by Tourniquet, tourniquet! Cut the bleeding!
There comes a time (1 and a half days for me apparently) when you simply have to cut off something that’s dead. Dragon Fin Soup is sadly such a game. The quintessential example of “when indie game companies go bad,” flipping through the forum posts of DFS is like reading perfectly preserved chapter book of poor management, over-hyped and undelivered promises, and disappointment in a game that is just *so* close to being good… but just doesn’t quite get there.
It’s a pity, because there is some real talent on the DFS team. Advertised as a rogue-like, the art at every single turn (be it in-game, cinematic, character portraits…) blows every other indie-game roguelike I’ve played out of the water. Bright, colorful, characterized, crisp, unique, interesting–it’s fantastic. It was probably the art that kept me going for so long. Sadly though… sadly… that is the only no-strings-attached compliment I can give. And art, a good game does not make. Good art is just… good art.
You see, the game advertises itself as a rogeulike–but it’s not a roguelike. It’s an indie RPG with rogeulike tendencies. The storyline is so long and filled with the most erratic difficulty curves I’ve seen in a while, coupled with sporadic deaths that feel outside of your control (to say nothing of the bugs) that you’d have to be a moron to play this on the rogeulike setting. No, I’m betting that anyone who’s actually played this game for more than a few hours has been playing through on the “classic” mode, which allows reloading after deaths. There’s just far too much dialogue and plot to that you’d have to skip through EACH time you die to make it worth it.
The crafting system is utterly broken in the worst ways possible. It’s obtuse, annoying to use, requires hours of time spent finding resources, grinding out crafting levels and figuring out what the heck you actually want to make that would be useful. I, like the fool that I am, was determined early on to ignore the forum posts that warned me of how bad it was, and try to use it to the best of its merit–it took all of about 20 minutes to figure out a money-loop grind, and after programming a macro on my mouse to repeat the tedious crafting steps that need to be done (over and over and OVER again) I quickly found myself with a ridiculously high crafting level, and infinite money. Infinite money lead to infinite bullets, bombs, and anything else I wanted to get my hands on (and I do mean *infinite* money; 1 minute of crafting returned a net profit of 600% of my investment, leading me to have so much money I couldn’t even spend it anywhere on anything useful because I had bought everything). From this point, the game’s “difficulty” became rather meaningless, as my deaths from then on out were more to do with my neglect out of boredom, or when the game bugged out, leading to it skipping my character’s turn indefinitely until I died.
The magic you get is fun, but completely random and because of this, largely inaccessible. If you could craft spells or buy them or have any sort of control or direction into what you received, then perhaps you could begin to construct strategies and alterations with how you played, but as it stands now, there almost might as well not be any magic in the game. For instance, after about 15 hours of playing, I received a “heal my pet spell” (marginally useful, although very rarely used and mostly had an extremely low impact on the game any time I used it), a water shield spell (situational, and again, so low-impact that it was rather useless), a berserk spell (statistically impotent and worthless–lowered your defense far more than the measly boost to attack that you received) and a regeneration spell (useful when I got it, but because it restored a fixed amount of HP, quickly became impotent as I gained levels). There are actually quite a few other spells in the game–offensive magic, curatives, status spells–but they might as well have not even existed for me. They’re that incredibly rare.
This leads to combat being entirely about positioning an enemy between yourself and a pet and using your melee over and over again on it until it’s dead. Alternatively, if you feel like messing around, you can drop a bomb or two, or swap things up with your guns–but in the end, you’re just whacking your opponent over and over, taking advantage of the backstab mechanic until they are dead. Then you move on… and do it the next one. And the next one. The same monotony exists with the questing as well; take 3 random quests, get 1 story-line quest, ad infinitum. The story is… mildly(?) interesting but the game is such a mess that it’s not really worth investing yourself in. That’s actually the best way to put it–this game is a mess (much like this review). Random squares on the ground alter your stats while you stand on them (an I DO mean random–they aren’t dependent on the terrain) which you will never pay attention to. Fishing is bugged, tedious, monotonous, and ultimately not worth your time. There are sidequests which can be described by the same. The game almost feels as if everyone was developing their own piece of the game in complete isolation, and then threw it together and hit “randomize,” the developers the whole time sitting around, congratulating themselves saying, “That’s what roguelikes are, right? Random!” The thing is, roguelikes aren’t actually as random as a novice to the concept might think–procedurally generated, yes, but not completely random. There are always constants that you can rely on that seem to be missing or buried deep within DFS that make the gameplay suffer.
To make matters worse, the producer of the game largely over-promised and under-delivered. They promised extra game modes, additional combat actions, more content, more bosses, late-game expansions, Paid DLC, free DLC, a PS Vita release, bug fixes, re-balances; I’m not even kidding, just check the forums for the game. This was all promised to be finished 2 years ago, and there’s been naught but radio silence. This is what has hurt the game the most. If the Grimm Bros. had simply released this game as-is, it could be remembered as this slightly-amusing RPG with fantastic art that just didn’t quite come together as a full-blown game. Instead, it’s remembered as a horrible game that never even came close to reaching its full potential, and was sold to the fans riding on promises and dreams that never came true.
As it stands, I too had to reach this point, and tell myself I needed to stop playing. I was no longer having fun, the storyline was no longer interesting and the art could only captivate me for so long, and I had to admit that I was only continuing to play it because I had invested so much time into it already. It’s just so sad–under the right structure, this game would be amazing, and I think that’s what’s allowed it to stay afloat (albeit on an incredibly rocky ship) for so long. Unfortunately, as most of the long-term fans and newbies to the game (like myself) have had to come to terms with is that no matter how many good ideas are buried here, it’s not a good game and never will be, in light of the Grimm Bros. hiatus for the last two years. A begrudging tier 2 game–if you have nothing better to do, there are definitely worse ways to waste your time, but certainly are better ones too.
