VasterClaws3: Dragon Slayer of the God World

Genre: Top-Down Action-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

VasterClaws3, released on PC in 2020 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021, is a Top-Down Action-RPG that’s vaguely in the same vein as games like Diablo. Players take the role of a dragon slayer and a shrine maiden leading a band of adventurers fighting hordes of enemies in a story that’s… well, somewhat incomprehensible. Something about stopping an invasion from an evil dragon world.

Yeah, this game features a pretty terrible localization, which has the unfortunate affect of making everything about this game more confusing than it needs to be. The other elements of the presentation don’t fare much better, either, with some ugly and dated-looking pixel art visuals and a forgettable synthesized soundtrack.

However, it’s the gameplay that ultimately lets down VasterClaws3 the most. Players only control the main two characters in their band of heroes, with all other characters auto-attacking any enemies that come into range. Their own character also auto-attacks, meaning that the only real control you have during the gameplay here is where to move your character and which of the two leads you’re moving. Beyond that it’s just moving around until your field of view brings you close enough to enemies to have combat pretty much automatically start.

Everything else boils down to party management. You grind to build up your party (or parties, as you can have multiple parties set up) and you can change your equipment or break down unused equipment to empower other equipment items. And that… er… seems to be about it.

Yeah, VasterClaws3 pretty much sucks all the fun out of the Diablo-style Action-RPG genre by dumbing down the combat, making party management dull, by making everything about the game more difficult to understand due to a poor localization, and then topping it all off with an ugly presentation. You have multiple better options on the Nintendo Switch, including multiple Diablo games themselves. Stick with those.

tl;dr – VasterClaws3 is a Diablo-style Top-Down Action-RPG. Unfortunately, it fails in pretty much every way – ugly presentation, dull and simple gameplay, boring party management, and a bad localization that makes everything harder to understand than it needs to be. You have much better options on Nintendo Switch.

Grade: D

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