In a world where everyone knows a skill or two, what happens when someone just… doesn’t have some sort of skill? They get branded “Skill-less” and deemed useless at doing anything. Except… What if it’s that they actually have one of the rarest skills of all? Welcome to Dragon Takers.
Originally released on mobile devices in October of 2024, Dragon Takers came to consoles in January of 2025. Dragon Takers is a turn-based JRPG, set in a world where everyone has some sort of skill. Except for Helio. He’s what is known as “Skill-less”… something that’s unheard of in this world. However, after his hometown is attacked, he steals a skill from the invading Dragon Army, proving that he DOES have a skill – Skill Taker!
Dragon Takers is an 8-10 hour long RPG where you’ll pretty much just go from point to point, following the story to its conclusion. Along the way you’ll pick up several party members as you try to save your childhood friend, Liana, who has been kidnapped. Cutscenes play out in a visual novel style format, with the characters appearing alongside the text boxes. As for the story itself? It’s sort of just… there. You do sort of just feel like you get dragged to the next location by some circumstance. There are a few moments where you can walk into the next area, but there ends up being some sort of plot wall preventing you from actually entering it.
Combat is, as previously mentioned, played in a turn-based style. You’ll input all of your commands at the start of each turn and then watch them play out. You can see on the side what the turn order will be like so you can make some potentially strategic plays there in terms of trying to heal up. Or you can just tell it to auto battle, set down the controller, and wait for the battle to finish… which is what I did most of the time, because navigating the menus in this game felt like I was trying to pull teeth.
The menus are one of the biggest points in which Dragon Takers fails. You will constantly be scrolling, not sure where you are, or trying to fight between tabs in your main menu. When you do finally select, say, your healing spell, the game then defaults to “Cancel” instead of “Use”, so you’ll often end up leaving the menu. The UI is very much built for mobile devices, with controller support sort of just slapped onto it.
Which brings me back to auto battle – I wanted to use it because I didn’t want to fight with constantly scrolling through annoying battles, but then the game only ever auto used whatever ability was closest to the top that did the most damage. It didn’t care about resistances or anything like that – something you can see through the same UI that lets you see the turn order – it just wanted to use the first available attack skill.
With auto battling, you can opt between three different modes – All Out Attack, Healing, or No Skills. The Healing option will opt to use Healing only if a party member falls below 50% health. While trying to learn skills for Helio (there’s 100 of them!), I found myself pretty much just living on the Healing tab if I wasn’t manually just telling him to use Skill Taker (his “Attack” command) and having everyone defend. You also cannot run from battle, so if you are trying to track a specific encounter to get a skill this ends up even more time consuming from trying to do that.
The game features zero currency, and all of your equipment upgrades will come from either enemy drops or battles. This brings me back to the menu – remember how I said navigating it was like pulling teeth? It’s even worse when trying to equip things. You can either try and go through each party members equipment, fighting with the UI to compare, or you can go to the big list of items and hope that you find the strongest items (which are typically closer to the bottom of the list at least). From there, you still have to make sure you tell it to “Equip” and not just Cancel.
The music is another thing that’s sort of just… there? I guess is a way to put it. It’s okay, but nothing memorable. Additionally, every track’s loop is just a bit too short, and you can hear the fact it’s not a smooth loop. Especially during long battles you’ll hear songs restart multiple times. This is something I feel could’ve been cleaned up a bit by ensuring that either the tracks were a bit longer, or making sure that they properly looped around.
One of my biggest gripes is the fact the game lacks any sort of in-game bestiary. When you need to find 100 skills among the enemies, if you’re missing a single one, you have no clue where to actually go and find it. The Skill List isn’t very useful either, as it also counts skills that your other party members can learn (there is a single skill Helio can’t learn that they can). Either having a way to view the bestiary or to see through the skill list what enemies have what skills would’ve been a vast improvement if you’re looking to try and get every skill.
Overall, Dragon Takers was just an okay experience that likely won’t stick with me for a long time. The lack of a bestiary or any sort of way to confirm where certain skills could be found made trying to track down the last remaining skills a chore, and the menu itself is just a nightmare to use. I understand that the game was previously a mobile title, but the UI was just frustrating to navigate.
Dragon Takers Score
5.5/10
Recommended if you’re looking for a simple JRPG to get through in under 10 hours, but be warned that the menus are really frustrating to get through. So if you don’t mind dealing with annoying menus then this is for you.
I was provided with a code by KEMCO for the purposes of reviewing.
