 S-N-S-T-R-I-C-E If you ever wanted to get some insight as to why this channel has videos titled Is This Game Worth Playing Today, the perfect example is Drakken for Super Nintendo. This was initially developed by Infograms for the Amiga and Atari ST, and then ported to the SNES by Kemco. It was one of the very first Super Nintendo releases, and it was THE first role-playing game that was available for those of us in North America. The game had some truly badass-looking cover art, it had a cool sounding name. I'm not sure what a DROCKIN is but it sounds like an Iron Maiden song or something and check out this title screen I mean come on this game should be great, right? No, it's decidedly un-great. It's pretty bad. But the thing is back in 1991 people were really rooting for this game to be great It's one of the first SNES games It's one of the first RPGs to feature vast open areas and 3D that you can wander around in despite not having any kind of 3D game engine and it's one of the first RPGs to employ real-time tactics DROCKIN really swung for the fences and it should be commended for that and plenty of people put tons of hours into this game back in the day And hey just because the game isn't very good doesn't mean it's completely devoid of some fun moment DROCKIN was a big deal at the time it was released and it was absolutely worth checking out back then if only for the novelty I remember my friend renting this and inviting me over and we were both completely Mystified about what the heck you were supposed to do in this game or what was even going on It was unlike any other game we'd ever seen before But unfortunately novelty always has a shelf life and in the case of DROCKIN It was a pretty short one because DROCKIN's flaws pop up all over the place as quickly as this giant dog head does So let's get into the game itself Just to give you an idea of how weirdly janked up this game is look no further than the story Developer infograms originally wrote the story in their native French Then it was translated from French to Japanese by Kemko for the super Famicom then it was translated again to English when it was localized And as a result of that the story for the SNES title is different than what you'd find on the original version And the story isn't exactly straightforward or forthcoming with information I still have no idea what the heck is going on like 90 percent of the time But it pretty much boils down to some gods being angry at you for some reason So they're gonna destroy the world but you can fight back if you're able to collect the gems of the DROCKIN's or creatures That are half-man and half-dragon and how do you do that? Well by wandering around aimlessly of course There's four parallel zones you can explore each spanning left to right as you can see on the map here And each zone has two castles and one healing shrine The whole point here is to play through this game in a certain sequence Visit one castle and talk to one person to trigger one event go to the next castle to trigger the next thing And so on the problem with this approach is that the game gives you next to zero information to go by So as a result when most people play this game You just end up wandering around forever and getting into random battles and dying almost immediately Even if you had the instruction manual for this game while it is helpful for certain things It's not particularly forthcoming as to what you're actually supposed to do. So what do you do? Well, what's cool here is that when you start you have four classes to choose from for your character and for your party And you can allocate stats for them as well kind of cool But ultimately very limited after that you pretty much just follow the path here Which takes you to this first castle you're supposed to go to but the problem is there's no way to get in any of these doors They're sealed by a barrier So now what you're supposed to check these markings on the wall and you do that by pressing a and selecting the Little button press icon thing in the lower right pick the one here, and it'll deactivate the barrier after that You kind of wander around the castle aimlessly until you run into this badass looking dragon But you don't fight it He just tells you to go to the next castle and so goes Drakken lots of cryptic nonsense lots of wandering around and lots of I don't know fetch quests only you're fetching text text quests Sure There's plenty of the typical RPG stuff here like managing items and weapons and armor and stuff But there's certainly nothing here in that category that makes it unique from any other RPG Unfortunately, what makes Drakken unique is the insane amount of random battles You have to deal with throughout the game and you don't have any real-time control in what happens at least not really Each fight is supposed to go according to how you allocate your party stats and strategy with your options being Attack full force or don't use magic. There's not a whole lot of range here to say the least The problem is not only are the battles you fight random, but the combat itself is too Sometimes you'll get a critical hit that ends the fight immediately and sometimes you'll miss every attack and get the crap kicked out of you It's incredibly frustrating the sheer amount of instant deaths. You'll randomly run into is really annoying Oh, and you can also wander into water. There's no barrier here. You just start sinking. Okay. I admit That's pretty funny I think the biggest point this game missed is that there's no real way to track how effective your quote-unquote Strategy may or may not be and by strategy I really just mean how you set up your party the battles themselves being so random indicate to me that it doesn't matter what you do Because this game is just gonna do whatever it wants regardless It's a classic case of the game playing you rather than the other way around and obviously it doesn't help that the computer AI here is dumber than a bag of hammers I mean come on get out of the way move it and what the heck is this guy's deal? Did he just blue skidoo out of there? I know Drakken has its fans that say just give it a chance and to a certain extent I get where they may be coming from the music here is certainly cool The art style is kind of interesting and once you reach a castle the game gets a bit more focused and you can talk to characters Explore rooms and collect keys while using the look icon to find things plus this game just has this weird creepy feel to it That no other game has it's hard to describe It's just kind of vaguely unsettling and I have to admit I kind of like that about this game I also dig the lore this game creates and plus I just can't help but laugh at how freaking goofy certain stuff is Right down to basic character movement They look like a bunch of awkward white guys busting out their best dance moves at a wedding reception But there's just way way too many flaws in this game to give another example I get what they were going for with exploring out in the 3d landscape and like I said earlier This was pretty freaking cool at the time But the problem is it's tough to determine where the hell you're going because there's no real landmarks you can go by Which means you got to be constantly flipping to your map which gets kind of old also the user interface here is just Slightly outdated to say the least to the game's credit both the game tutorial and the instruction manual do make sense of a good Chunk of the game's weirdness like explaining each icon's function or being able to press the y button to switch characters and perform Spells even in the middle of combat, but that's not nearly enough to salvage this unintuitive mess There's also lots more annoying stuff like equipment breaking permanently or cluelessly running into these giant dog heads Which lead to an automatic death? I haven't mentioned you die a lot in this game And it has nothing to do with what you may or may not have done the game just tells you to drop dead Drakken did receive a sequel a few years later titled dragon view and what's interesting here is that it wasn't made by Infograms the original developer but by Kemco the team that ported Drakken to the US and Dragon view does a great job taking some of the ideas that Drakken presents and streamline them to make for a much much better player Experience the 3d exploration map is still here And yeah that part still isn't the greatest but at least the combat transitions to a beat-em-up style where you have more control Over what happens dragon view remains one of my favorite games. I've discovered since I started this channel as for Drakken Yeah, it's not worth playing today. It was definitely a neat curiosity for its time, but playing it now. No, thanks There's just way too many problems Especially on the Super Nintendo edition if you'd like to check out what the game was originally like the DOS version of Drakken is available on Steam and gog.com the Super Nintendo version however is just way too flawed Yeah, it does have its own goofy charm But you can find so much better in the Super Nintendo library including the sequel dragon view All right, I want to thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day