Dragoneer's Aria Review

Written by: Alec Hilton Posted: 28th April 2008

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Monster based RPG hit the PSP.

Dragoneer's Aria Details:

	RPG
	PSP
	Koei
	Koei

12+

Out Now

N/A

What happens when you take the traditional themes of RPGs and turn it on its head? Well, Dragoon’s Aria is what happens; the basic laws of RPGs are taken and completely flipped. Normally that sounds like a basis for an excellent game, but unfortunately this is not true for Dragoon’s Aria at all.

The background story of the game follows a slightly different path than that of traditional RPGs in that you are not totally tasked to save the world as normally seen. Hundreds of years before the setting of the game, the Holy Dragon, Grinlek, was defeated and killed by a black dragon, but when he died six dragons were born from his sprit. These dragons, along with the help of dragoons, who were powerful human knights the black dragon was defeated and banished.

As the game starts you take the role of Valen Kessler, a young dragoon in training, on the day of his graduation a black dragon breaks out from the sky high above the capital city of Granadis and destroys it. Valen is then assigned to seek out the six dragons and check on them, along with this mammoth task he is also charged with discovering why the black dragon has reappeared.

So enters a particularly hazy section of the title, the gameplay, though the structure is there, the substance isn’t. From the beginning small holes appear in the structure of the game and as you progress they get bigger and bigger, until there is no way to avoid them. One of the biggest of these problems is the battle system that is employed; you have both basic strike attacks and more powerful skills to use against your foes. The skill attacks require mana, and mana can only be acquired by making successful hits on your enemies. This by itself doesn’t sound so bad, but as your characters grows and gains new moves, the cost in mana increases, this is where the real problems rest. You gain 50 points for each hit you make on a creature; the thing is that you need 100 points to make one bar of mana, so the gaining of mana if your accuracy is low can take forever. The worst part is that your mana total is capped at 10 so as your moves get more powerful and the mana costs go up, your left with the problem that once you have used a powerful attack, you will find that you can never use another move near that power again in the battle, which ends up being a real pain for the tougher battles in the game.

Another flaw in the battle system is that you can never tell what kind of creature you are going to come face to face with as, although you can see an enemy’s location on the map, all you see is an icon to represent the monster and that’s it. So you could be facing some impossibly powerful creature or a monster that only takes a hit to kill, its all potluck.

Unfortunately the battle system has a number of flaws and problems in it that can cause you endless frustration and can end your enjoyment of any battle. But the biggest of all the problems is the length of time it takes to complete a battle and the improbability that you can exit one. Basically a normal battle against field creatures can take anywhere up to 15 minutes, which really isn’t any good for travel as a portable game should be. There are points in the game were you are too weak or need to get to a place quickly so you just want to avoid battles entirely, nope sorry no such luck there. If you are seen on the map by a monster icon, which is 99% of the time, they will chase you down; they seem unwilling to give up and will chase you across entire sections of the map. Once they do catch you, you can if you want turn tail and run, which I managed about 15 times in the course of the game, you have to be lucky enough to escape which it is never a sure thing, and the creature will probably track you down again.

There are some good parts of Dragoneer’s Aria even if they are few and far between, the characters though stereotypical have a set type and stick to it which means that you can tailor your party to fight each monster pretty well. The characters are a bit seen-through and plain, they are all pulled out of the age-old formula for RPGs and they really haven’t been changed too much, which isn’t totally a bad thing. We have Euphe, a young woman who is surrounded in mystery, there is also Mary, who is a spunky, young pirate captain and finally there is Ruslan, who is a cynical swordsman.

With the graphics and sound quality of Dragoneer’s Aria, you really can’t expect too much as it is a PSP game, but on the sound side of things it really doesn’t sound that bad. The battle music is okay to listen to, but does grate after a while as it will loop over and over in your extended battles. But the levelling up and after battle stat summary music is a nice change with some lovely piano notes for added favour. The voice acting can be the greatest and the poorest part of the sound effects, which is a real shame. A lot of the blame can be levelled at the script which is no where near the best thing that we have heard, but about a quarter of the blame is resting solely on the voice actors shoulders.

The graphics are another story totally unfortunately, we have seen some of the amazing graphics that the PSP can produce in the right hands with games like Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core, but Dragoneer’s Aria never reaches anywhere near that kind of standard, the creatures although there is some nice detail on the textures and skins on some others look just plan nasty. The main characters fair better but still wouldn’t win a beauty contest.

Overall, if you’re a die-hard RPG fan and need a fix then Dragoneer’s Aria will fill a gap until Crisis Core lands on our shores. But if you are looking for a game to play on the train journey into work then look elsewhere as more often than not you will be missing your stop or just shutting the game off and losing all your game progress on that trip.