Retro Review - Dragon Valor
The old but beloved PlayStation 1 has one of the most varied lists of games in the industry, has classic games, cult games, games that today are considered representative of an entire generation, but also, as usual, has games not so good, other regular and other more forgotten by the community, the game of which I will tell you below is those games that are not excellent, but if they are fun enough to be remembered by me.
Dragon Valor is a story of revenge, but it's also a pretty simple story. It all starts when our main character, named Clovis, a young man who lives in a small town that is being attacked by a Dragon, who unfortunately of our protagonist, he witnesses the death of his sister, product of the flames caused by this great beast, this dragon was fighting against a warrior who carried the only weapon capable of defeating such a beast, but the warrior is defeated and Clovis full of rage over the death of his sister and the destruction of his people, wields the sword left by the warrior after his death, so he can get revenge on the dragon for killing his sister.
But this doesn't stay here, because the vengeance towards the dragon won't be only by Clovis, since there will be other protagonists, throughout the game, or rather, Clovis' descendants will be part of the game's story and that story will change depending on who our main character, Clovis, is going to marry, since he represents the first generation of a family to fight against dragons.
As you can read, Dragon Valor doesn't have a story for anything original, it's pretty simple and without any deep storyline, but it's what's needed for the approach of a game of this genre.
Dragon Valor is no wonder in the graphic aspect, it is entirely in 3D and the backgrounds of its scenarios are fixed, the amount of details is decent, which makes it a game where we can appreciate and recognize very well the different places we can go, does not have an excessive amount of details, but if enough so that the scenarios do not look empty and lifeless.
They used a somewhat dark color palette, which due to the plot and context of the game, I must say it doesn't look so bad in itself, it's not a game that has aged badly, but it wasn't innovative in this respect either.
The character designs feature the classic polygons that both made the PlayStation 1 suffer, their models are fine, the characters are very recognizable and feature a type of character design called "Super Deformed" which refers to characters that have a particular type of design where their heads are large and their bodies small, very similar to the "Chibi" style. In itself, you could say that Dragon Valor has quite decent graphics, taking into account the standards of PlayStation 1, but obviously are not comparable to other games that if they knew how to take advantage of the graphics capabilities of the Sony console.
The sound aspect is good, nothing of the other world, the melodies that we can listen to throughout the game are composed so that they fit in a decent way and according to the situation that is happening at that moment, yes, there are some melodies that are too generic and after listening to them for a long time boring enough, but nothing that will affect our experience of the game. In general, Dragon Valor has a soundtrack that you could say is fine, without going any further.
It could be said that Dragon Valor combines some genres of the videogame like beat´em up, action RPG and platform games, our mission is to go through lateral scenarios defeating any enemy that comes across us in front, in the same way, there will be sections of platform that we must cross to reach a certain place or a certain enemy.
Although we will be able to use magic this one will be rather of secondary use, due to its little utility by how simple they are and the greater weight falls on the combats body to body by means of the use of our powerful sword, as we defeat our enemies we will obtain points that we will be adding in the statuses of our characters, of there falls the genre RPG, but it is a very basic aspect of the RPG and only it is limited to that. Let's also find the typical shops to buy items that will help us throughout our adventure.
The enemies do not present a very developed artificial intelligence and they will only be presented as an obstacle quite easy to overcome compared to the final bosses, the battles with these final bosses are many more showy and present a greater challenge, in addition to being visually quite good.
As I said in the beginning Clovis will only be one of the 4 characters we can play during the whole game, he represents the first generation of his future family, and his offspring will be determined by some decisions we make during the game, decisions that translate into: "Which character Clovis is going to marry", because according to the woman with whom our protagonist marries, his son is going to be born with different characteristics and in such a way the end that Clovis is going to have, will depend on that decision and it is going to have repercussions in his descendants, in the same way when Clovis's first son is born, this will have to go through the same thing as his father: defeat enemies, defeat dragons, marry and have offspring and so on for two more generations, in other words, we'll have 4 main characters throughout the game and at the same time there will be many different endings.
If we can define Dragon Valor with three words those would be: "Simple but entertaining", because in essence that's what this game is all about, when you play it you won't find the 8th wonder of the video game world, but if it's a title entertaining enough to have a good time playing it.
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