Comments on: Review: Dragon Fantasy Book II

By: Matt Dance

Matt Dance — Sun, 29 Sep 2013 00:17:43 +0000

*Not only work on developing those elements, but having them work together. So, if you built a snow town like Narshe, but had chiptune music sounding like the Dragon Warrior Castle Theme, it wouldn't work. Those games had so much elements working together which made them truly great. I love that small teams with limited resources are able to produce decent, worthwhile games like this, but I love even more the small genius it took to make those 90's JRPG's we always reference so memorable. I wish an excellent writer and a composer would pop up in this scene.

By: Matt Dance

Matt Dance — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 23:02:56 +0000

Dragon Fantasy and, say, Breath Of Death come closer to being as good as the old Dragon Warrior games than anything like FF6 and Chrono Trigger. A facade is not enough, and thank you Ethos for writing to that point; they need to work more on developing characters, story, environments, music, and some gameplay mechanics (which aren't deep in those aforementioned games, but struck the right balance of being charming & memorable without becoming overgrown) than throwing in enough references and let it stand on its own merits. I bet Book III will take place in a dystopian metropolis.

By: Ethan 'Ethos' Pipher

Ethan 'Ethos' Pipher — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 12:55:55 +0000

@Mel – No problem at all. I have next week covered as well. I have some choice words for EA and their treatment of Plants vs Zombies.

@SN – That’s exactly it. It makes far more sense to me to try to mimic that sort of scenario in development: Give yourself a technical restriction and then try to see how good a game you can make with it. Dragon Fantasy is fun, but it definitely feels like it’s looking backward. Which I suppose was intentional, but it makes for a more hollow experience.

By: Andrew 'Mel' Melcon

Andrew 'Mel' Melcon — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 22:56:57 +0000

A large thank you to Ethos for filling in for me while I recover from some surgery. Thanks! Hopefully I’ll be up and running by Tuesday, but it might be next Tuesday.

By: SiliconNooB

SiliconNooB — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 21:41:37 +0000

Ah, the pitfalls of reverse-engineering a classic JRPG. The original makers of 16bit RPGs never had to try and make their games appear to be SNES RPGs, they just made RPGs and did whatever they could under the limitations… I do wonder whether it really is easier to set out to competantly mimic something rather than just creating something worthwhile from scratch.

The best faux classic RPG I’ve played is Barkley Gaiden, and that is a game that uses 16bit graphics to do something wholly original.