Dragon Fin Soup

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February 2016

Dragon Fin Soup is a crowd-sourced (voluntarily publicly funded) game that I played on the Vita. It plays a bit like a very old game I love called Nethack. Dragon Fin Soup is a turn based game so the action is as fast as you want. If you press nothing then the enemies will do nothing, but when you move or attack the the enemies take a turn as well. Overall the game is an RPG, with missions, experience points, and lots of armor and weapons to find.

I think this game has a certain appeal, but it falls a bit flat in some important areas. For example, for the first few hours of the game you can only get quests from one character, and all of the quests boil down to "go to this area and kill all of the enemies." This is a fair enough quest description, but the only area of the map you are allowed to go to is the area with the active quest. After several hours this changes so you can visit previously visited areas, but there is nothing to do there until a quest is activated.

Another appealing game design mechanic that ultimately frustrated me was the crafting system. There are seemingly hundreds of components in the game to collect, and enemies will drop such things when they are defeated. I collected loads of these items in the hopes of crafting superior weapons and armor, but the crafting system is the clunkiest I have ever encountered in any game. You find "recipes" that tell you what ingredients can be combined into equipment, but there are several issues with this: most of the recipes you find are for items you would be unable to use for many hours - say you find a recipe for a level 65 sword but you are only level 8. It would take probably 50 hours until you got to level 65 and could actually use the sword. Another issue is that most of the ingredients I found weren't used in any of the recipes I'd found - I had dozens of brass rods but no recipes that needed them. What's more, you have limited storage space to keep all of your ingredients - there are hundreds of ingredients but only maybe 100 storage spaces. I ended up needing to prioritize which ingredients to discard and which to keep, but I had no idea which things I'd actually WANT to keep. Man, this drove me nuts and is ultimately what frustrated me to the point where I realized I'd only get more annoyed if I kept playing the game.

Despite these flaws there is a lot to like in the game. It's fairly challenging and requires you to strategize your battles, but it isn't as cerebral as most tactical games. There's a huge varieties of enemies, some of which are bizarre or humorous. The game generally has a pretty good sense of humor as well. It also has a distinctive art style that many people are sure to enjoy.

I tried really hard to like this game and even gave it two chances, but ultimately it's flaws were a bit too much for me. Nevertheless, there is a lot to like about Dragon Fin Soup and I think it will gain somewhat of a cult following for its distinctive style.

The primary loading screen.	You play the whole game on the back of a cosmic turtle flying through space.	Your house.
Your house from the outside.	The classic RPG stat and item screen. Current stats are on the left, equipped items are in the center, and held items are on the right.	The map screen.
This games version of a mimic. Pretty gnarly teeth!	Stat boosts upon leveling up.	Gelatinous cubes will sometimes multiply upon death.
	Another shot of the map screen, which is on the back of a ginormous turtle.	See, a decent sense of humor. . .
You gotta admit, that's a pretty sweet enemy and enemy name.
?!	Attack!	Ooh, so many shovels and bombs to collect . . .
This looks more precarious than it is. Each turn the spikes alternate going up and down, so you just time the first step right and then when you walk forward they'll go down.		A mini boss.
	A giant floating eyeball. Just like in Nethack.
	Oh man, spiders are the worst.
	I don't remember why her eyes went crazy, but I'm sure it was awesome.