Dragon Sword is a super fun game if you're looking for a grindy offline MMO to play. The character writing is pretty funny, although often times the quest you're doing feel like filler. It's the kind of NPC interactions where if you feel like reading the text, you might have a laugh, but it often feels so inconsequential to the main story that you will be doing a lot of skipping. This is especially true considering how long the game is. I am 20 hours in, and nearing the 50% mark for the story. It'll probably be a 50 hour long story mode if the pace continues.
The combat is repetitive unless you swap up characters often, however the game heavily incentivises picking permanent 3 characters which you can feed your limited resources into in order to stay at or above the required combat power to complete tasks. Unless you're planning on beating the super end game, just pick your favourite characters. I have a pretty good combination going, but I've not worried about min-maxing at all, as I am mostly just focusing on playing it casually rather than beating everything the game has to offer. Characters who share attributes will produce a better flow to the combat, which is worth baring in mind.
The game looks pretty nice. It has a heavily anime focused art style as you can tell from the trailers. There is a lot of pop-in, and the rain can look a little blurry, but they are issues which you can easily look beyond if you're enjoying the other aspects of the game. I do really like how vibrant the colour scheme is.
There are many, many systems in this game. It's truly a gacha without the gacha. Systems upon systems which previously were used to force transactions to squeeze efficiency out of characters, now act as branching paths for boosts in power. It makes the leveling system feel a little more dynamic, knowing if your character is level capped, you can still get stronger in other ways if you're trying to beat a boss 15 levels higher. The character level is not the be-all, end-all of how strong you are at any given moment, so the ability to take on challenges technically above your level is very real provided you're party is well assembled and kitted out in other respects. Just don't be overwhelmed by the systems at the start of the game. Play the game's story normally, focus on the simple things like gear or skill level, and the rest of the mechanics will be drip fed to you over time. The game doesn't want to introduce a new mechanic before you've mastered a previous, so despite the fact that you get access to near everything from the early game, the game only expects you to handle a few basic systems.
The character designs themselves are competently made, but fairly boring overall. None of the designs are going to blow peoples mind. The sex appeal exists as you'd expect with korean design, but beyond that the characters are mostly going to appeal through their skillset and personality, rather than the design themselves. Outside of 'sexy guy' and 'sexy girl', the designs lack a certain uniqueness.
The tone / feel of the game is essentially breath of the wild at home. The music and sound effects are very BOTW. The tone of the game has that same adventurous feel with comical moments. The map design is super BOTW inspired. But it does lack combat depth, as you'll be pulling off the same combo routes a million times once you have your standard party of 3 rotation.
Not the game is only voiced in Korean, but the voice acting is pretty good.
Overall, it's a game i can recommend for people who are looking for an offline, grindy MMO, with pretty chill vibes, decent cinematics, a large helping of korean jokes, and you don't mind seeing the same well rendered cinematic battle cutscenes many times over.
