- Dragon’s Crown Pro
- Developer- Vanillaware
- Publisher- Atlus
- PS4, previously on PS3 and PS Vita
When Dragon’s Crown originally released it was packed with esoteric design decisions. There was plenty of classic brawler legacy within it, but those decisions almost felt out of place. Strangely, time has only served to make those eccentricities feel more at home.
Cursor based interactions and menus have become much more common on consoles, and the addition of a touchpad on the PS4 has only made that more natural. The online integration feels normalized too–the death messages that litter a stage have plenty of precedent, and seeing a party automatically populate with AI based on other players feels smart. And the heavy focus on multiplayer feels obvious now, especially with the popularity of RPG systems and loot based progression. Weirdly, even the bizarre structural turn in the second half, where you’re tasked with backtracking to do new objectives in the same areas, makes a lot more sense given the popularization of MMO style loops of repeated content. Despite being an entry in a genre a lot of people dismiss as being regressive, Dragon’s Crown ended up being rather prescient.
At the same time it is easy to see how far back Dragon’s Crown reaches for its core concepts. Most obvious is the influence of Capcom’s Dungeons and Dragons arcade brawlers. There’s that same sense of high fantasy majesty in its aesthetics (albeit deeply, deeply exaggerated) and the skeleton for both the combat and the RPG progression is there. In particular you can see the same desire to pare down the complex interactions of DnD into a simpler arcade style control scheme. It’s sometimes unwieldy, but it manages to integrate a lot of actions into a single attack button, and makes the transition between them work surprisingly well. There’s also a lot of that DnD spirit in the narration, which provides a continuous commentary on the journey, lightly guiding you to the next objective. It’s probably my favorite touch, and the Pro edition happily contains every DLC for the alternative voice packs. Which means you can get the whole game narrated by any one of the playable characters, even in Japanese, if you’re one of those people.
Speaking on the additions of the Pro release, this is largely the same version of the game that released on the PS3 and Vita, to the point that it will allow you to transfer data as well as play online with those versions. I had to boot up my PS3 to upload a save that wasn’t outdated (it doesn’t use Sony’s cloud saves) but it worked effortlessly and let me pick up my previous campaign. Which is great, because I had put in 20 hours already and it takes a long time to get to that endgame. As far as the other upgrades the art is now presented in a much higher resolution, making it clearer throughout, and the framerate has been stabilized.
The resolution upgrade is a mixed bag–the characters and effects look great, but certain backgrounds really show that they weren’t designed for these high resolutions. There’s a filtered, almost posterized effect that stands out in some of the more repeated backgrounds. The framerate upgrade is more welcome, as the original version, especially on the Vita, really took a hit when things got hectic, which in the final stretch of the game was ALL THE TIME.
That’s the greatest sticking point for Dragon’s Crown Pro. Despite the clarity brought by the upgrades this is still Dragon’s Crown. There’s that same sense of camaraderie, and the same creative twists on the brawler formula, but those upgrades don’t do anything to make battles more comprehensible when things get hectic. At times the battlefield felt so cramped I wish that it went a little further and gave me more space to move in, if only to open up the spread of magical effects, explosions and bodies thrown about in the chaos of the late game. It’s still fun, and there’s a different skillset to parsing and managing that chaos, but every problem with the original still remains. How much you get out of this new version is dependent on how willing you are to accept that.