Liege Dragon is a turn-based RPG published by KEMCO. It has all the role-playing elements you could ask for: a vast world to explore, plenty of enemies to defeat, and a party of characters to play. It sounds great, but let’s see if it’s really as fun as it seems.

I’ve played my fair share of RPGs from KEMCO, such as Miden Tower and Asdivine Kamura. There isn’t much difference between these KEMCO games in terms of gameplay. Most role-playing games include the same elements, such as battles, magic, exploring worlds, and the like. But it’s how these elements are shown differently that make an RPG sparkle for me. Liege Dragon was just okay for me. It’s not necessarily because it was so similar to the other games I’ve already played, but it was bland on its own.

The game begins with a too-long narration about its backstory. I stopped reading it about halfway through and, even though I could have skipped it, I let it go just to see how long it was. Six minutes later, I was able to begin the game.

There are a lot of cutscenes and dialogue to read, which is fine, but I much would have rathered played the game, explored the world, and battled enemies. For an RPG, there were too many cut scenes for me. The characters weren’t all that interesting, either. They had clichéd personalities, and I wasn’t interested in their story much. I won’t get into the story, though, due to spoilers.

The battles were okay. The characters could use a basic attack or use magic. The magic is learned through elemental crystals, which you receive from winning battles. Each spell needs a certain amount of crystals to be understood by one character. There are four elements: water, wind, fire, and earth. There are four characters, so I gave each of them one element to focus on.

The enemies have their strengths and weaknesses to the elements. So, earth attacks worked well with water-based enemies. To figure out the weaknesses, it was either trial and error there was a wind-element attack you could use. Overall, the enemies were easy enough to defeat. That is the regular enemies – not the bosses or mini-bosses.

Liege Dragon is not a game to breeze right through. The bosses are strong, and you have to grind a lot. Your characters have little defense, and one of the early bosses will wipe your team out in one hit. Even with the most robust equipment on (that you get from boss fights, find in the world, or buy), you need to grind for levels; your defense and HP won’t last long against these bosses.

Considering the battles aren’t that fun – enemies are in a cluster together, and your characters are just pictures at the bottom of the screen – this was annoying. There is an auto feature for the battles, but the characters aren’t that smart. They’ll only use general attacks. It wasn’t too bad to use for grinding, though.

I liked the graphics and the overall world. The character sprites were charming (the females had clothes on), and the world was fun to explore. The music was good too, but the soundtrack was limited. There were songs for intense scenes, battles, chill scenes, and the like. But the same song for each atmosphere played throughout the game. This is more of a nit-pick, but I would have liked a little more variety.

Overall, Liege Dragon isn’t too bad of a game. Just be prepared to grind a lot and throw many hours into it if you want to make it to the end.