Unpolished, unfinished, unplayable
I'd had the demo for Dragoon on my harddrive for some time. Looking for a decent fighter on the indie circuit is nigh-impossible, so I had downloaded the demo for anything that resembled a versus fighter in order to find one to play. Out of maybe six games I found two that weren't shit, and Dragoon didn't make that cut. It was ugly, slow, clunky, and pretty resembled something like a very early beta.
Recently, however, out of boredom and a yearn to catalog some indie fighters, I decided to bite the bullet and pay the dollar to buy Dragoon, hoping that if the gameplay and graphics weren't up to snuff, at least there'd be some interesting characters.
Sadly, it seems that I was dead wrong. Dragoon only consists of three versions of the same character, "Lulie", a midriff-sporting halberd-wielder. If there are any differences between the three, I definitely can't find anything. The single player portion of the game suffers similarly: after beating one match, you get a "Congratulations!" screen. That's it. No second fight, no further challenges, no story details. Even the most horrid of Dragoon's competition on Xbox Live Indie Games gives you a handful of characters and multiple fights, and often character motivations and endings. The game's official description calls it "An exhibition match given by the hunting people who lives with dragons. Contestants wield a large weapon for their hunting", but there is zero indication of this in-game, especially since the "people" mentioned is actually one person.
It has been a while since I've played the demo, but I don't recall at all anything that's in the full version that wasn't in the demo. Did I literally just pay a dollar for something that I already had? The saddest part of this whole ordeal is that it seems that the developer XELF has written a few books in Japan on how to program for 3D games in XNA, when it's quite obvious that they lack expertise in the subject.
So there you have it... if you're looking for a cheap fighting experience on Xbox Live, this is not the way to go. It's butt-ugly and pretty much the most boring thing I've played on the console. It may be slim pickings, but this is the bottom of the barrel.