Everyone's favorite tiny white console began its life a little slow with the third-party exclusives, but more and more publishers are jumping in with their own entries as Wii's success continues. The latest to join the fray is Dragon Blade: Wrath of Fire, developed by Land Ho—known for their work on the Panzer Dragoon series—and published by D3 Publisher, who recently published Puzzle Quest. IGN previewed the game at D3's pre-E3 press event last week, and they only had positive things to say.
Sam Guilloud, the D3 product manager for Dragon Blade, says there are too many casual and family games and not enough action-oriented games on Wii. The developers aim to fix that by creating a hack n' slash game that really stands out not only in the hack n' slash genre, but also among Wii's current line up.
According to IGN, what makes the game really shine is the controls. Dragon Blade is played using both the Wii remote and nunchuk to control the two hands. The remote is used for sword-swinging and the nunchuk to perform uppercuts and smashes.
Special dragon attacks are gained by defeating bosses. There are four known dragon attack forms: head, arm, tail, and double arm. Activating an attack form sprouts firey dragon body parts from the fighter. The head attack spits fireballs by jabbing the remote forward, the arm and double arm are really big arms controlled individually by the remote and nunchuk, and the tail turns the swords into a fire whip with a long range of attack.
Combat is pretty simple: lock on to the enemy and swing away to attack. Each level begins with the trash baddies seen in hack n' slash games since the genre begand and ends with a dragon boss. Each dragon is different; examples included a fire dragon, a water dragon, a smoke dragon, and a three-headed dragon.
The boss battle mixes things up a little, as expected. Each boss battle starts with a life bar that must be whittled down. Then crystals are exposed. These crystals are the source of the dragon's power so, naturally, they must be destroyed. After doing that, the fight goes into the Corebreaker stage, which was unavailable for preview at the time.
Dragon Blade is headed for Europe September 14. Other territories are yet to be announced.
Sam Guilloud, the D3 product manager for Dragon Blade, says there are too many casual and family games and not enough action-oriented games on Wii. The developers aim to fix that by creating a hack n' slash game that really stands out not only in the hack n' slash genre, but also among Wii's current line up.
According to IGN, what makes the game really shine is the controls. Dragon Blade is played using both the Wii remote and nunchuk to control the two hands. The remote is used for sword-swinging and the nunchuk to perform uppercuts and smashes.
Special dragon attacks are gained by defeating bosses. There are four known dragon attack forms: head, arm, tail, and double arm. Activating an attack form sprouts firey dragon body parts from the fighter. The head attack spits fireballs by jabbing the remote forward, the arm and double arm are really big arms controlled individually by the remote and nunchuk, and the tail turns the swords into a fire whip with a long range of attack.
Combat is pretty simple: lock on to the enemy and swing away to attack. Each level begins with the trash baddies seen in hack n' slash games since the genre begand and ends with a dragon boss. Each dragon is different; examples included a fire dragon, a water dragon, a smoke dragon, and a three-headed dragon.
The boss battle mixes things up a little, as expected. Each boss battle starts with a life bar that must be whittled down. Then crystals are exposed. These crystals are the source of the dragon's power so, naturally, they must be destroyed. After doing that, the fight goes into the Corebreaker stage, which was unavailable for preview at the time.
Dragon Blade is headed for Europe September 14. Other territories are yet to be announced.