DragonSword : Awakening

원신이나 명조 같은 서브컬처 오픈월드의 익숙한 감성을 가챠 스트레스 없는 패키지 게임으로 잘 구현해 냈습니다. 다소 지루한 스토리와 몇몇 편의성은 아쉽지만, 찰진 타격감의 태그 액션과 준수한 그래픽 덕분에 꽤 재밌게 즐겼습니다. 앞으로 어떻게 발전해 나갈지 기대되는 게임입니다!

Gonna spare you from the "gacha without gacha" comparisons, they're kind of meaningless unless you've already played these kinds of games before. Do you like upgrading your gear/characters with materials you earn from doing instanced dungeons? Do you like collecting characters (almost like a lego game) but in the context of an rpg? Do you like combat that is mechanically simple but still rewards good execution & good team synergies? Then this game may be for you. Otherwise you may be disappointed.

De maneira surpreendente me aprisionou, melhor de tudo é que não é gacha, você consegue todos os personagens simplesmente jogando e obtendo eles, jogo tem apenas 1 mês e tem de tudo pra melhorar ainda mais e alcançar uma quantidade excelente de vendas <3

I don't care to mention the pros, because the cons outweigh it by so much that I've chosen to stop playing because of it: TOO. MUCH. USELESS. YAPPING. I've tried to give this a chance. -There are dozens upon dozens of micro-stages where you walk short distances just to trigger ANOTHER brief chat with a nearby NPC. There's just too much filler conversations where nothing important is said. They are just there to get their 2 cents in. -I read this was originally structured as a live-service gacha game, then converted to a standalone product. However, the quest design retains the same repetitive mobile-style padding of those gacha slop games. -Combat is flashy, but ultimately has 0 depth or challenge to it from the amount I was able to play, which was very little. I only completed 1 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dungeon out of the entire 4 hours I played just doing the main quest line. ONE DUNGEON, which lasted maybe 10 minutes of gameplay. The rest was just open-world traveling/clearing of mobs, followed by more yapping. -No English VO, only Korean. If you don't choose Korean, the game literally turns off the dialogue volume. This turns it into a book reading game whether you have Korean on or not (unless you understand Korean). I genuinely cannot fathom how this game has this many positive reviews. It's clear this game has a target audience and It has to be from gacha players who are so used to getting their time and money wasted from poor gacha designs followed by useless exposition. I don't know if the developers will ever do anything about this. Oh well

既存の作品をかなり研究している印象を受けますが、実際にプレイしてみると非常に面白く、完成度が高いです。 最近のソシャゲは、せっかく好きなキャラを引いて愛着を持って凸を重ねても、1年もすれば新キャラのインフレに置いていかれ、産廃のようになってしまう……そんな環境に追いつくことに疲れてしまっていました。だからこそ、ソシャゲだらけの昨今のゲーム業界に、この作品にはぜひ一石を投じてほしいと強く期待しています。 今後、キャラクターや新マップ追加といったDLCが展開された際には、ぜひ購入させていただきたいと考えております。 DLC衣装は乳が揺れるのでお勧めです

It's not a bad game necessarily, but it's exceedingly average and doesn't really do anything especially well. This was supposed to be a gacha game, and that's clear when you play it because it rips off every single existing gacha game except that there's no pull economy. And let's be clear here, the developers intended for this to be a gacha game. The only reason it isn't is because they lost their publisher and they were forced to release it this way. They did not skip the gacha out of the goodness of their hearts or to take some noble stand against predatory gaming practices. They got into a bad situation and managed to get lucky because people wanted to rally behind the lack of gacha in the game. But anyone who plays any other gacha games would know that this thing would have been dead on arrival had it released as a gacha. This game is completely outclassed by games like Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves. So the question then becomes: why would you spend $30 on this when Genshin and WuWa are free? The combat in those are better, the presentation is better, the graphics and character models in WuWa are way better, the puzzles are better, the voice acting is better, both games have 100+ hours of completely free content, huge sprawling stories that have had years of updates, tons of unique and varied open areas, tons of different gameplay mechanics, and did I mention they're both completely free. So you might say, well in this game I get all the characters and I don't have to pay for them. And to that I'd say you've probably never spent $30 on a gacha before because you can easily get all the characters you want with that over the course of several months (and there are plenty of people who play and enjoy those games without ever spending and get plenty of the characters they want). Or you'll say, well in this game nothing is time-gated. And yeah, kind of, you got me there. But none of the main story elements in a game like WuWa are time-gated, so I'd still argue that there's 100+ hours of game that isn't time-gated. This review is kind of a rant, but I'm baffled by the glazing this game is getting while being painfully inferior to numerous games on the market that are completely free. If this game were free, I could see giving it a thumbs up for being entertaining for a few hours, but at $30 you're not getting a good value. I can't wait to see how they handle story and content updates (you know, the thing that all the other games give you for free every 6 weeks). For what it's worth, it runs fine on Proton, though I had to keep HDR off because it was turning some visual effects completely white.

고봉밥 국산 서브컬쳐 RPG 여캐들이 이쁘고 탐험하는 맛도 있고 스펙 올려서 딜찍누 하는 맛도 있음 전투는 일반적으로 사용하는 스킬 두개와 속성게이지가 차면 사용 가능한 스킬 두 개가 있음 캐릭 세 개를 조합해서 쓰는데 대체로 강한 조합은 정해져 있음 도전과제는 노가다 요소가 꽤 있고 탐험 같은 거는 할만 하지만 동물 종류 별로 500마리 잡으라는 도전과제는 많이 짜증남 가격도 싸고 분량도 많으니 추천 A content-rich Korean subculture-style RPG. The female characters are attractive, the exploration is enjoyable, and there’s a satisfying sense of power progression where you can simply overpower enemies with raw stats. Combat involves using two standard skills, plus two additional skills that become available once the elemental gauge fills up. You field a team of three characters, and there are generally established "meta" combinations that are the strongest. The achievements involve quite a bit of grinding; while exploration is fun, the requirement to hunt 500 of each animal type is extremely annoying. It’s affordable and offers plenty of content, so I recommend it.

[h1] A Deeply Strange Experience [/h1] Dragonsword awakening, from what little I managed to dig out of google's enshittified caverns, is a sequel to both an MMO I've never heard of, and about ten mobile games that I have heard even less about. Which could go some way to explaining why the story feels so incomplete, as it seems to be structured as a prologue or origin story for several of the central characters, which as a standalone story is understandably Insufficient, and I have no desire to play a bunch of gatcha slop in order to have greater context or investment. When I say that the story feels incomplete, it's not that I'm dropped into the middle of ongoing proceedings without sufficient context, it's that this story simply doesn't end, not even in a cliffhanger sense but in an "there is quite literally an unresolved Final Boss who showed up at a funeral to swear destruction on the kingdom midway through the game and all we did was take out two of his subordinates and fail to re-assemble the previous hero squad" This is act one, all setup and no payoff, all balls and no shaft. And that is a real problem, because it throws into sharp relief how badly other elements of the game hold up. The core combat is sound but simplistic enough to get repetative, the korean voice-acting is probably good, I'm not really equipped to judge, the stylisation mostly works, but some of the texturing and colour palette work looks uncanny, the canned animations during dialogue get repetative and play into how a lot of the characters are broad stock archetypes without much development. The story progression is static and lifeless, and often involves walking between three people in the same room to talk to all of them rather than just play a single cutscene, or banal "pick this up and put it down over there" environment interaction that feels like a default system that came free with the engine, that is never iterated on in any interesting way. Other complaints feel like emergent properties of the kind of game this is, clearly heavily inspired by the Genshin Impact subgenre of gatcha open-world games, but with the gatcha elements stripped out. But the flaws in storytelling and game design that are inherited from that particular Gatcha Slop subgenre remains, the absurd amount of things to level up, resources to collect, upgrades and crafting to simply jog in place power wise, the simplicity of the combat meant to function on phones or with minimal cognitive investment, the absolute pre-school tier "puzzles" in the environment, the relentless busywork of hundreds of generic chests guarded by 3-5 basic enemies throughout the world, the grind, oh lord the grind. The most fatal (and fascinating) flaw is how Characters work beyond the starters the game deigns to give you, this is from my hazy knowledge, a common problem in this lineage of gatcha games that attempt to have actual stories. Any character you *can* recruit has to remain in a state of quantum superposition throughout the story, where they *exist* but aren't necessarily allied with your team or not allied with your team, because you could recruit them in any order, this game choosing to parcel them out via tickets rather than how Gatcha's would do it. This is an example of the true unforgivable sin, in a supposedly *character-driven* story, the designers made an unforced error of letting the player grab characters randomly, which means it was written to ignore them. One quest early on quite literally unlocked a specific character rather than giving me a generic ticket, which means that they could have accounted for that in the story, have that character formally be part of the mercenary crew, or at least working alongside them, but the entire rest of the game they're treated like ships passing in the night. Sane story-driven RPGs weave squadmates into the storyline, they Know when certain characters will be included because they put the characters there and planned around when they would be recruited, even in games where you have the option of say, a couple of different characters being in a scene and having something to say, recruiting or not recruiting an optional character, getting characters in a couple of different orders, deciding if a given character has a lot or a little to say about a given mission or story beat. I'm not saying every team-based RPG needs to do it Bioware style, but it is an example of a pretty Solved formula at this point, one that gives the writers and designers the ability to have characters be both tightly wound into the main story, and to have access to their personal storylines paced out. In this game there are questlines specifically relating to some of the recruitable characters that go into their history, motivations and skills, helping to flesh them out, sounds good right? Well... yes and no, none of these character quests relate to the core characters who are canonically always with you and show up in the main story cutscenes wisecracking, I know about as much about the inner life of Aria now than I did when starting the game, but even this level of effort ends up wasted because of the aforementioned disconnect Recruited characters still end up having from the main story, their backstory quests exist in a narrative cul-de-sac, a gulag of characterization, an oubliette of development, and they play out less as you helping a sister-in-arms than justifying the DLC costume they change into during. This is generational copy loss, this is dedication to design decisions that are actively detrimental outside of a gatchaslop environment, added thoughtlessly without understanding what they do or why to use or not use them, just because another game was successful while having them. It's cargo culting, and I genuinely fear for a generation of designers that think the exploitative psiop mechanics of Gatcha games are *good design* worth importing into other types of games, and for that matter, the surprising number of people who apparently enjoyed this game at the time of this review's posting.

DragonSword: Awakening is a title I genuinely wanted to love. The premise of an open-world, anime-style action RPG entirely stripped of predatory monetization and stamina gates sounds like an instant win on paper. However, removing the gacha framework also strips away the smoke and mirrors, exposing a core gameplay loop that simply cannot compete with the polish, mechanical depth, or kinetic combat of the genre titans, whether it is Genshin Impact, Zenless Zone Zero, or Wuthering Waves. Its single biggest selling point is that it is a buy-to-play experience, but beyond that single distinction, the game fails to innovate in any meaningful way. Judged strictly as a gacha title, it would be considered mediocre at best; judged as a standalone premium action RPG, its structural shortcomings become impossible to ignore. The cracks show earliest in the combat design. Moment-to-moment encounters feel generic, plagued by a lack of expressive mechanical identity. Elemental and status effects do not interlock or stack in ways that reward creative synergy, leaving the combat flow feeling static and uninspired. Pushing into the mid-tier difficulties of the Gates quickly turns the progression into an endurance test, where difficulty scaling relies almost entirely on turning encounters into tedious damage sponges rather than introducing smarter mechanics. Even matching elemental weaknesses to enemy profiles yields little tangible impact, and while the roster of foes appears varied on the surface, their behavior and attack choreography lack distinct personality. The narrative fares no better, delivering a standard fantasy storyline that lacks the pacing, emotional stakes, or memorable story beats needed to stay engaging. By the ten-hour mark, the plot struggled to justify the time investment. While the visual craft behind the character models and animations is undeniably clean, and a few party members like Johnny inject some much-needed charm, the broader cast remains confined to rigid archetypes with little agency beyond pushing the plot forward. To the developers' credit, the technical execution is commendable. Optimization is rock solid, running smoothly across the board, and the visual presentation is polished even if the overall art direction plays it too safe. There is a deeply admirable ambition in trying to offer an honest, non-predatory alternative in a space dominated by multi-million-dollar live-service budgets. But good intentions and fair monetization cannot substitute for mechanical depth, compelling combat, and a narrative that pulls you in. DragonSword: Awakening is not an outright terrible game, but it lacks the identity and richness necessary to make it worth your time. Verdict: 5/10 (Not Recommended)