DragonFangZ: The Rose & Dungeon Of Time is a game in which I never thought that a poor translation could ruin a potentially good game. ThereDragonFangZ: The Rose & Dungeon Of Time is a game in which I never thought that a poor translation could ruin a potentially good game. There are certainly poor translations of Japanese games out there as a gamer that started their gaming career at Pong at a very young age. Remember "A WINNER IS YOU"? There are also translations of modern games that fail to hit the mark. Through all that I never thought a translation would render a game almost unplayable at times. DragonFangZ: The Rose & Dungeon Of Time is a genuine rogue-like, and reminds me slightly of Chocobo Dungeon. The game is appealingly bright and colorful, with quality enemy art and design and a 3D grid style background which is visual aesthetic and is really easy on your eyes. It’s challenging enough, and as with any genuine rogue-like you’ll start play each time at the first level and no equipment at level 1. The goal is to get all the way down to the level 30 dungeon. It took me many hours to get past the first ten, and the difficulty kept escalating quickly from there on. The random nature of a genuine rogue-like meant the loot I was getting just wasn’t what I needed to be useful. Anyone who enjoys genuine rogue-likes knows to roll with the punches and accept that sometimes an attempt at a dungeon is just going to fail because of the randomness of them. When the character perishes you’re returned to the start of the dungeon to try again. You'll feel like you’re making progress on occasion when you discover a special chest within a dungeon that allows you to put items into it, and they’ll appear in a warehouse at the very top of the dungeon for you to collect and take into your next dungeon run. If your character’s about to die, drop the best weapon into a chest, and save it it for your next attempt. All of this will feel familiar to veterans of rogue-like genre, and that’s exactly what it is. DragonFangZ: The Rose & Dungeon Of Time a very no-frills and straightforward example of its genre. As your character defeats enemies, they might drop “fangs” which you can equip. Those fangs each have a countdown ticker and when it reaches zero, can be used to perform powerful attacks that can really help you in a tight spot. The problem is that you can only get the ticker to count down when the hero fights enemies while standing in the middle of a room and there are no walls from any angle. This forces you to take some risks and fight battles in the middle of rooms, when there might be enemies attacking from multiple fronts. As simple as it sounds, that slight twist to the Mystery Dungeon rogue-like really helps DragonFangZ feel original and interesting. Generally speaking rogue-likes don’t do a well enough job of differentiating themselves from one another, so the fact that DragonFangZ does this I'd say hats off to the development team. It has all the presentational and gameplay elements it needs to be really great. But in the end DragonFangZ: The Rose & Dungeon Of Time is a decent game with a bad Japanese translation, sometimes bad enough that it effectively breaks the story or what's going on within the game.… Expand
