Drakkhen, for SNES

Rating: 5.5/10; Average

Not recommended unless you want to check out the novel combat system. Game is relatively short.

Drakkhen is a western style RPG with simplistic and unusual gameplay, which veers a little towards the God game genre due to the lack of control over characters.

The game begins with the option to use the premade party or create your own. There are 4 slots and 4 classes, and you are restricted to only a party of 1 of each class. Makes sense for balance but unusual party challenges are a thing, and the inability to do that hurts the game's replayability. The 4 classes are a warrior with excellent combat ability and a couple magic spells, a scout with slightly less combat ability and some utility magic, a cleric and a mage. The 2 casters have the obvious role focus with their magic but many spells are shared, such as the mage learning healing at a higher level than the cleric. All classes can fight with all weapons and the casters are capable of decent performance, especially with bows. Armor is not universal and the game does not show who can use what. Character creation comes down to picking a gender and rolling stats. Just like in Dungeons and Dragons the max ability score is 18 and you are given 5 values to assign to each of the 5 abilities with no tweaking the actual values. You only get a few rolls with no ability to save a previous one so there is significant incentive not to try and game amazing stats (though it is possible with save states). I found the rolls to be mostly generous and the abilities increase with level ups, so the starting values are not that important.

Next you are introduced to the overworld, which is viewed in first person and contains mostly uninteresting scenery, such as trees and water. Many things are annoying hazards; trees and rocks can block your way (though they are always individual things to go around, just a minor nuisance), water that can cause characters to drown if you stay too long, and graves which spawn powerful enemies with no reward or need to defeat them. There is a simple map and compass that shows the locations of everywhere you will need to go but getting around is more difficult than it needs to be because the compass is only visible on the map screen. You have to adjust your facing and keep going into the map screen to check your direction.

The game can be saved on the overworld but not in dungeons, which are the other major component of the game. The characters are visible on screen and can be moved around individually, even going solo into new rooms. Each character has a designated place to stand and will automatically move there, which can be annoying for the one you are controlling. The rooms have a hint of pen and paper descriptions but this is mostly fluff and there is actually very little of interest in the rooms. Loot is sparse and clearly visible, mostly as decorative shields and armor. Don't expect to ever find anything by rummaging through furniture. Some rooms have infinite enemies and some constantly lower health. Don't expect much in the way of puzzles or intricate gameplay. Dungeons are mostly about using torches or light magic to see and keys or unlock magic to open doors; not exciting.

The characters regenerate health and mana while on screen, which is all the time in dungeons. On the overworld it means you can't travel while regenerating and are open to random battles; seems like it should have been the opposite but it does make magic overall more viable. Combat is largely done by AI with little input from the player, which is a little interesting. You can give general orders to each character, such as attack, defend to avoid enemies or cast a specific spell. You can go into the menu to directly cast some spells, like healing. You can also move 1 character at a time to either avoid combat or get into melee. The combat is somewhat inconsistent with the characters seeming to move around randomly at times with wildly varying combat effectiveness; sometimes you can one shot a powerful enemy, other times your characters will suddenly fall over dead or the battle could drag on with no one seeming to do damage.

One of the most annoying features is separate xp gain for the characters, which seems to be based on damage done. I found the fighter to zoom ahead in levels by being the best damage dealer and thus stealing most of the xp, which severely hurts the cooperative party based nature of the game. Armor and especially shields can be destroyed in battle, which is a nice touch of realism. There is no repairing and I found myself hoarding shields (even the basic buckler at end game) because I knew it would get some use. Unfortunately, this ends up being very annoying due to how you get replacement gear. You can farm the dungeons for stationary loot (which mysteriously respawns every time you leave) or try to find a random merchant. Yes merchants are put into the random battle encounter list. Accidentally pressing "cancel” ends the encounter and I found I did that about half of the time while backing out of the menus to sell stuff and did not get a chance to buy anything. Would it kill the game to have towns with shops like a normal world?

While not a bad game, the lack of compelling story, setting and characters combined with the many poor mechanics make the somewhat novel combat system the only thing really worth checking out. This game could really have benefitted from better quest and level design as well.

Pro

• Novel AI controlled combat
• Competent overworld map
• Characters display the equipment they are wearing with different graphics for every item
• Decent variety of equipment and items
• Healing and revival is free at temples

Con

• Random stats at character creation
• Xp gain based on damage done
• Shops are random encounters
• Lack of maps in dungeons
• Lack of compass on main screen
• Pressing “up” at top of lists does not move to the bottom, and vice versa
• Lack of secrets and side content
• Dull dungeons and overall campaign/story
• No log to remind you what you are supposed to do next and no place names on map
• Dragon names (which are also the names of locations) are so similar to each other as to be nearly incomprehensible
• No description for equipment and items to see what they do, stats and who can use
• Equip menu cycles through every slot rather than being able to pick the one you want
• Way too much door unlocking
• Limited inventory
• Some monsters are overpowered