The classic top-down JRPG is classic for a good reason. It was the early exposure that gamers received for what would later be iconic series such as Final Fantasy, Lunar, and Dragon Quest, even if later installments in those series evolved into new methods of presentation. Even today, tools such as RPG Maker allow would-be developers to come up with their own homages to these seminal titles, while other studios build their own JRPG engines to try and recapture the magic. This is not always a good thing, as painfully exemplified by Dragon Takers.
Dragon Takers puts you in a fantasy world under siege from the Dragon Army, a confederation of monsters both human and otherwise led by the Drake Emperor Tiberius. As the story opens, we’re introduced to Helio, an orphan of the ongoing war of conquest who is constantly bullied for his lack of “Skills,” the term of art to describe spells and special abilities. Naturally, elements of the Dragon Army show up to cause a ruckus, kidnapping one of the villagers for inscrutable purposes and with orders to eliminate everybody else. And, as you’d expect, Helio awakens with a special ability just at the right time to set off for a sweeping adventure to rescue the kidnapped villager and save the world.
Visually speaking, Dragon Takers hews to the classic 8-bit top-down JRPG presentation model. The character sprites are a little fuzzy (obviously), but the important characters are recognizable (when they’re present). You’re not going to see a conga line of heroes, which is a little odd given the limited number of people who make up your party. The buildings and environments definitely have a retro feel to them, while the character portraits for monsters and humans both are quite well done in a classic shonen anime style. Visual effects for special attacks (from both your party and enemy monsters) are nicely executed. All of the visual elements are technically well made, but at the same time they don’t feel particularly inspired. We don’t have any reaction portraits when the characters are supposed to be feeling surprised or angry or happy, which doesn’t do the story any favors or give us a sense of emotional stakes. We have a lot of “iris out” moments when a fade-to-black might have been more appropriate. It all looks pretty nice, but it doesn’t do anything awe-inspiring.
The audio portion of Dragon Takers is somehow similar to the visual side but manages to be far less successful. Everything is done well from a technical perspective, but it doesn’t have any heft to it. The sound effects are serviceable, but don’t help bring the world to life. The music is repetitive and uninspired whether it’s in battle or during a big dramatic scene. The lack of voice acting is perhaps a blessing in disguise, since it’s hard to imagine good and convincing performances being attached to this project. When you can mute the sound on a game and it’s almost better for the player experience, you know something has gone badly awry.
As far as gameplay goes, Dragon Takers is a throwback in all the wrong ways. For some reason, the developers really want you to play with a controller, even though the keyboard will do just fine (no mouse support, unfortunately). Moving around is pretty simple; everything’s on a square grid, so the only downside is not really being able to move on a diagonal. The game’s own Steam page proclaims that the combat system is set up so that you can’t retreat as if that’s a good thing. It really isn’t. True, it does give you a certain “death or glory” mindset, but it also wastes a lot of time and energy. Battle encounters are random, with no visual indicator of mobs, so if you’re crawling a dungeon and low on health and mana, there’s a chance you’ll get into a fight right before hitting a restoration point. The inventory system is an absolute mess. Plenty of gear to be found in random chests and dropped from enemies (consumables are a little more scanty), but not a single merchant to sell your loot or purchase better stuff from. While it’s tempting to chalk it up to a bad design choice for the UI, it’s not precisely a visual problem.
The biggest hitch is a lack of indicators for consumable items on the character sheet. It doesn’t do anything to tell you how many items you can put on a character, so you spend a lot of time with lots of blank space. But then again, it really doesn’t become a problem until right at the very end. I went through probably 95% of the game with nothing in my consumable slots because the combat encounters between bosses were facerolls, and most of the bosses were more spongy than smart.
This leads into another complaint: the auto-battle system. You can set a couple of different “styles” for battle. It doesn’t instantly resolve the battle, it just plays out the turns. Problem is that it plays out the turns in the dumbest fashion possible. If you go “all-out,” it burns down your mana like there’s no tomorrow. If you choose “no skills,” you’ll rely strictly on basic physical attacks which do virtually nothing but get you killed. If you choose “healing,” you’ll get healed all right, but no buffs to improve you or debuffs to hamper your enemies, and no attack spells or special attacks of any kind. Speaking of healing, should a party member get downed and you forgot to equip the right consumable item to revive them, the auto-battle system doesn’t try to use the “Revive” spell to bring them back up. Worse, if you decide to retake control and use the spell yourself, it’s only a chance to bring the character back up, which burns a lot of mana if you’re not lucky. A guaranteed revival is a different spell/skill which doesn’t show up till much later.
This goes to my other big complaint about the gameplay in Dragon Takers. The main character, Helio, has an added mechanic to his basic physical attack allowing him to “steal” the special attacks of different monsters. Some of these are guaranteed to work. Others are only a chance, and the lower the percentage listed, the longer it seems to take to get lucky and steal it. It’s not just a grossly artificial system, it’s an unenjoyable one because no matter what, it’s guaranteed that whatever loadout you have, it will not be one which is generally applicable or one which is appropriately tailored to the boss fight you’re about to get into. Your companions have fixed skill lists. You as the main character do not. Ostensibly, there are 125 different skills you can pick up, which makes trying to get that particular Steam achievement the worst Pokemon knockoff since Palworld. Worse, the idea of throwing a fight just so you can tweak your skill loadout is not enjoyable in the slightest. Cascading trees of skills (in the vein of Final Fantasy VII and later) probably wouldn’t be much help in this scenario, but it might have made things a little less painful.
When it comes to the narrative and character elements of Dragon Takers, I’m legitimately torn between believing it’s an absolutely terribly written title from the get-go and believing that it was an absolutely terrible localization effort. It would be horrifying if both were true. It’s like somebody decided to mash up every terrible harem anime trope with about a hundred awful fantasy adventure anime tropes into one giant awful slurry, then stuff it into a container shaped like the main character framework from My Hero Academia. There’s absolutely no substance to any of these characters, much less the storyline. We’re pounded with exposition, but no character development. We have all the harem anime tropes but no mechanics for genuine interaction. There’s supposed to be this big terrible war happening and it doesn’t feel like anything significant is actually occurring. This is pastiche taken to its worst possible form.
The single kindest thing I can say about Dragon Takers is that it runs without bugs or glitches. It’s a port of a mobile game to PC, and I can’t imagine the experience is somehow better on a smartphone or tablet. If, for some reason, you bought this title on mobile, you’ve got no reason to buy it a second time for PC. If you haven’t, save your money and your time.
Axel reviewed Dragon Takers on PC with a review code.
