Drakan: Order of the Flame

Still runs fine on Win 8.1, so I guess the reason why it's not on GOG or anywhere else is either license hell or the owner (Sony?) not being interested in selling their legacy games. I missed out on this classic back in the days, but it was still fun to play today. Kind of an heir to Tomb Raider and precursor to Severance: Blade of Darkness, but with dragon riding on top of it, which was the most awesome part. The general gameplay was nice enough, but these dragon flight and aerial combat sequences were a real joy, incredibly satisfying as the ultimate power fantasy.

What I liked less was the melee combat, which I never quite got the hang of, and the way the game handles items and inventory. Weapons are basically consumables, due to their limited durability. You might find a sword with, let's say, 30/30 durability, and what this means is that after 30 hits, this weapon will break and be gone. In the beginning I thought there would be a smith or something else to fix weapons, but no, you just use the weapons until they're gone, no chance to repair them (which makes finding a weapon with stats like 40/150 or so all the more disappointing - why display the maximum durability in the first place then?). Add to that that the tetris-style inventory is rather limited as well, that even different types of potions and arrows take up different spaces, and worst of all, that you also need to make room for quest items (sometimes several of the same sort, each taking up one space).

And in consequence, I was often distracted with inventory management, pondering over which weapons and other consumables to keep and which to leave behind. Finding something cool and new always meant saying goodbye to something else. So on the one hand, I always found more weapons and items than I could carry, on the other hand, I was constantly worrying about consuming the good stuff too quickly and being left with nothing when in need. And the game made it even harder by giving next to no helpful information about the advantages and disadvantages of specific weapons or items (e.g. does a mithril sword pierce armor? if an ice crystal creates a protective field around me, why am I still being hit as hard as before etc; even the manual remains vague about all that). A nightmare for every packrat.

In the end, I guess I played it kind of wrong. You're probably meant to just use what you find, then pick up the next thing when it's gone, more like in a shooter than in an RPG. But as long as you haven't finished the game, you never know what to expect, if and when you will find another weapon as good as this again, or what you will need to defeat the opponents still waiting for you, later on. In hindsight, I also know now that it's often a valid tactic to just ignore enemies and run past them, especially all the knights which I thought much more annoying to deal with than any of the rather easy bosses. RPGs have conditioned me to try and kill everything, but you don't get any xp here, and only seldom rewards that outweigh the resource drain that combat might bring, unless you've perfected the art of melee and enjoy fighting the same types of enemies again and again. And sometimes you are required to defeat a specific foe in order for a door to open or a key to drop, but those opponents are indistinguishable from the rest. Sometimes, I also had to look up a walkthrough, because there was a lack of clues on what to do (e.g. a sarcophagus suddenly becoming an elevator, but only if you awkwardly hop inside it, and similar looking sarcophagi never acted like this before).

It's also advisable to save often and in different slots, because you can literally get stuck in tight spots without any hope of getting out of it again, especially when riding on the back of the dragon and letting him crawl through narrow tunnels. And the AI of the enemies could be rather buggy, too. Sometimes they had trouble with pathfinding and would just stand there, or they glitched a few meters above ground etc.

In the cutscenes the villain voices could sometimes be a bit hard to understand due to the distortion effects, and subtitles weren't as much of a standard back then as they are today, so the game does not offer any. But the story is simple enough that it did not really matter. The ending was a bit of a letdown, very short and kind of a cliffhanger, maybe in preparation for the sequel that only came out for the PS2 then (if that even continues the story; no idea whether that's the case or not).

Anyway, despite all the negatives listed above, I really liked the game. That's how good it feels to have a dragon at your command. :D