Dragon Drive: D-Masters Shot (Gamecube)

 After a long run of excellent games right from their formation, across the Mega Drive, Saturn, Dreamcast, Playstation, N64, and Game Boy Advance, Treasure entered the twenty-first century with a lot of goodwill from a lot of people. Unfortunately, they quickly squandered it with a bunch of games like Wario World that weren't bad, but they also weren't up to the high standard people had come to expect from Treasure. (And there was also Stretch Panic, which was bad, but weird enough that people were willing to overlook it a little.) Dragon Drive is one of their games from this era that didn't get released outside of Japan, and as a tie-in to a long-since forgotten anime and manga, probably would itself have been completely forgotten by now were it not from such a famous developer.

 

The first thing you'll probably think upon starting the first stage of Dragon Drive is "hey, this is like Panzer Dragoon, but in the modern day and also one of the free range stages from Lylat Wars!", which is fairly accurate. You start the game as a kid dangling underneath a baby dragon, flying over a modern city, shooting at other dragons. The dragon quickly grows to full size, and you have a boss fight. Then there's a linear rail shooting stage, to make things even more like Panzer Dragoon! And those are the three main stage types in the game: free range-style stages where you fly around an enclosed area shooting down enemies, linear rail shooter stages, and boss fights, which are like the free range stages, but there's only one enemy that has insane amounts of health.

 

The plot concerns a competitive virtual reality game about dragon piloting, and the bosses you fight are the other players. I do find this kind of plot pretty weak, especially in a videogame: I'm already playing a game, why am I playing as someone else playing a game? Where are the stakes for the characters here? However, it does allow for some variety in where the stages take place, without having to justify all these different locales. In the couple of hours I played, I saw the aforementioned modern city and attached highways, as well as a desert decorated with giant monster skeletons at sunset, a fantasy castle town at night, and a small jungle island. And of course, the sight of huge dragons flying and shooting breath weapons at each other is really cool.

 

There's power-ups too, in the form of various cards you can collect in the stages. You can hold up to four of these, each assigned to a direction on the d-pad for use. They come in three flavours, too: red ones increase your attack power for a while, green ones restore some of your health, and yellow ones do various different things, like having a big explosion emanate from your dragon, damaging all nearby enemies, or creating a holographic copy of your dragon to draw enemy fire. The use of cards in this way feels very much of-its-time. A lot of Japanese kids shows that weren't specifically about card games had some kind of card element to them around this time: Digimon Tamers, Kamen Rider Blade, and so on.

 

Dragon Drive D-Masters Shot is a decent enough game. I've definitely played much worse rail shooters, and if it were developed by someone like Tamsoft or Sandlot, it'd probably be enjoying a re-appraisal as a forgotten classic of the Gamecube library. Unfortunately, it's by Treasure, and like the aforementioned Wario World, it's one of those games that broke the spell they had over a lot of people around the turn of the century, by being merely okay instead of the excellent games we'd grown accustomed to them releasing. The biggest shame is that they don't seem to have ever recovered from this era. They haven't released any new games in over a decade (another kids' anime tie-in on 3DS, Gaist Crusher God), though they announced a comeback in 2022, we've seen nothing of that yet. Anyway, this game's pretty good, you probably won't regret seeking it out and playing it with the recent translation patch applied.

Time Stalkers (Dreamcast)

 Time Stalkers (also known as Climax Landers) has been on my radar for a long time, mostly by virtue of it being a Dreamcast RPG that's available in English that isn't one of the more popular few, like Skies of Arcadia or Grandia 2. There aren't many of those around (but it seems like there are people working on translating SEGAGAGA and El Dorado Gate, which is exciting)! Another point of interest is that it's a crossover game, featuring characters from a bunch of Climax's earlier games, like Landstalker and Shining in the Darkness. 

 

Oddly, this wasn't used as a selling point when it was originally released (at least, it wasn't in English-speaking places. Maybe it was in Japan?), and as hard as I've tried to find one, it seems that no-one (again, in the English-speaking world) has cared enough to list all of the characters and the games they're originally from. And unfortunately, I'll have to pass that disappointment forward: I probably could, with an hour or two of research, be able to place all the characters and their source games together, Time Stalkers just isn't a good enough game to be worth that much effort.

 

The plot is pretty generic crossover stuff, withfragments of different worlds all being drawn into some new pocket dimension by a mysterious force. An old man designates someone from each realm as a hero, giving them the ability to enter dungeons. The dungeons are procedurally generated, and you have a hunger meter that goes down as you explore them, like in a roguelike. But the combat is pretty generic turn-based RPG combat, but slower. It's so slow and so pointless and such a big part of the game. You'll dread missing an attack (which happens a lot in this game) not becuse you're scared of the enemy getting another chance to kill you (they mostly only deal a single point of damage), but because it means the battle will drag on for another slow, labourious turn.

 

There's other roguelike stuff in here, too, like how you return to level one every time you enter a dungeon. Which wouldn't be a problem in an actual roguelike, because they're all about learning how each enemy works, how to position yourself, how to use items effectively and so on. But Time Stalkers is all about getting through so many identical fights where you and the enemies slowly trade hits back and forth until somebody's dead. you could theoretically just run past the enemies and avoid entering battle, but every dungeon ends with a boss who's significantly more of a threat than the entire rest of the dungeon's enemies put together, and if you don't grind, you'll stand no chance against them. You do, at least, get to keep your equipment between runs, so you're not completely back to nothing every time, I guess.

 

There's also a mechanic whereby you can capture enemies and use them as party members, but since they're all so weak, it seems kind of pointless, unless you want to partake in even more grinding. The one kind thing I can think of to say about this game is that it looks kind of charming in that specific "low-poly models with high resolution textures" way a lot of low budget third party Dreamcast games are. Sometimes it's actually really ugly, but there's also plenty of times where the camera's at just the right angle to make it look kind of cool. Still, it's not enough to make suffering through the game worth your while. I hated Time Stalkers more with every additional minute I spent with it (I played for about four or five hours, up until the end of the third dungeon. Some of that time was spent running circles around the tiny overworld, desperately trying to find the next person I had to talk to to advance the story), and it definitely doesn't carry my recommendation.