Drakkhen: Final Rating

This was my most successful combat with the Prince of Water in about 15 tries.

Drakkhen
France

Infogrames Europe (developer and European publisher); Data East USA (U.S. publilsher)
Released 1989 for Amiga and Atari ST, 1990 for DOS, 1991 for SNES

Date Started: 12 December 2012
Date Ended: 3 January 2013
Total Hours: 24
Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5)
Final Rating: 35
Ranking at Time of Posting: 48/82 (59%)

Ranking at Game #455: 328/455 (72%)

I'm taking the unusual step of writing the "final rating" posting before the "won!" posting because a) otherwise, I would have nothing to post today, and I haven't gone more than two days without a posting since November 14; and b) I'm not sure if I'll ever win despite a willingness to try.

Let me explain what brought me to this lowly state. When I last posted, I was on a long quest to get the eight "tears" from each of the Drakkhen princes and princesses, some from their willing hands, others from their cold corpses. The "good" side included the Princesses of Fire, Water, and Earth, and their leader, the Prince of Air; the "bad" side was led by the Prince of Fire and included the Princes of Earth and Water and the Princess of Air. The next stage of my quest was to visit the castle of the Princess of Fire and find out what happened to her.

This is what happened.

The Princess's castle had been invaded and ransacked, and the game wouldn't stop giving me messages, in literally every room, about how devastated the place was, although these messages were of the "tell instead of show" variety.

I see neither head nor blood. Nor a statue, for that matter.

The princess was slain on her throne, but I got her tear.

The Prince of Air showed up and bade me go and kill his rogue sister.

Ugh. That meant trekking through the tundra for an hour again, trying to find the castle (which isn't off a main road), but I did it, and after falling for the damned door-locks-behind-you trick again...

Oh, for %)*$'s sake.

 ...I encountered the Princess and killed her. The battle took me three tries, and even then the best I could do was get out with one character dead. This is one of the few games where you just have to suck it up when one of your characters dies, because you rarely come out of "boss" battles unscathed. The Prince of Air thanked me, saying he couldn't have brought himself to personally kill his sister.

That doesn't explain why he won't personally kill the Prince of Water, though.

He gave me his tear and sent me to kill the Prince of Water.

A rare CRPG villain perfectly capable of carrying out his threats.

Like his kin, Prince Haaggkhen has devastating attacks that destroy my armor and kill me in one blow. Unlike his kin, he seems impervious to my weapons. I can maybe do 4 or 5 hit points of damage against him before a single of his attacks kills me, no matter how many protective spells I cast ahead of time. "Shield" and "Invisibility" do nothing; "Anti-Magic" does nothing.

It's possible that success is supposed to rest on one of the offensive spells, like "Paralysis" or "Anti-Matter," but this is a recurring problem with my version of the game, at least: ranged attacks and ranged magic just don't work. Offensive spells don't hit the enemy, arrows shot from the bow do nothing, and healing spells cast at my own party members hardly ever heal.

So the only hope I can see is to keep grinding and hope that higher levels with more health allow at least one of my characters to live long enough to kill the damned Drakkhen. The problem is that this will take a long time, even if I just leave the game to grind for me, and I'm not sure it will help. It's not like I can "almost" win against the Prince of Water; I can't even touch him.

I am going to give it a try--probably while I play the next game in another window--but in the likely event that all the grinding in the world does nothing, I'm going to offer my GIMLET now.

1. Game World. Set on an island, the game world is small, but in a way that makes thematic sense. The manual and game tell an interesting, if not always coherent, story of a newly-discovered island with a newly-discovered populace of dragon-blooded creatures who pose a threat to the human world. I would have liked to see how it ended (and I'll probably watch it on YouTube if I can't win myself).

The world isn't very dynamic, though. As you progress through the quests, you're told about armies amassing and sacking castles, except that the castles are already sacked at the beginning of the game. The world doesn't "change"; you just uncover bits of the narrative as you progress to key plot locations. The only permanent effect that I could see is that slain Drakkhen princes and princesses remain dead. Score: 5.

2. Character Creation and Development. Like a couple of other recent games, you're forced to play with specific classes: fighter, scout, priest, and mage. They have different capabilities and restrictions, but there's no real "role-playing" associated with the character classes. The list of attributes and choices are RPG standards, and as in most games, you get experience from killing monsters, and thus progress in levels. You achieve an almost immediate imbalance in character levels owing to the game's method of assigning experience points to the character who made the kill, and it becomes difficult to make this up during the game. Character leveling provides more health, magic, and spells, but otherwise isn't very satisfying. Score: 3.

These stats, particularly strength, end up being very important, and it's worth investing the time at the beginning of the game to re-roll.

3. NPC Interaction. The NPCs in the game consist of some named Drakkhen princes and princesses, residents you encounter at houses, and the crazy old guy that keeps showing up on the road. There are no dialogue options with these NPCs; you just hit the question mark icon and get what they have to say. The game provides two dialogue icons--"wave hello" and "impress"--that, as far as I can tell, do absolutely nothing. It's way too easy to accidentally leave the "attack" button checked when encountering a non-hostile NPC. The NPCs are intriguing, if entirely one-way. Score: 5.

It's often difficult to distinguish NPCs from things you're supposed to kill.

4.  Encounters and Foes. The game has some of the most interesting-looking encounters of any game I've played so far: wyms and rocs that swoop down on you from above, a wide variety of beasts and humanoids, and some truly bizarre foes, like the shimmying woman and the robots with the laser chests. The problem is that they're utterly uninteresting beyond their appearance. There's no real variety in their approaches and attacks, no way to interact with them, no strategies to employ (besides fight or flee), and no choices. There are a couple of "puzzles" relating to getting into castles and finding the right runes, but nothing too challenging. The enemies aren't even named. In essence, the game provides interesting monsters but not interesting encounters. The good news is that there's lot of respawning and plenty of opportunities for grinding. Score: 4.

These guys scared me even when I knew I could defeat them.

5. Magic and Combat. Very, very bad. Combat is a free-for-all, activated with a single button, and bereft of any "tactics" other than the few that different spells provide. However, since it's functionally impossible to switch spells in the middle of combat (without giving the enemy chances to pound on the characters without retaliation), to use spells as "tactics," you have to know what you're facing ahead of time. The selection of spells is fairly paltry and uninteresting. Score: 1.

6. Equipment. Not fantastic, but not bad. You do have a fairly solid variety of things to wear and wield, and it remains satisfying throughout the game to get better weapons and armor from castles and random monsters. The problem is that there are hardly any names for things. Two pieces of armor might both be called simply "cuirasses," but one has 10 points more armor protection than the other. Rings and scepters are just called "ring" and "scepter" no matter what they do--even in the shop, where knowing what kind of ring or scepter would make a difference in whether you buy it. Some of these items bestow "abilities," which are not explained. Some of them seem to do nothing despite selling for quite a bit of money. There are potions, but their runic names don't necessarily correspond with the spells of the same runes, so I'd have to keep notes to remember what they do, and I never bothered. Finally, there's no way to really tell what kind of damage weapons do, although the sale price gives you an idea of what's "better." Score: 5.

That's nice that the ring costs $2,850. What does it actually do?

7. Economy. There's plenty of gold, but the only reason to amass it is for resurrections, and the game has such a stupefyingly awful system for this (the character to be raised has to have the gold, but the only place to "pool" gold is in the weapon shop, nowhere near the temple) that it made me want to delete the game. The swordsmith hardly sells anything of value, and the only reason to visit is to sell stuff and get more money for resurrections. Score: 3.

The priest refuses my request for resurrection with rhyming trochees.

8. Quests. There is one main quest, revealed slowly (and a bit oddly). As far as I can tell, there's only one possible ending, no side-quests, and no role-playing. Score: 3.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. Probably the best part of the game. As you can see, it's one of the best-looking and best-sounding games I've played so far, with cool enemy animations, changes to backgrounds and lighting from day to night, artfully-composed castle rooms, and satisfying background sounds associated with combat, spells, and interacting with the environment. But I have to subtract points on the "interface," which was continually frustrating. Horrible pathfinding, characters who refused to go where I clicked, and similar problems plagued my gameplay. Score: 5.

10. Gameplay. The game has a non-linear game world (you can walk anywhere from the beginning, although you probably won't last long), but a fairly linear plot, in which you progress from castle to castle in a specific order. For this reason, I can't see the game as "replayable." Perhaps the bigger problem is that the designers seem to be sociopaths. The game has a shocking number of ways to deliver instantaneous or near-instantaneous death, even when you do nothing "wrong." Demon dogs that erupt out of the ground from bumping into gravestones, dragons that swoop down and destroy you without allowing you to get in a single hit, lethal splotches of water, trapped drawbridges, castle doors that chomp on you, one-way doors that lock behind you, and (as we see above) enemies who are simply unbeatable...these all conspire to create a game of laughably high difficulty. At times, I was impressed with the game's audacity, but for the most part, I was annoyed with the constant reloading.

And the game just drags. The world isn't all that big, but you have to grind so much that hours and hours pass between interesting things happening. I think I spent more time standing around the wilderness waiting for enemies to attack than I did "playing" the game. Score: 2.

The final score of 35 is fairly low but accurately reflects my feelings about the game. It really is too bad; there were some promising things in the game, and in many ways it was ahead of its time. More combat options, a better equipment system, and a slightly lower difficulty might have redeemed the game and make it authentically fun today.

It appears that most readers' remembrances of this game were with the SNES version, which (judging by YouTube videos of gameplay) has some features that make it a little more tolerable. There seems to be a wider variety of equipment, and the equipment actually has names. Wandering merchants that buy and sell gear. NPCs appear to have more to say, and it appears that it's easier to give individual orders in combat. Combat includes "critical hits." Sound is even better. Dragons that swoop out of the sky occasionally give hints instead of just attacking. I'm guessing there are other differences, too.

A screenshot from magmawk's SNES walkthrough. The dragons in my version were never helpful like this.

Drakkhen was developed by a team of French designers at Infogrames Europe, a company that made or published hundreds of games, including Alone in the Dark and its sequels. It bought the Atari label in the late 1990s and renamed itself the "Atari Group" in 2009. It is thus one of the few developers of the era still in business, with their headquarters in Paris.

Drakkhen's development history is a little confusing, and sources are inconsistent. MobyGames says that it was both developed and published by Infogrames Europe--and the French names of all those credited seems to support this. But Wikipedia (supported by the game's own title screen) gives the developer as a company called Draconian, a division of the Japanese company Data East. Either way, the game was a rare RPG outing for them. Data East published a few other quasi-RPGs for consoles, but few that it developed and none for the PC. Infogrames's only other RPGs are Mandragore (1985) [ed. which I covered in 2016], and a quasi-sequel called either Super Drakkhen or Dragon View (1994), published by the Japanese company Kotobuki for the SNES.

Computer Gaming World never gave this one a full review, although they did have a brief summary in the October 1991 issue. It reflects my views entirely:

Odd combat style allows for little in the way of tactics or even control during fights. Character movement is occasionally awkward with people getting stuck at times behind obstacles, or the party not following the leader through doorways. Sparse documentation does not provide enough information. Terrible character generation system requires creating the party together; one poor set of stats and you may well have to start it all over again. This one is only for the patient.

I could see where this would trigger fond nostalgia among people who played it when it was new, but despite some good features, I find it a little too boring and frustrating. I'll give it a little more time and then move on to Dragons of Flame. I'm hoping it's a weekend game, because starting Curse of the Azure Bonds would be a nice Christmas present.

Later edit:  I would greatly appreciate hearing from anyone who has ever successfully played Dragons of Flame in DOSBox. I cannot figure out the controls or interface for the life of me, and I'm not finding much online.