Welcome, all and pre-Sunday sundry, to another episode of ST-urday. I usually fill this top part with ramblings about what I've been up to this week, but I've really not been up to much. I've been intending to play the presently final Ratchet & Clank game in its series (that would be Ratchet & Clank Nexus) as something to fill the gap between now and December 1st, upon which date I intend to relaunch Go! Go! GOTY! and bash through as many unplayed 2015 games as possible. It's presently a meager list of three - The Suikoden-sorta comedic RPG Citizens of Earth, the cute but deadly action-platformer throwback Castle in the Darkness and the amusing graphic adventure game The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 (really enjoyed the first) - but I'm hoping to add to it when the Thanksgiving Steam sales start sometime next week. I received some birthday Steam vouchers that have been burning a hole in my digital wallet, and I have my eye on more than a handful of possibilities: Axiom Verge, Titan Souls, Ori and the Blind Forest, The Magic Circle, The Beginner's Guide, Divinity: Original Sin (though that might wait until I have a current-gen console), Life is Strange, Rebel Galaxy, Technobabylon, Cradle, SOMA, and so many more. 2015 was definitely a good year for Indies.
Needless to say though, my GOTY list will be interesting without any PS4/XB1 console games (or their PC equivalents, which are a forlorn hope on this system) on it. We're talking a Wii U game and a bunch of Steam Indies at the moment. Maybe I'll get to shine a spotlight on a few smaller titles that were otherwise overshadowed by the big releases of this year. The alternative is to focus less on new releases and just rate the games I finally got around to in 2015, which include a lot of fantastic games like Yakuza 3, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, Burnout Paradise, Shantae: Risky's Revenge and a whole bunch of other stuff I should've played years ago.
On the Giant Bomb Wiki front, I'm happy to announce that I completed my last project: sprucing up the game pages for the infamous kitty-litter tray that was the Atari Jaguar. Most of the work had already been done long before I started - largely by a user named xdgx, who did most of their work around the inception of the wiki in 2008 - but there were a few skeleton pages and header images to fix up. My present stopgap project is to go back and revamp all the NES/Famicom pages from 1983-1985, some of which I created or added to but years before I started getting serious about the wiki. There's various style issues with those pages and, of course, the ever-present (non)issue of them not having header images. After that it'll be some time working on the early PC Engine library and then, finally, the launch of Wiki Project Super '95. That's another 400+ page project that won't be done overnight, to say the least.
Drakkhen
I was apprehensive about covering this one. As with Ishar: Legend of the Fortress, which I looked at on ST-urday a little while ago, it's a continental European RPG that didn't feel like playing ball (or couldn't, due to licensing issues) with the various games building on the D&D ruleset and decided to go its own way. Drakkhen might be one of the least intuitive RPGs out there, but it's also packed with a deep amount of lore, some clever ideas, a very efficient if chaotic combat system and a lot of mysteries that would be more fun to explore and solve if the interface hadn't already created so many extra question marks to deal with on top of that. It's like trying to solve a murder case with the QWOP guy: you want to puzzle out the whodunnit, but first you have to puzzle out, like, basic movement. Drakkhen was definitely a game that continually bamboozled a younger me, even if I eventually figured a lot of it out. The controls, at least.
Drakkhen was developed by Infogrames, back when they were a moderately-sized French developer who, like their contemporaries Delphine Software and Silmarils, would often take a lot of risks on high-concept ideas. Nowadays, of course, they're playing it safe to a fault trying to relaunch numerous Atari properties as Atari SA to varying degrees of critical disdain. (Whatever did happen to that weird Asteroids base management reboot?) Drakkhen was a minor hit for them, and was fortunate enough to see a Japanese-developed SNES conversion from Kemco-Seika that confused and frustrated an entirely different audience of players.
To succinctly summarize the story of the game: The last great dragon is slain by a particularly foolhardy knight, plunging the world into a post-magical apocalypse, as the Dragon Gods were the ones responsible for the creation of the world and left their scions, the great dragons, as custodians of its magical power. The various peoples of this world have been dependent on magic over technology, since one was a lot easier to figure out than the other, that the sudden lack of it had some unfortunate repercussions. A boat-load of pilgrims were swept off course when their wind magic suddenly ceased, leading them to a hidden land full of half-human/half-dragon folk named Drakkhen. The Drakkhen have an ancient prophecy that dictates that they will conquer the planet and exterminate the humans once they are no longer protected by magic. The humans that are in the land of Drakkhen, however, discover that their magic is working again. It's up to a small band of adventurers to prevent the spread of the Drakkhen forces and possibly restore the world's magic in the process.
Welcome to Drakkhen! Because this is a serious, contemplative CRPG, the intro begins with a ten-foot-tall dragon prince carving the game's creators onto a stone tablet with his eye lasers.The game has an unusual character creation process. I don't just mean because they have an education statistic instead of wisdom and charisma, but rather that it takes advantage of the fact that the Atari ST version of the game came on three disks. If you were to play the first disk, which has the above intro, it would prompt you to insert the second disk which starts the game with the default characters. By loading the second disk first, you can create and save your own team to a blank data disk, and insert THAT instead after the intro prompts a disk change. Convoluted, but then creating your own team is a fairly superficial thing: you have to have one of each of the four classes anyway, so there's not a whole lot of wiggle room for customization.These four, in fact: the melee heavy Fighter/Amazon, the agile Scout, the walking band-aid that is the Priestess and the nuke-ready Magician. The characters all start off with nothing equipped, but they have some basic starting equipment in their inventories to put on. (The female Scout actually starts topless in this version of the game, so I made sure to equip her first before taking the screenshot. That's mainland Europe for you; they're a liberated bunch.)The game is all in real-time. That doesn't just refer to the combat, but to everything. The game has an internal timer that regulates a gradual day/night cycle (still fairly unusual in 1989). It also means that if you stand out in the open with your party for long enough, enemies start showing up to fight you. You'll also meet them roaming around too. Combat in the game is automatic: you simply have to click the sword icon on the bottom right and everyone fights hostiles in the vicinity. They default attack with their readied weapons, but you can switch the magic-users to spells.You'll take a lot of damage early on, and though the game doesn't really say it, you should probably run away from anything bigger than that tiny blue garter snake we just massacred. At least early on, when your equipment and levels are low. It's an unfortunate aspect of the game's random encounter engine: it will throw all kinds of powerful shit at you at all times. Saving frequently is also a good idea.Otherwise this happens. They really rub it in, huh? A little more dire than "You and all of your friends are dead."Anyway, by hitting the Enter key, the team returns (oh I get it) to the bottom of the screen and you can move around a fully 3D landscape as a team. Roads are the best bet, since enemy encounters are low and they all tend to lead to important places. Water is a bad idea, since your adventurers sink like rocks and will be dead in seconds if you don't move away.You, uh, might also want to avoid bumping into things. Something doesn't like it. Ditto with the night sky: constellations will come down and attack you, and there's not a lot even high-level parties can do against those guys besides disintegrate a little more slowly. Even if the Cave of Wonders from Aladdin here is a pretty shitty thing to have happen to you, it does demonstrate the game's intriguing sense of mystery I was talking about earlier. Wouldn't you want to know what this thing's deal was? Or, purrhaps more purrtinently, how to kill it?So this is the first location of the game, a keep in the mid- Goddammit, did that moat shark just eat my scout? I hate moat sharks.So this is the first location of the game, a keep in the middle of the wilderness close to where the player starts. It, like all the castles in the game, houses one of the game's bosses: the Drakkhen Princes and Princesses, who are far bigger and stronger than the rest of their species. This one has protected itself with magical forcefields, though I suspect they're just here to keep out wandering riff-raff like ourselves. Activating the wrong symbol on the walls summons some low-strength hunchback dudes. In fact, it might be a good idea to accidentally get this part wrong a few times, since it guarantees a fairly easy encounter and some useful cash. Most of the encounters outside, in comparison, are less than survivable.Dropping the forcefields means you can now send one or all of your team out exploring the castle. it's worth noting that the game doesn't let you save inside castles: You have to return to the entrance, leave, save and then come back in to find the whole place has been restored. This also comes in useful though, as it also respawns all the items you can steal. Remember the shield on the wall on the previous screenshot? It's mine now.It's not a bad idea to grab some items from the surrounding rooms, leave and come back in to fill up on valuable equipment for when we reach a vendor. I'd also like to heal up, but I never did figure out how healing spells worked in this game. You seem to regenerate health very slowly, so I usually ran away from enemies whenever my health was low.I've sent my Amazon out solo since my Scout isn't feeling too hot. Your team will follow the leader wherever they go, but you can manually select someone who isn't leader (it's indicated by the red light on the left between the paper dolls) and they'll be on their own. Splitting the party has its uses: it means not having to corral this bunch through a series of doors, but it can also leave you vulnerable. Both your single explorer and the team you've left behind, should something randomly encounter them.Aw crap. Maybe I won't go in here.Uh, thanks old dude? These hint NPCs just magically teleport in and out when you're exploring or outside for some useful lore and tidbits. So far none of them have asked me if I want to play money making game or talked about secrets in the eastmost peninsula.The game uses jade coins as its currency, and it has an odd way of distributing cash: every character has their own treasure total, their own inventory and their own XP gauge. XP only goes to the one that killed the monster, which can put your two melee characters a little ahead of the others, but the player can fix this by beating a monster half to death and letting the two mages finish it off by telling the warriors to stop their attack. Kinda awkward, right?This doorway just took a bite out of me! Hey, when is a door not a door? When it's a jaw! Yeah, now you know the pain my Scout feels.This is Prince Hordtkhen, the Prince of Earth. Each of the Drakkhen royals have an elemental domain, and it determines where in the world they are. Other elemental Princes/Princesses are in less hospitable parts of the world, where the encounters are tougher and the terrain less survivable. It's an effective way of "gating" what is essentially an open-world.If you try attacking him now, there won't be anything left of you. Not even vapor. But you can talk to him to get a little side-quest instead. The game's main questline is gently goading you towards a fairly boss-free route for right now, while you're still vulnerable and squishy. Before we try to figure out where East is (there's no map or compass in this game, though the sun still works the same way as it does here), you can grab these powerful armored pants from the Prince before leaving. Not everyone can equip them, but you can leave and go back in a few times to get as many pairs as you need. Sort of an exploit, but you need every advantage in this game. From here, there's Inns (these allow you to heal up and possibly buy/sell from merchants), Shrines (shrines are instant heals and can resurrect fallen members, who appear as crossed swords and don't earn XP while dead) and the aforementioned castle of the Princess. For now, though, I think I'll leave off here.
Drakkhen's one of those games where half the reward is in figuring it out. It's brutally unfair, even if you know how the game's systems work, and the UI leaves a lot to be desired. It's fairly singular in its genre though, and that went a long way back then when every other CRPG was either Wizardry-inspired dungeon-crawler or a D&D Gold Box turn-based strategy game.
There are also precious few games as intimidating as Drakkhen. A game where you get attacked by enormous panther heads by bumping into gravestones, or colossal flying space caterpillars by having the temerity to look up while walking around at night. The land of Drakkhen really isn't for the faint of heart. Maybe that's why it appealed to so many; there's definitely something to challenging the insurmountable. Or maybe people just liked it because it looked incredible for 1989 and had a wide range of novel features they hadn't seen before. Or maybe because it has giant dragons with laserbeam eyes, who knows? That last one alone was probably enough for tiny baby Mento.
