Dragon's Crown

2024-11-26
Tittygeddon or Dragon's Crown as it's called in the US, is side scrolling ARPG with a surprisingly deep combat system and Vanillaware's patented gorgeous hand-drawn art style. The mechanical depth was what got me hooked. I played the Wizard where you have to hit enemies to regen MP to cast spells paired with a whole set of spells you could mix and match including even a spectacular long-cast-time Meteor spell. We love a long-cast-time mega-nuke spell in a game. And as far as I can tell each class has as much nuance.

Sadly despite the mechanical depth my interest began to wear thin as I continued to pick up loot with boring "+15% fire damage" type effects and the repetitive structure of "fight a boss over and over so you can level up to fight the next boss" became clear. But hey, maybe it's cause I played this solo instead of with horned up Amazon/Sorceress players online on PS3 back in the day. A good romp nonetheless.

2023-09-04
What an odd game. It's a side scroller action RPG with a surprisingly deep combat system, Vanillaware's patented gorgeous hand drawn, animated art style, and an overall very cool old school dungeon crawling vibe complete with a narrator voicing over everything.

The combat is really interesting because even though it presents initially as this very simple 2D beat'em'up type game each class you can play as different combos and moves and mechanics. The Wizard I played for instance has a mana pool that requires you to charge up, disabling you from attacking or blocking, to refill. Then you have different attacks that change based on whether you're jumping or walking or which direction you're facing. Changing your staff then changes that whole moveset again. And then you have equippable abilities which are limited thus creating different builds. The wizard has passives like being able to float around and active abilities like a meteor spell that takes 10 seconds or so to charge but then nukes everything on the screen. We love to see a big charge, big damage spell. And all of this is just describing one of the classes.

In typical ARPG fashion you're getting experience and loot. The experience makes you stronger and unlocks new abilities while the loot you sift through to find things that will also make you stronger. I didn't see a huge amount of synnergistic items, more of the 15% fire damage variety which made the loot system overall a bit tedious.

I'd say in general the game gets pretty tedious once you start to get to the end. You've already explored the combat system to it's medium-level depths and now you're just playing the same maps over and over to beat bosses and get more experience to beat the final boss. It's odd then that after beating the "final boss" there is a post-game which is more of the same. I'm sure some of the joy of this game is lost because I'm playing it single player instead of online with randos back in the day on PS3 but even then it seems to overstay it's welcome a little bit on the tail end.

That all being said I enjoyed my time with it. Perhaps especially because of one of the bosses being a Killer Rabbit in a direct reference to Monty Python. And even more likely because the wonderful art, music, and narration tying together a very unique vibe not found in other games.