Mr Robot

This automated RSS Feed post is about: Dragoneer’s Aria is a story driven role playing game in which you take on the roll of Valen Kessler, a fresh graduate of the Dragoons, mortals tasked with assisting six world protecting dragons. You find yourself suddenly enmeshed in the act of saving your world on the day of your graduation when a mysterious and seemingly all powerful Black Dragon appears and battle with one of the four elemental dragons who help protect your world. Several centuries earlier, this same Black Dragon had killed the Holy Dragon Grinlek, who’s soul became six lesser dragons who now protect the world.
As you progress through your journey other characters can join your party and bring their strengths with them. You can decided who will lead your party while walking through the world map, as each character also has different abilities. Once character may slowly heal your party as you travel through the world while another will help you travel faster.
The game is divided into the world map, in which encounters happen and the characters gain experience and levels and the city maps, in which Valen can wander about purchasing items, making new things and progressing the plot line.

Each character, including Valen have skills broken into three categories, Field, Battle and Dragon skills comprise these categories. Field skills help the characters move faster through the world map, assist in exploration and help in other ways. Battle skills are those which assist the party in the heat of battle, and can include skills that heal other party members or alleviate ailments. Dragon skills are used in concert with various Dragon Orbs that characters collect and keep in their inventory. The Dragon Orbs impart damaging elemental abilities to each character, which can gain levels and potency with frequent use. They can also be used to exploit particular weaknesses in the various enemies the characters will face. Skills use is based on mana points. Mana is collected in battle by defeating, blocking, attacking or using an item. Mana points are required to use the skills themselves.

This is the core of the battle system in Dragoneer’s Aria and it can be a bit frustrating at times, particularly as your character gains levels. Mana is needed to use skills, and higher level skills which would be most useful to characters and require the most mana can be used the least as you are constantly finding yourself short on mana – with only enough to enact simpler skills. You find yourself working towards skills that ultimately you won’t be able to use much. Mana is fueled by points you collect through defeating enemies. 100 points translates into 1 mana point, and defeating enemies translates into 50 points.
At it’s heart, Dragoneer’s Aria is a hack and slash game with an interesting item generation scheme and a level/grind/level format, which can be ultimate frustrating as each encounter is represented by a generic floating monster sprite. As you wander through the world map you can see various encounters on your radar or floating in front of you but you have no idea what it is you’ll be encountering until you actually enact the encounter. Often, encounters will enact themselves as the generic encounter icon chases you about the world map until if successfully grabs you and draws you into battle.
Battles are protracted affairs in Dragoneer’s Aria. It’s not uncommon to spend an hour going through only four or five encounters, which makes the level/grind/level basis of the game a bit hard to take after several hours of play.

There is an interesting item making scheme, in which characters can purchase recipes to make neat new things out of the piles of junk that they’re hauling around. Unfortunately it means that your characters will be hauling around a massive pile of acquired items, hoping for a recipe that will fit some of what you have.
The graphics in Dragoneer’s Aria are good although they’re not amazingly wonderful. There aren’t any “wow” moments in the game where the PSP’s graphics capabilities are made to shine. The sound quality is decent but again nothing to write home about. The voice acting is weak, in many cases being all together forgettable. The characters you find yourself with are pretty standard role playing fare – you won’t meet anyone new or bump into any new ideas here. All of these individual qualities combine to make for a game that, while it starts out with promise ultimately does not deliver.
The Good

1. An interesting concept with lesser “mortal” creatures interacting with dragons, which are usually seen as the pinnacle monster or ally in most role playing games.
2. Interesting recipe system in which characters can take the loot they’ve been hoarding and make new and useful things.

The Bad

1. One of the games biggest weaknesses is the mana system, which complicates and trivializes aspects of combat, rather than adding to them in an exciting and new way.
2. Character acting is not all that good.
3. Combat grind becomes very tedious after a while with individual rounds of combat taking far to long.

Overall Score: 5
Gameplay: 6
Experience (Sound/Graphics): 6
Replayability: 5
Fun Factor/Price: 4
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