Merge Dragons is the Genre Popularizer of the Merge-3 game.
Developed by Gram Games Limited (who had developed similar merging games), Merge Dragons is set in a magical land called Dragonia, a formerly lush and beautiful vale that has been turned into a barren wasteland by the evil Zomblins. To heal the lands, the player is tasked to match scattered items left behind from the destruction and merge them into better units that can be used to lift the Zomblins' curse and rebuild the world to its former glory. Helping the player achieve this goal are various dragons, each with its own special ability. Like everything else in the game, the dragons must be merged to raise its level and increase its capabilities.
The game is available on iOS
and Android.
Merge Dragons provides examples of:
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: From new dragon eggs to coin vaults, almost everything in the camp will become more expensive.
- Allegedly Free Game: The Premium Currency of Dragon Gems is incredibly slow to gain through ingame methods, and requires a fair amount of luck to get without paying, and the game loves to tease you with bonus items that you don't actually get to keep unless you spend those gems. Most level rewards require spending gems to collect. To collect all seven mission rewards, you need to spend gems. Many dragon eggs cannot be bought with coin, just gems. When you have two of an item, often a third one will float over, but to actually get it you have to pay Gems or real money. Sometimes when merging, extra items show up in a large white bubble that vanishes in an hour, and to use them in any way before they vanish, you again have to pay gems, which you are unlikely to be able to farm before the item vanishes if you don't already have them saved up. Some structures require gems to upgrade instead of merging. And chests full of guaranteed Dragon Eggs and Nests all require spending Dragon Gems to open. You never have enough Dragon Gems. There are multiple limited energy mechanics and time sinks, every one of which can be bypassed with either Dragon Gems or real cash. You can watch a limited number of ads each day to bypass some of them after you've gotten enough stars, but even with this, progress without paying slows down massively.
- Ascended Glitch: Non-programming example. The Midas Ducks weren't actually supposed to be ducks. A studio in Ukraine was hired to do the art of this Dragon, and they were titled "Midas Drakes". In English, "drake" is often used as a synonym for "dragon", but “drake” and “hen” are also the terms for male and female ducks, so “drake” is sometimes translated to "duck" in other languages. So Midas Ducks were created instead, and the developers liked it anyway, hence we got Midas Ducks instead of Midas Dragons.
- Construct Additional Pylons:
- Downplayed. In the camp, you need coins to buy eggs and stone bricks to build, but you can only store a puny amount of them both at start. To expand your capacity, you need to spend them on new storage first. The more you have, the more expensive new ones are.
- Dragons working in the camp will eventually exhaust their stamina and need to rest in a dragon home to recover, which need stone bricks to build and becomes progressively more expensive.
- Freemium Timer: Playing world map levels uses up anywhere from 1-6 chalices (you can have up to 7). It takes 1 hour to get one chalice, or you could refill it with gems.
- Gray Is Useless: Dead land is grayed out, and you have to match and activate Life Essence in order to heal it. Matching items with those on dead land can also heal it, and this is the only way to heal the darkest corners of the earth.
- Last of His Kind: The game starts when you rescue Ezra, the last dragon. Her status as the last dragon doesn't last long, as you soon hatch more.
- Little Bit Beastly: Kala, the shopkeeper who makes daily deals with you, is a lady with fox ears and a tail.
- Our Dragons Are Different: The game contains so many races of dragons that it may qualify as a Parodied example!
- Palette Swap: Each type of dragon has two tiers, and the second tier dragons are just a recolored version of the first.
- Pattern-Coded Eggs: Each dragon egg is patterned in such a way that you can tell what dragon is inside by just looking at them. Some are also textured such as the Grass Dragon Egg.
- Shout-Out: There are a *lot* of very recognizable default names for your dragons. Names are taken from myths (Hera), classic video games (Zelda, Erdrick), modern TV shows (Daenerys, Hodor), MMORPGs (Onyxia), and pop culture (Madonna).
- Taken for Granite:
- Ezra's soul is trapped in three statues at the beginning of the game. You merge the statues to rescue her.
- Petrified Zomblins can be merged to free a Zomblin too, though left alone they will eventually break free on their own.
- Violation of Common Sense: Since the cost depends on how many dragon homes are currently built, if you only have the starting level 1 dragon home, you can buy as many as you want at the low cost of 7 stone bricks before building any. When you have a quest to build a large number of dragon homes, barring using glitches to put them back in a bubble where they don't count, it's best to actually sell all but one level 1 dragon home and cram them all into that one tiny home, to reduce the cost of the new ones you need to build, and you can usually afford to buy enough to get you better homes than you had before.
- World-Healing Wave: Activating a high level Life Orb creates a wave of hearts that sweeps across dead land, healing it.
- World of Badass: All dragons are capable of fighting with their Breath Weapon as a mechanism of the game.
