first, i'll just say that the reasons i don't like this game are petty. i recognize this. the point of these reviews is to be biased, though, so just take what i say with a grain of salt.

i'm not the target audience for this game; i don't tend to like overly indulgent bland sexual fantasies like this that cater mostly to straight men, so i'm already not really looking at this in a favorable light. i don't think there's anything wrong with what dragon's crown is doing, exactly, but it is very much not my cup of tea.

the imbalance between the hyper sexualized & objectified women, with the power house fantasy beefcake men, is so droning & dull & unintelligent that i'm almost embarrassed to look at this game's cast of characters. and no, i don't think this game toting itself as an obvious callback to "the classics" is a good excuse for this kind of design choice; there are tropes & things that we should have left back in the 90's, and this kind of ... aesthetic for the characters is probably one of them.

frankly, though, the thing i find the worst is not actually how blindly horny the design ethos is, but instead how grotesque that methodology manifested. i just can't stand how the main crew of playable characters are proportioned. they're nasty. i actually think the art direction is really nice -- low-saturation colors & painterly, stylized character portraits are 100% my shit -- but the massively cartoony anatomy of the PCs, plus the not-quite-cartoony art style, renders itself as highly disturbing to me ... so much so that i couldn't really stand to see more of the game.

but i'll be honest -- from what i saw, dragon's crown doesn't actually look that bad. if i was a super fan of the old arcade classics like shadows of mystara, i would be going crazy seeing that era of game design re-emerge, where main characters & plots served mostly as stylish vessels for the bulk of the beat-em-up gameplay. the addition of RPG / level-up elements in this seems interesting at a glance, although i did take a peak at some contemporary reviews to the game's original release back in 2013, which lamented the "sameness" of the levels. i would wager that playing this with friends might soften the blow of repetitive level design, but i'm not curious enough to test that out for myself.