Dragonica

If you like games where your character is darn cute-looking, you should give Dragonica a check. Dragonica, also known as Dragon Saga, is a free-to-play 3D side-scrolling MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) developed by Barunson Interactive.

At the beginning of the game, players are asked to choose between one of the two races, Human or Drakan. Depending on which race you chose, the jobs you have access to will be different. Humans have four jobs to choose from, Warrior, Magician, Archer and Thief. Drakans on the other hand have fewer options, only Summoner and Twin Fighter. What's more, the Drakan jobs are gender-locked with Summoners being male and Twin Fighters being female.

Like most other MMORPGs, you will have to accumulate levels in order to advance into deeper specialties with more abilities and skills. And interestingly, each job is vastly different and have their own unique skill tree in which players place acquired skill points into to gain new skills or enhance already acquired ones.

With different jobs having a different skill set, the combat style of each job is totally different and is guaranteed to give players a unique experience.

Although there is a character stats window, there are no stat points for you to allocate to your character when you level up. All these stat points are hidden and distributed automatically for you. Without having to worry about stat points allocation, you can focus all your attention on which skills to learn.

Although the game is said to be 3D, the scope of movement is mainly focused on the horizontal axis. Depending on which map you are in, the vertical and depth movement may be limited. In general, the larger the map, the more freedom of movement you have in the three axes.

For instance, town maps are generally larger and allows for more movement in the three axes while monster maps might be smaller and thus are more restricted.

Combat in Dragonica is much like arcade styled side-scrollers. Moves are performed in real-time but with focus on the use of skills. Naturally, these skills have cooldowns, but with the right skill sets, players can perform ground and aerial combos which will render enemies incapable of retaliating.

While hunting in the regular maps, players can gain treasure boxes when they successfully accumulate certain number of monster kills. These treasure boxes will randomly give items like Gada Coins, Weapon Enhancement Powders, Armor Enhancement Powders or even weapons and equipments.

Apart from regular monster grinding, there is also a large number of quests and mission dungeons for a player to complete co-operatively with others.

The entrances to these dungeons are littered randomly around the world of Dragonica. And for easy recognition, they are marked as a huge padlock on the mini map.

Each of these dungeons is guarded by a "boss" monster. Upon killing it, you will be rewarded with bonus experience and random items.

Depending on the rank you received, the amount of bonus experience and number of items you get will differ. The rank is of course calculated from various factors like, your level, the monsters' levels, the dungeon difficulty and how much you contributed to killing the monsters in the dungeon.

Sometimes, if your lucky enough, you may even get set items from these dungeon runs. As you equip more of these items from the same set, your character will gain additional stat bonuses like extra agility or accuracy.

And while we're talking about items, you ought to know that there are various things you can do to your equipment, in Dragonica, to enhance their capabilities.

Firstly, you can enchant (upgrade) your equipment. The upgrading is done using weapon or armor enhancement powders (depending upon the equipment your upgrading). Upgraded weapons will increase in ATK (Attack) and MATK (Magic Attack) while upgraded armors will increase in DEF (Defense) and MDEF (Magic Defense).

And for weapons, upgrading it to +4 and beyond will give it a glow (+4: Yellow, +8: Azure, +12: Light Red). However, do note that increasing upgrades will increase the risks of the item breaking or being downgraded back to 0.

Next, you can soul-craft your equipment. To soul-craft your equipment, you will need souls. These souls are obtained from dismantling items which contains soulforce. When you soul-craft your equipment, they will give you bonus stat points (VIT, INT, STR, or AGI).

Finally, you can socket your equipment with cards made from crafting. Not much is known about this at the moment because I have yet to lay my hands on such a card. Apparently, the crafting process is pretty complicated, requiring crafted items from different crafting categories.

To add to this difficulty, our character is strongly discouraged from learning multiple crafting skills. Additional crafting skills are increasingly expensive and time consuming to learn and level. Yet, to actually produce a sellable end-product would require us to learn AT LEAST three crafting skills (One gathering skill, one refining skill and one production skill).

Generally, the crafting process starts from the gathering of raw resources to the refining of them and finally using the refined resources to craft actual products. However, these crafted products aren't weapons or armors which you can use. They are simply items which you can apply on your existing equipment to improve, modify or shift their enhancements.

To learn these crafting skills, find the Production Maestro, Midas in the Port of Winds. You will need to buy the necessary crafting tools from him too.

Next, equip the gathering tool you have bought and enter the portal named "Port of Winds [Windy Farm]" right behind his back. You will need to position yourself at the correct location to start the gathering process. (Press "H" and right click on the gathering skill icon.)

Once you have gathered enough raw resources, you will need to go to your "MyHome" to access the crafting machine which refines your raw resources. The cost of getting your own home is 20 gold plus a weekly rental fee of 5% the cost. And with the costs of buying the crafting machines, you will need quite a sizable amount of money in order to start crafting.

Finally, with the refined resources in hand, you will need to get back to Midas to start the production process. (And frankly speaking, taking all this trouble just to get these end-products, they had BETTER be worth the time and money spent.)

For hardcore gamers, all these features would probably sound very interesting. However, for casual gamers, we're probably better off ignoring this whole crafting thingy. You can probably live without them.

For the most of it, Dragonica tends more towards the adventuring aspect rather than PVP. The world of Dragonica features two huge continents, El Grego and Fearas. The two continents are further divided into different sections and within these sections are smaller areas and towns that are interlinked. With these many places to go to, you can be sure that the explorer in you is satisfied.

However, I doubt I can say much for the blood-thirsty peeps out there. There is some PVP content in Dragonica, but it isn't grand in any way.

The first type of PVP is where the player can enter a room to battle other players. This is done via clicking on the "PVP" button at the lower right hand corner of the screen. Upon entering the PVP lobby, you can decide which rooms to enter or create your own (Each room can hold a maximum of 10 players). Basically, its just single or group battles with conditions of either death match or last man standing.

The second type of PVP is called Emporia Wars. In this type of PVP, guilds are pitted against guilds in a single elimination tournament fight. Winners of the tournament will gain the right to hold a castle for one week. (The perks of holding a castle is as shown in the second picture.)

All-in-all, if you like controlling cute avatars and have the heart of an explorer, by all means give Dragonica a try. If however, there is a blood-thirsty killer lurking inside you, I would suggest that you look elsewhere. Dragonica might not be the game for you.

Dragonica Video Clips

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