Sagacyte's BG corner

Hello, friends. Sorry I have been unexpectedly absent minded lately but May has been a surprising month in the not-so-good way. Not terrible, but still. Wife got surgery this past weekend - she's ok! - so I missed Music Friday again. I am a terrible blogger. The good thing is I took my Vita with me to the hospital so I got a lot of time to catch up with Dragon's Crown, which I just completed this weekend. Or I thought I had, at least - and that's wonderful.

DC is a wonderful game by Vanillaware, set in a fantasy setting where you control an adventurer fighting for the land of Hydeland. Your chosen hero changes your playstyle - melee, ranged or magic user - as you battle hordes of fantastic enemies in dangerous locales. The game is rendered in a beautiful engine that makes every character, scenario and cutscene looking like a painting bursting with life.

It's gameplay is sort of reminiscing to old school beat-em-ups. If you ever played Final Fight or Streets of Rage you get a pretty good idea of what to expect. DC shakes it up a bit by adding RPG elements to it. Bosses and chests drop loot which you can use to increase your character's stats, stores offer gear or potions to help in your forays, the local church can resurrect dead adventurers so you can take them with you as allies, and the city's guild allows you to take on side quests and upgrade yourself with news passive and active skills. There's quite a bit to do!

Slight spoilers may follow: This weekend I got a chance to complete the main quest... only to find that this opened another difficulty. But instead of just having to do it all over again it just drops you back in the world, tells you what you need to complete this new challenge, and ups the difficulty/level of dungeons. It immediately reminded me of the old SNES days, where beating the game suddenly opened up secrets and extra challenges. I'm not really sure if I'll tackle the extra content, since my backlog is big enough as it is (and Heavensward is coming soon), but it was a nice surprise to see the game offering extra incentive to stay in it, beyond finishing the main quest. The game DOES have an online component, but I haven't tried it.

One more thing: thank the Twelve for the Vita's suspend feature! DC has no pause, which was a big problem when I had to be alert for anything the wife may need. Just suspending the Vita took care of that problem!

As a final note I'll do say that DC does take the sexualization of its characters a bit to the extreme. Males are 90% muscle and females have big... qualities to them. Even the more armored of females are drawn in suggestive poses; most are wearing little armor, though. Some barely anything (GIF). I didn't find this problematic, but I remember people doing when DC came out all those moons ago. I don't mind, the style is awesome so... there.

So, it's a beat-em-up right out of the SNES era, with RPG elements, good music, and a beautiful graphic engine. People have found references and details in its art ever since the trailers - it's a very interesting game, and I'm loving it.

Game on.

- Sagacyte

Don't stare!