Drakkhen (SNES) Playthrough

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Published on January 12, 2022 7:53:57 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGpLQujoDJg

Game:

Drakkhen (1989)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 3:48:01

26,655 views

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A playthrough of Kemco-Seika's 1991 RPG for the Super Nintendo, Drakkhen.

Being released just a couple weeks after the North American launch of the Super Nintendo, Drakkhen holds the distinction of being the very first RPG to be released for the system in English. It is a conversion of a French computer RPG, originally developed by Infogrames and released for the Amiga and the Atari ST in 1989. The SNES version was handled by Japanese developer Kemco, who handled several PC-to-console ports in the late 80s/early 90s, including Lagoon (SNES) and the NES MacVenture games Shadowgate, Deja Vu, and Uninvited.

Drakkhen doesn't adhere to the mold of the Dragon Quest-style JRPG, nor to that of then typical western CRPGs like Might & Magic or Wizardry. It presents you with a smoothly animated, real-time 3D world that you can freely explore in first-person, and when you meet with an enemy encounter or enter a location interior, the characters all step out from the bottom of the screen and move about in a 2.5D plane.

In the castles that serve as the game's dungeons, you find gear for your party, simple puzzles that occasionally involve switches or levers, dialogue sequences, and major boss fights. There isn't a lot of story directly fed to you over the course of the game, but the castles have all sorts of artifacts that you can examine that give rise to the story in a more organic way than the typical NPC exposition dumps that were a genre staple at the time did. There is a story, and it is a good one, but you'll miss much of it if you don't go out of your way to uncover those bits and pieces.

Battles are largely run on auto-pilot. You can direct each character's general behavior with a series of offensive and defensive settings, and you can command them to cast spells. Otherwise, the only control you have in battle is the ability to make your selected character walk where you want. It's useful for maneuvering them into a good attack position, and often it's necessary to manually avoid enemy attacks when the AI is behaving like it's suicidal. It's surprisingly engaging for an semi-automated system, but be warned - if your people aren't equipped properly or if you leave them completely to their own devices in combat, your party will meet its end quickly. You also need to make sure you regularly save your game. The outcomes of battles are rarely certain - you may destroy an enemy in one encounter, only to be wiped out by the same enemy in another. Even worse, powerful enemies can destroy your equipment, which is hardly ideal if you've just spent a ton of money on a good piece of armor.

I really liked Drakkhen, but I will warn anyone that is interested to not expect a user-friendly experience. It's too easy to get lost, and though the SNES game introduced a map, a mini-map on the main screen would have been a huge boon. The interface consists of a lot of icons that bring up menus that run pages deep, and thanks to the lack of any confirmation prompts, it's way too easily to accidentally do things like teleport from a castle just before you reach a boss fight, thus resetting the *entire* dungeon.

But if you can acclimate yourself to it, the game play is solid. Old and a bit creaky, but solid. The graphics are nicely done - they reflect the 256-color upgrade that the games received in its Dos port - and the 3D scrolling is surprisingly smooth. The character sprites are all nicely defined (and some of those enemies are super creepy!), the cinematic scenes look great, and how great is that title screen? That's a lot of blood on the altar. The Nintendo censors must have been too focused on the dragon to notice.

There are also a couple of really cool little things that the game does that make me remember it so well after all of these years. There's a full day/night cycle that you can watch happen as you walk around, and there's at least one puzzle in the game that relies on this. My favorite random thing, though, had to be the constellation attacks - if you face certain constellations at night, the stars come to life and swoop down in the form of a huge monster to attack. If ever there was a moment to soil yourself in awe, that would be it!

And those enemy noises are hilarious. Bleeeeeehhh!!!

Though it hasn't aged as well as most other SNES RPGs, there's no denying how impressively put together Drakkhen was. Though it might take some real work to get into it, it's a good reflection of just how far we've come, and if you're willing to give it a chance, this eccentric gem still is quite fun to play.

(This is a new 4K upload to replace my somewhat fuzzy original video of the game!)
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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