Draglade from Atlus is a side-scrolling fighter with action and RPG elements, and also uses music to make combos in the heat of battle. Instead of fighters, combatants are called “grappers.” The matches are also called graps, and there really isn’t an explanation why. Each grapper has a weapon called a “glade,” which creates a different weapon from material around it. This material can also infect local wildlife, and turn them hostile, and it’s the grapper's main job to protect the cities from such attacks. There’s also dark material, and as you can easily guess, it’s evil.
Beat combos are Draglade's attempt to make combat more interesting. Every game has got a gimmick to try and sell it, and this is obviously it for Draglade. Unfortunately, beat combos are just too frustrating to use, despite being an interesting idea. As a result, I never really used it in the main game, tutorial aside.
Basically, the beat combo uses different music beats when you attack. When you hit the enemy, it makes a noise, which allows you to basically play a song while fighting to get the crowd on your side. However, it really doesn’t matter if you use it or not. The system is basically DDR or Guitar Hero/Rock Band, in that you hit the light/heavy attack button when the arrow is over the indicator, and your accuracy is rated “cool” to “bad”. Unfortunately, the system is a bit off. When its directly under an indicator, it won't always register. I even thought it might be my DS, so I tried it on another system… no change, it’s the game itself. This made getting the regular beat combo even more annoying, especially since you have to try to pull them off in the middle of a fight.
There is also a “phat” beat combo, available if you’re able to complete a higher level beat combo first. I wasn’t able to ever get one, considering the beat combo system is rather flawed, and I couldn’t get enough “cool” hits to obtain it. According to the game's website though, it follows directly after a perfect beat combo, and does massive damage...which would have been nice, if’n it had worked.
The fighting system in the game is actually very good overall. Despite all the flaws in the game, the actual combat is intense and satisfying. The tournament settings and other grapper fights are rather fun in the end levels, with the enemy having a ton of health most of the time. You have to rely on careful fighting, beat combos and the game's version of magic attacks “bullets” to succeed.
They had some great boss fights near the end also, including fighting a giant black dragon. Each of those fights was interesting, and I enjoyed them quite a bit more than the other parts of this game. The one gripe with these was the healing bullet. There was only one type of healing bullet, so I automatically had it equipped. However, if you’re not directly under it, you won’t get healed. It would even heal your enemy, which can be a pain in a major boss fight. Using these bullets is essential to staying alive, and yet is counter-intuitive, because they could heal the enemy. Granted, this added some more depth and strategy to the game, having you heal when the enemy was farther away and whatnot, but more or less it was annoying.
Posted: 2008-01-25 19:53:27 PST