Drakkhen

Just sits on the boot menu for me. Looks too old anyway to enjoy.

Drakkhen was the first RPG on the SNES and played so unintuitively awful, you'd swear it must have been better in its original intended setup with a mouse and keyboard. Now new generations can have their optimism shattered and discover the SNES port was the best case scenario, complete with far more sensical UI and much needed rebalancing. The mouse's only purpose here is to make you accidentally click on your own party members as they run around in circles blocking your path to further screw up your setup. Most of the keyboard is for hiding what few buttons actually do anything as you stumble through horrible menu designs and accidentally turn the sound off trying to access a basic item. Half the clickable menu is hands you can't tell apart and others are things like the "don't just stand there and let the monsters murder you" button that shouldn't need to exist. It's kind of an achievement in how bad everything works that an early control pad ends up being the ideal way to play despite the genre. I still wanted to play this game because it does have some moody visual flair, and exploring a hostile world dressed entirely in stuff you grab off castle walls has its charms. B…

Drakkhen, developed by Infogrames and published by Atari, is a landmark RPG that pushed the boundaries of role-playing games in the late 1980s with its ambitious design and experimental mechanics. Originally released in 1989, the game places players on a mysterious island inhabited by dragon-blooded creatures, tasking them with forming a party of four adventurers to restore balance to a world on the brink of chaos. The characters follow traditional RPG archetypes, including fighter, scout, priest, and mage, each contributing unique abilities that must be strategically employed to survive the challenges of exploration and combat. The narrative unfolds gradually through in-game events and a detailed accompanying manual, creating a sense of immersion that draws players into its rich and fantastical world. One of Drakkhen’s most remarkable innovations is its approach to world exploration. Unlike many RPGs of its era, which relied on grid-based movement, Drakkhen offers a continuous, scrolling 3D landscape that gives players unprecedented freedom to traverse forests, mountains, and rivers in a seamless environment. Encounters with enemies occur organically within this open world, seaml…

DOSBox janking this up quite badly.

https://youtu.be/JPKRuIgwakw Simply put it's just not aged very well and would be only approachable by super fans from the original release.

Old school, tough as nails, wrpg. Read the friggin' manual... or just die within the first minute. Game's 5 mb, so it'll be on my machine indefinitely. Plays fine on dosbox with proton 9. Experimental half-worked as of writing. I had some issues with the window size going down after. Alt + enter usually fixes it.