Originally published at: Review | Infinity Strash: DRAGON QUEST The Adventure of Dai - XboxEra
For all those familiar with Dragon Quest, not many know about Dai no Daibouken—Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai is a late 80s manga that was adapted to an anime and, more recently, a remake of said animated adaptation. Infinity Strash: DRAGON QUEST The Adventure of Dai developed by Game Studio Inc., KAI Graphics Inc., and SQUARE ENIX and published by the latter, follows that remake to a tee up to some point in the remade anime. Players take on the role of Dai and the companions he meets as he sets out to defeat the Great Demon Lord and fend off his Dark Army.
What should’ve been a neat adaptation of a fun shounen unfortunately ends up being a lot more dry than I expected. Let’s ‘Infinity Strash’ through the details, so you get an idea of what I’m talking about.
One Big Adventure
Our tale starts off with Dai fighting an unknown adversary, throwing us right into the game’s fairly simple combat system. You have your dodge, three-button attack system with a special if you time the last swing, and three skills that you can fire off once they’re available for use. You’ll fiddle with these for a minute as Dai, while weighty and easy to control, you learn that he can’t quite cancel out attacks. He can block as well perform perfect blocks, which are key to breaking your opponent’s advantage so you can get a few swings in. But it’s much easier to perfect dodge as the window is much easier to time. But I digress. Dai gets whooped and it’s all the way back to his humble beginnings for us.
In Infinity Strash, players progress through Dai’s adventure through story, free quests, and story combat stages. Story missions are basically the anime told through what is easily the lamest way to retell the show. For most of these story chapters, you will sit and watch still pictures from the show with voice acting dubbed over them and occasionally a transition. Make no mistake either, this will take up roughly a third of your playthrough of the game.
Free quests and story combat chapters are small stages where you either fight off wave(s) of enemies, a boss, or both at once. They’re short, inoffensive, and at worst begin to get boring sometime before halfway through the game. A lack of real combos doesn’t help and the waves of enemies begin to feel like a chore to clear. You do get more skills to work with, as you continue the game’s story and meet Popp, Maim, and Hyunckel and get to play as these characters too but the fundamentals of the game ultimately failed to keep me interested.
But what I can say is that the in-engine remakes of fight scenes were really well done. Heck, the game’s presentation is really solid—visuals are good, animations are over-the-top, and the sound effects are great. The few in-engine cutscenes you get to see are a visual treat and really sell the shounen story that Dai no Daibouken really is. It just sucks when those end and you’re back to the dry-and-drab stills.
My Memories? Keep ’em
Infinity Strash runs for about seven chapters and after the first, you are introduced to the ‘Temple of Recollection’. A simplistic roguelite crawler that runs separate to the main game, but also not really. See, for our heroes you’ll equip them with memories that you unlock through this part of the game and as you progress through the story. Slotted memories give boosts to stats and offer unique skills (particularly for Dai). You’ll need these memories levelled up to keep up with the game’s baddies in later story chapters. These memories also feature art from the original manga, which is a treat to see.
This mode is a strange one. To level up memories, you need to ‘dupe’ them by going through this mode. This mode is also where you level up characters’ skills with gems found through the game. You can progress through the story just fine and collect these gems but to level them up, you need to jump to the Temple menu. It feels needlessly complicated—you’ll see skills or memories ready for levelling up in the story side, but you can’t level them up there, forcing you to trudge over to the Temple to do what should be done from the preparations menu.
And then the Temple itself is boring. You’ll boar through small stages, fighting off waves of Dragon Quest familiars and bosses you fought in the campaign. You level up independently from the campaign mode, too. It makes fights more tedious than they have to be as a result, thanks to enemies taking more whacks than they really need to.
I’d be less harsh on this part of the game if it were an extra mode, but the way it tangles into the meat of the game (and not in a particularly fun way) leaves me scratching my head. After beating the story one of the game’s suggestions was to run back to the Temple and I’d much rather not. I think this would’ve been a great idea if the game was solely focused on its rogelite component.
Dai Machigai
Infinity Strash had a big job to do. Taking a long-running show and adapting it to game format isn’t as easy as it seems, especially with the slow start that The Adventure of Dai has. I applaud the developers for the in-engine cutscenes and especially some of the fights against the Dark Lord’s minions. Those particular cutscenes were really well-done down to the minute details of Dai’s foes being totalled but still breathing. The boss fights too, were good fun. Learning to guard break attacks or using skills at the right time to punish does feel good to pull off.
Unfortunately, for the good that Infinity Strash does for the serialised manga, it shorts itself through poor retellings of the anime episodes, simple but ultimately boring combat, and a Temple system that really doesn’t mesh well with the main campaign. But if you’re a shounen or Dragon Quest diehard, Dai’s adventures are a fun spectacle—but I think I’d rather watch the anime. ∎