Where are my dragons?

Here's a blast from the past: Dragonstone. It was an Amiga game that came out in 1994.

Original video located here. Accessed 7th June 2017

I didn't have the full game but I did play a demo of the first level (Woodlands) a lot back in the day - hey, when your system is being phased out and you find yourself short on actual games what else are you going to do?

Looking at the gameplay of this game, it's quite clear the makers of Dragonstone were going for something along the lines of a Zelda clone. of course, this was meaningless to me as a teenager as Zelda would come much later on. But, I want to call attention to two things in the playthrough.

Firstly, the pixel art is simply stunning. I will forever maintain that the 16-bit area produced some beautiful graphics that have aged surprisingly well and this game certainly makes a case for it.

Secondly, this game always struck me as being set on a remarkably small scale. You see, prior to this the RPGs I played usually required me, the player, to defeat some huge Big Bad and involved traveling through to a wide variety of diverse locales with a whole bunch of NPCs to encounter along the way. Not so with this one: based on the Woodlands level alone one gets the feeling the this game is a very isolated experience. You start in a forest as opposed to some village, there are are only two NPCs in the entire area (with the first being both in the middle of nowhere and not immediately apparent) and there is no music, only basic sound effects. All of these make for a very atmospheric experience and proof of the adage that Less is More.

Watching the play through itself, the idea that this is a smaller scale RPG is enforced with the locales themselves: They seem rather limited. We see Woodlands, a Village, a Mountain, a Port Town and finally the Dragon Isle. The small number of locales is fascinating to me: If this is representation of the game's world it's a small one. Does that mean that something bigger is happening out of the view of the player?

It may sound odd but I like this formula of 'small scale adventure with isolationist mood and something bigger may be happening elsewhere'. Wish more people would use it in this modern age.