about as cliche as it gets when it comes to the fantasy realm – it’s a world filled with knights, wizards, kings, magical talismans, dragons, and every other fantasy staple there is outside of hobbits and halflings. Though the setting and characters are formulaic, I found the story to be actually pretty engaging to a point. It’s certainly not a page-turner, but the reason it works is because of the combat. Getting from plot point to plot point is a blast as you leave a wake of destruction and bodies strewn about anywhere you go in the game.

Gameplay

Combat is 90% of Dragon’s Crown and there are a few things that separate it from similar games. The gist of the gameplay is you travel through various levels via the hub system. Each level consists of making your way through hordes of mindless enemies or “trash” until you reach the inevitable boss battle, which I’ll talk about later.

What really clicks with Dragon’s Crown is it’s as much as an action RPG as it is just a straight beat ’em up. As you progress through the game you’ll level up your character, collect skill points for new attacks/bonuses, and gain new weapons, armor, potions, and of course gold which is the currency that runs everything. As long as you have enough gold you can essentially play forever as you buy continues with it.

Classes and Customization

Another key point is the game’s variety of classes. The game does an excellent job of having a great variety of character classes. I played most of my first playthrough as a fighter which is a button mashing extravaganza, mindless fun but still mindless. Switching to a mage is almost a completely different experience with similar controls. You’re able to pull off some incredibly powerful abilities with skill but you also have to manage your mana balance in a firefight. If you just button mash as a mage like the fighter you’ll end up standing in the fray not casting anything at all. It really makes the game accessible to a bunch of different people – those who want a simple beat ’em up and those who are looking for a little more depth and challenge.

Beyond the core character differences, you’ll be able to level your character and complete quests to gain skill points which allow you to augment your character with certain abilities and buffs. For instance, I chose to make my fighter much more like a tank focusing on giving him a larger health pool and the ability to heal himself with treasure and food more effectively and then focusing his damage on more AOE than a single target. This may seem like a small detail, but it really adds to the replay value and it makes my generic fighter feel more my own, and it makes me want to play through the game with all the different variations that I could come up with.

Combat and Boss Fights

Fighting through the game’s many minions is fun and it never gets old jumping through a half dozen enemies with an AOE attack and watching the hit numbers fly everywhere. But the real joy I got from the game was the boss fights. The game does a great job of making the fights interesting. When you’re fighting these giant menacing bosses they’re not all just “spank the boss” fights. The boss fights add many dynamics that make you focus on things besides just dealing damage.

For example, one boss has you fighting a giant gate. During the battle, cannons will come out, and you’ll have to find a cannonball in the battlefield and then load the cannon and then find a torch and then set off the cannon to blast the gate down. Another boss fight will have you fighting a giant wraith where you have to kite the enemy towards candles and only in the bask of the holy candle can you actually damage the wraith.

Dynamics like this make the boss fights more engaging instead of just button-mashing. You actually have to circumnavigate the battlefield for certain objectives, worry about positioning, and then time your attacks to be most effective. It really is a treat that puts a nice cap on each of the levels.

Shortcomings

For all of Dragon Crown’s delivered promises, the game does have a few shortcomings. The developers did what they could to make the combat as engaging as the player wants it to be, but there are still moments when I would just go into autopilot and cruise until the boss battle. I’d look up and I’d be attacking nothing in a corner because I wasn’t focusing and I was getting lost in all of the repetitive action on the screen, which brings me into my next issue – the graphics.

At times the game looks like a beautiful Renaissance painting but all too often, especially with four allies or fire or mounts or heaven forbid fire-breathing mounts, the frame rate suffers drastically on the Vita. It certainly isn’t crippling, and it’s beyond noticeable it will bother some more than others, and it might push them to the PS3 version despite Vita’s advantages. Perhaps the most disappointing thing is the expectation that a game like this shouldn’t even be testing the Vita, let alone punishing it the way it does.

Longevity

One of my concerns with a game like this is longevity. The first run I was able to beat it in about 13 hours, but that’s going to change depending on which character you start off with. But even after that there are tons of reasons to keep playing like a new difficulty level, the action RPG elements, the character classes, and the fun combat to keep you going.

Multiplayer is going to factor in as well. The game allows you to drop into random people’s games or preferably play with friends. The levels are short and made for pick and play quick little bursts, limiting stranger frustration but it’s also nice to have an upgrade with a real person over the game’s AI when you’re not out and about.