Dragon View

"Very decent actually"

I just recently played this, and I must admit that at first I was writing this off as complete crap. Everyting from the title screen to the name entry reminded me of some corny medievil action game. I gave it one look and said ''crap, good-bye.'' The name entry text alone looks like it was designed for a 5 year old with a vision impediment.

I was pretty wrong.

The Graphics:
Another thing that turned me off was the very pixeled and low-resolution sprites. It made me remember old Sierra DOS games. But it works out pretty well as the aforementioned sprites are well animated and evenly colored. Many different enemy sprites with nice attack animations and good fluidity. (I mean c'mon..this is the SNES for cryin out loud)

The Sounds:
Hmm.....hard to tell. The sound effects are as good as you could expect, but the music sounds rather....old school. I'd almost say the music could be in a NES or Mastersystem game, it sounds very simple. The thing is with oldish music like this is that it has a tendency to get catchy.

The Gameplay:
So it's a sidescrolling beat-em up with RPG elements. Not too (but some come to mind) many games are like that so it could be ''innovative'' but not ''revolutionary'' at all. You walk around towns, and dungeons using a sword or throw-blade type weapon, attacking enemies and opening chests. Then there's the map, which is very early 3D snes graphics. Much like a super fx chip, but not quite up to par with Starfox. It's not mode 7, but it's not super fx. It's just itself. =P The movement is a little bit off though, and it takes some getting used to. The whole game takes some getting used to. It's not your run-of-the-mill SNES cartridge.

The Story:
I won't spoil anything but the basic plot is that an evil wizard kidnaps your girlfriend. You have to go get her back. Woopie-ding! There's some twists and turns in there, but nothing that will make you're eyes pop out or set your gears in motion.

Replay value:
Not much. It's kind of linear and you get to a point where you're pretty darn strong, so you can just wander about and screw around. Hehe.. A second time through would be okay, but in a row...I don't think so. Not for me at least.

Overall:
This is a very cool game, and even if it looks really plastic and corny at first, you'll probably like it a lot.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 08/19/02, Updated 08/19/02