While I'm late to the party with this 3D entry in the Dragon Buster series, Dragon Valor makes a surprisingly good jump to action combat on the PSX while telling an enthralling and replayable generational storyline.

The main gist of the game is that you play one of several generations of dragon-slaying swordspeople, each wielding a magical sword to complete their quest. Starting with a semi-remake of the first game's storyline, the player make take three possible paths that correlate to one of three magic swords, allowing completely different storylines/gameplay based on who they wed and what children they raise.

General gameplay is a variety of hack and slash actions with light RPG stats and magic to use in combat. The player can crouch, dash, double jump, triple combo, stop moving to auto-block and do a variety of moves based on those actions. It's quite expansive, and even if most monsters can be brought down by patient use of block + combo it's exciting to use stylish action to take down foes.

Foes are also surprisingly unique and varied for this title, involving rock golems/monsters, axe heads, lizard people, strange eye walls, scorpions, sorceresses, and more. Each of them have different movesets as to make them more fleshed out than other RPG baddies. Bosses usually consist of either an opponent human player or a large dragon to fight, and there'll be many dragons to fell on the family's quest to rid the world of evil.

Levels are split into either beat-em-up style linear segments where the player must beat up enemies to advance, or small dungeon areas with a dash of exploration. It's nothing too complex or interesting with regards to puzzles, but there's plenty of ROCK to accompany your quest, as this has a positively stellar soundtrack. While not full Guilty Gear heavy metal, this soundtrack knows how to shred.

As for looks the game has a lot of great 3D, even if it's a little repetitive. There's a little divergence between character portraits and their models (think FF7) but it doesn't stray from the action, and the dragons are always iconic and long necked in their ferocious design.

Dragon Valor was a surprisingly welcome title on the PSX, where its simple but effective action combat helps make it stand out on a system where good 3D action was still being fleshed out.