Dragon Blade is definitely a budget title, but it still manages to outshine most of its full featured brethren on Wii.
Dragon Blade: Wrath of Fire is a new IP for Wii ... a hack n' slash adventure with a fantasy story written by Richard Knaack, who's written a handful of novels based on nerdastic things like Warcraft ... but probably best known for his "Dragonlance" series. So ... yeah, the guy knows dragons. And this shows, as the opening prologue does give you quite the indication that the story was conceived straight from the mind of an experienced fantasy writer.
The story is nothing too ground breaking or over the top, but as I said ... not only is it imaginative, but it explains the gameplay rather well. There are "spoilers", or at least spoilers of the opening cut scene in the following sentences, so skip ahead a paragraph right now if you don't want to read them! Valthorian, a dragon, was sick and tired of men waging wars, so he barged in, fought for the side of good, made kings of a few men he trusted, and all was pretty great. Well, up until the point where some evil dragons show up, convince Valthorian's kingly friends that he's actually evil ... and the whole lot of them storm his stronghold and cut him down. Valthorian's soul was then split into shattered "cores", or the equivalent of a dragon's spiritual-like heart, in a way, and the cores were obtained by the kings, who then went on to use them to rule in evil ways. The Dragons who planned Valthorian's demise, likewise, rule the Kings, and the minions under them all have transformed into man-beasts out of the extent of their own evil minds. One of the kings, however, regretted what he had done ... moved to a small village, hid amongst the farmers, and did everything he could to try and resurrect Valthorian, to no avail. He hid his shard of the dragon's power ... and generations progressed, until one of the king's descendants, the hero farmer named Dal, hears Valthorian's telepathic message, finds the shard, and takes up the Dragon Blade to defend his village from the attacking man beasts. Although he kills them all ... he can't save many of the villagers ... including his fiance ... and so we end up with some cheesy, melodramatic moments between the beginning of the game and the actually gameplay ... but it does set up the concept of justice, vengeance, and a whole slew of incentives for Dal to take up the Dragon Blade and go town.
Dragon Blade's presentation is its lowest point. The only voice acting in the game that I've stumbled upon was the opening cut scene ... in which Valthorian explains his beginnings. The voice actor's performance was a bit melodramatic though, and unconvincing ... but worse than that ... that's really the only voice acting in the game. The rest of the game is filled with text boxes ... and not only that, text boxes that strangely lack any indication of who's talking. Sometimes you don't know if one person on screen is talking, whether it's someone else, or whether one of them is thinking ... or even if its Valthorian's own disembodied voice. And the fact that there's hardly ever a character model with a mouth that actually moves, this sort of presentation is not only confusing, but hinders the story telling experience quite a bit. None the less, context clues may let you stumble through the game's story well enough.
Graphically, Dragon Blade delivers in ways you'd expect in some places, but then exceeds expectations in others. Most of the character models are extremely low-poly ... like, Playstation 2 quality character models ... and the level design is EXTREMELY, EXTREMELY linear. But you may be surprised by the level of detail in many of the textures, not only for character models, but for surrounding environments as well. Dragon Blade's best graphical performance, however, has to be its lighting and effects ... as everything is well lit and runs liquid smooth. There's not that kind of "this character glows a bit while everything else doesn't ..." effect you saw on Gamecube very often ... and, on the contrary, often times the very fire from your blade can light your enemies in an eerie glow as flaming embers drizzle behind it. The Wii's extraordinary color pallete rendering ability and bloom lighting comes into play quite often as well, which really helps make up for the low-budget hold backs the rest of the game's graphics suffer from. However, Dragon Blade still suffers from some unusual aliasing: aliasing that borderlines on looking like an interlaced display in some cases, which makes we wonder whether or not the game actually runs in progressive scan.
Obviously, however, Dragon Blade's shining moment is its gameplay and controls. The best way I can sum up Dragon Blade ... is that it is a more refined version of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess combat mechanics. You can do many of the things you could do in Twilight Princess, including blocking, locking on to enemies, and swinging your Wii Remote as a sword, but the controls make Twilight Princess' controls feel very tacked on. Unlike Twilight Princess, Dragon Blade actually has a different, corresponding sword slash for different directions you swing the remote -- left, right, up, down, or forward -- and you can string these attacks into combos of 3 in nearly any order, making the game feel far more satisfying than Twilight Princess' "waggle-a-wiimote" attack function.
As you progress through the game and obtain more dragon cores, the Dragon Blade acquires more powers ... including a giant flaming right arm, two giant flaming arms, a "dragon tail" which is more like the Balrog's whip from Lord of the Rings, some dragon wings for a double jump, a dashing move, and a giant flaming dragon head which can breathe flames or shoot fire balls. Using these special abilities, unlike your basic sword attacks, use up some "fire power" in a meter you have ... however, defeating enemies or busting objects can give you shards to refill this meter. Not only are these new abilities extremely fun ... but as you progress through the game, more and more enemies spawn and assault you at once ... really demanding that you take out a giant flaming fist and swipe all of them away in a single blow ... which is so amazingly satisfying its indescribable.
For the low price of forty dollars, Dragon Blade: Wrath of Fire appears to be a successful budget title. Its definitely a taste of things to come, from future hack n slash titles like Oneechanbara R and Soul Calibur Legends ... and from what I've played, its a fun adventure that gives you a decent amount of replay value as you attempt to go back through levels and beat them with better time, taking fewer hits, killing more enemies, and unlocking pieces of armor you can collect. On the grand scheme of things it may not be a masterpeice of video game art, or offer much, but what it does offer is quite a bit of fun ... which is why, for a budget title, Dragon Blade is a fair game.