“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”.
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