[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.
