Ok, not only was this game short, it was easy, had a terrible story
with some of the poorest written dialog I've read. The dungeons are
pathetic, as were the bosses within this game. There's no collectibles
within the game or even puzzles, heck Drake learns to "Double Jump"
like in every platformer game ever invented since Mario but there's
only two sections within the game that require it. While this game
might look similar to Zelda from the outside, it's certainly nothing
like it at all.
----------Battle System----------
Dinotopia is a third-person action RPG. You fight solo for the most
part of the game, except for one dungeon. The AI in this game is
ridiculously stupid, the most enemies you'll be fighting at a time is
5, and while you might be fighting one, the rest just stand there like
an old western movie until you try to attack them.
You gain experience for each monster killed or quest completed. While
you gain levels, the game doesn't really keep track of them, and
there's no status screen showing your stats either. You gain a new
attack after each level though and you can view them.
There's only four weapons in the game, and they each have one special
attack. You can find gems within the game by doing sidequests to power
up your weapons aswell. The Red gems activate your special attacks,
while the Green and White gems make your staffs much more powerful.
There's a couple items you can gain, by using the D-Pad you can throw
these at enemies, causing them to explode, but they're quite useless
and I never used them or had a need to use them. If you run low on
health, there's always a plant near by that will boost your life and it
sometimes regenerates, so this makes the game pretty simple.
You do get armor within the game, and each new piece of armor is always
better than the last, so they automatically equip it on you, but you
have no idea how much better since there's no stats within the game.
The armor is visible on Drake, within cutscenes or within the rest of
the game, so that's a nice plus.
The dungeons are pretty pathetic, linear. Each dungeon requires you to
complete one task, mostly "Defend (insert area)" by just running
through it killing anything in your path. You'll find atleast one
sidequest within each mission, and they're ALWAYS the same quest,
"Collect 3 items and return them to me" fetch missions. It gets old.
Not only are the dungeons painfully linear, easy, and boring, and the
quests are generic, but you have to run through them numerous times
within the game.
There's only a couple boss fights within the game and they're easy as sin.
----------Characters / Story----------
You play as Drake Gemini, and the game thrusts you into a story that
makes no sense to me since I never read the books or watched the shows
or whatever this game is based off of. Anyways, within two seconds of
the start of the game, your twin brother decides to join the
"Outsiders", the evil group within the world of Dinotopia that is
trying to rule it. Before Drake can take on the Outsider's empire, he
first must become the "Guardian of Dinotopia" by collecting 4 Mallet
Heads, these Mallet Heads go on the end of his staff and he can use
them as weapons. You start off with one Mallet Head, and you get
another one within a few minutes of the game, so your quest is rather
small.
----------Graphics----------
Let's keep this in mind, Dinotopia came out a year after Star Fox
Adventures and the same year as Wind Waker and Beyond Good & Evil,
and it's looks like a game that should have came out on the Dreamcast
in 1999. The graphics are dull all the way through, there's no special
attacks, the water looks like crap, the textures are bad, the character
models are just plain ugly. There's nothing to fancy about this game.
The fact that you have to play through each dungeon atleast 2 times,
and sometimes 3 or 4 times, and the fact that it's a 6 hour game makes
this a poorly developed game all the way through.
----------Sound----------
Everything is voiced out, so that's a plus. To bad that the voice work
is really really generic for the most part. The music is also pretty
generic, but it never bothered me.
----------World Map----------
The game features one town, but it's kinda big and is separated into
various sections but you can go through the entire town right off the
bat of the game, with only a few things you can't "reach" until later
in the game. There's really no world map within the game, but all the
dungeons are linked through the game. For example, there might be an
elevator on the "Far Outpost" part of town, and so on.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
5:53
WOW, now that's a short game. The game saves before the final boss,
nothing to special after defeating him, just a short "thank you for
saving Dinotopia" then credits. No unlockables after completion that I
noticed. blah.
