After the rather nice intro FMV, Dragon Valor instilled in me higher expectations than the average PlayStation game. Unfortunately, it failed to deliver on those expectations. The environments are bland and repetitive, with lots of greens and browns and very little in the way of adornment and decor. A giant castle feels more like a beginner's level in Quake, and dungeons are all the same drab color. The characters don't fare much better either, with genuinely frightening facial textures and dull design. While a few of the bosses look quite cool, especially the later dragons, for the most part, Dragon Valor is, well, ugly. The game also majorly overuses a motion-blur effect, and you'll find yourself sick of it before the first chapter is over. Unfortunately, you haven't even remotely seen the end of it.

The music doesn't help, either. Weak and repetitive, you'll find yourself reaching for the remote to turn it down soon after you start playing the game. The tracks sound like they're ten seconds long each, and loop endlessly throughout the level. It's irritating, and distracts from the game. The sound effects are dull as well, with swings and grunts and kees and not much else. There's nothing here that'll excite you, or even impress you. The fact that there's no voice acting is also a hindrance, as anything would be better than the slow text crawl during the cutscenes.

And, to complement the lackluster graphics and sound, Dragon Valor delivers decidedly lackluster gameplay. It does a few neat things, and has a few interesting features that haven't been seen often in other games, but in the end it's a weak hack-and-slash with repetitive gameplay that'll have you packing it away long before you beat it.

You start off the game as Clovis, a young man who witnesses his sister's death due to the flames of a dragon. A man who was fighting the dragon perishes as well, and Clovis picks up his sword, becomes a Dragon Valor, and proceeds to kick said dragon's butt. The game continues like this, with Clovis and his descendants going off on adventures to kill the dragon/save the queen/kill the dragon/whatever. It's not exactly a stellar plot, and the mediocre translation does nothing to make it more interesting. Add in the fact that you can't speed up the text, and you've got more frustration than interest.

The actual game consists of standard side-scrolling hack-and-slash, with the occasional touch to mix it up. As you play, you get new spells to cast and use against the bad guys, which is nice. And although your descendants don't pick up everything that you have, they do keep some of the stat-boosting items and all of the spells. So, although you start off weak in HP and magic each time the game segues into the future, you still have some sense of progression.

Unfortunately, that progression is uniformly dull. You'll find yourself hacking through the same enemy types over and over, and although new enemies are certainly introduced throughout the game, it's just a matter of learning their patterns and styles. Enemy AI is uniformly idiotic, and I beat many a boss by swinging my sword, pausing for them to get back up, and swinging again. It's not particularly fun or interesting, and it doesn't make you want to keep playing.

Yes, the spells (some of which are nice, especially as they level up as you continue in the game) are quite nice. And the bosses are generally pretty cool, even if most of them have a trivial pattern that you can exploit to destroy them. There are some quite tough battles, too, as you progress in the game. But as a whole it just feels terribly weak -- a half-finished game idea.

Most of the enemies and bosses are near-trivial to defeat. A few bosses actually have some pretty tricky patterns, or require certain spell usages to really be able to beat them in a reasonable amount of time. But others consistently run into your swinging sword. The real difficulty in the game is finding motivation to keep playing, more than anything else. It's hard to keep yourself excited about this sort of title.

The controls, for what they're worth, are easy to learn and understand. You'll soon find out that keeping your hands off the buttons means that your character'll block any front attacks, which is very useful against certain hard-hitting enemies. It doesn't block non-physical attacks, though, so be forewarned. The game goes through something of a tutorial in the first stage, which is actually rather nice, but reading the instruction book can teach you a few even handier moves that the game itself doesn't cover. The game's mechanics themselves feel half-baked -- you visit the store once between each stage, generally, and sometimes they only buy, and other times they only sell. And you can't heal or gain MP between levels, as a general rule.

PS2: The game has little to no load times to begin with, and the Fast disc speed option seems to do little to nothing to "improve" them. The graphics Smoothing option, on the other hand, makes the pixilated characters a little more bearable to look at. The game's still pretty ugly, but it's definitely more bearable.

In the end, Dragon Valor is nothing more than a standard romp through a standard fantasy world, slaying standard fantasy beasts. It's not the worst example of the genre, but I have more fun playing Final Fight on my Super Nintendo than I do playing Dragon Valor. Unless you're a die-hard fan of the genre, you'd do well to pass on this game.