Review
Dragon Blade: Wrath of Fire (Wii)
Even at first sight, a title like Dragon Blade: Wrath of Fire is destined for mediocrity. I mean, from the back of the box everything looks okay: a generic white dude gets a righteous sword of fire from a dead dragon and cuts through armies of monsters using an inferno of dragon-based attacks. Actually playing the game, though, and it comes across at best as a good appetizer for Namco's upcoming Soul Calibur Legends. What we've got here is a basic introduction to hack n' slash games with Wii controls done right, and some players might find it to be more than just that. The thrill of executing combos with remote and nunchuk aerobics lasts to the very end with the help of a daring soundtrack, but it's hard to get past the fact that the game presents itself like a GameCube beta.
After a decent intro video, which tells the story of how the benevolent dragon Valthorian – and seven other evil dragons – became entwined with Man's wars, things start to get a little rough. The game's hero, Dal, is introduced in a cinema that looks like it belongs on the SEGA Saturn, and the in-game graphics of Dal's village stand out about as much as a Ford Taurus in a traffic jam. Well, they actually do stand out quite a bit, because they're so bad. Then you start playing the game and defending your village from monsters, and you realize you're just going to be waggling the remote at wave after wave of enemies for the next few hours. When I got to this point a voice in my head said, "... you're playing Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers with waggle...!" and I nearly put down the remote right there.
I'm glad I didn't, because things turned out considerably better once I pressed on. The upside is that all this waggling is actually kind of fun, but it takes awhile to appreciate. Unlike The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which interprets all remote-shaking as basic "attack" button input, Dragon Blade attempts an argument for why the Wii deserves to exist. The mindless melee that constitutes most of this game is elevated by a combat system that differentiates between swinging the remote left, right, up, down, and even thrusting straight forward. Novel, right? It puts you in a very perplexing situation, because it's not enough to simply remember what to do for each desired command – you have to physically master the moves yourself. If you're not making decisive movements, weak horizontal swipes are going to override your attempts at jabs and vertical strikes, and it's very challenging at first to focus on getting the movement right when you're in the heat of battle. Given time, frenzied swinging gives way to precise combat that yields impressive combos, making each horde of enemies a new opportunity to further hone your play.
This is huge. It makes Dragon Blade the first Wii title I've found that presents a control scheme that is alien at first but eventually rewarding to learn. That means Dragon Blade achieves the failure-and-improvement struggle that made video games fun to begin with, and it does it in a way that only the Wii could do. The console needs more of these experiences.
Dal's dragon-based powers add more flare to the title, and often the desire to find his next power inspired me to push through more and more low-AI foes. Just as the dragon in PlayStation 3's Lair can tip the scales of battle against thousands of enemies, Valthorian's gifted abilities make any fight one-sided, so long as Dal keeps replenishing his power meter. Using claws of fire, Dal can slash, pound, and – yes – even sucker-punch his enemies flat onto their asses. It's satisfying, and reminds me that many games I enjoy don't even have a single move that's just fun to pull off on its own. As Dal progresses he adds more dragon powers to his arsenal, such as dragon wings that he can use to shield himself and get mad air. Over time, Valthorian's powers fill out what begins as a very modest and somewhat limiting moveset.
It's unfortunate, then, that the game itself is so bare bones. It's competent, but very clearly lacking the time and money to conjure up anything too impressive. For the first few levels, Dal literally follows a linear path and just wallops anything in his way until he gets to the end of the level. Sometimes iron doors will lock him in a room a la Zelda and Valthorian will warn, "It's a trap! Find a way out!" Gee, Valthorian, maybe I kill all the enemies in the room, like I would have anyway since that's pretty much all I do? Later in the game there's a little switch-hitting and backtracking, but this is merely garnish to a meat-and-potatoes meal of slash-em-up melee and boss battles. The boss battles themselves are fairly straightforward matters of finding a pattern and exploiting it for chances to attack, but they're rewarding. They don't really try to be cinematic, but the process of attacking and defending – as well as rationing dragon powers versus normal attacks – hearkens back to the balance found in great Super Nintendo titles that many modern games lack. They're also a legitimate challenge, and score another point for Dragon Blade's sense of achievement in an era where so many titles hold your hand from one cinema scene to the next.
The team behind Dragon Blade clearly knew their limitations and focused on doing what they could rather than trying and failing at more ambitious goals. That said, the game's lack of ambition should be enough to keep many potential fans at bay. Besides the repetitive gameplay, the game fails on most levels of presentation. It is unlikely to visually impress anyone who has previously encountered polygon-based game design, although the enemies and bosses look pretty good compared to mid-era Nintendo64 titles. Where the game really shows its ghetto origins is in the pacing of its cutscenes. Even cuts like those showing a door open as a result of a switch being hit has a stilted, off-timing feel to it. The in-game camera is spot on, and for all intents and purposes the game plays without fault, but it's a shame that at nearly every corner Dragon Blade betrays its own low production value. There is, of course, one significant exception.
Although there's very little voice acting and none in-game, I'd still have to count audio as one of this game's principal strengths. It's rare to encounter a soundtrack that does such a good job of convincing me that the fairly mediocre adventure I'm on is actually an epic saga of modern storytelling. I wasn't fooling around when I compared this game to the Soul Calibur franchise; if I didn't know better, I'd assume D3 Publisher got their hands on some of the composers from the Soul team. When music elevates the experience like this, it makes you wonder why nobody makes such a big screaming deal about audio the way they do about graphics. The soundtrack doesn't erase all the sub-par visuals, but it does just about all it can to make things better.
The last surprise I got from Dragon Blade was just after beating it, because I began playing the early levels over again and still having fun with it. This dodges a bullet that's affected many of Wii's major titles – including Twilight Princess, Super Paper Mario, and Metroid Prime 3 – which is that after beating the game I have no desire to continue playing. It's not like getting 30 hours out of Metroid and calling it quits is a bum deal, but it bothers me that so many of the platform's titles hold so little desire to continue playing. Now that rental periods can be extended a month or more, it seems like lunacy to shell out $50 for one play-through of even the most stellar title. What Dragon Blade offers is nothing too special, but levels are scored by enemies killed, clear times, and the like, so it gives an arcade-impulse to run through again for a better score. The concept is simple and none-too-ambitious, but it works with the hack and slash action. Besides, you're not playing for the story, so it's not like anything is lost once the game is completed. It's a big stupid endurance test of the same gameplay throughout, but something about it remains fun all the way through and then some.
After a decent intro video, which tells the story of how the benevolent dragon Valthorian – and seven other evil dragons – became entwined with Man's wars, things start to get a little rough. The game's hero, Dal, is introduced in a cinema that looks like it belongs on the SEGA Saturn, and the in-game graphics of Dal's village stand out about as much as a Ford Taurus in a traffic jam. Well, they actually do stand out quite a bit, because they're so bad. Then you start playing the game and defending your village from monsters, and you realize you're just going to be waggling the remote at wave after wave of enemies for the next few hours. When I got to this point a voice in my head said, "... you're playing Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers with waggle...!" and I nearly put down the remote right there.
I'm glad I didn't, because things turned out considerably better once I pressed on. The upside is that all this waggling is actually kind of fun, but it takes awhile to appreciate. Unlike The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which interprets all remote-shaking as basic "attack" button input, Dragon Blade attempts an argument for why the Wii deserves to exist. The mindless melee that constitutes most of this game is elevated by a combat system that differentiates between swinging the remote left, right, up, down, and even thrusting straight forward. Novel, right? It puts you in a very perplexing situation, because it's not enough to simply remember what to do for each desired command – you have to physically master the moves yourself. If you're not making decisive movements, weak horizontal swipes are going to override your attempts at jabs and vertical strikes, and it's very challenging at first to focus on getting the movement right when you're in the heat of battle. Given time, frenzied swinging gives way to precise combat that yields impressive combos, making each horde of enemies a new opportunity to further hone your play.
This is huge. It makes Dragon Blade the first Wii title I've found that presents a control scheme that is alien at first but eventually rewarding to learn. That means Dragon Blade achieves the failure-and-improvement struggle that made video games fun to begin with, and it does it in a way that only the Wii could do. The console needs more of these experiences.
Dal's dragon-based powers add more flare to the title, and often the desire to find his next power inspired me to push through more and more low-AI foes. Just as the dragon in PlayStation 3's Lair can tip the scales of battle against thousands of enemies, Valthorian's gifted abilities make any fight one-sided, so long as Dal keeps replenishing his power meter. Using claws of fire, Dal can slash, pound, and – yes – even sucker-punch his enemies flat onto their asses. It's satisfying, and reminds me that many games I enjoy don't even have a single move that's just fun to pull off on its own. As Dal progresses he adds more dragon powers to his arsenal, such as dragon wings that he can use to shield himself and get mad air. Over time, Valthorian's powers fill out what begins as a very modest and somewhat limiting moveset.
It's unfortunate, then, that the game itself is so bare bones. It's competent, but very clearly lacking the time and money to conjure up anything too impressive. For the first few levels, Dal literally follows a linear path and just wallops anything in his way until he gets to the end of the level. Sometimes iron doors will lock him in a room a la Zelda and Valthorian will warn, "It's a trap! Find a way out!" Gee, Valthorian, maybe I kill all the enemies in the room, like I would have anyway since that's pretty much all I do? Later in the game there's a little switch-hitting and backtracking, but this is merely garnish to a meat-and-potatoes meal of slash-em-up melee and boss battles. The boss battles themselves are fairly straightforward matters of finding a pattern and exploiting it for chances to attack, but they're rewarding. They don't really try to be cinematic, but the process of attacking and defending – as well as rationing dragon powers versus normal attacks – hearkens back to the balance found in great Super Nintendo titles that many modern games lack. They're also a legitimate challenge, and score another point for Dragon Blade's sense of achievement in an era where so many titles hold your hand from one cinema scene to the next.
The team behind Dragon Blade clearly knew their limitations and focused on doing what they could rather than trying and failing at more ambitious goals. That said, the game's lack of ambition should be enough to keep many potential fans at bay. Besides the repetitive gameplay, the game fails on most levels of presentation. It is unlikely to visually impress anyone who has previously encountered polygon-based game design, although the enemies and bosses look pretty good compared to mid-era Nintendo64 titles. Where the game really shows its ghetto origins is in the pacing of its cutscenes. Even cuts like those showing a door open as a result of a switch being hit has a stilted, off-timing feel to it. The in-game camera is spot on, and for all intents and purposes the game plays without fault, but it's a shame that at nearly every corner Dragon Blade betrays its own low production value. There is, of course, one significant exception.
Although there's very little voice acting and none in-game, I'd still have to count audio as one of this game's principal strengths. It's rare to encounter a soundtrack that does such a good job of convincing me that the fairly mediocre adventure I'm on is actually an epic saga of modern storytelling. I wasn't fooling around when I compared this game to the Soul Calibur franchise; if I didn't know better, I'd assume D3 Publisher got their hands on some of the composers from the Soul team. When music elevates the experience like this, it makes you wonder why nobody makes such a big screaming deal about audio the way they do about graphics. The soundtrack doesn't erase all the sub-par visuals, but it does just about all it can to make things better.
The last surprise I got from Dragon Blade was just after beating it, because I began playing the early levels over again and still having fun with it. This dodges a bullet that's affected many of Wii's major titles – including Twilight Princess, Super Paper Mario, and Metroid Prime 3 – which is that after beating the game I have no desire to continue playing. It's not like getting 30 hours out of Metroid and calling it quits is a bum deal, but it bothers me that so many of the platform's titles hold so little desire to continue playing. Now that rental periods can be extended a month or more, it seems like lunacy to shell out $50 for one play-through of even the most stellar title. What Dragon Blade offers is nothing too special, but levels are scored by enemies killed, clear times, and the like, so it gives an arcade-impulse to run through again for a better score. The concept is simple and none-too-ambitious, but it works with the hack and slash action. Besides, you're not playing for the story, so it's not like anything is lost once the game is completed. It's a big stupid endurance test of the same gameplay throughout, but something about it remains fun all the way through and then some.
Closing Comments
Recommended if you are willing in spirit, burly in arm strength, and easily enticed by dragons.
Is Dragon Blade fun? Yes, but that's not the right question. Is it a title that I would recommend to just anybody? Not really. Striking with precise remote movements and bowling over enemies with claws of fire is indeed very cool, but even the Wii fanbase will probably find it hard to look past the game's lack of depth or aesthetic niceties. Compared to its blockbuster brethren Devil May Cry and God of War, Dragon Blade is a bargain bin purchase that few will make. It's a shame, because the core gameplay is very well done, and if the game rakes in enough cash to garner a sequel there might be enough left over to bring this series up to par. The story leaves off poised pretty well for new chapters to be added, so I'll be keeping my fingers crossed on this one.
