Unfortunately, the entire game is not composed of excellence and beauty. One of my largest complaints is the storyline - as an introduction, players are given some fine underlying text details, a vague pre-rendered opening movie, and then that is it. The rest of the campaign's storyline is fleshed out from encounters with Quibeck on his floating carpet, and even this limited dialogue is vague (some of the subtitles don't even match up with the actual speech) and unenlightening. The end of the game features a neat, somewhat difficult boss battle, but it was over all too quickly, and I was essentially told "Congratulations on getting the power-up and winning the game - now, go take a rest duder!", followed by a cut to the credits. Kind of a kick in the pants considering all the effort I had put into the game, and given the scope of the story (trying to save the last pockets of humanity from extinction), I was hoping they would take the story a lot further. On a further depressing note, the game lacks any kind of multiplayer element, which is unfortunate. Seeing this game with co-op play would have been awesome. The gameplay really is fun and interesting for the duration of the campaign (if a little repetitive at times - though there are several unique situations where the player unexpectedly shifts control from the dragon to certain ground forces to carry out special assignments), but I really wish they had expanded on the story some more rather than half-assing it.

Graphically, IoD also feels a bit dated in places, but the detail of some of the texture work really shines up close, especially on the dragon models. The animations are quite acceptable, with a neat effect of the dragon's head turning to track whatever target you choose to attack (seeing a point-blank fire-breath attack occur on something looks incredibly cool too, and should cause all you fantasy fanatics out there to have tight pants). The game's landscape looks passable for the most part, but again, everything feels rather dated as far as the terrain goes, and the view distance is cut back to an annoying degree (thankfully, the "pop-in" effect is still barely noticeable). "Passable" is a word I'm going to have to use again in relation to the special effects (though I loved the real-time day/night transitions), but I encountered a really strange problem on my Radeon 9600 Pro that caused my framerates to fall through the floor every time my dragon was in the vicinity of a bunch of special effects at once. This was especially noticeable if I use the "freeze" spell on someone and then picked him up with my dragon, and no amount of graphical tweaking I did seemed to resolve it. That bug aside, the game's graphical engine seemed quite scalable, and the level of quality means that it should run nicely on most less-than-modern rigs out there, so be sure to give this game a glance if your system isn't cutting-edge and you want a refreshing new game to play without having to scale back all the detail settings.

IoD's sound engine is another element that has its up's and down's. I quite thoroughly enjoyed the different music tracks the game played, and IoD uses the common trick of playing different tracks based on if the situation is peaceful or breaking out into a full-blown skirmish. Or at least it pretends to, except the game simply decides to randomly jump between the "peaceful" and "action" themes whenever an enemy gets nearby. Using this system, I was actually able to develop a "warmer-colder" trick to assist in hunting down the last few foes on a map when I had trouble locating enemies The music system isn't bad, just a little predictable. While the sound effects were more than adequate, the voice acting (aside from Quibeck) ranged from laughable to "I can't understand what the hell this guy is saying because he's standing too far away from the microphone". Given the game's development and focus for a foreign audience, I can understand why this is, but I was really hoping that the English players out there would get a much more passable vocal experience. Ah well, maybe some day.

So there you have it. "The I of the Dragon", despite having a few quirks beyond its curious name is still a very solid title that is definitely worth a second glance for any fantasy gamers out there who like a little RPG love to spice up what would otherwise be a generic action game. While the game only manages to look decent, not exceptional, it is by no means an ugly title - just simply one capable of running smoothly on a wider range of systems than most other modern games. Besides, dragons are still really god damn cool, and being able to gobble up villagers on a whim with nobody else caring (possibly because they're afraid of pissing off their dragon overlord) provides an unlimited amount of random, sadistic entertainment. I'd definitely rank this as a "must-buy" for any dragon-lovers out there, simply because there aren't any other games like it currently out. Give it a shot.