Liege Dragon (Android)
Feb. 4th, 2024 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckro1,000 years ago, Abigore the evil dragon blocked out the sun, so three heroes summoned Oberon the good dragon and returned light to the world. Then they founded three kingdoms and the dragons went to sleep. Now, Abigore has returned and set his monsters forth, and a mysterious white-haired boy was found in the mountains without his memory. Taking the name Yuran, meaning “friend of dragons,” he becomes our protagonist.
The first thing you notice is the quality of the translation...or lack thereof. Now, I shouldn’t be too picky because I’ve definitely seen much, much worse in my time (especially from KEMCO!), but in the second scene the king of Blaze is very concerned with losing his “suzerainty” over the other two kingdoms, and that set the level of quality for me.
Unlike most EXE-Create games, this doesn’t have difficulty levels. Also, it didn’t give any free IAP currency when I bought it. (You get LDP from winning battles, but it’s like 1 point every five battles. So you’ll get a few free consumables or extra weapon slots by the endgame if you don’t buy anything.) This has a shockingly long start-to-slime time, with almost half an hour of play before the first battle.
In a cute innovation, most enemies are represented by clusters of monsters, and hitting them knocks off a certain number roughly proportional to their HP lost.
You get elemental stones as you defeat monsters, and can use them to unlock spells (one at a time, in any order you choose) for your characters. There’s clearly intended to be some flexibility in whether characters are mages or not, as all four characters can wear any armor but the robe armor improves your Int at the cost of lower defense. You can learn the most powerful magic very early if you save up for it, but you definitely don’t need it and you can’t afford the MP costs anyway. There are also elemental combo skills you get by learning their prerequisites, skills you learn from sidequests, and physical skills your characters get from leveling.
There are two trophy sets: One gets you items and bonus skills for accomplishments; pretty standard. The other is the “Monpletes” list, which lets you get bonuses for killing a certain number of each monster, so long as you use the “Researcher” skill on that monster first. This functionally puts in a “beat 5 of X monster” quest for every enemy in the game, but you don’t have to go back and forth to towns to get them. That’s not too bad, even if it means you need to use Researcher on every monster the first time you meet it. There are also standard sidequests in towns with fetch quests and bonus bosses, and some of them give you event items that weaken the plot bosses. (Complaint #2: There’s an early quest to collect “green film” from a monster in the first dungeon. That monster, as far as I can tell, never drops that item and you can’t steal it. Actually, the stealing skills never worked for me on anything.)
There’s also a weapon upgrading system (that’s limited and less breakable than some others—you can’t easily stack your built-up best weapon onto the next level up) and a weapon lotto that you can use LDP or Tickers to get weapons from. Enemies drop a lot of weapons, too. The system “tops out” earlier than in other games I’ve seen it—you can only put two skills and a +99 bonus on any one weapon.
PLOT SPOILERS:
The big twist (as you’d guess from the start) is that Yuran is Oberon the holy dragon. The holy dragon who was guiding you the whole time was actually the evil dragon, who was directing you to finish unsealing it. (The mysterious man chasing you is the younger Prince of a rival nation, who freed the evil dragon out of jealousy and lust for power.) The three other party members are all representatives of the three nations and descendants of the original heroes.
The interesting plot point is that “Silky,” who presents as a girl, reveals about four hours in that she’s a boy. And the rest of the party is cool with it and consider this a trust-building event. My original reading of this was as a lousy translation of the idea that she’s a trans girl. A little wonky, but an attempt at inclusiveness, maybe? But then there’s a very awkward scene with a lecherous vampire who tries to hit on Silky and is distressed to learn she’s male, which leans into some unpleasant tropes. And at the end it’s revealed that Silky is actually the elder Prince of one of the other countries, who ran off to be a traveling bard. I think the idea is that they’re a crossdresser, but still identify as male? I mean, the party and pretty much all the NPCs are presented as supportive of whatever is going on here, so that’s good. But I don’t think they’re getting representation points for it.
I only bothered to get the “Normal Ending”, because (Complaint #3) honestly this goes on too long for what it has—I was ready to go fight the evil dragon three dungeons and four hours before the game actually let me. In that, Sleipner (Silky’s brother, the younger prince who started this mess) sacrifices himself to seal the evil dragon and Yuran/Oberon goes back to sleep in his castle. Apparently there are three bonus postgame dungeons and something like 6 possible endings depending on how completist you’re willing to be.
Overall: I’d call this middle-tier. It wasn’t fantastic, but it had enough to it that I played through the whole thing. The difficulty was fair (if a little uneven) but it had some system and pacing issues that other KEMCO/EXE-Create games have done better at. And while I don’t think Silky’s storyline was offensive, I think it was questionable enough to turn people off.
The first thing you notice is the quality of the translation...or lack thereof. Now, I shouldn’t be too picky because I’ve definitely seen much, much worse in my time (especially from KEMCO!), but in the second scene the king of Blaze is very concerned with losing his “suzerainty” over the other two kingdoms, and that set the level of quality for me.
Unlike most EXE-Create games, this doesn’t have difficulty levels. Also, it didn’t give any free IAP currency when I bought it. (You get LDP from winning battles, but it’s like 1 point every five battles. So you’ll get a few free consumables or extra weapon slots by the endgame if you don’t buy anything.) This has a shockingly long start-to-slime time, with almost half an hour of play before the first battle.
In a cute innovation, most enemies are represented by clusters of monsters, and hitting them knocks off a certain number roughly proportional to their HP lost.
You get elemental stones as you defeat monsters, and can use them to unlock spells (one at a time, in any order you choose) for your characters. There’s clearly intended to be some flexibility in whether characters are mages or not, as all four characters can wear any armor but the robe armor improves your Int at the cost of lower defense. You can learn the most powerful magic very early if you save up for it, but you definitely don’t need it and you can’t afford the MP costs anyway. There are also elemental combo skills you get by learning their prerequisites, skills you learn from sidequests, and physical skills your characters get from leveling.
There are two trophy sets: One gets you items and bonus skills for accomplishments; pretty standard. The other is the “Monpletes” list, which lets you get bonuses for killing a certain number of each monster, so long as you use the “Researcher” skill on that monster first. This functionally puts in a “beat 5 of X monster” quest for every enemy in the game, but you don’t have to go back and forth to towns to get them. That’s not too bad, even if it means you need to use Researcher on every monster the first time you meet it. There are also standard sidequests in towns with fetch quests and bonus bosses, and some of them give you event items that weaken the plot bosses. (Complaint #2: There’s an early quest to collect “green film” from a monster in the first dungeon. That monster, as far as I can tell, never drops that item and you can’t steal it. Actually, the stealing skills never worked for me on anything.)
There’s also a weapon upgrading system (that’s limited and less breakable than some others—you can’t easily stack your built-up best weapon onto the next level up) and a weapon lotto that you can use LDP or Tickers to get weapons from. Enemies drop a lot of weapons, too. The system “tops out” earlier than in other games I’ve seen it—you can only put two skills and a +99 bonus on any one weapon.
PLOT SPOILERS:
The big twist (as you’d guess from the start) is that Yuran is Oberon the holy dragon. The holy dragon who was guiding you the whole time was actually the evil dragon, who was directing you to finish unsealing it. (The mysterious man chasing you is the younger Prince of a rival nation, who freed the evil dragon out of jealousy and lust for power.) The three other party members are all representatives of the three nations and descendants of the original heroes.
The interesting plot point is that “Silky,” who presents as a girl, reveals about four hours in that she’s a boy. And the rest of the party is cool with it and consider this a trust-building event. My original reading of this was as a lousy translation of the idea that she’s a trans girl. A little wonky, but an attempt at inclusiveness, maybe? But then there’s a very awkward scene with a lecherous vampire who tries to hit on Silky and is distressed to learn she’s male, which leans into some unpleasant tropes. And at the end it’s revealed that Silky is actually the elder Prince of one of the other countries, who ran off to be a traveling bard. I think the idea is that they’re a crossdresser, but still identify as male? I mean, the party and pretty much all the NPCs are presented as supportive of whatever is going on here, so that’s good. But I don’t think they’re getting representation points for it.
I only bothered to get the “Normal Ending”, because (Complaint #3) honestly this goes on too long for what it has—I was ready to go fight the evil dragon three dungeons and four hours before the game actually let me. In that, Sleipner (Silky’s brother, the younger prince who started this mess) sacrifices himself to seal the evil dragon and Yuran/Oberon goes back to sleep in his castle. Apparently there are three bonus postgame dungeons and something like 6 possible endings depending on how completist you’re willing to be.
Overall: I’d call this middle-tier. It wasn’t fantastic, but it had enough to it that I played through the whole thing. The difficulty was fair (if a little uneven) but it had some system and pacing issues that other KEMCO/EXE-Create games have done better at. And while I don’t think Silky’s storyline was offensive, I think it was questionable enough to turn people off.
