The Nameless: Slay Dragon Review

RNG is a big part of most RPGs, though it’s often only relegated to combat or loot drops. The oddly named The Nameless: Slay Dragon decides that this isn’t enough, tying most actions in its gamebook-style adventures to random chance.

It’s an often frustrating game due to this, but one that has at least a few interesting ideas.

Gamebook Adventures

The Nameless: Slay Dragon sees you creating a character from a few basic starting choices, as you start your journey to slay dragons that are terrorising the world. This quickly takes you to LastGuard, appropriately named due to it being humanity’s last line of defence against the dragons.

Exploration is all done via a static overhead map, with various points of interest dotting the area. As you complete more events in the overworld, more of the map is revealed to you. While some events do have visual effects tied to them, it’s admittedly not the most engaging way to present your adventure.

Instead, most of the worldbuilding is placed on dialogue and flavour text, as you encounter new events and characters. However, this is one of the main problem points with The Nameless: Slay Dragon.

The original text for The Nameless: Slay Dragon is in Chinese, and thus I can’t comment on its quality. But the English translation often comes across as dry and lacking in personality. This isn’t helped by the absence of any voice acting. It’s understandable for a small indie developer, but would have gone a long way in punching up the otherwise bland script.

As for the overall narrative, it really does feel like a classic gamebook for better or worse. While your character has the initial goal of slaying dragons, it often feels like you’re just progressing in a really random way.

For example, while your initial forays in LastGuard do lead to story progress, a lot of what you do there feels like padding or filler. Some choices that can be made don’t even feel like they have any impact on the world when they should, such as attacking the mine foreman in broad daylight.

Most of the journey has this odd feeling, where the occasional important event is interspersed with what amounts to little outside of XP and item gathering. Choices you make can occasionally lead to sidequests, but often offer little of interest.

It’s hard to explain, but I’d almost describe The Nameless: Slay Dragon as an open world game that’s been made linear. You go around collecting random things, occasionally fighting enemies or doing quests. But it’s all essentially railroaded behind small clusters of interactable markers on a bland 2D map.

RNG Woes

The vast majority of actions in The Nameless: Slay Dragon are tied to percentage checks, influenced by your party’s different stats. This applies to things like scavenging for items, ambushing enemies, or navigating the environment.

No matter what you’re doing, you’ll have to perform a lot of these skill checks. It can be annoying failing something your characters have 70%+ chance of succeeding in over and over again, especially for events that have negative outcomes if you fail.

Failing a skill check adds to your party’s fatigue, which reduces your chances of succeeding further. Fatigue is removed by resting, but this also reduces bonus rewards you can receive during the story. Essentially, failing checks just leads to more failure, which in turn leads to save scumming.

It’s possible to save at any time outside of battle or events, and with how RNG-heavy everything is you’ll want to do this frequently. I often found myself making saves every few minutes, just so I wouldn’t lose too much progress if my RNG was bad enough.

Interesting Class Progression, Simple Combat

Character building is where things start to improve a little. Each party member has access to a number of classes, with more unlocked as you progress. Levelling up gives you points that can be spent on upgrading classes, unlocking new active and passive abilities.

What makes this work well is that you’re not locked to just picking one or two classes. You can choose to max out a few classes, or spread points across a lot of classes at once. A cap on passive traits does limit how viable this is, but it does give you more options on how you tackle encounters.

Adding another layer to character customisation is the Spark system. Sparks are equipped to slots for each ability, offering various boons when they’re used. Some are simple like damage or crit rate boosts, while others can activate skills like detecting an enemies next move (something you’d normally need a separate ability for.)

Add in even more powerful effects that unlock once you use abilities enough times, and there are many ways to mix and match what your party has available. Some skills are even tied to exploration or optional dialogue, which goes some way to improving the otherwise bland adventuring.

Unfortunately, actual combat is fairly standard and also plagued by The Nameless: Slay Dragon ever-present RNG. Combat is a fairly standard turn-based affair (the starting turn naturally decided by a percentage check), with the usual options for attacking or using items.

Combat does make use of an extra Soulforce mechanic, where you can build up a separate gauge to boost success rate or access certain class-specific abilities. Nothing crazy, but it’s a pretty competent battle system overall.

My problem is that the percentage chances for landing hits and debuffs on enemies seems way too small (or potentially I’m just that unlucky.) In many battles missing a single hit could potentially lead to a party member dying next turn, so you’re basically forced to restart if your RNG is bad enough.

My first attempt at some bosses involved multiple misses and a quick death, with the next attempt going much better only because I got luckier. I’d imagine this is mitigated by playing on the lowest difficulty setting, but playing on Hero or above RNG just feels far too punishing.

The Nameless: Slay Dragon Review – Final Impressions

The gamebook style of The Nameless: Slay Dragon is not something you see often, but the overreliance on RNG checks really sours the experience. There’s a good amount of content here for those that persevere (including story threads tied to multiple playthroughs), but I can’t really say that I had fun during my time with The Nameless: Slay Dragon.

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Our review of The Nameless: Slay Dragon was done using a Steam code provided by the publisher.

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