In Drakkhen, the humans must prove themselves worthy of the dragons challenge, and what a challenge it is. Everything in this game wants to kill you. But you can literally walk out with nearly an entire room full of junk in the castle levels. Make sure to stuff every shield, candlestick and millions of pounds of useless arrows and spears onto your person, just because you can. :) You are absolutely not safe at night, the freaking constellations will literally come down and try to battle you. What's more, is you'll spend most of the journey wandering around in circles if you choose not to follow the roads. When there are roads, that is! The map helps, though not much. I may as well mention that you can't swim either, and every time you go too far into water, your party does their best Monty Python impression of human beings being utterly overcome by knee-high lakes and rivers. I love how the battle system works here though, you don't do much of anything. You just hope that your party has the best armor and weapons available and watch as all four of them more or less beat a lizardman or some other sort of monster to death. Unless they get taken out, which can be almost instantly with some monsters. If it looks really powerful, run if you know what's good for you! The music is quite awesome though, at least in the Super Nintendo version which is what I owned. The mixture of adventure game elements with first-person walking was also quite unique. The Castle levels offer a completely different style of gameplay and make for an intriguing adventure. You'll just have to watch your characters fight for hours at a time, while wandering around the map like an idiot. Where did that dragon tell me to go? It doesn't matter, because my characters are already drowning to death in knee-high water. If any of this sounds like fun to you, then pick this one up.
The premise of the game is obviously the evolution of the RPG, from it's early 8-bit days to high-resolution textures and all that other fancy stuff that we have now. Though the game does offer a few dungeons and bosses throughout each evolution, it's ridiculously short and comes with a final boss who just literally seems thrown in at the last minute. It's been rather cheap in sales here lately, so I'd definitely get it if it's cheap, and you're bored with everything else. I highly recommend the sequel over this, as that's where the devs really got to work on creating something that used the evolution concept in a more story-driven manner that just plain works. You can actually finish this whole thing in an hour, so keep that it mind. Right now there are much better RPG experiences on GOG like Legend Of Heroes and Grandia II: Anniversary. But once again, if you're bored... pick it up.
