Has someone seen the dragon?
Once upon a time,
the Great Dragon attacked an innocent city Dirin
dale, killing its king, burning a good couple of houses, causing a great uproar among local heroes and
wannabe-heroes, and inspiring
Monolith Productions to make a game based on the adventures of the former.
Yes, the game is a
Spiritual Successor (not to say: a total clone) of good old
Gauntlet but this does not stop it from being an extremely addictive
Hack And Slash filled to the brim with an unusual if, perhaps, a bit exaggerated sense of humor, making it an
Affectionate Parody of classic fantasy tropes and quirks. For today's gamers, it can have a specifically
vintage taste, but when given a chance, turns out to be one of the best possible sources of mindless entertainment when you just need to, you know, kill some
Demonic Spiders or other
personal space invaders, earn some gold and lose some
Hit Points.
Has its own
Characters page, where all four characters are described in more detail.
Contains the following tropes:
- Awesome, but Impractical: Boots of Mercury - which are the power-up massively increasing character's movespeed - are not very effective due to the fact that they make it difficult to control the character's actions.
- Awesome But Practical: All the other power-ups though are all kinds of awesome and can easily turn the tides of battle. Special mention goes to Ghost and God-Like which issue a character with what essentially is a complete invulnerability.
- Boss Battles: every fifth level. All of them are of damage sponge variety, but as the levels progress they will become increasingly difficult due to various obstacles thrown in.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: All the characters address the player if they stand around for too long.
- Damage Over Time: As expected of Gauntlet's clone. Characters will lampshade the constant health drop if you let them stay in place for too long.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: You just have to wait a couple of seconds for the character to respawn. Can be annoying if you start swarmed by monsters.
- Destroyable Items: Chests, Weapon/Armor Upgrades and Scrolls can be destroyed. Characters or The Voice will comment on the matter.
- Dungeon Crawling
- Electric Torture: as a kind of a Death Trap.
- Everyone Is A Super: even Kellina, who apparently uses a sword and a shield to fight, has a magical attack at her disposition.
- Everything Trying to Kill You
- Healing Buckets with Hearts In Them
- Interchangeable Antimatter Keys: the keys disappear, but only those made of the same metal are interchangeable.
- Locked Doors: very many of them.
- Man on Fire: while walking through the dungeon, you can very literally catch a hot by stepping into a puddle of flames drifting in the air. Sadly, this does not apply to your enemies.
- The Maze: all the dungeons.
- Money for Nothing: gold is here only to indicate how many points you scored - you can't use it to buy anything.
- Mook Maker: all enemies are spawned by various spawners that can(and should) be destroyed.
- Mooks themselves:
- Airborne Mooks: Bats and their Red cousins, Phantom Knights, Wraiths, Dragons and Curses.
- An Axe to Grind: Trolls.
- The Archer: Serpent Women.
- Curse: One of non-standard enemies, faster than all player characters(save for Eryc) who can obstruct you by i.e reversing your controls, disallowing you ranged attack or by increasing your health drop rate. They are also tougher than normal monsters.
- Dem Bones: And they throw swords at you!
- Drop the Hammer: Ogres. Curiously, they're the only melee monster to use a weapon.
- Intangibility: Hags, Phantom Knights and Wraiths have a brief one which can make player's projectile pass through harmlessly, complete with brief disappearing. Including bosses. Still vulnerable to Magic Scrolls though.
- Giant Spiders: Coming in two flavors, The Goomba-ish one and literally Demonic Spiders-ish one.
- Phantom Thief: Might be an actual phantom thief. Incredibly fast and capable of stealing all of your upgrades and scrolls. Suffice to say, if it happens before a bost fight, you are in trouble. They do sometimes give something if you kill them before they reach you though.
- Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Skeletons and Phantom Knights use them as projectiles.
- Multi Mook Melee: Though it's generally discouraged to go melee.
- Notice This: Shiny Sense.
- One-Hit Kill: Even on the highest difficulties picking up Lvl. 2 weapon upgrade will allow you to one-shot any mook short of a Curse or Thief.
- Glass Cannon: All the player characters are made of wet paper, especially on the highest difficulty setting.
- Our Dragons Are All The Same: complete with Breath Weapon.
- Plot Coupon: the keys.
- Power-Up: A few of them:
- Skeleton Key: Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
- The Grotesque: The Mask of Evil, which makes all the monsters run away from you.
- God Mode: comes in two flavors, Ghost(which adds a benefit of monsters being completely unaware of us) and God-Like(which doesn't).
- Sprint Shoes: Boots of Mercury which greatly increase movement speed. It's more of a nuisance though as it's harder to control such a character.
- Orbiting Particle Shield: Fury of the Sun which acts as a constant Magic Scroll to everything that comes nearby.
- Randomly Generated Levels: One of the game modes allow you to traverse endless random dungeons.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Thieves and Curses.
- Smart Bomb: The Magic Scrolls which one-shot everything on the screen save for bosses.
- Standard Fantasy Setting: where all this takes place.
- The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: eventually, in the Dragon Quest mode.
- Warp Whistle
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