Dragalia Lost

Sadly, Cygames recently announced that Dragalia Lost is ending this year. The last story update will come in July and the game’s end-of-service will come a while after that. I’ve been playing Dragalia Lost since its launch, so I’d like to write up a post to summarize it and capture some of what made it such a charming little mobile game. I normally wouldn’t go over the plot in as much detail as I plan here, as I’d generally just say that if you want the full story you should play the game… but given the circumstances, I think it’s worth really painting the whole picture here.

What is Dragalia Lost?

Dragalia Lost is a mobile game developed by Cygames and published by Nintendo for mobile, released in September 2018. It’s a “free” game supported by gacha transactions to buy characters and dragons. I’m not going to go too deep into gacha transactions in this post but… they’re pretty unethical. Compared to other gacha games, Dragalia Lost is relatively “affordable.” I was able to obtain most characters and dragons without spending money. Still, it’s a predatory practice. As much as I liked Dragalia Lost, I always had a hard time recommending it due to its gacha elements.

The game is openly based on Granblue Fantasy, a massively popular game of the same genre, also developed by Cygames. I played a fair bit of both games and I’d say that Dragalia is a bit more streamlined and coherent, but also has less content. Dragalia also has a more active combat system, while Granblue’s combat is turn-based. Both games have a very similar setup and general narrative structure: a young, good-natured protagonist heads out on an adventure following a main plot, but other characters and frequent seasonal events add extra story along the way. It’s a pretty good format for building a big world with lots of characters without needing to tie things together too closely. Both games also make an effort to shuffle up characters so it really feels like the ever growing pool of characters really know each other, exist in the world, and have lives beyond that of the protagonist. Even the main menu screen shuffles up characters in various situations to give the impression that there’s a whole world here and things happen even when you’re not around.

In addition to the story and seasonal characters, Dragalia also has a number of crossover characters from from games like Mega Man, Rage of Bahamut, Monster Hunter, Persona, and Princess Connect. Most notably, there were multiple major crossover events with Fire Emblem Heroes which felt appropriate to both games, which was really neat for anyone who was playing both games at the time (and probably won a lot of new customers for both.)

The gameplay involves both active touch-screen based combat and a great deal of inventory management in setting up teams strategically to handle each particular challenge. There are many overlaying progression systems, so players spend as much time in menus as they do hacking through enemies. This probably sounds boring to some people, but I really like games with systems like this. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 stands out as a more traditional JRPG with some similar mechanics. Gaining new power is often more about expanding your options, rather than simply becoming stronger.

Dragalia has both 2D and 3D art mixed well throughout. Story scenes include 2D images with dialog that’s both written and voiced, combat uses 3D models, and there are options to use your favorite in various menus.

The soundtrack is pretty good. It definitely leans heavily towards very light, bouncy JPOP, but if that’s what you’re into, you should check it out.

Game Mechanics

Alright, I’ll try not to get too deep here, as I’ve begrudgingly come to understand that most people don’t care as much about fiddly game mechanics as I do… but, no, that’s a lie, I’m going to explain everything because I actually really love this shit, and I just can’t be the only one.

Quests

As a Role Playing Game, you don’t simply boot up the game and find yourself in combat, arcade style. From the main menu, there are a number of various progression mechanics to choose from, but if you want to get into some combat you need to navigate to “Quests.” At launch, there weren’t many options here: either pick the newest chapter of the campaign, replay an old part of the campaign, or select the event (there’s almost always been at least one ongoing event.) Even at launch there are a couple more options: a handful of “Recurring Events” that allow for grinding out basic progression items. Looking at it today, there are just a ton of options. Of course the campaign and grinding options are still there, but there are often multiple temporary events, more than ten different endgame activities, a rogue-lite option, a battle royale with mechanics straight out of pubg, and even a dog-walking event. Some of these options are easy enough to be easily won via auto-play, where you don’t even need to control your characters, but some of them are actually pretty goddamn hard. I would rather beat any boss in Elden Ring again than jump back into the multiplayer queue for some of the endgame quests.

Most quests involve combat, but there are also plenty of quests that skip combat altogether to focus purely on story, told in the style of a visual novel. The most common quests are just boss arenas: a limited scope room where one or more waves of enemies, generally ending in a very powerful boss, appear. There’s generally a time-limit and score options for completing the quest extra fast and without any of your adventurers getting knocked out. Some quests have a larger map, including traps, keys, and various other mechanics specific to each quest. A handful of quests have a very large map and require protecting various positions. Many quests can be played either solo or in multiplayer with a pretty quick queuing system: I’ve always been able to find a room for current events in just a minute or less.

Combat

Once you’re loaded into a quest, you have to actually fight your way through it. Whatever the objectives, the controls are always basically the same. Press and hold on the touchscreen to move in a direction, tap to attack. Each weapon – there are nine types – has its own attack style and combo system, but the general form is to tap multiple times to do a combo attack or press and hold to do a force strike. Combos are important because each move in a combo does a different amount of damage: at the highest level of play, players may choose to only perform partial combos to take advantage of a particularly high multiplier on, say, the third swing, then move into a force strike to cancel the fifth. Continuing to hit enemies without any break also builds up a combo counter which offers some advantages and triggers certain abilities.

Some weapons, such as certain staffs, have special moves that consume a resource to do something big. Each weapon has its own advantage. Swords, for example, are great for wearing down enemies when they’re in an overdrive state. Daggers are great for chasing quick enemies. Wands are often a bit underwhelming in terms of direct damage, but wand-wielding characters generally have more powerful skills. Each weapon also has its own force strike: some, like swords and lances, charge forwards while axes swing in a circle. Ranged weapons either shoot a beam or drop down projectiles from the sky. It’s really an extremely rich combat system for a touchscreen mobile game: the difference in playstyle between different weapons rivals that of more traditional action games.

Each adventurer can have up to four skills equipped at a time: two are specific to the adventurer while the other two are either taken from the weapon for shared from another character. Skills charge when attacks connect, so the basic flow of combat is to make standard or charge attacks until some skills are charged, then use these skills. More advanced play involves saving up skills or using them in specific combinations. Some skills are straightforward, just doing a bunch of damage or healing. Some are just a bit more involved, applying a buff to your adventurers or a debuff to the enemy. Others are pretty complicated, such as Fjorm’s (yes, Fjorm from Fire Emblem Heroes) ability to reflect damage back, but only if you time it correctly. Using a skill like this inexpertly just wastes it, but using it well can make some content trivial (there was a time when it was hard to find a group for one of the endgame activities unless you brought your Fjorm so everyone could just reflect the boss to death in a few seconds.)

In addition to attacking and using skills, there’s also a dodge mechanic that grants invulnerability frames. Notably, these don’t work on all attacks. Enemies have a few attack types: they can just make a normal attack, they can make an attack with a red targeting indicator, and they can make an attack with a purple targeting indicator. Dodging is effective on basic and red attacks but not on purple ones. This holds for basically any form of avoiding damage: you really need to actually move out of purple attacks.

In addition to all of that, you also have the option to shapeshift. The dragon gauge fills when attacking, killing enemies, getting bosses to a certain fraction of health, and breaking certain items. You can shapeshift any time after getting the gauge to 50%. Shapeshifting transforms the selected adventurer into their equipped dragon for a time. Dragons do a lot more damage, have powerful abilities, and can break obstacles in the environment. Additionally, dragons don’t have health: damage taken goes to the dragon gauge. This ends shapeshifting early, but it’s usually better than dying.

Oh, and to make all of that more complex, you have four adventurers in your party and you can switch between them freely through combat with the other three being controlled by the AI, following the selected adventurer. In standard multiplayer you play with up to four players and each player controls just one adventurer. In raids, up to four players bring their full team, so there are up to 16 total adventurers in a quest at a time. Swapping between adventurers to set up a chain of skills or take advantage of different circumstances is an important part of the game.

Enemies are generally less complicated than adventurers, but some (like Volk in the screen shot above) have multiple phases, several skills, and complex debuffs and resistances. All bosses have three phases, indicated by the yellow bar beneath their health. Generally speaking, this bar starts empty and slowly builds as you deal damage. Once it’s full the boss enters their overdrive state, generally making them more aggressive and triggering some new skills. While in the overdrive state, dealing damage will decrease the overdrive bar: different weapons and skills do this at significantly different rates. Sword force-strikes are particularly effective for wearing down the overdrive bar. Once the bar is empty, the boss enters a brief state where they are broken. In this state, they generally stop moving and attacking and take significantly more damage. There are many abilities, particularly those granted by wyrmprints, that trigger off of either the overdrive or break states.

Standard, non-boss enemies, still have their own skills, attack patterns, and element, but they’re much weaker. Some can create a barrier which can be broken by a force strike (or by just dealing a lot of damage, but this isn’t efficient.) Normal enemies can generally be knocked down, which is critical for keeping your adventurers safe, particularly when facing a large group of ranged enemies.

Equipping a team

So, we covered what you do in a quest, but what you take with you is just as important as how you use it. Each adventurer has their own stats and abilities, a weapon, a dragon, and several wyrmprints.

Adventurers

Each adventurer has a weapon type and an element. This is inherent to that adventurer and cannot be changed. They also have a base HP and strength value which sum to form their might, which is a single value to roughly represent a character’s overall power (some abilities can also influence might, but this is a pretty close approximation.) Each adventurer has two unique abilities that cannot be swapped out. They also have a co-ability that serves as a buff for the team, adding to some stat. Co-abilities don’t apply to other players in multiplayer and they don’t stack: if multiple adventurers have the same co-ability, only the strongest will apply. Adventurer’s also have a chain co-ability, which is like a co-ability that stacks. Co-abilities and chain co-abilities generally aren’t very complicated.

Adventurers also have some passive abilities that grant various perks. Most adventurers are immune to one type of debuff while special “gala” adventurers are immune to two. They also have at least one other passive ability that grants some benefit specific to that adventurer. There’s a lot of variability on what this can do. For some adventurers, like Mym, it can grant a special transformation that overrides their equipped dragon and increases strength for the duration of a quest after shapeshifting. Characters like Unwavering Auspex Zena gain a special resource to empower one of their skills. Simpler characters, like Lily, just gain 20% strength when at full health and start quests off with their skills prepared. Overall, might is very important, but once you get to a certain level of play abilities, particularly resistances, become more important as it’s easier to hit the minimum might for a quest than it is to actually beat it. It doesn’t matter how much damage you can do it you’re asleep and it doesn’t matter how much health you have if you’re constantly on fire.

Adventurers have a level, which can be increased by simply including them in quests but is much more efficiently taken care of by just throwing easily farmed XP materials at them. They also have a rarity, which is not only a measure of how rare they are but also determines their max level and the highest level of mana circles they can unlock. Rarity goes up to five stars (though the most common adventurers have three stars, so there are really only three levels of rarity.) Three and four star adventurers can be promoted up to five to achieve the highest level and the full number of mana nodes, making them just as powerful as five-star adventurers. Generally speaking, natural five-star adventurers have abilities that make them particularly powerful, but there are plenty of endgame teams that include four and even three star adventurers, provided that they’re fully promoted.

Mana circles are the second leveling system for adventurers. Most adventurers have 50 total nodes, but some have an addition 20-node spiral at the end, bringing the total to 70. The specific nodes are unique to each adventurers. Most nodes just grant some HP or strength, but others unlock or strengthen abilities. These are the same abilities I mentioned before: mana circles are simply how they’re unlocked. Most mana nodes are unlocked using various farmable resources, but some nodes quire special items only available in specific events for that character. Some nodes also unlock new chapters in that adventurer’s story: each adventure has their own full story! I’d love to quote one here, but they’re actually kind of long. Fortunately, they’re all available on the Dragalia Lost Wiki.

Adventurer art is pretty good. The 3D models are cute, and their 2D images are really solid. Compared with Granblue, Dragalia adventurers are a bit cuter and more symbolic, but still pretty elegant.

Weapons

The type of weapon is determined by the adventurer, so for a given adventurer you can only choose among your weapons of that type. Weapons have the basic stats HP and strength, which add to the adventurer’s own in a straightforward way. They also have a skill, a couple of abilities, a number of slots for wyrmprints, and a bit of story. Weapons also have a rarity, but this basically just a measure of how good it is: you wouldn’t use a lower rarity weapon unless it offered a critical ability.

Weapon skills are similar to adventurer skills, but generally a bit simpler. Some of the strongest weapons have an ability that alternates between granting a great deal of strength and healing, which is very useful. Not all weapons have abilities or skills, but the good ones all do. In addition to the active skill, weapons can have up to two abilities which grant a passive buff. Some of these, mostly those used for void and astral battles, are very situational, adding some protection or extra damage against specific enemies. Weapons with these abilities are generally “budget” weapons that are easy to grind out but only really serve as stepping stones to complete the harder content in order to craft weapons that are more generally powerful. Other weapon abilities, such as those on the strongest weapons, offer straightforward stat improvements in certain situations. One of the most useful abilities is to extend the window between hitting an enemy and the combo window resetting, which makes it easier to maintain a very long combo even while dodging attacks.

Weapons, like dragons and adventurers, can also have an element. Matching the element to the adventurer is important to get the most out of it, as this adds an extra 50% to the weapon’s HP and strength. This is so important that it’s often worth equipping a lower rarity weapon of the same element rather than a higher rarity off-element weapon.

Weapons are crafted and upgraded using a variety of resources. At the highest levels of power these resources come from specific challenges, making the weapon grind the primary focus of endgame progression. At launch, the highest level weapons came from high dragon trials, but in the current state you can basically skip the high dragon grind and move on directly to crafting agito weapons, using chimera weapons to defeat the agito bosses. Agito weapons are then sufficient to fight higher level agito and primal dragon bosses.

Weapons have a level, which is easily increased with whetstones. Their max level, and available abilities, are determined by how many times it’s been unbound, up to eight times. This used to require merging multiple copies, but now that the game focuses more on crafting than finding, it really just requires a collection of materials.

You can also craft additional copies of weapons in case you want to have multiple of them in a single party, but this is fairly uncommon as you generally want four different weapon types to take advantage of their unique buffs and strengths.

Each weapon has a small icon for menus and a 3D model for rendering in combat. The art itself is fine, not really notable, but it’s neat that different weapons actually do look significantly different in an adventurer’s hand. There are also unlockable weapon skins for some cosmetic customization.

Dragons

Similar to weapons, dragons have a base HP and strength which contribute to the adventurer. Like weapons, dragons also have an active skill and up to two passive abilities. The skill is only available while shapeshifted, but the abilities are always active. Abilities add perks like multiplying strength by two for adventurers with a matching element (you almost always want to equip a dragon with the same element,) increasing crit rate, or increasing skill damage. Some dragons have odd abilities, such as Chronos Nyx who doesn’t lose dragon gauge over time but spends it to use his very powerful skill. Dragon skills can be very powerful, either do a great deal of damage or providing a potent buff to your team.

Most dragons function as described in the combat section above, but there are some exceptions! The default is for an adventurer to spend their dragon gauge, which must be filled to at least half, to shapeshift into a dragon for a while. They can generally only use the dragon’s skill once while transformed (with some exceptions for dragons like Mars,) damage taken goes to the dragon gauge rather than to the adventurer’s health, and once the gauge is depleted they shapeshift back into their adventurer form. The player can swap to any adventurer to transform into their equipped dragon, so there are four options when playing with a full team.

Some adventurers don’t shapeshift into their equipped dragon. I already mentioned that some adventurers always transform into their specific dragon, regardless of which dragon they have equipped (which still matters, as it confers stats.) There are several examples of this, most notably the human forms of dragons from the story, which all transform into their true selves. Members of the royal family transform into their pactbound dragon. There are also a couple of weird cases, like Megaman, who transforms into Rush.

A handful of adventurers have a hybrid transformation, where they change into a different form, but they keep their HP (damage will go to health rather than to the dragon gauge.) Think of this as the adventurer empowering themself, rather than shifting into a different form. This applies to just Tiki, Gala Notte, Kimono Notte, and Sandalphon: these are all characters who have story reasons to not need the assistance of another dragon.

More common are adventurers who utilize dragondrive, which essentially spend the dragon gauge to apply a powerful buff. This is pretty similar to the hybrid transformations, but in game terms it does not count as being shapeshifted, which precludes these adventurers from participating in dragon battles.

The last exception comes from just a handful of adventurers who summon a partner. This applies to the Persona adventurers and to Gala Zethia. This is sort of half-way between shapeshifting and dragondrive: the adventurer uses the dragon gauge for a powerful buff, but this buff includes a second unit that enters the battle under AI control.

Dragons have a standard level, which is advanced by feeding them dragonfruit (which is easy to grind so you generally don’t need to think about this too hard.) Similar to weapons, their max level is determined by how many times you’ve unbound them. Unbinding a dragon requires either a special rare item or getting an extra copy and merging them.

Getting fully unbound dragons is potentially the most expensive part of the game. As a free player, I had no problems getting a large collection of fully unbound dragons using the freely available currency, but I don’t have all dragons, and I also played for a really long time. Newer players have always had to either make due with unbound dragons or spend a lot of money pulling for multiple copies.

Dragons also have a friendship level, up to 30, that is increased by giving them gifts. The friendship level adds some stats and unlocks the dragon’s unique story. Yup, both adventurers and dragons each have their own story. Whereas adventurer stories are told similar to normal quests, dragon stories are told as old fairy tales.

Dragon artwork ranges the spectrum from…

You can find the full list here.

Wyrmprints

The wyrmprint system took a couple of tries to get right, as it was kind of broken at launch, but it’s been in a good state for quite a while now.

Each adventurer can equip up to eight wyrmprints, assuming that their weapon is fully upgraded. These are divided into a few categories: 3 x gold, 2 x blue, 1 x snowflake, and 2 x green slots. Gold slots take five-star prints, blue slots take three or four star prints, the snowflake slot takes a special type of print only available from the rogue-lite mode, and green slots only take special prints from some endgame bosses in Rise of the Sinister Dominion.

Regular wyrmpints, for the gold and blue slots (which are also accessible much earlier in the game and thus feel like the “normal” slots) grant a variety of buffs: enough that sorting through them all and building the best team for a particular quest is easily the most complicated part of building a good team. Some of these buffs are pretty straightforward, like +20% skill damage. Others are still straightforward, but only apply in certain situations, such as +20% flurry strength (which increases strength by 20% when the combo count is 15 or higher) or HP 70% = Healing + 15%, which is self-explanatory. Some buffs only apply for adventurers with a certain element. There are also options to increase resistance to a specific debuff type or to absorb the first few times the adventurer would have been affected by such a debuff (there are times when you’d prefer either of these, depending on the specific quest and adventurer – seriously, this gets pretty complicated in practice.)

There are also a few wyrmprints that increase rewards for quests, particularly for specific events. These multipliers are pretty potent, so it’s often worth equipping copies of the event prints on each adventurer in your team when grinding out rewards for an event.

The other two wyrmpint types grant similar buffs, but at lower values and it’s much more difficult to get the specific one you want. These provide a small, marginal benefit, but it’s enough to set apart teams that are fully decked out from those that are merely close.

In addition to the buffs it provides, each wyrmprint has HP and strength, which contribute the the adventurer’s total. Each print also have a level, and leveling them requires yet another resource that’s easy to get, but is a bit harder for new players as it’s tied to the gacha system (but once you’ve been playing for a while you’ll have so much that you never need to even think about it: I can easily level all of my wyrmpints without even denting it.) You can also unbind wyrmprints, which used to require finding multiple copies but now you can just throw more resources at it. Same for getting multiple copies, which is far more relevant for wyrmprints than it is for weapons as it’s actually pretty common that you’ll want multiple copies of a specific print in your team, either because it’s just very good or because you need multiple adventurers on your team to have extra resistance to the same thing.

Wyrmprints also have their own story! This is told via stages, which unlock with each unbinding. The story is also captured in the print’s image, which starts in one state then transitions when you refine it. Here’s an example from Volcanic Queen. Fun side note, this character is a great reference to Brunhild, who teaches Sigurd wisdom and runes (mentioned in multiple stories.)

What I particularly like about this story example is that this describes a scene from the game’s story… but from the Flamewyrm’s point of view. Her love for the protagonist, Euden, is not requited.

Wyrmprints are neat, take a look at more of them here.

Castle

Oh yeah, one last piece of your team: you castle. There’s a very simple city building system in the game for upgrading your castle and constructing new buildings. Some of them take basic resources and some are specific to events. Each building grants a multiplier to some stat that functions all the time. Each individual upgrade is small, just an additional percent HP for flame adventurers, for example. But, after filling up your castle completely, it adds up. By the end of the game, you’ll have around +70% HP and strength to all adventurers, +45% hp and strength to all weapons, +10% hp and strength for all dragons, and +20% damage while shapeshifted (the max values are higher than this, but this is around what I have and I played a fair bit.)

You also get a similar bonus from Notte’s Encyclopedia, which is basically just an achievement system. The bonuses here are smaller than for structures and take more grinding, but it can still get you an extra 10% hp and strength or so.

Game Loop

So, with your team created and an understanding of how to select quests, the basic game loop is pretty straightforward. Until you’ve completed the campaign, you’ll focus on completing quests in the campaign, only stopping to grind some upgrades if you get stuck. Once you beat a chapter, you can do it again on hard and very hard for extra rewards, but it’s not required.

Once you’re caught up on the campaign, you’ll focus on events, there’s pretty much always at least one, sometimes two. All events grant some rewards, you’ll always get at least some basic upgrade and crafting materials. Some events will also grant a new structure, which will confer a normal bonus to some stats as well as a huge bonus for that particular event. The best events grant a new adventurer, usually either a crossover character or a seasonal version of an existing adventurer (with all new stats and abilities!)

Once you get to the endgame content, you’ll focus on progressing through the most challenging content and crafting the weapons to get to the next level. Throughout the game’s life, new layers of endgame progression were continually added. Each new layer was generally added in a way where it also fit with the most recent chapters of the campaign, allowing high level players to start encountering the newest villains right away. This always gave a great feeling that the game was really alive, as your repeated skirmishes with the endgame bosses – and frustration with them – is woven into the story.

There are a couple of special modes that grant their own rewards. The Mercurial Gauntlet is a damage check which grants a huge monthly bonus based on the highest level you’ve attained. The Kaleidoscope is a very long rogue-lite that’s actually pretty goddamn hard. You pick one adventurer and go through many floors of a dungeons, finding upgrades along the way. At the end, you get some special wyrmprints depending on the character you used.

That’s… pretty much it. Managing all of the different team builds and responding to each new event makes up most of the game. If this were all it had, I’d still think it was a neat game – I love complex team building systems like this. In particular, I think that the system in Dragalia works much better than the one in Granblue. Granblue’s system involves a lot of counter-intuitive progress mechanics where it’s easy to lose out on a lot of rare items or time. It also uses a weapon grid where you just collection a bunch of weapons for the team and they all add multipliers in really obtuse ways. It’s all massively difficult to understand, even if you look up a guide, and it doesn’t really make any sense an element of the story: you’re really just throwing a bunch of different numbers together. Dragalia, on the other hand, does a great job of making all of the components of a team fit together in a way that feels like part of the story. Euden, our protagonist, can shapeshift into dragons and he can confer this power to an ally. Each adventurer has their own talents and their own preferred weapon. The wyrmprints are the only part that requires a little more imagination.

Oh, there’s also an energy mechanic and a player level, similar to most freemium mobile games, but the game gives out so many free energy refreshers that I only really had to worry about this for my first month or so. As of today I have so many thousands of energy refreshers that I would be hard-pressed to use them all up if I tried.

With that covered, let’s move on to the story!

…is how I initially transitioned into the first five chapters of the story, but I’m moving things around a bit. To keep things organized, this post will just contain what you just read: the game itself. Next time we’ll cover the first ten chapters of the story.