Dragon and Weed: Origins OB – Dual Edges: Episode 0 – Preview
Follow Genre: Visual Novel, Indie
Developer: West Dragon Productions
Publisher: OG-ZONE Digital Entertainment, GrabTheGames
Platform: Mac, PC
Tested on: PC

Dragon and Weed: Origins OB – Dual Edges: Episode 0 – Preview

Good: Cool art style, informative world building
Bad: No autoplay, loop continuation issues
User Score
9.0
(3 votes)
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Rating: 9.0/10 (3 votes cast)

Visual Novels have become a really popular genre in recent years; a lot of them enter the market every season. Usually, they tend to be romantic or light-hearted, though there are exceptions, Dragon and Weed: Origins OB is one of these exceptions with its story focusing on a futuristic world where war is money, differentiating itself from the norm. Dragon and Weed: Origins OB – Dual Edges was developed by West Dragon Productions and published by OG-ZONE Digital Entertainment and GrabTheGames. We got a chance to try the game out, starting with episode 0, and discover the war filled world of DWO.

Earth has been overcrowded for a while but in the last 50 years, the massive expansion of humankind made it worse. Some humans left their home planet to discover space while others stayed on earth. Water and raw materials had become so rare that conflicts started to happen everywhere. Nations fought against themselves and against Private armies. Many nations fell, alliances were settled and then afterwards broken again. All of this in the interest of the conspirators. For now, though, there is an era of peace.

It is at this time we meet the two main characters Dragon and Weed, who are two soldiers part of the 8th Section of Division IV of the European Common Army (UNECA). As they come home from a mission, they notice that their lieutenant Rose is in conversation with an important person. This person is Lieutenant-General Gregson-Mitchell who is one of the higher-ups. He came here to convince Rose to let him have her two top soldiers, who of course, as you might have guessed, are Dragon and Weed. Right as the discussion between the Lieutenant and Lieutenant-general starts getting heated, Dragon and Weed interrupt by badmouthing the special guards accompanying Gregson-Mitchell.

Since Dragon and Weed: Origins OB is a visual novel it is mostly story-based. For episode 0, there are no choices for conversation, it is unknown if this option will be added in the future episodes. Since episode 0 is mostly about building the world and introducing the characters, it doesn’t say that much about the storytelling yet. If you had the option to autoplay the conversation, it would play out similar to an animated series, but for now, there is no autoplay, so you must click between the conversation parts.

Dragon and Weed: Origins OB uses a pretty cool art style. Even though the game is 2D, it seems like there are some 3D elements added. This is mostly due to the environment and style of shading. There isn’t a lot of movement present in the game as there are only a few animations, but these are more like still images being moved or gunfire appearing out of guns while the people stand still. If a character moves, it jumps between pictures. Even though a lot of visual novels have still images, they usually zoom in on a character while DWO shows the entire scene like a series. The jumps between camera shots are quite harsh as well; even a character going from one pose to the other is quite hard sometimes. This certainly isn’t helped by the fact that some minor animations stop completely when the conversation is done. This however also happens if you skip, since it just skips to the end of the text, so you’ll always get a still image.

It might be an idea for the developers to input an autoplay mode, this could help to continue the conversation before the animation loop stops and gives less of a harsh stop between conversations. There is also another issue with some of the characters’ lines and that issue is the length. Some of the dialogue gets cut off at the bottom because their part is so long. This could be fixed by making either the box a bit longer, or just cutting up the conversation subtitles in two or more parts.

The music in DWO is a sort of Electro-type music that fits together with the rough theme of the game. There are only certain times that music plays, during conversations it will mostly just be environment sounds like birds chirping and waves crashing on the beach. DWO is fully voiced and besides voice actors for the characters, it also has a narrator. Since this episode is about story-building, we first got to hear the narrator’s voice tell us about the situation of the world. The voice actor did a really good job telling the story in a dramatic and interesting way.

All the other voice actors also did a great job portraying the emotions of the characters. The different voices really helped make the episode feel more alive. For example, hearing frustration in a character’s voice helps bring the still image of a frustrated person to life. There is a little bit of an issue with the sound that is related to the still image issue mentioned above. Once a dialogue piece is done, the sound stops immediately, which adds to the harsh stops mentioned above. For example, a character might be talking with birds chirping in the background but when he is done speaking, the background sounds stop and there is complete silence until you click to continue. Even if you immediately click, there is always a moment that the sounds get cut off.

Dragon and Weed: Origins OB – Dual Edges is an indie Visual Novel where you’ll follow the story of the two soldiers Dragon and Weed. As mentioned above, in episode 0 there are no dialogue choices that you can make, and it is unknown if this will be added in the future episodes. So, in episode 0 the only gameplay element that is present is reading the conversations and clicking to continue to the next part. For some reason, space pauses the game, which is a little bit of an odd choice since usually, ESC is the most common button used to pause games. Visual Novels also often allow you to press any other button to continue but it seems that DWO only accepts clicks.

Conclusion

Dragon and Weed: Origins OB Episode 0 is mostly a world-building episode and isn’t that long. Since the episode is that short, it is not very clear yet on how the following episodes will play out. It is quite obvious that this episode was meant to give a taste of the story and the badass main characters. The developers had also announced that they would release all episodes separately with episode 0 being free, but it seems that this hasn’t happened yet. The only way you’ll be able to play episode 0 is to buy the full package which will unlock all episodes as they release. As for the other episodes, episode 1 was supposed to come out early March but got delayed. The developers announced this on the 14th of March, since they want to release episode 1 and 2 together. A new release date hasn’t been announced yet for now.

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Dragon and Weed: Origins OB - Dual Edges: Episode 0 - Preview, 9.0 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
Theotakutem


The one and only slowqueen! -student multimedia-

2 Comments

  1. MC_JP
    April 16, 2020, 19:54

    the art style reminds me of Appleseed

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    • Ibuki
      April 17, 2020, 00:32

      Same

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