Dragon Trail: Hunter World is edging ever closer to a Western release. Its pre-registration campaign is currently underway and generating a huge amount of interest.
To keep the temperature up, the game’s publisher has just released a new teaser trailer.
We’ll pick through this tantalizingly brief video shortly. First, here’s a catch-up session for those of you who haven’t been following the news.
Dragon Trail: Hunter World is an open-world RPG set on a fictional landmass called Star Island, and starring a tribal youth on a quest for answers.
Specifically, he wants to know what happened to his father, after he disappeared under suspicious circumstances. This takes the boy into the jungle, where he is set upon by ferocious beasts.
Fortunately, things start looking up for him when he finds a Fire Wyvern egg, which promptly hatches into a baby Fire Wyvern.
Meanwhile, the boy discovers the Book a Loyat, a magical text that promises to reveal all the answers he was looking for and more.
Star of the Show
Star Island is, fittingly enough, the co-star of Dragon Trail: Hunter World. It’s a vast, diverse stretch of land consisting of several different geological features and, more importantly, monster habitats.
You’ll spend your time on Star Island exploring these habitats in search of creatures to capture, train, and evolve. They come in all shapes and sizes, from the humble Bluish Parrot to the hulking Woolly Mammoth.
You’ll find Icy Bears, too, and of course you’ll be joined in battle by your trusty Fire Wyvern.
Being an RPG, Dragon Trail: Hunter World features a class system, allowing you to choose the character type that best suits your combat needs and playing style.
There’s the Warrior, the Priest, the Ranger, and the Shadowhunter, each one boasting its own unique strengths and abilities.
The Priest, for example, is a master of healing and buffing, while the Ranger is able to pick off enemies from a distance.
The Warrior is a straight-up beefcake, dishing out pain and soaking it up with equal nonchalance, and the Shadowhunter operates stealthily, sneaking up on enemies and dealing huge amounts of damage at close range.
We don’t learn an awful lot more about classes in the new trailer, nor about the plot of the game or the creatures you’ll discover. But there are a few morsels to keep us going.
For a start, the trailer makes it clearer than ever that Dragon Trail: Hunter World is an absolutely gorgeous game.
Clearly inspired by Nintendo’s Breath of the Wild and miHoYo’s Genshin Impact – two of the biggest and most acclaimed titles of the last five years – Dragon Trail: Hunter World boasts a stylish cel-shaded look.
Hard Cel
Cel-shading, for the uninitiated, is a technique that allows developers to strip all the fussy detail out of 3D graphics, creating a fresh, smoothly animated, clean-looking environment to explore.
Some of the most visually distinctive games of the last few years have used cel-shading, including Okami, Untitled Goose Game, and Borderlands. Dragon Trail: Hunter World fits right into that esteemed company.
The trailer also reveals a little bit more about Star Island and its majestic scale.
At the start, we see our hero standing on a hilltop surveying a vast landscape. At the center of it all is a huge tree, spreading out into a carapace of foliage so broad and dense that it can support an entire temple.
The small details are just as impressive. Grass waves in the breeze while sunlight plays on the surface of the water and breaks through the trees in glowing shards. Dragon Trail: Hunter World looks like a fantastic place to while away the hours.
We’ll be there soon. You can pre-register now on Google Play, with a lucky few getting the chance to play the early access.
For the rest of us, Dragon Trail: Hunter World will be available later in 2022.