Dramatic Road: the origin of wind Game Review

Dramatic Road: the origin of wind has a brilliant high concept: it's a Fire Emblem-style strategy RPG set in modern-day Kanagawa rather than medieval times. Every archetype you remember from those games is therefore remixed. Archers are tennis players; armor knights are baseball umpires; cavalry units ride motorcycles instead of horses.

Of course, Dramatic Road isn't just a modern-day Fire Emblem. It's specifically a high school delinquent saga inspired by classics like Bari Bari Densetsu. What starts as a senior high school student's attempt to revive his motorcycle club expands into a three-year battle on the streets. Hapless freshmen grow into capable seniors, while seniors inevitably graduate over the course of the story, forcing the player to scramble and raise new units to take their places.

It matters that these characters are delinquents, rather than Fire Emblem's royalty. The latter series, after all, has always been limited by its simplistic lords-versus-bandits framing. Dramatic Road might start that way, with its heroic motorcyclists from Gyo-un High School forming the Murakumo Alliance to defend students from local bullies. But the revelation that the Alliance's nemesis, Dark Carriage, is composed of former motorcycle club members complicates everything. If both heroes and villains started from the same place, what really separates them? Is there really such a thing as “heroic” violence?

The second act steps things up even further, as the new club captain, Shizuka, attempts to broker peace between rival schools. Former enemies prove themselves as friends, friends unexpectedly become enemies, and Shizuka's pacifist instincts are pushed to the limit as local power players take advantage of the chaos. The best moments of Dramatic Road hit like a great delinquent manga or live-action series, where the player plays each chapter just to find out what happens next.

There's just one problem: Dramatic Road is very easy. Its balancing and encounter design skews towards recent Super Robot Wars titles rather than Fire Emblem. Enemies only lightly punish units for your tactical mistakes. Map types are limited, and the developers lean on enemy reinforcements to turn up the heat rather than more complex conditions. The developer also does not implement the bonus conditions that give Super Robot Wars games a modicum of friction for experienced players. What you see is what you get.

Dramatic Road also implements two useful convenience features. The first, “shift change,” is a currency that lets you break the game's action economy and give any unit that hasn't yet acted an immediate turn. This lets you deploy slow-paced tanks and archers as you please rather than waiting ages for them to move. The second is a powerful rewind feature, as seen in Tactics Ogre or Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Unlike in those games, you can use the rewind in Dramatic Road to reset the game's RNG. While these two features make battles snappy, they also tilt the game's balance even further in the player's favor.

To be fair, recent Fire Emblem games like Three Houses aren't known for challenging map design either. But when I found myself winning an early Escape chapter in Dramatic Road simply by defeating all the enemies rather than retreating under fire, I couldn't help but think something was wrong. The story wanted this to be the low point, from which the motorcycle club rises to overcome adversity. Instead, it was just another map.

The game's unit design more successfully evokes personality through gameplay. I'll always remember the characters in Dramatic Road. Reika, a batter who multiplies her strikes to defeat opponents; Soji, a delivery man who buffs party members with soba from the back of his motor scooter; Hayato, a long-range sniper able to move after he attacks. While the game doesn't have supports as Fire Emblem does, it reveals unexpected connections between the cast through cutscenes; some units are siblings, others are rivals, and fellow club members remain fiercely loyal to each other.

Despite my love for the cast of Dramatic Road, I found myself frustrated by how limited my options were to customize them. Most units can choose from a list of generic attacks to purchase and upgrade; I found most of them weren't worth bothering with compared to a unit's unique skills. Equipment is similarly constrained, with most items in the game being simple stat upgrades. Only the fact that units learn new attacks and passive skills as they level keeps battles fresh.

The game's presentation is fairly limited, as you'd expect from a humble independent title like this one. The music is banal, consisting of strings of notes that aim for guitar chords but sound more like bicycle horns. Attacks in battle lack the luxurious animations you'd expect from a Fire Emblem game, or even other independent strategy RPGs like Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo. That said, the lack of animations at least keeps the pace of battles brisk. I also found Dramatic Road's character designs to be well-balanced in terms of gender and body type, a nice change from Fire Emblem's insistence that heroes are beautiful and villains ugly.

I'll admit that I was a mark for Dramatic Road: the origin of wind ever since stumbling on its freeware predecessor. I'm glad that its developers kept making games, and that its newest title in the series is accessible to a wider audience. That said, I'm torn on what that audience might look like. Casual strategy RPG fans will likely find the newest Fire Emblem's aesthetics more appealing, while hardcore players forged in the fires of Fire Emblem ROM hacks will likely find Dramatic Road to be too easy. If you're too broke to afford Fortune's Weave and enjoy delinquent stories like Sukeban Deka or Tokyo Revengers, though, Dramatic Road may be the game for you.