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After linking the soundtrack to Dragon's Crown on my gemlog, I decided to write more about the game. Developed by Vanillaware in 2013 and released on the PS Vita and PS3, I got it for my Vita. Dragon's Crown is a very D&D-esque side-scrolling fantasy beat-em-up in the vein of Chronicles of Mystara or Golden Axe. Its similarities with the latter give me nostalgia for my childhood when I would play Golden Axe with my brother, but Dragon's Crown is frankly a much better game.
There are six characters to choose from: the Fighter, Dwarf, Amazon, Elf, Wizard, and Sorceress, each with their own moveset and gameplay styles. You can play solo or with up to three friends, who can be either human or AI-controlled. As a beat-em-up, the game is very action-heavy and can get quite chaotic when playing with a full party of four; there are also some light roleplaying elements. I love multiplayer co-op games like this and wish there were more of them.
The action can get pretty chaotic with lots of characters and enemies on-screen
There's also a narrator, who you have different voices to choose from for, who describes things as though he (or she) were a Dungeon Master which also contributes to the feeling that you're playing a D&D campaign, which is pretty cool.
Beautiful scenery and Dungeon Master narration
The stages are wide and varied, from forests to sewers and caves to ruins and ancient fortresses -- the usual gamut of fantasy RPG locations. The monsters are likewise varied and incorporate most of the classics, inspired more by Western RPGs (as mentioned, the game is very transparently D&D-inspired) than their Japanese counterparts. The boss fights are especially spectacular and the bosses are often gigantic, with foes such as giant chimeras, medusae, cyclopes, archdemons, "gazers" (renamed beholders), and of course dragons. The music is excellent (hence why I linked it on my gemlog), and the game has a hand-painted artstyle that is both beautiful and highly distinctive.
Boss fight with a gigantic D&D-style chimera
Though speaking of the artstyle, I would perhaps be remiss if I didn't mention that the game attracted some controversy when it came out owing to what might clinically be described as cartoonishly exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics on some of the character designs (primarily the sorceress and amazon) and in some of the event art. Now, I'm not one of those neo-Puritans who needs to get out smelling salts and a fainting couch in the face of "sexualized" character designs -- I'm more likely to appreciate having something attractive to look at while I play -- but I'll acknowledge that taken too far it can be in poor taste (and after a certain point there's a boomerang effect where it stops being attractive and just becomes trashy anyway). The sorceress in particular is the "bounciest" character I've ever seen in a videogame; in some of her animations it's so over the top as to mostly just be cartoonishly absurd in a slapstick way. Even the sprite animator himself later said he might have gone a little overboard with some of the animations. All of which is to say, YMMV and if a cartoonishly well-endowed sorceress bouncing all over the screen sounds like a turn-off to you, you'll probably want to stay away from this one.
It's not only the female characters who have cartoonishly exaggerated proportions
Nonetheless, it's been probably a decade since I've played this game and lately I find myself wanting to dig it out again. I think it might be available on the PS5's online marketplace, and so far I've gotten so little use out of my PS5 that it's been a pretty wasted purchase, so maybe on my vacation I'll see if the game is available and if so, buy it (again) and give it a whirl.
Straight out of Golden Axe, the ability to ride monstrous beasts
There's plenty of footage of the game on Youtube. For example, here's a co-op playthrough using the fighter and elf (from which the screenshots above were taken):
Dragon's Crown Fighter+Elf Playthrough
Believe it or not, not even close to the bounciest of the sorceress' animations
