Dragon's Crown: The Playing

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Maxus
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Dragon's Crown: The Playing

Post by Maxus »

So Dragon's Crown has been coming out for, like, a year or more now.

And now it arrives.

Gameplay: Mix Odin Sphere with Chronicles of Mystara. You pick your characters, they have movesets, equippable items....A lot of the gameplay is the same. You can explore odd nooks and crannies for loot. There's even a harpy who fights like the one from Shadow over Mystara: Throwing feathers down, attacking on the ground, grabbing you and dropping you...

Other noticeable feature:

The fanservice is strong in this one. Not just because of the Sorceress. Background NPCs display some noticeable jiggle, the witch who owns the magic item shop is wearing essentially a loincloth-bikini thing.

While I appreciate the eye candy (and, in general, this is a very stylized, very pretty game), I'm sure it'll wear thin after a while. Maybe.

Anyway, I guess I'll do a playlog here. So far, I've done the first level as the warrior, and fought some goblins, some lizard men, orcs, snakes, and a Harpy.

One interesting bit...I found an adventurer's bones and took them to the temple where the priest resurrected him. So now I have an NPC warrior following me along. I intend to loot him for his stuff at some point. I suppose there'll be other bonepiles around.

Incidentally, the bonefile had a last message.

It said

"Arrow...in the knee..."
Last edited by Maxus on Wed Aug 07, 2013 5:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.

--The horror of Mario

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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Post by Surgo »

This game has a fondling minigame. I think that's all that needs to be said about it.
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Post by Rawbeard »

every game should have one.
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Post by Surgo »

Ehh...no. I'm not really into H-games, and the art is ungodly ugly, so I think I'll skip this one.
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Post by Maxus »

So, finally have a full party of people whose bones I've found.

I can't -swear- to it, but I think that -maybe- some of these are the remains of other PCs. I'll have to check, I don't remember anything about it in the tutorial.

Also, the dwarf can pick up enemies and throw them at other enemies.

This has my approval.

Edit: Well, it seems you do need to learn your whole move repetoire. I had to dance around a couple of bosses: I went back to the first dungeon on a sidequest, and incidentally discovered that the Amazon, at least, has a diving jump kick if you double jump, then press jump again. Dodging works. And works well.

So I had a much easier time evading the boss by using a lot of hit-and-run attacks, dodging to behind it when it tried to land in melee range, and the like.

This also has my approval. Nothing gets on my nerves like a game with an elaborate combo/dodge system that YOU DON'T USE BECAUSE YOU CAN DO THE SAME THING BY BUTTON MASHING. This, a scientific approach works quite well.
Last edited by Maxus on Wed Aug 07, 2013 6:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.

--The horror of Mario

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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Post by DSMatticus »

Surgo wrote:This game has a fondling minigame. I think that's all that needs to be said about it.
...
I'm not really into H-games
:roll: The internet has been abuzz with Dragon's Crown because for some reason oversized jiggling breasts suddenly got controversial out of nowhere, but of all the stupid bitching I've heard you're taking the cake. It has scantily clad women, jiggling boobs, and naughty noises. The God of War series has scantier clad women, jiggling boobs, naughty noises, and a bunch of sex minigames. Most modern fighting games have scantily clad women, jiggling boobs, though the noises are probably only ambiguously naughty at best. The Witcher series has naked women with everything but close-up crotch shots, probably some jiggling boobs somewhere, naughty noises, and a bunch of HBO-style (okay, maybe a bit more conservative) sex that fades to black when things get too steamy.

You sound like my grandmother. The reality is Dragon's Crown's approach to sexuality is only interesting in its almost parody-esque exaggeration (feel free to argue women in videogames totally looked realistic up until 'that stupid Dragon's Crown'), and it is no smuttier than several wildly successful mainstream Western and Japanese titles. You can complain about how the videogame industry approaches sexuality. There's probably some legitimate complaints there (i.e. "like fumbling boys who just hit puberty"), and some bullshit ones ("stop liking boobs! Boobs are evil!"). And you can bitch about Dragon's Crown as an example. But it's not actually breaking any new ground and leveraging it as an exceptional example is just mind-numbingly ill-informed and ill-thought.
Surgo wrote:and the art is ungodly ugly
Mostly agreed. The cheesecake is too cheesy and the beefcake is too beefy. There is neither cool factor nor sex appeal, and it makes me want to not play more than half the characters because they look like jokes that, having seem them plastered all over the internet forever, have gone stale. Elf and wizard win by default.
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Post by name_here »

Uh, I'm pretty sure the people giving Dragon Crown crap about that are the same people who gave those aforementioned games crap about the aforementioned things.
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Post by Kaelik »

DSM, he said he is not into games that have fondling mechanics. So he probably doesn't play the God of War games for their fondling mechanics either.

He didn't say that no one else is allowed to play them, or that they shouldn't exist, just that he is not into H-games.

So far I have not heard Surgo whining about boobs being bad, or even the art being unfair on women (just ugly, which you and I both agree with him on).

So maybe... don't say that you've heard a lot of whining about a game, and Surgo's is the worst, and Surgo's is the worst because of a bunch of things he didn't say that you heard from other people whining?
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Post by DSMatticus »

You two misunderstood. I did not bring up those games because they are awesome and Surgo has to like at least one of them. I don't know and I don't care. I brought them up because they have comparable levels of sexual content and no one could ever rightly call them an H-game.

I don't care what games Surgo doesn't like and why he doesn't like them, but Surgo's snarky attempt to suggest that Dragon's Crown is somehow especially sexual in nature was stupid, because the types and extent of Dragon's Crown's sexual content are commonplace and unnoteworthy.

Edit: Also, rereading my post the misunderstanding is completely my bad. The only hint that that's the point I'm driving at is the last sentence of the second paragraph, so oopsies.
Last edited by DSMatticus on Thu Aug 08, 2013 1:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Kaelik »

DSMatticus wrote:but Surgo's snarky attempt to suggest that Dragon's Crown is somehow especially sexual in nature was stupid, because the types and extent of Dragon's Crown's sexual content are commonplace and unnoteworthy.
Even with that message, you are still wrong. Dragon's Crown is especially sexual compared to the mean and mode of games. The fact that one other game that you can name has explicit game mechanics for sex, and a couple others have optional cutscenes does not change that having game mechanics for sex counts as more sexual in nature than most games, and perfectly justifiable as a reason to not play. While God of War's sex scene that happened in one game is stupid as fuck, I would hate it even if it wasn't, because I don't want to play a game that has you push buttons to have sex with people.
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Post by DragonChild »

Dragon's Crown (at least in the japanese? not sure if english?) has an easter egg that has a woman tied down to a bed and you get to poke at her and she moans and squirms.

Yes, there's nothing especially sexual about that at all... I mean, if you think your weird rape fantasies aren't actually sexual.
Last edited by DragonChild on Thu Aug 08, 2013 2:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Zinegata »

Bought it. Played it. Actually pretty decent old-school game.

The art's actually pretty nice except for the girls with impossible spines. The unlockable art gallery is actually pretty cool and reminds me of great materials for an RPG book.
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Post by DSMatticus »

Kaelik wrote:Even with that message, you are still wrong. Dragon's Crown is especially sexual compared to the mean and mode of games.
DSM wrote:I brought them up because they have comparable levels of sexual content and no one could ever rightly call them an H-game.
Put the goalpost back where it was and have another kick. Then I'll play goalie. If you were planning to run off with the equipment and play by yourself, then you don't really need me.
Kaelik wrote:While God of War's sex scene that happened in one game is stupid as fuck, I would hate it even if it wasn't
Not really a critical point, but for reference the God of War series has a fuckton of sex minigames. It is a number greater than one by at least two.
DragonChild wrote:Yes, there's nothing especially sexual about that at all... I mean, if you think your weird rape fantasies aren't actually sexual.
And one of the God of War games has a minigame where hordes of women nearly fondle their bare breasts as they wait their turn to leap on the protagonist's off-camera dick. There's definitely an implicit nonconsensual aspect to the Dragon's Crown groping minigame, but it's also still just some squirming and moaning. You might find it more morally questionable, but that is not actually the same thing as more sexual. They are separate concepts.
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Post by DragonChild »

Considering you think "Stop liking boobs! Boobs are evil!" is an illegitimate complaint somebody would make, I will leave you to enjoy your rape games in favor of trying to have discussions with somebody who.. uh... doesn't feel a need to defend rape games presented as mainstream entertainment.
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Post by Zinegata »

DragonChild wrote:Considering you think "Stop liking boobs! Boobs are evil!" is an illegitimate complaint somebody would make, I will leave you to enjoy your rape games in favor of trying to have discussions with somebody who.. uh... doesn't feel a need to defend rape games presented as mainstream entertainment.
Can people stop this stupid nonsense about "rape games" when it's like .01% of the content and the rest of the game is what's actually more fucking interesting than another retard pissing match?
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Post by DragonChild »

If he gets to complain that the constant, unyielding sexism of the video game industry and really just society in general is people telling men to "stop liking boobs", I get to say he's defending a rape game. If anything, I'm the one being more honest here.
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Post by Zinegata »

Way to miss the point. :roll:
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Post by Kaelik »

DSMatticus wrote:Put the goalpost back where it was and have another kick. Then I'll play goalie. If you were planning to run off with the equipment and play by yourself, then you don't really need me.
Which is it? Did he try to imply that Dragon's Crown is especially sexual like you claimed was your problem in your post, possibly with hyperbole?

Or are you just saying that it isn't actually an H-game?

Do you admit that Dragon's Crown is especially sexual, like God of War? Or are you just a lying hypocrite?
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

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Post by DSMatticus »

DragonChild wrote:Considering you think "Stop liking boobs! Boobs are evil!" is an illegitimate complaint somebody would make
DragonChild wrote:If he gets to complain that the constant, unyielding sexism of the video game industry and really just society in general is people telling men to "stop liking boobs"
DSM wrote: You can complain about how the videogame industry approaches sexuality. There's probably some legitimate complaints there (i.e. "like fumbling boys who just hit puberty"), and some bullshit ones ("stop liking boobs! Boobs are evil!").
You are a strawmanning shit. Not only was the phrase "stop liking boobs! Boobs are evil!" never used as a stand-in for anyone in this thread's position on Dragon's Crown, the exact sentence you are using to claim that it is straight up says there are legitimate complaints about how the video game industry approaches sexuality, which makes your entire claim here bafflingly stupid. Fuck off until you can read. Or if you know how to read, fuck off until you can manage to not be a dishonest asshole. Mostly just fuck off, because your misguided indignation is really annoying.
DragonChild wrote:doesn't feel a need to defend rape games presented as mainstream entertainment.
Firstly, you are retarded for calling Dragon's Crown a "rape game" in the same way calling any of the other games I've brought up as examples a "porn game." Even if that minigame were a scene of hardcore OMGWTF rape, that would not make Dragon's Crown a rape game. It would be out of place and creepy as hell to be hit with out of nowhere, but it would still actually be a 2D beat 'em up with a freakishly out of place scene of hardcore OMGWTF rape. And that would be bad for various reasons, but you would not call that a rape game because it is not a game about rape.

Secondly, that has never been and never will be the point of this conversation so I'm going to tell you to fuck off until you can read again. The actual point here is Surgo made a snarky quip or two about Dragon's Crown sexual content, and those quips were stupid because there are games with similarly sexual content and you'd have to be an idiot to call those games an "H-game" or say the "only thing you need to know about God of War is it has a sexual minigame." You can certainly not like a game because of it's sexual content, but calling a game pure smut because it happens to have the same amount of sexual content as other games which are obviously not pure smut is stupid.
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Post by DragonChild »

The fact is "Stop liking boobs" is never an argument made by anyone, and that you would even pretend it is ever means you actually pretend strawmen used by sexist idiots are actual things that occur, which means you are not worth talking to as a person.
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Post by DSMatticus »

Kaelik wrote:
DSMatticus wrote:Put the goalpost back where it was and have another kick. Then I'll play goalie. If you were planning to run off with the equipment and play by yourself, then you don't really need me.
Which is it? Did he try to imply that Dragon's Crown is especially sexual like you claimed was your problem in your post, possibly with hyperbole?

Or are you just saying that it isn't actually an H-game?

Do you admit that Dragon's Crown is especially sexual, like God of War? Or are you just a lying hypocrite?
That Dragon's Crown is sexual like God of War is the entire point. It has been the point all a-fucking-long.

If this were a thread about God of War, and Surgo showed up to say, "God of War has a sex minigame. That's all that needs to be said about it. I'm not really into porn games," the correct response would be a combination of mockery and eyerolling. Not because God of War is a good game. Not Because God of War doesn't handle sexuality in the least mature possibly way. Not because Surgo is using the term porn literally instead of hyperbolically (at least, one would hope not). But because the insinuation "sexual content reduces a game to smut!" is stupid even in the context of criticizing a game for its sexual content.
DragonChild wrote:The fact is "Stop liking boobs" is never an argument made by anyone
If you are banking on extremists never existing "on your side," you are going to be sorely disappointed by the world time and time again. That said, "stop liking boobs" is actually a really common argument. It is dressed up with different words, but it happens all the time. For example: one of the Dragon's Crown's controversies kicked off when Jason Schreier bitched about how oversexualized the sorceress was. Not as a part of a larger point about how Dragon's Crown's "eye candy" catered to men more than women (true). Not as part of a larger point about how the videogame industry caters to men more than women (true, and definitely a problem). Not as part of a point about how something that happened in the game was particularly objectifying. Just a stand-alone jab at a sexualized female character design and its creator. That sort of shit is stupid and not helpful.

It is a shame that the videogame industry is so male-dominated. And it is a shame that this trend reinforces itself as efforts to appeal to the male market base provide little incentive for women to hop aboard. And it is also a shame that a subset of journalists think the solution to this problem is to pile negative attention on cheesecake and things that appeal to men, because that does not solve the stated problem and gives actual sexist idiots ammunition to strawman those who have legitimate complaints. The actual solution to the problem is not to shame people for making and liking sexualized female character designs, it is to encourage publishers to make more games whose art styles are gender neutral or aimed explicitly at women.
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Post by Korgan0 »

I'll happily make the argument "stop liking boobs," since "liking boobs" in this context is an expression of horrific objectification.
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Post by DSMatticus »

Korgan0 wrote:I'll happily make the argument "stop liking boobs," since "liking boobs" in this context is an expression of horrific objectification.
By all means. I'm genuinely curious.
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Post by nockermensch »

This video

I kind of lost the count of Tower of Doom / Shadow over Mystara references there. I must play this game now.
@ @ Nockermensch
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Post by Kaelik »

DSMatticus wrote:That Dragon's Crown is sexual like God of War is the entire point. It has been the point all a-fucking-long.

If this were a thread about God of War, and Surgo showed up to say, "God of War has a sex minigame. That's all that needs to be said about it. I'm not really into porn games," the correct response would be a combination of mockery and eyerolling.
No, the correct response would be the recognition of hyperbole as a legitimate means of communicating.

So let's try this again DSM: Say one of the two following things:

1) "I, DSM, agree that Dragon's Crown is especially sexual for a videogame, and Surgo was right to imply that it is, and that this marks something that he doesn't want to play."
2) "I, DSM, am a lying hypocrite who refuses to admit that Surgo was right to imply that Dragon's Crown is especially sexual for a videogame using hyperbole."

Here, I'll get things started:

"I, Kaelik, agree that if Surgo meant that Dragon's Crown was literally an H-game, he is wrong on the internet. Even though he is still right if he was using it figuratively or hyperbolicly to emphasize that it is especially sexual for a videogame."
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
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