Dragon Riders: Chronicles of Pern

"Mummy, can I ride the dragon? Not today, child."

You know, I'd rather been looking forward to this one. The previews I'd read sounded OK, the graphics looked nice enough, and I wanted a nice, new RPG, having been through Skies of Arcadia and Grandia 2 a fair few times.

So I saw this in my local GAME, decided to get it, went home and started it up.

After a nice FMV sequence, some nice atmospheric title music that sounds like it was done by an Irish band of some sort, and a title screen promising the illusion of riding the dragons around the place and landing on a rock in the middle of nowhere, it's time to get into the game.

Now where do I begin? Best to begin with the nice stuff - the graphics and voices. They are acceptable. Sometimes the graphics are actually quite nice, but not all that frequently. The character models are very nice, not Shenmue quality but still better than 90% of other DC games, and the voices seem to -mostly- suit their characters.

But then you get to play the game, and you realise it's not all nice.

Throughout the game you seem to be given missions by different people. With the game (or at least up until chapter 3 of 6) divided up into sub-quests, which include finding a child's lost toy, getting people to a meeting (which involves several more sub-quests to get them there), but there is a big storyline present. It just involves lots of annoying little storylines.

The controls are also really quite iffy as well, the same kind of controls used in survival horror games like Resident Evil - ie forward always makes you walk/run in the direction you're facing. It may just be me but I hate this control method with a vengeance.

Next, the camera. The instruction manual offers the promise of being able to change the camera angle with the L and R triggers. Unfortunately, try as a might (and needed to at several places thanks to the character getting lost out of sight and awful camera angles) it just wouldn't. However, you can go 1st person when you get the crossbow, so long as you have some arrows. The arrows actually make no noise, so make sure you don't try to fire one, wonder why it didn't work, and end up using them all up, as I did.

Combat's up next, and this basically involves walking up to an enemy, waiting for the COMBAT prompt to appear, pressing A and pressing up on the analogue pad to hit the thing, hoping for the best. A bit meagre at best, as you cannot move forwards or backwards while in combat. You have to let go of A, spend the time to turn around (if you need a fast retreat), run a bit, turn around again and engage in the battle once more.

But in any case, to the dragon riding.

I'm not sure if this happens in the DragonRiders books, but the dragons seem to travel around by effectively teleporting, or that's how it seems. Reading the books in the library in the game seems to have some inkling about it. But in any case, transport must be done by first finding a large open area for your dragon to land in. Every place only has one of these, so you have to make your way there, enduring the loading times (but more on those later). Then you call your dragon and, in a nice bit of the game, he comes and lands. You get on (changing clothes if necessary) and fly off. Then the new destination loads, your dragon lands, you get off, and your dragon goes off to a safe spot, probably trying to chase other dragons, happy in the knowledge they can fly about but we cannot. Is it just me or does that seem a little underwhelming?

But all of this put together would not necessarily equal a bad game. If you're into RPGs with several sub-quests, don't mind about the control method and battles, then it'd be alright. Not every RPG has dragon riding, remember. But it's the atrocious loading times that make you want to kill the person responsible for burning this data onto this lump of plastic known as a disk! It's OK that it has a screen telling you how far along it is, but come on, you can go to the toilet in the time it takes to load a small interior area! And the frequency of these makes progress a chore for most souls.

So overall, let's weigh out the pros and cons -

Pros
+ Some nice graphics, VERY nice at times
+ Good voices and title music
+ Good storyline
+ Pern readers may get a kick out of it

Cons
- Very little music, and voices can get on nerves
- Storyline marred by countless little sub-quests
- Control method
- Battle
- Loading times

Overall, if you want a game that has a story that is tragically marred by the frequency of the sub-quests, don't mind about the loading, control method, battle system, and the lack of general dragon riding in a game called ''Dragon Riders'', then you're clearly a braver soul than I, as I have since taken this back. Everyone else should steer well clear.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 02/25/02, Updated 02/25/02