Drakkhen retrospective: Hak hak ’n slash | Super NES Works
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- Опубликовано: 18 сен 2017
- The Super NES gets its very first RPG, borrowed from the European PC scene, and it's pretty weird! Intriguingly weird, but weird all the same. For example: it's a 3D RPG that uses a flat scrolling visual effect but doesn't make use of Mode 7. What a strange little adventure.
Игры
That choir stab in the opening really gets around. It comes from the Roland S-330 library and appears in tracks like James Brown is Dead by LA Style.
And also James Brown is still alive, by Holy Noise.😉
Wow. The random ass trivia I'm learning about this game 30yrs later. Lol.
I remember wanting to play this game when I was a kid because it was the only early SNES game that never showed up in any of my local rental places. The concept of an open 3D world was an exciting concept back then, and my young imagination pictured Drakkhen as something far greater than the inconvenience simulator that it actually was.
I have a confession: I liked this game. It's very nostalgic for me. Took me years to beat it. As you said, it was back in the day where people bought fewer games and really had to commit to the ones they had.
lol me too
I kept renting this game as a kid, convinced their was something good about it, something I was not understanding at the time. I never beat it, but I burned away several weeknights as a kid trying not to die from another constellation attack.
as clunky and muddled as it may be, I agree. Drakkhen had tons of atmosphere, and the amazing OST on the SNES port went a long way towards making it playable. I especially liked the detailed environments of the castles, such as the slime and water stains in the water castle.
Going to sound insane for someone of my generation (born in 97.)
But I only just played this game about 2 years ago. Despite being one of those "Where the fuck do I go" games, I actually found myself enthralled with its world. The music, scenery, day and night cycle, as well as combat system made me want to keep playing.
I think Drakkhen is a hidden gem on the SNES, and is one of the best Western RPGs on the system.
@@Mr.Foxhat Glad to hear that from someone 16 years my junior. Warms the heart, truly.
You know, the second I saw that titlescreen, I was going to comment "This looks like an Amiga game, not a SNES one"
Whatddya know.
I love this game!, I finished it more times than I can remember.
It is a simple RPG where you take the role of Messenger between the dragon (Drakkehn) lords of the 4 castles in the 4 zones of the game in some kinda electronic soap opera.
Long live the Drakkhen and its beautiful OST !
I remember getting this as a child eagerly awaiting Final Fantasy II/IV and being simultaneously enthralled and put off by how opaque it was. What was with the constellations? What was with the hellhound heads? What were the silhouette giants? What was even going on? I actually managed to push through and beat it while never fully understanding what I was doing besides cheesing through that barrier thing by walking into it backwards.
Protip: Don't try that on Amiga/PC, you'll get dead quick.
I rented this a few times. It was so weird it kind of enthralled me. And wandering around in the 3-d world was the first time it struck me what gaming could eventually be.
Anyways, I beat the game without seeing the final boss. My team walked into the room with the final boss, may mage auto-casted something and killed him in one shot before I could figure out what was going on.
This sounds extremely plausible for this game.
The great thing about chronological series like this is that you can find great games that have been forgotten over the decades.
This doesn't look like one of those but boy, I look forward to seeing them :)
I love Drakkhen, even today. You could save anywhere on the overworld and it's super fast, so making a habit of it is easy. If one team member dies, experience doesn't get shared. It's based off of the damage they deal (meaning you can level up mid-battle). So, it's not the end of the world if one or two of the 4 dies. Besides, you can just chill by the ANAK and grind and once you're about 2 levels in, everything becomes easier and not so random.
i keep returning to these videos, specifically the SNES series. These are some of my favorite things to relax and watch on RUclips. Thanks for the gift of such an excellent retro game video set, Jeremy! I look forward to more.
For all the mentions of opaqueness/weirdness/randomness, I was really hoping this overview would show the I LOVE YOU random encounter, which I think pound-for-pound might be the strangest thing ever put into a video game.
I've never seen that one, I'm afraid.
Except the enemy doesn't say "I Love You" in the SNES version at all.
Oops, right you are! In retrospect it DID seem like an unusually good audio effect for the SNES... silly me.
For the curious, the Amiga experience: watch?v=cnE9XEC5mWw
Even though it's not really good, exactly, this game really captivated me as a kid, maybe because it was so mysteriously obtuse. I eventually went back and beat it in my late 20s, only with the help of guides, and even then I still found it fun.
I recall renting this game way back when and even though I fumbled about and never really got anywhere, other than into some battles in which I was quickly dispatched, I still marveled at the graphics this game managed to produce. Back then as a teen if I couldn't understand the mechanics of a game (especially an RPG) I'd write it off as something too complicated that I did not enjoy and regretting wasting my weekend rental on but the graphical style went a long way for me playing, and failing at, this game. My first exposue to RPGs was Dragon Warrior and then Final Fantasy Mystic Quest so yeah.. this game was great. I just wasn't at its level yet. Great video!
One of my favorite SNES games ever, just behind A link to The Past!
I played this game when the snes first came out. Could never beat it and I was already a fan of jrpg playing games like dragon warrior and final fantasy on the nes. I thought the game was okay back but final fantasy 2 came out shortly afterwards and that one stole my heart.
I had the same confused rental experience, but it's nice to see that there's a lot to this game. Love the detail of those interior adventure scenes! Adventure / RPG combos are my favorite, from Spellcaster to Quest for Glory.
I've always loved this game for how atmospheric it is and how unique it seemed at the time (since my experience with RPGs at the time was limited to consoles). It sounds like games where you manage your party in battle rather than control it might not be for you; if you just let them go at it, you're going to die a lot in this one. I also enjoy drinking Buckler (the non-alcoholic beer) whenever it's available and only my best friend has ever correctly connected it to the first shield you get in Drakkhen.
I've played Drakkhen off and on the past two decades. It has problems but not as terrible as others say once you have acquired knowledge of it. The only thing I always hate are the Doomshades (giant black shadows that shoot lasors) that eat your gear every time it appears, making me trek back to the Winter Fort to gear-up again. Another one to note is it's red cousin Love Monster. It wails creepily at you on SNES but on the Amiga it chants "I love you" repeatedly as it attacks.
I know it's terrible, but I've always loved this game. It has such an unsettling, unique vibe about it. Granted, at the time, I would obsess over any RPG I could get my hands on.
I loved this game as a kid. I was one of the ones to beat it.
The music in this game is incredible. It's different than the PC version too!
I remember beating this, somehow. It turns out the game is actually very short if you get lucky with gear drops.
That SNES Reverb!
I remember this as a kid all I know one place in time, equip 3 bows to the non tankers bring one extra for now for the tank. There was a place/room with endless spiders & be ready to farm them. Set the controller down, turn the sound off & let them go at it (since they auto attack) make sure they don't die but there I level up so fast I was able to Juggernaut through the rest of the game. And NEVER give up or unequip the bows for the 3 non tanks, just let them have those since they suck through the whole game attacking
Drakkhen was the first computer game that I spent my hard-earned cash on, and I remember that it was very opaque back then, even with a mouse and keyboard. It was bad, but not devoid of some fun moments. The next purchase I made was Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World, which was far more interesting and influential, and was maybe the reason why I love CRPGs and console dungeon crawlers like Etrian Odyssey still today.
Never knew it was such an early release... the first RPG on the Snes, the console with the best rpg ever is... a wrpg?
I too had oddly fond memories of this game -- my best friend had played it a lot at his house, and he already got me into Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, etc. In hindsight, it probably reminded me of all the Tandy/CoCo adventure games I played years earlier. The great music and calming, sparse overworld made for a terrific atmosphere even if, yeah, there's a lot wrong with everything else. (Having said that, if Drakkhen was released after Final Fantasy II and III, I wouldn't have given it the time of day.)
I remember being amazed at the "skybox" colors on this game after coming from the nes haha
To get everyone to clean up in my old office, we would put on video game music to pass the time. I would always close us out with the gloomy, Burzum-esque noise of the song you played at the beginning. That may be the most fun I've had with Drakkhen, as much as I've given it a chance over the years.
thinking about maybe playing this, it looks really chill
Michael IV walks into the dark room, and out of it... ECCHs a monster.
I remember Dragon View!
I discovered your channel a few days ago and I've been binge watching it and loving it
C’mon Jeremy: “Drakkhen Slash”!
░░░FOUR░░
░ELEMENTS░
░FORM THE░
░UNIVERSE.░
Just a wandering merchant here!, everything is all right, go on with your lives people.
I remember completing this game in the '90's for the SNES, but I never played the computer version, which I understand is more complex and difficult.
Reminds me of Swords and Serpents on the NES. I might give it a try.
Drakkhen II: Dragon View is a pretty good sequel, albeit an adventure RPG rather than a JRPG.
But, this game is Western developed. It doesn't really play like any JRPG. It's just an RPG. Dragon View is pretty much an action RPG.
I feel in love with RPGs when I first played Dragon Quest.
Reminds me of the Betrayal at Krondor games on the PC at the time. Same sort of cryptic randomness, same sort of dungeon crawling and same frustration.
I'm playing the second one - Dragon View, and it switches up the crazy enemy encounter rate with avoiding enemies and a beat them up style of gameplay in battle.
I always have and always will have love for this game. There's just something about it. Nostalgia probably lol
My parents got me this game for Christmas as a young child. It utterly baffled me and I don't think I ever got past the first castle. It's the only game I've ever owned where I fundamentally did not understand the basic game rules the dev had laid out. I never knew about the shrines mentioned in this video and never understood how to resurrect my characters.
I rented Drakkhen on the same day I rented Earthbound. I tried very hard to put time into Drakkhen, but it got very little attention ;)
Drakkhen never stood a chance
I feel the same way about RPGS. They are great!
I love this game
Brilliant, as always!!! :)
Yup, I had that Terminator game. Seems like it would be a good candidate for a remake if the license could be secured since it was so clunky at the time. Can't say I've ever played Drakken despite preferring western RPGs...French RPGs are a strange lot.
When I was 10 or 11, we had the Amiga version of Drakken, and my sister and I, though thinking of ourselves as “seasoned” RPG players at the time, could not figure it out at all, even with a full mouse and keyboard. This is the first time I’ve ever seen that map. I’ve seen every player character killed in about 5 seconds by a random encounter about 30 seconds into the game many, many times. Not very encouraging considering the floppy disk load times on the Amiga. Several minutes spent loading what was supposed to be a sprawling, immersive RPG, only to die much, much faster than 10 year old me would have at twitchy arcade port like Golden Axe or Gauntlet. :(
Maybe Nintendo wanted to showcase Mode7 to its fullest through this port, which half worked and half didn't work.
Obscure SNES RPGs always had their own quirks throughout the console's lifetime.
Even Gdleen, a JRPG that appeared at similar time as SNES Drakkhen, had its own quirks.
Great stuff Jeremy. My only piece of constructive criticism is that you mention the (excellent) soundtrack in the brief Retronauts article, but not in the video.
I played this a lot and was awestruck by the open world, but I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do. All my time playing the game boiled down to randomly wondering around until all my characters died.
Well, the Mode 7 stuff looks interesting
So the weird thing is, that doesn't appear to be Mode 7. It looks to be simple polygons rather than a flat bitmap being stretched and tilted. I don't think Mode 7 allowed for surfaces as large as Drakkhen's seamless overworld.
Jeremy Parish wow, I never knew that
I loved and hated this game as a kid because of its impenetrability . I've been working through the SNES backlog recently, and was thinking about digging this one out, so I got pretty excited when I saw this episode. In retrospect, however, I guess it's for the best to just leave this one in the past.
Never knew this got an SNES release. What's next, Betrayal at Krondor?
Wasnt there a Super Drakken on SNES? I could do of swore I rented that from Major Video back in the day. Maybe it was this game then, I dont know. I thought your character was visible while traversing the psuedo 3d world.
At the end does he say "hoary old rpgs" or Horii ;)
Playing this on Evercade now, named my Scout "Gin" for Gintendo. I'm surprised at that I'm liking this game despite its flaws and the need to check a guide a lot. Sure, it's not Final Fantasy but I've played worse RPGs and I appreciate what it was trying to do.
... does have great music, though.
I owned Drakkhen but didn't know what to do or what was going on i was probably to young to really understand what to do
I own this very cart. Thanks!
I always wonder what the "Next Time" music on these videos is from?
It's the "Next Episode Preview!" song from the end of each episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Those Chrono Trigger names.... Sacrilege!
What’s the name of the tune used at the Next Episode frame for the outtro? It’s driving me crazy!
This + Doom makes me think the SNES probably could have pulled off a very stripped-down version of Daggerfall or more likely Arena. Probably wouldn't be worth developing or playing, mind you, but still.
At 1:10 did you mean to say "SNES"? Just wanted to point that out in case it was an error =D
Why does your party turn into a cloud of glitter in combat? I imagine that is also never explained.
They’re under a protective invisibility spell when they vanish like that.
Every time I hear about this game, I get it confused with Draken. ~Draygone
This looks a lot like Eternam. I guess they both come from Infogrames.
It looks quite awful to play, but on the other hand, this really is something of a surprise. This style of game was pretty unusual in those times, especially on a console.
Plus this seems to genuinely involve a game engine that draws actual polygons. (albeit not in a very interesting way), and that it's doing that 3d effect without mode 7 is even more fascinating.
Of course, that the SNES can draw polygons (in very low quantities) without secondary hardware should surprise nobody, since people have been demonstrating polygon drawing routines for about as long as computers have existed, and many of the 6502 based home computers have a dozen 3d graphics demos running at various framerates, and all of them are by definition slower than a SNES. (since the fastest of them seem to top out at about 1.79 mhz 6502's, where the SNES is 16 bit, which helps a lot, has some hardware multiply/divide functionality, which helps even more, and runs at 2.68/3.58 mhz, which certainly can't hurt.)
And, while you may not have ever stopped to think about it, the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the past title screen (and presumably the game's ending as well) were recently confirmed by the developers to be using 3d polygonal models.
(What did you think that rotating triforce actually was? I'd never actually given it any thought, but that it's a 3d model drawn in realtime is fairly obvious in hindsight. At a rough estimate that means that game has the ability to draw about somewhere between 9 and flat shaded 33 polygons at high enough framerate, with some primitive lighting. Of course, it could also be a trick, especially if the developer is lying about how it works. But if it's actual polygons that's more impressive than you might think. - of course, both times it appears are scenes where no gameplay is happening...)
I finished that game with the highest levels possible, but when I went to the Forbidden outer areas I came across these Million point elder dragons who wiped me out with one hit. Did anyone ever defeat those guys?
What is the song you play at the end
Also, was the Ps1 action RPG 2CD game Dragon Valor part of this series?
no, that's a sequel to the Namco arcade game Dragon Buster
Didn't SNES have an 8 button controller? (X,A,B,Y,L,R,Select,Start)
Technically, but I wouldn't call a Genesis controller a 4 or 7 button controller.
Select and start are generally left out, considered more 'system' buttons
You could say it's a 12 button controller by including the dpad if you really wanted to get literal about it
Oh god, the SNES Ultima ports are so bad.
(Also, I'd be very interested to see a video or podcast about *why* Dragon Quest became and stayed so popular, because while I have an idea, it doesn't really explain how Japan then became extremely receptive to RPGs in general and the US and Europe cared less (as a whole) for so long.
DejaVoodooDoll As much as I love Phantasy Star, I can't say that it pushed a large amount Sega fans into RPG fandom. If that were the case, the quantity of RPGs on the Genesis vs that of the SNES would be reversed, and there would be more RPGs released in the West in general if all it took was good games to convert Americans to the genre. Also, while the first Phantasy Star didn't have nearly as many bugs as the first Final Fantasy, it wasn't a game full of advanced strategy either. And as for grinding, PSI and II weren't any better than FFI either.
Though games being released late here probably is one of the factors. Square really shouldn't have bothered rolling out an expensive marketing campaign for Final Fantasy in 1990, given they must have already been planning to release Final Fantasy II/IV in the US a year later.
If they got rid of the characters on screen and made this turn-based I think this game could have been a cool Wizardry/M&M clone for SNES.
Holy crap. This is fascinating but I could never play this game.
This game taught me three lessons: don’t think a game will be cool by looking at the cover. I do not like RPGs. Sometimes the devs hate you.
I know this has nothing to do with Drakkhen, but every time I get to the "next time" section of your videos I get the urge to rewatch Evangelion.
Yeah, me too
The whole point of the first two years of Super FamiCom and Super Nintendo game software (as with any videogame systems) is to serve as tech demos and early POTENTIAL of the brand new hardware capabilities but NOT as an indicator of the full power of the system as such I always find it hilarious when you are doing a retrospective look at when these games first came out but you shove a fully 3d game or a game that came out in the last two years of official Super Nintendo North American support due to the shift to newer hardware due to NEW competitors throwing new challenger hardware that only forced companies like Sega and Nintendo to abandon their older hardware and later Sega through Sega of America's arrogance committed this sin with the Dreamcast which only brought then entire Sega hardware division to total bankrupcy.
Lol! This game? I tried to play it awhile back on an emulator, but it made not a lick of sense.
Try it for DOS and get even more confused. SNES version is a piece of cake in comparison.
Holy Crap. I just went to Archive.org to try out the Dos version. And... I got stuck on the character creation. No Clue on how to reroll my stats for my Warrior, NuclearLandlord.
I owned several games as a child to the point where I owned almost every American snes game and 100% them all. discovered Game x Change and lost them all for a few N64 games. Now i still buy as many games but hard to commit fully when something new drops so quickly.
Have never heard/played this game, and I'm no stranger to archaic CRPG mechanics, but this just seems tedious/roughly designed. I could be wrong, and this is just my opinion of course, but that's the impression I get from watching this video.
I remember hated this game when I was six. Even at six, I hated this game. Think about that. A six year hated a video game. Six.
This is very reminiscent of Dragon View. Edit: Should've watched the whole video before commenting lol
Haha, Dragon View's a fine sequel that does away with all the obtuseness of the original but loses a lot of the lore as a result. Like, the original game gets what, a paragraph of text as to what happened? All because it was on some far away island?
most JRPG nowadays are inspired by western RPGs but, japan rpgs are much focused on great storytelling plus interesting character plus unique combat mechanic being evolved over decade with each iteration of JRPG, being a niche product in japan also help since most devs in japan don't really want to risk more than enough, unlike western RPGs nowadays, most of the glory days are gone, either pure greed, foolish decision or maybe, PC was never meant for gaming. remember JRPG being a niche & still going strong because of console platform dominated Japan in full scale.
Western RPGs are also called blobbers to distinguish them from a party-rendered team that appears on-screen in JRPGs. In blobbers, your party is one entity and you look from its eyes, hence the first person perspective. Best blobber since forever is Wizardry 8, which the Japanese retook and reshape it as an anime blobber.
This game looks cryptic, unweildy, and overambitious... therefore it is infinitely interesting to me.
I thought the game was impressive visually, but the gameplay was rather boring and frustrating.
Worst game ever
This rpg game sucks.
i had this game as a kid and jfc did i hate it.