Dinotopia is a short, easy and stripped down RPG.
----------Battle System----------
Dinotopia is a third-person action RPG. You fight solo for the most part of the game, except for one dungeon. The AI in this game is ridiculously stupid, the most enemies you'll be fighting at a time is 5, and while you might be fighting one, the rest just stand there like an old western movie until you try to attack them.
You gain experience for each monster killed or quest completed. While you gain levels, the game doesn't really keep track of them, and there's no status screen showing your stats either. You gain a new attack after each level though and you can view them.
There's only four weapons in the game, and they each have one special attack. You can find gems within the game by doing sidequests to power up your weapons aswell. The Red gems activate your special attacks, while the Green and White gems make your staffs much more powerful.
There's a couple items you can gain, by using the D-Pad you can throw these at enemies, causing them to explode, but they're quite useless and I never used them or had a need to use them. If you run low on health, there's always a plant near by that will boost your life and it sometimes regenerates, so this makes the game pretty simple.
You do get armor within the game, and each new piece of armor is always better than the last, so they automatically equip it on you, but you have no idea how much better since there's no stats within the game. The armor is visible on Drake, within cutscenes or within the rest of the game, so that's a nice plus.
The dungeons are pretty pathetic, linear. Each dungeon requires you to complete one task, mostly "Defend (insert area)" by just running through it killing anything in your path. You'll find atleast one sidequest within each mission, and they're ALWAYS the same quest, "Collect 3 items and return them to me" fetch missions. It gets old. Not only are the dungeons painfully linear, easy, and boring, and the quests are generic, but you have to run through them numerous times within the game.
There's only a couple boss fights within the game and they're easy as sin.
----------Characters / Story----------
You play as Drake Gemini, and the game thrusts you into a story that makes no sense to me since I never read the books or watched the shows or whatever this game is based off of. Anyways, within two seconds of the start of the game, your twin brother decides to join the "Outsiders", the evil group within the world of Dinotopia that is trying to rule it. Before Drake can take on the Outsider's empire, he first must become the "Guardian of Dinotopia" by collecting 4 Mallet Heads, these Mallet Heads go on the end of his staff and he can use them as weapons. You start off with one Mallet Head, and you get another one within a few minutes of the game, so your quest is rather small.
----------Graphics----------
Let's keep this in mind, Dinotopia came out a year after Star Fox Adventures and the same year as Wind Waker and Beyond Good & Evil, and it's looks like a game that should have came out on the Dreamcast in 1999. The graphics are dull all the way through, there's no special attacks, the water looks like crap, the textures are bad, the character models are just plain ugly. There's nothing to fancy about this game. The fact that you have to play through each dungeon atleast 2 times, and sometimes 3 or 4 times, and the fact that it's a 6 hour game makes this a poorly developed game all the way through.
----------Sound----------
Everything is voiced out, so that's a plus. To bad that the voice work is really really generic for the most part. The music is also pretty generic, but it never bothered me.
----------World Map----------
The game features one town, but it's kinda big and is separated into various sections but you can go through the entire town right off the bat of the game, with only a few things you can't "reach" until later in the game. There's really no world map within the game, but all the dungeons are linked through the game. For example, there might be an elevator on the "Far Outpost" part of town, and so on.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
5:53
WOW, now that's a short game. The game saves before the final boss, nothing to special after defeating him, just a short "thank you for saving Dinotopia" then credits. No unlockables after completion that I noticed. blah.