Drake of the 99 Dragons

released on Nov 03, 2003

Drake of the 99 Dragons (also titled Drake) is a cel-shaded third-person shooter video game developed by Idol FX and published by Majesco Entertainment. It was released for the Xbox on November 3, 2003 and for Microsoft Windows PC systems on June 14, 2004. The game stars Drake, an undead assassin who is on a quest to avenge his murdered clan, the 99 Dragons, by recovering their ancient "Soul Portal Artifact" from antagonist Tang. Tang intends on using the artifact to harvest the souls of dead beings and power his undead cyborg army. Idol FX intended for Drake of the 99 Dragons to be the launchpad for a multimedia franchise, which would include comics and a potential animated television series. However, the contract they signed with Majesco gave them a mere six months for development, leaving little room for play-testing and resulting in the game being unfinished. As a result, it is often considered to be one of the worst games of all-time.


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Avoid this monstrosity of a game at all costs. This was my “terribad” pick to play as part of a longstanding tradition with friends. Drake exemplifies everything about early 2000’s design that you’d rather pack away and forget ever happened. Clumsy, glitchy, unpolished, and often totally unfair, this is one heckuva bad game.

Full Review: https://neoncloudff.wordpress.com/2020/01/30/now-playing-january-2020-edition/

This review contains spoilers

This was so bad, any review others could give it are overrated. The Story is that a man who can absorb dragon souls shoots enemies, and his master gets killed, so he kills himself, and comes back to slay them all, this is the most basic story for a martial artist ever, and the way it was all handled makes it worse than recycled, including the sudden ending. The Characters are ultimate bland people, no personality outside it's robotic stereotypes, and their voice acting is not even acting, it's worse than school plays. The Graphics are garbage, they look like 5 bit models made into 3D, the lip syncing doesn't match the models, and the camera doesn't always go where you want it too. The Gameplay has you attempt to shoot enemies with 2 handguns that never run out of ammo, while being unable to shoot at 2 different targets with them, and the slightest movements make your character swing both his guns as far in that direction as it will go, "But Wait... There's more" there is a pointless blue shade when you pause, each level has a time limit, even ones that have zero reason to have them there, and the protagonist shouldn't suffer in any way from being that late, enemies spawn too close to you, later if you die, you have to wait in purgatory for a moment before starting the level all over again, but not the rest of the time, there's no purgatory then, you still start at the beginning of levels though, you can get hit again before you can avoid it, and I noticed some of the AI didn't shoot in my directions sometimes, also I noticed a truck driving in reverse, and they told me you can't simply shoot a boss, but you can. The Music is also garbage, no effort, and sounds are worse than you can possibly expect a game to have. Drake of the 99 Dragons is 99... % garbage and 1 percent the box art.

I've discovered the problem at the heart of media rating, the reason why people think we backloggers are so weird. It's not the over-cataloging, it's not the verbose reviews, it's not the "critical eye" (AKA not being able to shut up when someone puts a movie on). It's that we treat our little ratings like a formal evaluation or grading of a game's quality, when in reality a score is simply "how much did this thing cater to my standards". This leads to a lot of pseudo-objectivity. To resolve this problem, I am giving a 10/10 score to Drake of the 99 Dragons. If you disagree with me, shut up, you're wrong.

Like, its a mess, obviously, but I thought it was pretty fun. The only really terrible thing about this game are all the ugly ass UI elements and text-effects.
Years ago I saw an xbox copy at a flea market for $60. I always heard it was one of the worst games ever, so that got me curious. Instead I bought a $5 copy on ebay and played through it with a friend.
The way drake is animated is absolutely wild, and I love how edgy he is.
I like that you don't really have to aim, you kind of just parkour around the levels and try not to die until Drake has killed everyone. Both the story and the game itself are super fast paced and over in a few hours.
I feel like if this was an indie game released today people would enjoy it, so I guess all the hate is contextual.