I wasn't actually expecting to make a thread on this, but seeing as a previous post I made in another thread was met with a bit of eyebrow raising, I wanted to at least articulate my thoughts in a seperate thread to prevent derailing.
So! Let me preface this by saying that I genuinely adore the brawler genre a whole lot with games like Streets of Rage, Dungeons and Dragons, Spikeout, Sengoku, Guardian Heroes, Fighting Force and more recently Scott Pilgrim and Muramasa being my favorite in the series. Next to character action games they're my most favorite genre of all time. Dragon's Crown, on the other hand is something I just cannot enjoy as much as these. Not because the aesthetic doesn't appeal to me, because I genuinely love Kamitani's art (I have a framed Muramasa poster in my living room that looks real nice!) but...it's lacking in a lot of issues in game design that really irk me.
Combat
I think the biggest issue with the combat of Dragon's Crown is that the combat feels incredibly cheap in encounters. The contributing factor to that 'cheap' feel would have to be the lack of hitstop or the look of the supposed hitstop that's in the game is nonexistent. At the most the enemy character turns red and vibrates a bit. Now most would consider "why would hitstop be needed in a game like this?" Consider that later in DC there are enemies that can take an additional hit without 'flinching' and, if you have a class like the Archer, can pretty much eat through your attacks for free. It's apparent even with the tank classes like the Fighter (who is my second favorite class next to the elf) and the Amazon.
Another issue I find with the combat would also have to do with how Party Formation is a contributing factor to how combat in dungeons work. In DC I usually tended to run Elf/Wizard/Fighter/Sorceress because most, if not all of the maps contain either wood or bones that can be used for the spellcaster classes to make more friendly AI to wade through bigger monsters. That's great! But the issue within lies with enemy scaling. Meaning the AI doesn't actually get any more difficult when more players are added, instead the health of the enemies just get bigger. There's no challenge added to the dungeons with a full team. It eventually becomes a session of whittling down sponging enemies, which is kind of boring.
Movement
Dragon's Crown is pretty fast when you're moving left/right, but switching between 'lanes' (I call the foreground and backgrounds of brawlers 'lanes' because Guardian Heroes broke me lol) is a slog. Archer is my main, and she's arguably the fastest character in the game so WHY, even in later levels is her base up/down movements so damn slow? It becomes a huge issue playing solo and weaving through groups of enemies between lanes doesn't become exciting, but rather incredibly tedious. Which is why when as Archer I always remain in the air when switching lanes because it seems o be faster than simply walking.
UI/Towns/Misc.
Returning back to the 'party formation' issue, when golems, skeletons and your four members are on the field battling more monsters the screen becomes more difficult to distinguish your player characters and the other PCs from the AI both friendly and enemy. It becomes chaotic yes but the chaos is kind of a bitch when you both have to fight and protect the thief as he's scavenging in certain scenarios.
The thief. The thief is the worst. Why do I have to protect AI to open a chest? Why is there another thief that randomly shows up, that makes me stop fighting to kill him? It isn't smart to have another PC guard the thief because the risk/reward isn't worth it at all when the chest has a high chance of being a low rank chest. All four players have to be on the field to deal with the now sponging enemies.
Tiki is an unnecessary addition to the game when searching for secrets results in mostly undesirable rewards. Mapping her to the right stick to make the user manually search for secrets is a genuine waste control potential and should be reserved to a novelty as, say, a second player managing Tiki.
The Town setup is just a preference thing. I really would prefer if the entire game's contents were restricted to just a world map, and we could navigate the town through main points.
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I think Dragon's Crown is a fine looking game on both PS3 and PSV. But as a brawler, it's probably one of the weaker brawlers I've played. There's more game design related reasons that contribute to my distaste for the game, but these are the main ones that highlight why.
Looking forward to the counterpoints/disucssion!
