Dragon Force is a rather unique strategy game for the Sega Saturn that mixes turn based strategy with real time tactical movement, decision making, and party building. Development for this game was started by J-Force, but Sega eventually took it over and finished it. In North America, it was localized and released by Working Designs. Sega used Working Designs' English translation for the European release of the game.

Dragon Force focuses on a continent-wide war between the various kingdoms and empires of Legendra (terrible name...). There are eight total kingdoms to choose from, but only six are initially available; the other two are unlocked after your first time beating the game.




In Dragon Force, each kingdom gains control of various generals, by either recruiting them by searching in various castles, or by recruiting captured commanders. There are ten different types of generals, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. There are ten main types of common soldier as well, and each of these also have their own specific strengths and weaknesses. You don't have to worry so much about trying to remember each soldier type, since the manual includes a table detailing the effects that these common soldiers have against other types.

With so many different countries and stories to choose from, the game has plenty of built in replayability. For this review, I only played one scenario from start to finish and dabbled in a few others. I picked Highland as my main campaign, and after playing it, this one seems to be designed to be a tutorial type of campaign. Highland is rather isolated, so you do not have to worry about border wars early on, and there is an easy, peaceful annexation of Palemoon. This campaign makes me wonder if Lord Wein and the elves' Queen Teiris will be more than friends after this giant war.

Given this easy annexation, I then stormed Tristan to basically conquer the entire Eastern half of Legendra. The rest of my conquest then focused on the Western half, picking off kingdom after kingdom until I finally took down Goldark. The threat continues as the evil being Madruk is still working to be awakened; simply conquering Legendra is basically only the first half of the game.


While this game is quite fast paced in the beginning, it gets bogged down in the middle. You can just run around and storm castles all day long, making sure your enemies have little, and later nothing, to counter your assault with. Once you've finished the conquest, absolute chaos ensues, but you can basically spend the time grinding levels until you're ready to easily blitz through the rest of the game. Turns begin taking quite a long time when you're storming castle after castle and being counterattacked. Just before I was done conquering, it wasn't unfounded to have single turns take nearly an hour or more! This game ends up being a major time sink, and as a result, I've just been pecking at it for months while I've strolled through other games.

Each one of the scenarios are quite long and rewarding, and if you could only pick one Saturn game to have on the system until the end of time, this would be a great candidate. Is it worth the price tag? It is if you enjoy the game and play through every single campaign to see the story unfold from the many different perspectives. This game is not cheap though, and in most cases, it may be one of the last games that anyone collecting for the Saturn will pick up. Holy crap this game rules!

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