This Day In Gaming - July 25: Dragon's Crown

On July 25, 2013, a game that had been thirteen years in the making finally reached players. Vanillaware's Dragon's Crown launched in Japan for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita, published by Atlus. It was the studio's first high-definition console title, and it arrived carrying both an unusually long history and an unusually loud controversy. More than a decade later it is remembered as one of the great modern love letters to the arcade brawler.

 A game that almost never happened

The story of Dragon's Crown begins around the turn of the millennium. Director and lead artist George Kamitani first imagined it as a Dreamcast successor to Princess Crown, his 1997 Sega Saturn title. That early version was to use 3D graphics and drew on the arcade Dungeons & Dragons games Kamitani had helped make during his time at Capcom, titles like Tower of Doom. When Princess Crown underperformed and his studio closed, the idea was shelved for roughly ten years.

Kamitani revived the project in 2009 after finishing Muramasa: The Demon Blade, and the road to release stayed rocky. He pitched an early version to Capcom, who passed because, in their view, it would not sell the numbers a Monster Hunter did. UTV Ignition Entertainment picked it up around 2010 and steered it toward Sony's hardware for its cross-play multiplayer, but when the publisher hit financial trouble in 2011 the funding dried up. Atlus, which had released Vanillaware's earlier Odin Sphere, stepped in to rescue it and even lent producers from its Persona team. In a final twist, Atlus's own parent company, Index Corporation, filed for bankruptcy in 2013, the very year the game shipped.

The production itself ran about four years, the longest Vanillaware had ever spent on a title at that point, on a budget of over 100 million yen (roughly one million US dollars). The demands were so heavy that the team had no resources left to localize their earlier Grand Knights History, which lost its planned Western release.

What players actually got

Dragon's Crown is a hand-drawn 2D side-scrolling action RPG and beat 'em up hybrid. Players choose from six classes, the Knight, Amazon, Dwarf, Elf, Wizard, and Sorceress, and fight their way through the dungeons of the kingdom of Hydeland, gathering loot graded from S down to E. Up to four players can team up online, with local co-op on the home console version. Programmer Kentaro Ohnishi, working in a genre Vanillaware had never tackled, built the skill system and borrowed loot mechanics inspired by Diablo. Deep endgame modes, cooking minigames, rune magic, and resurrected bone piles that fight alongside you gave the game far more staying power than its arcade roots suggested.

The art is the thing people noticed first. Kamitani drew on Frank Frazetta's fantasy paintings and deliberately exaggerated every body, human, monster, and hero alike, designs he said "were not intended to be taken seriously." That style also sparked a heated debate in April 2013 over the sexualized female characters, with critics like Kotaku's Jason Schreier calling them symptomatic of the industry's treatment of women, while others argued the whole grotesque cast was exaggerated on purpose. The conversation followed the game right up to launch.

Reception and legacy

Reviews landed in "generally favorable" territory, with the PS3 version reaching 82 on Metacritic. Destructoid scored it 9.5 out of 10 and credited it with reviving the beat 'em up, and Electronic Gaming Monthly called it "a love letter to the classic side-scrolling arcade brawler." Critics who were less impressed pointed at the thin story, which IGN named its greatest weakness, and at repetitive dungeons.

 Commercially it outperformed expectations. It moved more than 300,000 units in Japan in its first week, had shipped 800,000 worldwide by December 2013, and passed one million by September 2017. The success, Vanillaware admitted, was bigger than Kamitani had ever expected. In 2018 the game returned as Dragon's Crown Pro on PlayStation 4, with 4K visuals, a re-recorded orchestral score, and cross-platform play.

For a project that spent thirteen years drifting between studios and publishers, Dragon's Crown ended up doing exactly what it set out to do: it made the arcade brawler feel vital again, and it remains one of Vanillaware's defining works.

Sources

Wikipedia

Gematsu