RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

Dragonica Online is a very solidly designed game which is unfortunately marred by some of the same issues that have plagued other free to play MMOs for years now. It offers arcade-style beat-’em-up combat that makes the game genuinely entertaining to play, and provides a wealth of activities for players who are interested in more than mindless grinding, but it also has some significant issues with its level curve, as well as some unpleasant balance issues. On the whole, Dragonica Online is a good choice for those looking for an unusual and active online game, but it doesn’t deal with the pacing issues unique to online gaming any better than most free to play MMOs.

On a superficial level, the combat of Dragonica Online resembles the combo-based gameplay of LaTale. However, where combos in LaTale were really just long strings of skills slung at a grounded opponent, Dragonica Online‘s system encourages players to knock the foe down, kick them into the air and juggle them. Skills are generally geared more towards making it easier to link attacks into juggles or knockdowns, with only a few actually geared towards raw damage output. This system is at its strongest when players work together to create huge strings of combos, with one player knocking the foe into the air so that a second can juggle them, while a third waits to slam the monster into the ground with a giant squeaky hammer. Combat is very fast and active, and the variety of attacks helps keep combat fresh and interesting.

A seahorse scale is just one of the odd little points of interest to be found.

Dragonica uses a fairly rudimentary class system, with four initial classes branching out into eight advanced classes, after which players are locked into a third and final class promotion. The basic classes are extremely basic; Dragonica offers players the choice of a Warrior, Thief, Magician or Archer. Warriors can be promoted to the physically defensive Knight, or to a slow-but-devastating Gladiator; Thieves can become Tricksters, which specialize in area-of-effect damage and bizarre toys, or silent stealthy Ninja; Magicians can pick between the support and healing-focused Priest, or the more offensively-oriented Battlemage; and finally, Archers select between the crossbow and missile launcher-wielding Ranger and the more nature friendly Hunter. All in all, the game offers a solid variety of classes and styles of play, and for the most part, the variety is managed well. Almost all of the classes have a role to play in combat, and they do it well, but there is a significant tilt in the game design towards the long range classes.

During dungeons, known in this game as Mission Maps, players are sent through a series of small, mostly linear maps that very closely resemble the stage setup of some of the arcade beat-’em-up games of yesteryear. After defeating the boss that waits at the end of the Map, players are given a grade, calculated by how many combos the player had, how many times they attacked, the number of times they fell in combat, and most significantly, how often they were hit by an enemy. Long range classes have a significant advantage here simply by virtue of not having to be anywhere near the enemy in order to damage them, while not having any real disadvantage in attack output to compensate. This reward scheme, along with the lack of any way to grab and hold an enemy’s attention, also makes it extremely difficult for any class that tries to play defensively. As it stands, Knights, which suffer the double stigma of being a defensively focused close-range class, are extremely difficult to use effectively.

As is often the case with free to play MMOs, Dragonica has a few issues with pacing and balance. The game’s level cap is extremely low — only level 60 at the moment — which leads to a great deal of weight being placed on individual levels. The difference between one level and another is frequently the difference between mercilessly slaughtering an enemy and being nearly incapable of landing a blow on it. This is less of a problem in the early parts of the game, where the levels go by fast and furious, but becomes a significant issue once the rate of experience points begins to drop off. As it stands, reaching level 20 and the first job class promotion is easy enough to do in a couple of evenings, but hitting level 30 is like smacking a brick wall. Quests dry up, and the player is expected to grind for the vast majority of each level. This becomes extremely difficult once the player has outleveled the Mission Maps, as the next step up, Chaos Maps, require players to collect a special kind of currency called Devil Soul Stones not only to gain entrance to the map, but also to buy special shields to protect them from the toxic atmosphere contained within. The practical upshot of this is that Dragonica essentially forces players to grind in order to grind.

In the end, Dragonica Online would probably have done much better to have a vastly higher level cap, in order to allow players to maintain the fast paced feel of the early levels. As it stands, the arcade-style action of the early levels is quickly drawn down by the snail-like grind of the mid to late levels. Given that Dragonica has no real overriding theme beyond the style of combat it presents, the sharp decline in pace is a significant disappointment.

The game’s wide variety of side activities does help to counteract this unfortunate loss of pacing. Dragonica offers player vs player combat, Daily Quests — which, as the name suggests, can be completed once each day, usually for a random, yet useful, reward — and a fair number of achievements, which present players with collectable medals for hitting certain milestones. The downside to this is that Daily Quests often have tedious or unusually difficult completion requirements, and achievements don’t really have much of an actual effect on gameplay. The side activities Dragonica offers are nice diversions, but they don’t do enough to mitigate the grind.

Dragonica derives its name from the backstory it presents, which paints a picture of an ancient world where humans and dragons co-existed. Of course, such a pleasant state of affairs could hardly be allowed to continue, and eventually humans and dragons went to war against each other. Fast forward a couple thousand years to the present day, and the player embarks on a quest, ostensibly to prevent the resurrection of an evil dragon, although you’d never guess that if the opening sequence didn’t come out and tell you so. The actual plot tends to ignore the backstory of the game, instead sending players on the long series of fetch quests that MMO players are now so well accustomed to. What little plot there is largely deals with the mutation of animals by a mad scientist, and the player’s attempts to join the Dragon Fellowship, a coalition of adventurers dedicated to helping the little guy.

As is often the case with MMOs, the plotline is thin to the point of being almost nonexistant. There are few characters with any real personality, and fewer still that even make it to being two-dimensional. The tale being told has no real theme or purpose to it, other than as an excuse to send the player out for ten Wolf Pelts or to kill fifteen of whatever monster happens to be hanging about.

On occasion, enemies you’ve defeated will get flung towards the screen, with comical results.

At first blush, the visual style of Dragonica Online will seem extremely familiar to most players. The super-deformed characters combine with a bright palette of colors to create a happy-happy style that a great deal of games use, but Dragonica backs it up with solid variety in area types and a surprisingly good eye for detail. As with so many games, Dragonica features wide rolling fields in the early parts of the game and deep, dank caves in the later parts, but the plains are packed with flocks of sheep and slowly tilting windmills, and the caves are full of elegant stalagmites, erupting lava pools, and bizarre glowing orbs of fungi. In short, although the game generally sticks to the tried-and-true when it comes to area concepts, the artful execution and attention to detail goes a helluva long way towards making each one intriguing.

The soundtrack of Dragonica is surprisingly subtle, given the visual style it has to mesh with. Where the visuals tend to stick to bright and obvious, the music moves with an unusual degree of grace, creating a very solid counterpoint between the two. The only real complaint here is that there simply isn’t a great degree of variety to be had. Though each individual area is technically self-contained, it shares a general theme with several surrounding areas, and therefore uses the same music. The practical upshot of which is that all six beach-themed areas use the same fairly short track, as do all four of the ruins areas, and so on and so forth. By the time a player finally exits a particular theme group, the song in question tends to have worn out its welcome.

On the whole, Dragonica Online isn’t a particularly difficult game, especially for Archers and Magicians. The game’s interface is effective and easy to use, and although the placement of some of the hotkeys are a bit awkward, it’s easy enough to reposition them. The only other thing worth mentioning is that Dragonica currently doesn’t have very good joypad support, which is a bit of a shame for such an action-oriented game.

What it all boils down to is that although Dragonica Online presents entertaining combat, engaging artistic design, and a solid amount of side activities, it is still bogged down by the same problems so many free to play games experience. A mind-numbing slog at higher levels, a flaccid and uninteresting plotline, and the same quest system and story progression players have seen a thousand times over, all of which drags down an otherwise quite enjoyable and fast-paced game. Still, Dragonica Online is still a very young game, and it will be interesting to see where forthcoming updates take it.