Short and to the point: the game is completely overwhelming in the sense that I never really know where I’m supposed to go. I had never played a gacha game before, because the whole pay-to-play slop thing turns me off completely, even though a lot of these games look genuinely good.
Dragonsword Awakening therefore felt like a real breath of fresh air at first — but that changed quickly. The game feels very thin, with too many resources you have to collect through various endless grinds. Here’s a more detailed breakdown:
[h2]Visuals:[/h2]
It looks okay. The important characters stand out, they’re varied and generally well done. The remaining NPCs, on the other hand, already start looping extremely often in the first two minutes in town. The art style is pretty, but it can’t keep up with other titles in the same genre.
[h2] Animations[/h2]
Hah! HAH! The fights might look spectacular visually, but everything outside of combat is so lazily done. Actions aren’t even shown — they’re just implied. Character A pulls Character B away because they screwed up — you see none of it. The characters just idle around.
[h2]Voice acting:[/h2]
The biggest problem for me is that there’s only the Korean voice track. At the very least an English dub should have been included for the global release.
[h2]Controls + combat system:[/h2]
Giga boring. Auto-attack spam, two action skills, and two combos that can be executed under certain conditions. Some skills let you switch from one character to one of the other two in the active team and trigger their combo skill. That’s fun for the first 2–3 hours, after that it becomes extremely repetitive.
[h2]Characters:[/h2]
Clichéd stereotypes. That’s really all there is to say. You look at the design and immediately know what you’re getting.
[h2]Story:[/h2]
It lost me, because everything in the game world sidetracks you. The story itself is told through quests, most of which are dull fetch quests, often with routes that go from A to B, from B back to A, then to C, back to A, then to C again. Nowadays you can do this better.
[h2]Gacha mechanics:[/h2]
Since I’m a newcomer to the genre I can only say this much: it’s too much. All the items, the in-game shops that require a resource that functions exactly like premium currency in actual gacha games — except you earn it by playing. On top of that there are daily quests and weekly quests… in a single-player game? Why?!
[h2]Verdict:[h/2]
Sometimes less is simply more. Dragonsword Awakening is packed with so much stuff I can only describe it as “screen noise.”
