A very funny Unity-created VN with multiple playthrough variations marred a little by limited functionality and a slow skip. The dragon protagonist is great fun to play as.
Borgash is a 5,400 year old dragon, and like most males of a certain age, is something of a grumpy old man; although in the wider picture, he’s not a bad sort. So, he likes to roast the occasional irritating human. That’s not his fault, it’s an innate characteristic of his species. Cut him some slack, he has a right to be grumpy after discovering that someone has issued a quest to have him killed for stealing the crown of a dead king… that he is entirely innocent of any part in.
The story starts with the player taking the part of our heroic dragon, whose name can be altered to personal taste, as he is presented with a scroll displaying the quest by a knight he has just outfought – only to have to put on his spectacles to be able to make it out. This leads us into a clever little scene where the reader has to move the spectacles over the blurred writing on the scroll in order to read it. This is original and amusing and sets the game up on a good footing.
Forced into a quest of his own to get the one demanding his death rescinded, Borgash must leave his cave and find a way into town. There are two possible routes, each of which will offer up the opportunity to acquire a companion on his travels, and ultimately lead him to the inn from where the offending scroll originated. If he chose to travel without a companion to this point, he will be presented with a different one at the inn, only without an option on this occasion.
Expecting that to be job done, our hero will find to his horror that the inn is merely one of many where the quest is displayed, and he must travel on to the adventurers’ guild to get it removed, where he will face layers of totally unnecessary bureaucracy if he wants to get anywhere. Or he could simply choose to burn the place down. Who needs all that hassle at his age, anyway, right?
Having identified his tormentor, Borgash learns that he will need to attend a human party, and is thereby obliged to alter his visible form, and even then, he can only gain access if he acquires a date. This leads to several more scenes with some highly entertaining interactions between characters, none of whom are what they appear to be at first.
Presentation
The game is created using Unity and starts with a small box offering choice of screensize and full or windowed, before the main story display opens up. If you have several windows already open when starting the game, it could be possible to miss this and believe that it isn’t running when it’s actually waiting for input.
Once playing, the in-game options are minimal, with just menu, auto and skip buttons being present inside the text box. There is no backstep, history log, or text size option. Pressing escape, however, does provide a good save feature, which proffers the chance to name your save, making it so much easier to recognise exactly where you’ve left off. These slots can also be saved over or deleted to make room for extras. I’m not certain how many are available in total, but I had eight saves in use at one point without trouble.
Graphics
This is an odd one. While primary character sprites are perfectly serviceable, colourful and sufficiently detailed, they move on and off screen in weird jumps like they are walking on the moon; secondary ones are more simplistic and those used just as background are positively unpleasant to look at.
Backdrop graphics have a very unusual, blocky style, which looks suitable for young children when viewed close-up or on a large screen, but if copied and reduced in size, or viewed from a distance, look remarkably lifelike. This is either a stroke of genius, or there are landscape photographs in use here that have been thoroughly painted over. Ultimately, one way or the other, it works.
Sound
Since original release, several additional backing tracks have been added to the game, which have raised this aspect of the package overall. None of them are especially lengthy, and one (which I suspect was the original) is repetitive and somewhat unwelcome, but the overall audio accompaniment now, 3 years after release, is passable. There are also a few effects, which are fine.
Minigames
During gameplay there are a few minigames to tackle, which, as far as playing through the story goes, are broadly avoidable. Darts/breathing fire are incredibly easy, simply position the cursor where you want to hit, and click when the projected hit points moves over your target. Karaoke is odd, there is an up-down scale with a sweet spot, and you need to click at just the right moment for maximum score, through 7 attempts. This appears to have a problem, as the 7th “note” seems to always net the minimum score. Some people have achieved the perfect score achievement, so it must be possible, but you should expect frustration if you want to try and get it. The remaining minigame involves “looting” flowers floating in a river, it’s a simple case of clicking on them as they float by, but requires being able to see the standard mouse pointer atop a blue water background to see where you’re clicking, and it’s virtually invisible.
Overall, the minigames would have been better omitted from the game.
Experience
What Dragon’s Dilemma clearly has in its favour is the amount of possible variation in storyline which makes it eminently replayable, although this is also something of a bugbear. The fastest text speed is not instant, which means that when replaying and looking to use the skip function, skipped text is still displayed at the maximum preset speed, with this making skipping SLOW compared to your typical Ren’py-built visual novel.
There are a large number of possible endings and Steam achievements, but it’s going to take a huge effort in both time and patience to find them all. After 11+ hours of replaying, I’ve found 14 of 20 internal endings, and 12 of 17 achievements, and I’ve lost the will to keep going through at the fastest available pace to look for other alternatives, which is a shame.
Where else it both scores and concedes, is in the text. There are a few very basic spelling errors and typos, including a double dose of the dreaded “per say”. I do wish when writers don’t understand what they are typing, that they simply wouldn’t use it. The Steam community, on the whole, tends to be very forgiving with text lapses in visual novels; but ultimately this serves to encourage lack of effort to get things done right. If you’re charging for a work of fiction, the onus is on you to provide quality for money, and with the internet so readily to hand, there really is no good excuse for publishing sloppy literature, regardless of how light hearted it may be.
The “light hearted” aspect though, is where this game really shines. This is, by a distance, the funniest visual novel I have played through to date. Granted, there are some joke attempts within that miss by such a margin it’s easy to fail to realise they were meant to be amusing at all (I’m looking at you, Janet , the multi-job bore); but there are also many occasions on which I was happily giggling out loud.
When the necessity for Borgash to take human form arrives, the player is presented with options for a head shape. Choosing one of the “incorrect” ones leads to some hilarious lines, as does choosing the noble lady as a date. I had a spell of several minutes having to wipe away tears of laughter.
Verdict
At £8.50, whether this is a good buy for you or not is going to come down to whether the failings are, in your view, game-breaking or not. If you can live with the limited functionality, uninspired minigames, slow replay skipping and text flaws, then you’re going to find a very amusing story tucked in between which will give you many a good laugh and comfortably reward 2-3 plays through.
Beyond that, you’re left with a tiring road to finding other endings and jokes which, once spent, won’t have the same impact repeatedly. In summary, I found this hugely enjoyable in the first, and second, instance; and that was enough for me to confidently give it my approval; but if 100% completion is an absolute prerequisite for you, then perhaps think twice.
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