At one point in the week I found myself with quite a
significant gap between one engagement and the next, and decided to fill the
time with a couple of hours of Dragon Quest, which was released on the Nintendo
Switch recently. It’s a relatively early form of JRPG (Japanese Role-Playing
Game) and the start of a long-running series of games. I’ve spoken quite a lot
over the last few years about playing the first iterations of games to see
their core mechanics; they rarely provide as deep an experience as their later
games but it’s always interesting to see. Dragon Quest plays like an early
Final Fantasy, or Phantasty Star game, where you’re set on a quest to find the
Ball of Light and rescue the Princess from the Dragon Lord. This doesn’t sound
particularly inspired, but sometimes the simplest plot lines are the most
effective!
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| Stay off the purple patch until you can handle it... |
This game doesn’t have the depth and options of games that
followed, either to its sequels or to the vast amount of games it inspired. The
turn-based combat is entirely menu-driven, the magic system is very basic,
there’s no party, no visible customisation and no crafting. With that being said,
I’m pleasantly surprised about how much fun I’m having with it. It’s
challenging, but well-balanced. Admittedly, the first fight I got in to was
with a monster that was too high-level for me and I died straight away, but
this is actually quite a rare occurrence and the difficulty of the monsters
scale up quite well. You have a choice of where to go in order to complete your
objective, but not too much choice. The world map looks big but doesn’t look
like it will take too much time to see the significant areas. There is a
certain amount of grind required to get through the game – you’re relying on
your equipment to a certain extent, and treasure is not dropped at a rate where
you have more money than you can spend, so it will be a while before you get
enough gold together to buy the best gear – but it doesn’t overstay it’s
welcome. The result is a standard but enjoyable experience that I’ve had a good
time with so far, and I hope to be able to pick it up again soon!
I’ve also been playing Spyro the Dragon, and this time I
managed to complete the game 100%! I’ll do a blog about that at some stage, so
I won’t say anything more about it here other than what a delightful experience
it was, and hopefully I’ll get some time to play the other two games on the
disc!
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| At this point I'm just recycling pictures of Legions I've used before and seeing how long it takes people to notice. |
Finally, I was putting a lot more time than I expected into
The Horus Heresy: Legions. I got caught up in the politics of the Warrior Lodge
I am a part of – it takes itself a bit more seriously than my last one, and
there is an expectation that we will get a certain amount of points before the
end of the bi-weekly events or we will be kicked out. I came to within about a
day of this happening, so I stepped my game up and actually ended up doing
quite well, which at least partly resulted in the lodge getting the second
highest reward crate available. They’ll never do any better by my intervention,
as I refuse to spend any money on tickets, but they’ll have what help there is
in me!
I also found myself enjoying the cards in the new event, as
for once I’ve read the material it’s based on: Macgragge’s Honour, a graphic
novel. Also, Ouon Hommed – my preferred choice of warlord for this – has a very
powerful card-drawing ability that I suspect will get reduced for balance
purposes in later iterations. However, I managed an eight-win run with him,
which is my best run yet, and won the achievement for doing so which is a
positive thing! I’m going to try a few more runs with Hommed to see if I can
get him up to twelve wins – the maximum you can get off one ticket – before his
abilities are modified, as for once I might have a hope of managing it!
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