Dragon Spirits Reviews

Dragon Spirits, in so many ways, is THE ultimate dragon game for dragon lovers. Every kind of dragon you can imagine is here in this Pokemon style RPG. 158 dragons ranging from fearsome and scary to gorgeous and expressive, sometimes even full of personality or humanity. It's great to see a game where dragons are mostly friends and not foes, making my heart soar as high as any dragon in the sky! The artwork on the dragons is stunning, despite them all basically being static images bashing against eachother in the decently fun battles. The combat is a nice hybrid between turn taking and real time action, kind of like ATB in Final Fantasy 6, 7, 8, and 9. You can have up to 4 of these lovely, huggable, sometimes kissable dragons ( well, not always ) in your party and swap them out for others in a very Pokemon-like manner. The main hurdle with Dragon Spirits is that if you like leveling up a lot, the level limit for your dragon friends is 20. The game features a very strange leveling system I'm still trying to get to grips with, but you basically build up your dragon's individual stats by using certain abilities or getting hit by certain abilities, or sometimes it's random what stats will increase. The main fun of the game, if not the progression system, is collecting dragons for your dragon friend army. As the stats increase, your dragon levels up, until hitting 20. There is more of a focus on balance here compared to Pokemon, and over-leveling is basically impossible in Dragon Spirits, although you can maximize your dragon's abilities by combining trinkets, stat "potentials", and ability combinations which you can change at healing/rest points. Each dragon already knows a unique set of abilities, except for cool "talents" which are powerful passive abilities. Once your dragon hits level 20, the stats stop increasing. The game is kind of huge. I'm actually shocked at how open-ended it can be. The problem is, earlier on you have to go to classes at the Dragon Spirit Academy, and if you want to explore the big open world or do side quests you have to skip class. The teacher... well, he'll come looking for you and chase you down. He is very tough, and if you lose to him in Dragon Spirit combat he will drag you back to school. You can, however, do those side quests before class or after class, but you are limited to where you can go to in the open world after class. So you MUST skip class if you want to explore the big world, dungeons, and more. You ARE rewarded for attending class, but you also might miss on certain moments in the story from what I can tell. Eventually, the game does give you a couple of weeks where you can explore the big world freely. The broken English is annoying to say the least. It really takes me out of the game and it's an unfortunately huge flaw. I try to ignore it and make a big effort to immerse myself in the story or characters, but it's hard when they talk like how racists think Chinese people talk, in broken English. Despite that glaring flaw, there is another flaw in the form of poor visual quality, where the game is quite blurry in full screen, which I prefer to play it at. If you love dragons like I do, you owe it to yourself to get this game. Because, well, we really haven't got much to speak of right now... besides Spyro: Reignited Trilogy, Angels with Scaly Wings, and Glyde. Some honorable mentions are Age of Wonders 4 and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. It's either way too many multiplayer games, or really bad asset flip singleplayer games like Dragon Forge. It's kind of dumb that we have to rely on indie devs to give us what we want, but for once I would just like a AAA dev to give us a game where dragons are either friends or you ARE the dragon. Dragon Spirits, for now, will wet my dragon-sized appetite for my true dream dragon game!