Wednesday, March 23, 2022

Thoughts on Dragalia Lost

As an expert in not playing Dragalia Lost, seeing as I only played the intro, I decided to explain its failure. Publish or perish, after all.
First, right from the beginning, the controls felt worse than similar games like Bleach Brave Souls.
Second, that intro gave the impression the game would be dungeon-focused, but when I looked in later, it seemed the entire thing was boss-in-a-box fights with a heavy co-op focus. The audience that wants more of the former feels deceived, and that which wants the latter will never know that game has it.
The biggest problem, however, is that it missed its aesthetic. It seems to me, a professor of not playing Dragalia Lost, that there's a triumvirate of aesthetic categories such that the successful mobile games hit one or two hard, which we will call Cute, Cool, and Coom. Games can touch on all three, but you can tell where its heart is. Granblue Fantasy is cool and Princess Connect is cute, for example.
So what's Dragalia Lost? It has those chibis, so it's cute, right? Not really. They don't have particularly cute expressions. They look like low-poly characters in an early Playstation game, as if their tininess were a technical limitation rather than a choice. Furthermore, they're being used to tell a pretty po-faced fantasy story about dragons and time travel. The music is cutesy, not cute. The difference is crucial. Maybe it's cool, but then, it's full of chibis and tubby dragons, not to mention pastels and slice of life type wyrmprint art are not the least bit cool, to say nothing of Euden's hair. It certainly isn't coom. The occasional bikini doesn't cut it. You need to hit different tastes and have a sense of the erotic which Dragalia Lost lacks almost completely. That's why it got so little fanart.
You can talk about this or that update or monetization all you want, but that only matters if people play it in the first place. Dragalia Lost's numbers were disappointing from the very beginning. I contend the primary reason was the lack of aesthetic appeal, although of course some people liked it a lot. Plenty of stuff I like also isn't popular, so I know how it is.

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