“Dragon Lore”
Developer: Jaisen Laviero
Genre: RPG
Status: Demo
Length: 20 to 30 minutes of gameplay and dialogue
Best Feature: Music (Marginally)
Worst Feature: Gameplay
Recommended: No

“Dragon Lore” is your run-of-the-mill RPG, and that’s about it. The idea for this game seems to be ripped right from esoteric legends, esoteric because their wordings were misleading and vague. The game pushes you overly-long introduction and then forces you into the standard “Go to this cave and do this”-type gameplay.

STORY: 5/20 The is a dull one of a seemingly random chosen individual and his friend who are called upon to solve the mystery behind the destruction of their town, which seemed to have been destroyed for completely random reasons for those of us who are entitled to omni-cognizance. The characters traipse around a small area of the map doing this and that until a connection to a former hero-to-be gone evil (who the developer named after himself -_- ) is introduced, at which point the game ends abruptly.

CHARACTERS: 3/15 A little better than the actual plot of the game is the characters. Albeit the story takes the characters nowhere, they at least have personalities… At least Lado and Elise, the two filler characters introduced, Biran and Larry, could’ve just as well been called Biggs and Wedge, or Solider1 and Soldier2. Mind you that neither of the two personality-imbued characters have much in the way of meat on their persona, they pretty much cartoon characters who can go from despondent to elated in a matter of lines.

POLITICS: 2/10 There was very little the story actually had to do with politics, but it at least hinted at established government, or at least the Xenton Mage Academy had some sort of political pull in the area.

MUSIC AND SOUND: 6/10 Tolerable, but nothing spectacular. Too much music from other games, but at least I couldn’t recognize any Squaresoft midis. The battle theme was neither exciting or even close to mood-setting, and some of the music was just outright annoying. But, to contrast, some of the music was quality work and well-placed.

GRAPHICS: 4/8 A lot of RTP graphics, in fact, chipsets were entirely RTP graphics… notably, RTP graphics from RPGMaker 2003’s RTP! While this is a little better, it’s still unacceptable, especially with the way they were used. Towns were flat and unattractive and their insides were similarly unsuitable. The only non-RTP chipsets were used to make the chipset-based CMS *tsk* *tsk* *tsk*. The facesets were all original RTP, RTP edits or commonly used facesets similar to that of the RTP… At least everything looked the same. Most of the featured monster graphics were taken from very old 8-bit games, and are very uneasy on the eyes. The saving grace to the graphics, if there is one, is the custom battle animations, which were nicely done.

SYSTEMS: 2/9 Not good. A few CMSs were present, but there were all chipset-based. A big no-no from a programming aspect. As usual, the ESC button calls up the custom menu which can be used to access the normal menu, which is inconvenient, especially since nothing from the custom menu is of any use in the demo. It appears as though some other systems had been programmed into the Common Events area, but none of them came up.

GAMEPLAY: 4/15 Pretty bad, bluntly. Gameplay offers nothing new and doesn’t give you any of your essentials very well. *Great* mini-games, like the ten-second race to get to your date, despite the fact that you there’s been no previous indications as to where you have to go, only decrease from the enjoyment.

(SUB-CATEGORY: DIFFICULTY – 3/5 Actually not too bad. The first dungeon was well-balanced (although very unexciting). The second dungeon however, was a little problematic ‘cause every monster casts a rather devastating attack that hits the entire party.

(SUB-CATEGORY: FUN: 1/5 Unfortunately, it’s just not there. This game is not fun to play. The story is written like a bad cartoon, executed like an 8-bit RPG and leaves a taste in your mouth like cigarettes.

OVERALL: 30/97 (31%) All in all, despite the fact that it fails in almost every category, this game is not the worst. It’s very “newbie”-ish, but if you were a newbie, you could do a lot worse than “Dragon Lore”.