I of the Dragon

I of the Dragon is a 2004 game for Microsoft Windows XP, developed by Primal Software of X fame. It is essentially a strategy shooter with some RPG elements.

The game follows the player who takes the role of one of three chosen dragons: Annoth the Firebreather, Barroth the Magician, and Morrogh the Necromancer; found in three hidden eggs long after their species left the lands of Nimoa, they are awakened and raised by the priests in order to protect the kingdom from the evil demon Scarbrorr and his legion of monsters.

The dragon arrives just in time to save the last remaining human settlement from destruction, and from there must plow through enemy territory, performing gratuitous monster murder and razing of lairs, all the while helping to build and fortify more human towns.

This game contains examples of:

 * All There in The Script - Quibeck (the carpet-mounted wizard who brings you news) and Pardis (the warlord you play as in Wonderland and Terra) are never named in-game. You will only learn their names if you look up the official website (or here, now).
 * Annoying Arrows - the Scarbrorr-aligned towns of Forest, as well as some of the orc critters in Ferra, shoot arrows at you. They are the weakest things you can possibly get hit by.
 * The Archer - Kindjal. Towns also produce archer units to help with defense.
 * Artificial Stupidity - The carpet-piloting wizards can attack monsters, but they usually do not. If there is even one corpse on the map, no matter where it is, they will drop everything else to try to harvest the soul from it, even if they are actively being attacked. It's not uncommon to see a pile of wizard corpses resulting from successive wizards trying to collect a single soul from a dangerous location.
 * Backstory - the intro of the game, as well as the cutscenes during the Wonderland and Forest maps, explain most of it, most importantly that dragons felt betrayed by humans and left, but still handed over three eggs to the priests as they believed one day Scarbrorr would come back.
 * Big Bad - Scarbrorr.
 * The Dragon - the.
 * Breath Weapon - each dragon has two or more attuned to their element -- fire for Annoth, ice for Barroth, poison gas for Morrogh. They come in sweeping flamethower and longer-ranged fireball varieties, and Annoth gets a special homing fireball as well.
 * Camera Screw - since the engine was designed for a flying dragon, the mid-to-late-game missions in which you play as humans suffer from a spot of Fake Difficulty due to the camera focusing behind trees, exaggeratedly panning out, or simply getting stuck below ground.
 * Creepy Monotone - the citizens of Wonderland.
 * Death From Above - naturally, since the player is a dragon, this is the primary means of attack. Some spells, like Barroth's Magic Stones and Annoth's Meteor, take it even further.
 * Dummied Out - Mana inflow, like breath capacity, was originally limited by a Mana Meter that would deplete when spells were being charged, and slowly refill once all spells were primed. The meter is still visible in the upper-right corner of the screen, and will display a tooltip explaining its intended purpose, but it's always at 100%. Spell charge times are instead limited by the number of spells being charged at once.
 * Escort Mission - The Earthskull map opens up with a pair of Simorans, whom the player mush protect as they lurch towards the town. It's challenging to keep them alive even on lower difficulty settings, but turn up the hard, and the town can be destroyed before they reach it, meaning you have to either fly back and forth to protect both the town and the caravan, or let the town fall and try to rebuild it amidst the hordes of monsters. Fortunately, the caravan's survival is optional - keeping one alive will award you with experience, and keeping both alive will net you a decently useful spell.
 * Evolving Attack - the natural breath weapons, which have two or three levels.
 * Exclusive Enemy Equipment - Quingor's corpse drops the spell Fire Stone, which allows you to shoot the fire stones that he shot at you.
 * First Person Snapshooter - you can save pictures of whatever the camera is vieweing (with better effect when taken from the eyeview camera or zoomed in a monster). The pictures end up saved as Targa images, which can easily reach over 2MB per picture.
 * Flying Seafood Special - Trixxter lairs are (inexplicably) floating jellyfish forests.
 * Fragile Speedster - Barroth's stat gains lean towards this - high speed, good mana inflow for spell spamming, but low regeneration means he can't stick around a fight as long as the other two.
 * Full Set Bonus - Five red crystals gives the player ten extra health points. Five green crystals gives the player an extra spell slot. Five blue crystals gives each dragon ten points in their specialty stat - fire power for Annoth, mana inflow for Barroth, and regeneration for Morrogh.
 * Giant Flyer - in addition to the dragons, a good number of flying monsters are a notch or twelve larger than the humans.
 * Gorn - the player eating monsters, even more if you zoom in on the poor creature as it is daintily ripped to bits. One of the most glorifying and worthwhile things of the entire game.
 * Green Hill Zone - Mediterrano.
 * Horse of a Different Color - Roadrunners, ridden by just Pardis at first, but towns at level five or six will also produce lizard-mounted warriors.
 * Hot Bar - with up to twelve magic slots to which you can assign magic spells, and are accessed via the F1...F12 keys.
 * Interface Screw - unintentionally though. Try not to place any oft-required spell in the F11 or F12 slots (to the very right) or you may end up hitting the Power(Off) button in most modern keyboards.
 * A legitimate example, however, occurs after every play-as-a-human segment. When you regain control of the dragon, your spells will be in order of level, instead of whatever order you had them in before.
 * Kill It With Fire - Annoth's specialty is to set things on fire or right out blowing them up.
 * King Mook - Tokolosh and Quingor, the first two bosses of the game, are larger versions of ordinary monsters. Interestingly, you don't encounter the smaller versions until much later in the game.
 * The is a
 * Knight in Shining Armor - Pardis.
 * Level Up Fill Up
 * Limited Move Arsenal - done in a good way: you can learn lots of spells, and you have to switch the five-to-twelve (depending on how many magic slots you get) that you can use in between battles.
 * Lightning Gun - Barroth's Lightning Breath, and later Lightning Storm. A few monsters (and the wizard tower in Ferra) will shoot the player with lighting as well.
 * Lost Forever - the spell Detect Monsters is only available if you manage to escort both Simorans in Earthskull to the town. If even one of them dies, no spell for you. Thankfully, Save Scumming is an option.
 * Ludicrous Gibs - hit a monster or human with a powerful enough attack, and it will... evaporate. For some reason, the giant mushrooms also explode into bloody clouds when attacked.
 * Made of Explodium - The earth magic shrine at the center of each town will release a huge shockwave when destroyed that smashes any town buildings that are still standing, and kills every living thing within the town. It can actually be useful to destroy the shrine yourself while trying to build a town, since it will kill off whatever monsters were making it difficult to keep the town standing.
 * Magic Carpet - Quibeck and the soul-collecting wizards ride these.
 * Magic Missile - Barroth's specialty is to annoy foes by shooting at them with an immense variety of stuff. His basic spell is almost this verbatim.
 * Magic Meteor - the meteorite in North Star drops the Detect Lairs spell if smashed open.
 * The Medic - Towns produce two types of units specifically for healing: red-skirted women who heal living units, and blue-shirted men who heal buildings.
 * Morrogh can become this using Aid, once he's assembled a large enough army of summoned units.
 * Mighty Glacier - A few monsters, most notably Pluchidos. The Maloriks that defend level 6 towns also qualify.
 * Missing Secret - lots of it. Egregiously done with the Earthskull map where there is a foggy mountain range covering about 40% of the entire map area and where absolutely nothing happens ever. In fact, if it weren't because you can follow the Invisible Wall markers into the wild blue yonder, you could finish the game not having known of that part of the map.
 * Same with North Star. You only need to travel around the town and the meteor crater, but the whole map is about four times that size, containing no fewer than five smoking volcanoes that are only there for show.
 * Monster Town - the town in Forest is handled by monsters and must be released from their control and rebuilt from scratch.
 * Zigzagged with the idyllic town of Wonderland, a human town.
 * Mook Maker - the primary objective in each level is to destroy all of the "lairs," which are these. They even respawn if there is no human town in the area.
 * Mr. Exposition - Quibeck.
 * Necromancy - Morrogh's specialty, according to the manual -- in the game it functions more like Mind Control and Summon Magic.
 * No Ontological Inertia - the North Star meteorite is radioactive and will damage you if you fly too close to it... unless you break it open, then it's perfectly safe! No way those visible fragments of meteorite could possibly still be dangerous!
 * Notice This - The earth magic's epicenter, the spot where the town in each area is built, glows blue.
 * A more subtle example: in North Star, the Trixxter lair that contains the town-upgrade artifact has a slightly different particle effect than other Trixxter lairs.
 * Our Zombies Are Different - they don't sparkle, but they shoot homing magic missiles.
 * Painfully Slow Projectile - Annoth the Firebreather has access to the Hound and Firestar spells which works like this... fortunately though, it does cast good damage and it is also a Homing Projectile.
 * In addition, Longstar travels so slowly that every flying monster in the game could avoid it simply by outrunning it. It's decent against lairs, though, since it has enough range that you can avoid the monsters that patrol near them.
 * Zombies attack with these as well.
 * Patchwork Map - Wonderland has some... interesting landmarks. The northern two-thirds are pleasant fields dotted with skinny but extremely tall mountains, and the southern edge is an almost perfectly vertical ledge, beyond which is desert as far as the eye can see. Ferra, Rockwood, and Forest, all of which are south of Wonderland, have no hints of desert at all.
 * Point Build System - The dragon has six stats: fly speed, health, regeneration, fire power, breath capacity, and mana inflow. Every time the dragon levels up, it gets 25 points to spend on upgrading these stats (or getting new spells instead). The same stat will cost different point quantities for different dragons - for instance, fire power costs 3 points for Morrogh, 4 points for Barroth, and just 2 for Annoth.
 * Random Drop - when destroyed, lairs have a chance to drop crystals that improve stats.
 * Ridiculously Fast Construction - it takes about fifteen seconds from the player clicking the build button for a human town to be completely built (or upgraded to the next level). In addition, town repairs are instantaneous. Explained as being the function of the artifact you extracted from the first boss's corpse.
 * Sentry Gun - Barroth's War Sphere and Ultimate War Sphere and Morrogh's Star of Despair are "core" types.
 * See also the turrets that protect the mind-controlling building in Wonderland.
 * Summon Magic - A number of spells, mostly exclusive to Morrogh, poof player-aligned monsters onto the field. Summon Sinisterwing is the only one available to all three dragons.
 * Sprint Shoes - Spirits of Wind provides Barroth with faster flight for a relatively long period of time. Actually pretty useful as it allows the dragon to outmaneuver some otherwise unavoidable homing spells later in the game.
 * Spell Of Plot Advancement - Longstar, which you get by the time you are learning about spell chaining, mana charging, and orb collecting.
 * Swirly Energy Thingy - the earth-magic shrine in the center of each town projects a pulsating magical vortex straight upwards. It heals the dragon if it hovers inside. Higher-level towns also get a second vortex that restores mana.
 * Also, the portals that Scarbrorr uses to attack Rockwood.
 * Unexpected Gameplay Change - a total of five times during the story (Pardis in Wonderland, Kindjal in Forest, Pardis again in Terra, and an unnamed Zealot and then Kindjal again in Crimea), the player is placed in control of a human instead of the dragon. Generally, these missions involve stealth (seeing as humans are much squishier and less powerful than a dragon), and tend to take place in highly uneven terrain, unstraightforward to navigate.
 * Unwinnable By Mistake - depending on the order in which you destroy the lairs in the last map of the game, one of some bugs in the game will trigger which will prevent you from accessing the portal to the last battle, or even from the portal appearing at all.
 * Another instance just before the Crimea stage, where you must carry a Zealot from Terra into the area... assuming, that is, that a Zealot actually spawns.
 * Useless Useful Spell - Slow Death and Infuriate for Morrogh end up as this, mostly because of the fact that most battles are away from towns, and you-against-many.
 * Teleport Spam - Barroth + Extended Blink spell + enemies firing several magic missiles at you = this. Of note however, you can not control where Barroth is teleported to.
 * Timed Mission - A caravan spawns when the player first enters Forest, and heads for the (hostile) town. If it gets there before the player destroys it, the town gains some lightning-shooting wizard towers that make destroying the town a lot more painful.
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential - your dragon is hungry and there are no edible monsters around? Just with no one complaining -- and hey, if they do, just remind them that they were the ones who scared off the dragons long ago. And then murder a few of them so you can use their corpses to get that last bit of upgrade energy.
 * Videogame Objectives - resumed quite bluntly as "kill everything" by an IGN review.
 * Walking Wasteland - Morrogh has a bit of this, especially in his spells.
 * Dragon Needs Food Badly - If it goes hungry, the dragon's health, mana, and breath will recharge at half their normal rates.
 * Your Soul Is Mine - type 2B. The carpet-mounted wizards fly to each corpse on the map and extract the soul from it. The souls become energy that the player uses to upgrade the town.
 * The player gets to harvest a soul themselves during the aforementioned Zealot mission in Crimea.