Breeding in DragonVale: Playing God

I once wondered what it’d be like to play a God. And then I found the God’s Playing Field series, and I was contented.

And then… years later, after many late giggly preteen summer nights: DragonVale.

DragonVale is to God’s Playing Field as apples are to oranges, but hey! Oranges are fruits too.

DragonVale is a simulation fantasy economy/farming/park sim video game created by Backflip Studios for the iOS and Android platforms. It can be downloaded for free from the Apple App Store or Google Play and played on the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad or several Android devices. DragonVale was released in September 2011 and uses the freemium business model

One plays as a psychotic wizard  god whom always seems to be a little full of oneself with long wispy white hair and a little-too-big-smile. We get random tips from an amazing help box that pops up everywhere–it’d be a little creepy if I didn’t know it was a video game.

Through the first five minutes, the wizard (you) are instructed on how to breed your first Dragon! (Why are we doing this?) Who gives a flip! Nah, go right ahead, click on that buy an egg icon and buy one! In fact, buy the only one you can, so you can start by showing off these creatures to random people… somewhere in what can only be assumed is the sky. What sky? Probably some psychotic old man’s dreams as he cracks out on a Bloody Mary with too much Vodka.

See, at this point (two seconds in) I can’t figure out if the game resembles Pocket Frogs or Farmville. It even bears some semblance to Pokemon.

The whole point of this ordeal of a game is to engage in the market of Dragon Trafficking, by hatching assuredly stolen eggs. (Apparently dragon eggs have a black market.) Then, we’re instructed to hatch the eggs and given the option to speed up the process with the gasp freemium gem system. And then? We kindly wait for some stranger to gawk at our newly hatched child whom has no mother to help guide it into the world. …Go us.

What more could this game offer? After a few touching swipes of the screen, and ohhs and ahhs at how cute our abducted dragon-ling is, we’re instructed to buy another one! Repeat offenders we are. Then we make it a cute little habitat so we don’t piss it off and it starts burning down the village and eating people.

But wait! There’s more! We force them to breed, so we can make shiny new ones!

…

Yeah okay.

Farmville was better than this. At least it was mildly humane. 

I gave it a two because the dragons were cute.