YMMV / Drake of the 99 Dragons

• Awesome Art: One of the very few well received qualities about the game is the menu and cover art, which gives off a nice Jhonen Vasquez meets Genndy Tartakovsky with bits of Bruce Timm feel. It’s a shame that the comic never happened (beyond one Prequel issue), because it might’ve actually worked.
• Awesome Music: The credits theme starts as a genuinely beautiful and calming track before transitioning into a heart pumping techno piece.
• Bile Fascination: The game quickly earned a notorious reputation for its low quality and it remains one of the go-to examples for one of the worst games ever created. Most people check this game out simply to see how awful it is. It is possibly this is why it got a rerelease on Steam.
• Camera Screw: The auto-aim function and the camera were mapped to the same analog stick, making combat virtually impossible.
• Cliché Storm: In a World… governed by the rules of Chinese Mythology, a macho, brooding anti-hero clad in a black leather trench coat dies and comes back to life with vaguely-defined magic powers In addition to these powers, he specializes in martial arts which may or may not even exist in real life, and lots and LOTS of guns. Our hero goes on an epic quest for justice and self-discovery after a dark-armored former rival turned to the dark side attacks his dojo and kills his sensei. Also, it’s 20 Minutes into the Future.
• Common Knowledge: It's sometimes believed/stated (such as by the Joueur du Grenier) that Bruce Timm did the character design for this game. He didn't, the creators simply emulated his style.
• Complete Monster: Tang, the Arch-Enemy of the 99 Dragons Clan, is the CEO of Tang Industries, one of Neo Macau's leading economic powerhouses. Although publicly portraying himself as a charismatic and charitable businessman, Tang is a heartless megalomaniac with designs on world domination. To this end, Tang harvests the souls of the recently deceased and implants them into cyborgs against their will, from which he desires to amass a powerful army and install himself as Supreme Dictator of Neo Macau. Realizing the difficulty in securing fresh corpses for souls, Tang struck a deal with the King of Hell to free him from the spirit realm in exchange for an infinite supply of souls, massacring Drake's entire clan for the Soul Portal artifact necessary to do so.
• Good Bad Bugs: The Final Boss won't attack you as long as the camera isn't facing him. Since you first have to spend an inordinately long time destroying part of the wall in order to make the boss vulnerable to attack, this is a godsend.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • According to interviews, the cel-shaded graphics were meant to resemble the art style of Batman: The Animated Series. Then, several years later, Batman would receive his own cel-shaded game in the form of Batman: The Telltale Series.
  • And finally, Drake himself, a black cloak-wearing, undead assassin who wields Guns Akimbo and throws them away instead of reloading them. Wait, Reaper, is that you?
• Memetic Loser: Drake himself — in no small part due to his stupidity, canonically dying frequently, his dialogue and attempts at being cool coming off as incredibly corny, and in general just coming off as über-lame rather than the no-nonsense badass you can tell he so desperately wants to be.
• Memetic Mutation: Drake of the 99 ______. ^Explanation  The game’s title is easily exploitable so some have taken to replacing “Dragons” with other, often derogatory, words.
• Mis-blamed: The developers, Idol FX, were not completely at fault for how the game turned out. The publisher, Majesco Entertainment, rushed Idol FX, giving them only eighteen months to make a hugely ambitious game that could launch a multimedia empire, something the small and inexperienced team simply was not equipped to handle. Though it was also noted that there was apparently a large language barrier between the Swedish devs and the New Jersey-based QA team as none of the bugs the QA team submitted ever got fixed.
• Narm:
  • The game opens with Drake firing his empty guns at nothing while giving a dramatic monologue about who he is. The scene is meant to establish him as a badass, yet only makes him look like a kid playing with his dad’s guns while trying way too hard to be cool.
  • Drake’s mentor has voice acting more akin to a redneck than an wise old mentor.
  • Drake calls the forces attacking the 99 Dragons "out of this world".
  • Any potential badassery Drake could've displayed is completely undercut by the sheer number of times he dies in the story due to his own incompetence.
• Obvious Beta: The game’s Troubled Production and and strict deadline clearly show in the final product.
  • The Time-Slowing and Time-Freezing abilities are useless because they also affect the player. The other abilities don't work, period.
  • Fall damage is extremely inconsistent; frequently you'll die falling from shorter distances than you'll survive. Even worse when taking a long drop is the only option forward.
• Scrappy Mechanic: When you die, you're sent to another realm where the guardians insult you, and then it send you back. This gets old very quickly due to the game's difficulty and long loading times.
• Signature Scene: Drake jumping out of a skyscraper window under the (incorrect) belief that he's invincible, and immediately dying afterward. It sets the tone of the rest of the cutscenes in the game.
• So Bad, It's Good: Similarly to The Legend Of Zelda C Di Games — the gameplay is undoubtedly terrible, but the cutscenes are vastly better despite being so cheesy. Doubly so for the PC version, which manages to resolve many of the frustrating controller issues of the original console game, consequently making the rest of the game's many flaws much more comedic and exploitable in the player's favor.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: As ProJared puts it:
  "Hold on now... Drake has two pistols, a trenchcoat, can run on walls, and go into Bullet Time. And this game came out in 2003, the same year that the last two Matrix movies were in theaters. [Beat] I'm sure they weren't trying to capitalize on that market at all."
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: This game does have a pretty badass concept and distinct visual style. In fact the game probably would have turned out great if the publisher wasn't forcing the developers to launch a multimedia empire from the get-go.

---