Dragoneer's Aria

"Could it be any more straightforward and generic?"

Dragoneer's Aria is developer Hit Maker's second attempt at the RPG genre, first being the ill-fated Blade Dancer, a mediocre PSP title that didn't quite "get it". You could say it's a decent RPG as far as decency goes, and it probably is, but Blade Dancer was missing a lot of important RPG elements, and so it's only fair to expect these to at least be in Dragoneer's Aria, if Hit Maker learn from their mistakes at all. And indeed, Dragoneer's Aria delivers in offering what Blade Dancer didn't have. It has a full-fledged storyline, with twists (or attempts at twists), a decent plot of developed characters, and little improvements here and there, that don't change much in the end, but at least it's there. However, despite the additions made to the presentation, the gameplay and overall end result still suffers a great deal. It's a mixed bag of good and bad, but in the end, the bad really outweighs the good.

Dragoneer's Aria is all about having this and that to show off, but while still completely missing the point. The game starts disappointing right off the bat with no intro at the title screen, which we've grown used to in pretty much all RPGs these days, offering very little style and personality. On the other hand, the game looks and sounds great, which makes up for the lack of presentation, but only so much. The title screen song is beautiful and melodic, but that's a given, since it was composed by Bach, a classic, but very fitting for the game. After all, what else to expect but some great music from a game called Dragoneer's Aria? The game does have a few good melodies throughout it, and a catchy ending song sung by Japan's rising pop star Mimika. I wasn't particularly impressed with the overall soundtrack as a whole, which went unnoticed most of the time due to soothing music being used a lot, but the battle theme was fairly good, despite being repeated way too much. A couple more upbeat songs here and there wouldn't have hurt.

That's the problem with Dragoneer's Aria; it's all deception. You start the game thinking it's this really epic RPG involving dragons, spells and what not, but it's all just in appearance. The game looks really good. The 3D graphics are sharp, clear and vibrant, the characters have a great art style and the environments are fairly varied, as well as the enemies. However, the animations are terribly poor. The same character animations are used over and over again in all of the cutscenes, adding no particular charm to the already somewhat stale storyline. The characters look extremely stiff, delivering lines of mediocre voice-acting that never seems to match the mouths, evoking emotions that don't reach out. It feels like watching a boring theatrical play, with always the same gestures, the same expressions. The dragons on the other hand look rather impressive, but don't take enough of the story.

This only goes to show Hit Maker probably didn't have a very high budget for this project, which is understandable after something like Blade Dancer. This would explain the lack of intro, the re-used character animations, repeated backgrounds and places, yet how they still managed to get the rights to Bach's musical piece, get a pop singer to sing an original song for the game, and a talented artist to draw the characters, baffles me. But that's the whole thing about Dragoneer's Aria. Starting with the storyline, which begins on a good note. Although Valen looks a bit effeminate, I thought he was an overall pleasant main character, and each of the three other members which your party is composed of, are engaging enough as well, each having a different personality and good, sometimes funny, interactions during cutscenes. It all started great, really. Dragons, elves, fantasy, bad guys... But it just didn't turn out like one would think.

The game's Dragoneers are humans who were trained to protect the remaining dragons of the land. Valen is one of them. He's sent on a quest to investigate the dragon's nests after a black dragon attacks the capital, along with his friend Langley and two other Dragoneers. On the way he meets Euphe, a typical goofy girl who begins to travel with him. That's about all there is to the plot. The game consists mostly of traveling around the big city through several linear paths that lead to each of the dragons' dens. Then once you've defeated the boss in there and watched the little cutscene, you return and take the next path. The problem with the storyline is that there is never anything interesting happening. It's always all so cliche and ordinary. Euphe acts like a clumsy damsel. Mary manages to be an annoying brat posing as a grown-up. Ruslan feels like being a douche for no reason. Valen remains calm. You get so used to this set-up that it just doesn't matter anymore after a certain point. You already know the deal. The cutscenes are often irrelevant and the story never shocks you, even when something shocking happens. You just come to not care after a while.

It's not just the storyline that is generic in Dragoneer's Aria; the whole game is. I know pretty much all RPGs are meant this way, but usually the good ones have a little touch that makes them unique and thrilling to play. Dragoneer's Aria has nothing. All the locations in the game consist of straightforward paths that take 3 minutes to cross, in addition to two cities and a small village. I have nothing against traversing narrow lands, but open-ended ones usually work better for exploration. Dragoneer's Aria just feels too simple. You walk there. That's it. To make it worse, you can't open most of the treasure chests you find on your way. Most chests require a certain item to be opened that you can only obtain from certain enemies that have an incredibly low drop rate, so you just end up ignoring all the chests since you can't open them anyway. Plus, they're really not worth the time to fish for items that enemies will just most likely never drop.

Not that there isn't already a lot of fighting in Dragoneer's Aria. At some point, I started feeling as if the game was just all about fighting. I'm probably odd, but I love grinding in RPGs. I like to spend time building my team. However, in Dragoneer's Aria the grinding is so omnipresent, with nothing else to do on the side, that it got tedious very quickly. You simply cannot walk to a boss. If you want any chance to even come close to defeating one, you'll have to grind a lot in each area. When I say a lot, we're talking about 2 or 3 hours here. The slow battles drag on for very long, and some are very hard, so you'll probably end up saving the game after each battle so you don't lose anything. If it was just of the walking around and cutscenes, this is easily a 10 hour game, but because of all the grinding, it adds up to at least 30 to 40 hours. I think I've never grinded so much. And it's not like the battle system is that good to start with.

I like turn-based. Actually, I prefer it over real-time, unless it's a fun mix of the two. Hit Maker went with the typical turn-based for Dragoneer's Aria's battles. For the most part, it's pretty good. Each of your four characters can use special dragons skills, in addition to magic. You can set the magic yourself, so you get to decide who are your healers, your fighters, etc. You can also set the dragon skills to each, so every time you receive a stone from one of the dragons, you can set it to a character to change his skills (from the elements of ice, water, fire, etc). This makes for interesting customization, except that the way it works is really bad. The only way to level-up these skills is to use them in battle, and this takes time. Too much time actually to even bother. It works faster to use the same skills from the start that to switch and start back from scratch. Plus, the battles work on a Mana system, which make them drag on even more. You can only use a certain amount of skills per turn depending on your Mana. If you're short on Mana, no more skills, just normal attacks. That's fine, but the Mana bar takes way too long to fill back, so you can't use the skills as you please.

Despite all those flaws making pretty much all of the game, Hit Maker's RPG still has a few qualities, though not enough to be redeeming. For one, there's a nifty crafting system where you can make special weapons, armor and accessories by combining items together, but here again, the problem is that fetching those items requires too much trouble for what it's worth. Unless you're willing to spend another 50+ hours on the game (I guarantee you won't) battling enemies -- that's already all we're doing in the game --, you're probably not going to use the crafting system much, which is too bad. Actually, I'm trying to think of anything else that is good about the game, but I just can't. It's not that everything about it is bad, but it's just really so-so. There's nothing original here, nothing special; it's just all so generic, all so unimpressive. The game might look and sound good, but aside from that the game is really bland and kind of dull.

I really wanted to like Dragoneer's Aria. There aren't many RPGs on the PSP, let alone good ones, so seeing from screenshots of the game, this looked promising. But in the end, the game feels too much like a low budget RPG. The English voice-acting is horrid, the graphics look good, but very bland, the storyline starts great, but never picks up and gets very stale up to the crappy ending, the characters are fun, but too predictable, the music is neat, but barely audible, the loading times are atrocious (we're talking about 30 to 40 seconds here), there is far too much grinding, and the environments are way too small and enclosed. It's really hard to find something positive to say; every good thing about Dragoneer's Aria also has a downside. I'm not meaning it's a horrible game and you should stay away from it, it's still enjoyable at moments, especially if you're into generic J-RPGs, but we're very far from anything epic. If you can't get into it from the start, there is absolutely nowhere in the game where it gets any better. It just remains consistently average all the way through. It's the RPG 101 of generic role-playing; throw a few characters on a quest to save the land, make them walk and fight for long hours, and then abruptly end the game. That pretty much sums up Dragoneer's Aria.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 07/15/09, Updated 07/21/09

Game Release: Dragoneer's Aria (US, 08/21/07)