Note: This review concerns the PC release of this title, with notes concerning other versions as needed.

I'd like to thank Kemco for the review key to this title.

Some games have great concepts yet bad executions. They could be good save for unfortunate flaws that drag down their better aspects. In this regard, Dragon Takers is a textbook example of this.

Dragon Takers has a backstory of the draconic empire of Tiberius, which is currently trying to conquer all of the world. Over half is under his thumb, but he's not going to be satisfied until it's all under his domain. Meanwhile, you are Helio, a guy trying to make ends meet in your own little village until the dragons attack one day. While barely surviving their assault, you discover you have the ability to take enemy powers for your own in battle, and joining together with the resistance, your goal is to topple Tiberius' ambitions for good.

The core gameplay loop is standard to any turn-based RPG. You fight monsters, get new equipment and abilities, and explore new areas. The key difference is that the game revolves heavily around Helio's ability to take enemy skills, which he can change out between battles at will. This allows him to specialize in any area needed to round out the rest of the allies on his team.

The graphical style is an odd mix of excellent battle sprites and character portraits with great animation crossed with oddly simplistic world set pieces and basic character sprites. While the styles aren't too bad in places, it is a noticable difference in quality and a more unified art style would have been a good idea. World design of towns and dungeons is incredibly small and rudimentary, and there is little interesting to explore.

The music and sounds are classic high fantasy RPG. Nothing really exceptional, pretty generic music for the genre really, but none of it is unpleasant sounding and it sets the mood at least.

Controls I regret to say are not very good, especially on the PC version. The controls were clearly ported from the Android/iOS versions of this game, and not very well. This game requires a controller for optimal play (it does not work with a mouse and keyboard in my experience), and unfortunately, keys cannot be rebound. Also, the menus are far more tedious to navigate than they should be because the controls are never explained, button highlights are a bit difficult to make out, and you have to wade through a lot of menus. Of particular annoyance is all the hoops you have to jump through to change out equipment.

Stability is pretty good. It's based on RPG Maker UNITE, the Unity-based RPG Maker, and runs well on Windows. It is not rated for Steam Deck, but it ran out of the box fine on Linux and Steam Deck via Steam Proton.

One last note that I admit sours me: This is a very linear game. The story is nigh entirely on rails, there is little worth exploring, and the plot has hardly any sidequests or anything interesting to explore. It's servicable as a RPG for beginners, but its replay value is quite poor.

Morally, this has a few minor concerns.

The violence is "give orders and watch it happen" turn-based RPG style. It's pretty devoid of blood and gore. Language is slightly old English medieval, meaning the worst profanity might be a few h*ll and d*mn mentions here and there.

Sexual content is fairly low aside from a few mildly revealing character portraits. This game has a pretty generic high fantasy aesthetic, including some generic undead/demonic style foes, but that's about it, the magic is quite generic.

Morally, this is a straight up "save the world" story with generally morally upstanding heroes. Conversely, the enemy is bog standard "evil empire with an aggressive expansionist streak" that obviously needs to be taken down.

Overall, it's mildly competent and while it has potential, it's held back by some poor design choices and annoying controls. Morally, this is pretty tame and generally suitable for older children on up. While it's not unplayable, I find it hard to recommend because of the poor design decisions that drag it down.