Dragon’s Crown, the upcoming hand drawn RPG/beat-em-up from Vanillaware (developers of Odin Sphere, Muramasa,) has apparently been in development for quite awhile: an artbook for the game that was just released in Japan reveals that Vanillaware originally started planning the game back in 1998.
The game was originally planned for the Dreamcast, and was going to use 3D models instead of Vanillaware’s now trademark hand-drawn 2D style. It’s currently unknown why Dragon’s Crown was in development for so long and why it never came out for the Dreamcast (or any of the systems that followed it up until now,) but I’m sure Vanillaware George Kamitani will enlighten us about the game’s protracted development cycle sometime in the future.
Despite still using art by Kamitani, the original version of Dragon’s Crown features a much different aesthetic, as the characters are much more… uh, reasonably proportioned than the more stylized characters in the final version of Dragon’s Crown, which comes out for the PS3 and Vita next month.
You can view more scans of the Dreamcast Dragon’s Crown over at Siliconera.
I know there’s been a big controversy surrounding Dragon’s Crown’s depiction of its female characters, and I totally understand why people are disappointed at the game’s juvenile obsession with big, floppy boobs, but I’m still hyped for the game — questionable character designs aside, each of Vanillaware’s games have been substantially better than their previous projects (Muramasa was a big improvement over Odin’s Sphere, which itself was a magnitude more playable than the import only Princess Crown,) so I can’t wait to see what they’ve cooked up for Dragon’s Crown.
