Dragon's Crown

This is one of the few games that's tried to incorporate RPG elements into a beat-'em-up, and it does so pretty successfully. Each character has enough gimmicks and upgrades to be consistently fun to play (with varying levels of difficulty), and while there's not enough stages or bosses to justify a hundred hours of play, you can reach a level of proficiency where you're just jumping in, joining randoms, doing a run of two or five stages, and hopefully getting some good loot out of it. Although the local co-op campaign is enjoyable, Dragon's Crown was built for online drop-in play from the ground up, and without that it does get old around the 20-hour mark. Still, a gorgeous-looking, 20-hour beat-'em-up with wild Frazetta-esque art and the ambiance of a D&D campaign may be worth the asking price for more than a few people. It's just a shame that this game's only handheld release (on the Vita) is dead for the purposes of online play; here's hoping it gets ported to the Switch.

I'm sure part of my middling response to this game is just my natural disdain for the dungeon crawler. Dragon's Crown's character set-up is great, with a few wildly differing classes, but the RPG mechanics could have better been balanced and presented as a core of the difficulty curve. Without it, the game just turns into a beat-em-up that goes on for way too long. The randomizer options just do not slot well for this sort of game, even with the branching paths doing okay at measuring progress and success.

Plus, a killer rabbit boss. Monty Python and the Holy Grail came out around fourty years ago; that's plenty of time to have run this gag into the ground.