Review: Dragon Fantasy Book One Vita

Evil is afoot in the land of Westeria, and the only man who can stop it…..is fat, bald, and retired! Battle over 80 different enemies over multiple episodes! Equip powerful weapons, learn arcane magic, and master the skills of thievery!

Pros:

• Pixel graphics bringing a 8/16 bit era feel to it all. Plus a brilliant option where you can actually change the graphic style specifically to 8 bit appearance.
• Gameplay is a huge sprawling RPG game. Level up your character, buy/sell items and go dungeon crawling.
• music is good and very atmospheric, Again though like the graphics, you can change the quality to a chip tune ensomble.
• Cross buy with PS3.
• Cross save with PS3, You can choose to save the game locally or upload it to the cloud.
• Cheap price point, only 5.49 which is a nice little price for an RPG game.
• Multiple save slots so you never need to worry about losing a save.
• If you die you restart at an ever present church which can be found in every town you encounter.
• You do not lose any gained exp or items when you die and instead lose half the gold you are carrying.
• The map for navigating the land is ahuge map and you are free to roam where ver you please, The map can be best described as the same map style used in Zelda 2.
• Random battles in dungeons and on the map. You are safe in the towns.
• If you cant get to the save point at the church, You can do a quick save. be warned when you next come back to the game, You can only carry on from your quick save.
• Huge selection of enemies all with unique attacks and fighting styles.
• If you get poisoned or bleeding or any other effect, It changes the colour of all the menus so you know whats going on.
• You can fight, use magic or attempt to run in each fight.
• In fights you get a text based summary of what is going on.
• You can find inns at the towns and staying in here will cost you money and advance time, But also refill your health and magic points.
• You can buy/sell items in shops.
• Level up and the attributes get automatically assigned.

Cons:

• Slow starter with a lot of text screens as the story is told, Fighting enemies early on is slow.
• The start is slow but also quite difficult as the starting gear is crap, Earning gold takes ages plus the threat of losing half of it by dying is always there. Buyng health potions helps but takes away the money for new weapons.
• No real battle animations, Just an occasional swipe icon.
• game has a lot of stop starting, story goes dry at times then ramps up then calms down.
• grinding is needed a lot of the time to get better gear or fr the most part, To stock up on health items.

In Summary, Its a RPG lite and for the most part it is fun, The story is good but the pacing is a bit off. i found myself at many times getting lost or getting fed up with travelling to a dungeon only to die off some random event, and start back at the town. If you are willing to do a bit of grinding and level up and get new gear, The game then starts getting a bit easier. Despite this niggles the game is fun and I prefer it on the vita as it fits it more. The game will have more chapters and the not knowing whats coming feeling is a huge draw. So in short, Hack slash repeat…Win.