DRAGON TALE - RZX NOTES
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As this game was submitted so close to the CSSCGC 2021 deadline, I didn't have time to play it from start to finish - reviews had to be written as promptly as I could get them out, and in the case of Dragon Tale, I did so after playing around with it for a couple of hours to see what was there. I'd managed to get a grip on the movement mechanics, and had a vague idea of how the combat worked, and I'd seen what the original Famicom game looked like so I could make a fair comparison. The Spanish text was a huge hindrance to getting anywhere in the game, though...

For this RZX, I made sure to visit every location I could get to, note down what the characters said, get an online translator to help, and bash the output of that into shape. It didn't always work out well (I think a "bumpy doll" is something considerably less family-friendly...) but I managed to get to know what I needed from the translations, in order to further find out where to go next. There are really only five locations to reach - the blacksmith's house in the far northwest, the temple in the southwest, the temple on the island with the bridge to it, the spiral-shaped ground towards the final temple, and the yellow doors.

I've taken the shortest route I could between each location, just to try and keep the fights to a minimum, because they get very tedious after a while, especially with just the one enemy. I started out with "Manual" fights, selecting a card each time, but changed to "Auto" - that way it's possible to regenerate HP. I have no idea how or why, but then, this game was an abandoned work-in-progress.

The final location, the yellow door, stops the game with a message hidden by the custom character set. It actually says "File not found, 1545:2" - this is where it tries to load "FIN.BAS" which is not on the disc. Presumably, this was the end sequence that was never programmed. So I can say I've covered as much of this game as there is to see. I've made a full map of the 36 different screens, but a fair few of them are just about barren; maybe Enrique would have put more features and more locations in if there had been the memory available to do so, but there wasn't.

So this is what you get - an unfinished, very much imperfect, but visually marvellous entry for the CSSCGC. At least you can look at it and think "maybe, just maybe, if..."

- JRW 31/1/2022
