DragonSword : Awakening

I’ve always liked the premise of gacha games, but not their heavy monetization. With DragonSword: Awakening, we finally have a gacha game that’s a premium product, and I think that at $30, it’s well worth it. The high-quality visuals, excellent sound design, and extensive narrative make it a worthwhile investment, not to mention you can easily get around 30 hours out of it, maybe even more. It doesn’t save you from the heavy grind found in this genre, and the UI takes some getting used to. But at the end of the day, it’s an amazing action RPG with beautiful visuals, creative quest design and a likeable cast of characters. And if you are willing to get past the grind and some repetitive aspects, you’ll find DragonSword: Awakening to be a true diamond in the rough.

Dragon Sword: Awakening is an open-world RPG that pushes QTEs and tag-team action to the limit. Exploration feels a bit repetitive, but the world is dense, while the outstanding combat and seamless design create a satisfying gameplay rhythm. With its classic fantasy charm and exceptional action, this is a game to watch.

DragonSword: Awakening successfully sheds its gacha origins to become an enjoyable premium single-player RPG. Its fast, intuitive character-switching combat, rewarding exploration, and generous progression systems make it easy to get invested, even if uneven storytelling, occasionally confusing systems, and localization issues keep it from reaching greater heights.

DragonSword: Awakening is a gorgeous anime game that feels like they took Genshin Impact, stripped out the microtransaction garbage, and tied it together with a fun, interesting story. There’s still plenty of grinding and things to unlock, but nothing requires luck with a predatory gambling mechanic. The game has fun dungeons, solid characters, and big, flashy story moments you’ll have a good time with, all for less than half the price of a triple-A game. If you’re in the market for a fun game that’ll keep you entertained for a few dozen hours, you should definitely consider DragonSword: Awakening.

DragonSword: Awakening is a pretty good open-world action RPG that uses the gacha formula without the genre's obvious drawbacks. While its gameplay elements and systems clash due to design flaws, its eye-catching visuals, interesting narrative, and great sound design certainly justify it as a full-fledged game. All in all, it’s a game that’s definitely worth it for the price it asks, but be sure to expect a bit of a grind in the form of gacha-like repetitive progression.

Dragonsword: Awakening delivers well-polished, albeit familiar-feeling gameplay made popular by titles like Genshin Impact, without any of the microtransactions. While I’m not personally a fan of the title’s gameplay identity, I can see how genre fans would love Dragonsword: Awakening, which does everything the biggest games in the genre do for a fraction of the price.

DragonSword: Awakening combines satisfying exploration, engaging team-based combat and solid PC performance, but an overcomplicated interface, slow opening hours and lingering mobile design elements keep it from becoming one of the genre's standouts.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Nice graphics and engaging combat/exploration but unfortunately it suffers from the same issues every gacha game has which is endless running around and boring story/dialogue. You talk with person A, run to person B to talk, then run back to person A to tell them you spoke to person B. Now imagine that being every second quest.

The good: Graphics are nothing crazy but they have a nice consistent art style, the world is dense in vegetation and has a variety of trees and plants to make different areas stand out, the music is more than serviceable albeit nothing crazy. The character designs are good, some I like, some I don't care for, I feel like it's on par with most jrpgs. The bad: This is a live-service game for 30 bucks, both the main story plus side stories are unfinished and will be expanded in the future, if this will be for free funded by the dlcs or paid I don't know. Talking about dlc, this game has 80$ worth of dlc, which are outfits and mounts, 8 bucks for a swimsuit is crazy work, not to mention some core game mechanics are locked behind the dlc mounts and outfits although small give gameplay advantages. The small rooster of characters basically makes it so there's 1 single team for every type, and to boot combat is extremely simple and repetitive with an absolute lack of skill expression or building of any type. Characters are one-noted, they have absolutely no depth to them and the same goes for the story, maybe I'd enjoy it more if I was 10. Since the game was designed as a gacha, just like one, the amount of grind to build a character is crazy, only difference being that there's no stamina limit here. There's a million currencies and most characters are unlocked by buying them with currency instead of through quests or main story. Even tho I mentioned that the world looked nice, it's super empty, mostly populated by your usual kill 5 enemies at this location to unlock a chest. I came into the game expecting a jrpg with gacha quality, which at least in terms of budget is bigger than your usual single player jrpg, but instead I found a game that lacks everything that makes a single player jrpg good or a gacha good, I genuinely believe that if this game released as a gacha it would be EOS within a year.

It's easy to appreciate that this game started its life as a gacha game. The artwork is very good and the world is nice and colorful. It's clear the developers were banking on attracting customers based on its similarities to Zelda BotW. However, actually playing the game, it's painfully clear that the game is going to be a boring grind for many hours. I think I was 10 levels above the starting fodder and they were still damage sponges. I really couldn't care less how good the game looks when it plays like mobile garbage.

The "Awakening" is realizing you just wasted $30 on a mobile corpse. Score: 1 / 10 If you ever wondered what happens when a developer panics, strips the casino out of a dying mobile game, and tries to sell the remaining skeletal remains to PC gamers for thirty bucks—welcome to Dragonsword: Awakening. This isn't a video game; it’s a forensic cleanup site of a failed gacha **** Gacha Ghost Town Hound13 proudly announced they "removed the microtransactions." Sounds great on paper, right? In reality, it’s a disaster. Imagine a theme park where they removed all the rides but left the ticket booths, the endless queues, and the overpriced hot dogs. The entire game is built around mobile-game architecture. You are still collecting duplicate heroes. You are still staring at 50 different red exclamation marks on your screen. You are still logging in to claim daily digital garbage. But since there is no loot box to pull, you are forced to unlock everything through a soul-crushing, mind-numbing grind that feels less like playing a game and more like working a second shift at a data entry firm. They kept the chore, but took away the dopamine.Unreal Engine 5? More like Unreal Optimization 0The developers slap the "Unreal Engine 5" logo on the screen like a badge of honor, but the game looks like a upscaled PlayStation 3 title covered in a thick layer of **** Graphics: Textures pop in 5 seconds after you look at them. The open world is a barren wasteland of copy-pasted trees and blurry **** Performance: I am running an RTX 4080, and this game managed to turn my PC into a literal space heater. Frame rates drop to cinematic single digits inside the main city. It stutters every time you swing a sword. Optimization didn't just walk out the window; it never entered the building.Combat and Story: A Masterclass in BoredomThe combat is advertised as a high-octane action-slasher. It’s not. It is a brainless button-masher where enemies stand still and politely wait for you to cycle through your character cooldowns. There is zero weight to the hits, no tactical depth, and the boss fights have the mechanical complexity of a **** for the story? It feels like it was written by an AI that was fed a diet of generic light novels and then suffered a severe system crash. The localization is purely offensive. It is so clearly a raw, unedited machine translation that sentences frequently lose all grammatical structure. It makes Google Translate look like Shakespeare.VerdictDragonsword: Awakening is a cynical, lazy cash-grab. It is an unoptimized mobile port trying to masquerade as a premium PC RPG. Do not buy this. Do not wishlist this. If you accidentally bought it, press Alt+F4 and run to the Steam Refund button before your two hours are up.Pros:The "Exit to Desktop" button works flawlessly.Cons:Everything else.