Dragon's Crown is action, leveling, and looting in their purest forms.
Including boot up screens and character creation, you'll be slashing at monsters within a few minutes of Dragon's Crown. Combat feels as simple and elegant as the arcade brawlers many of us grew up on but without the monotony that could be found in some of the less well conceived ones. Melee fighters will mostly be hitting one button, which can be paired with a directional button for different attacks, tapped in rhythm for combinations, briefly held to block, or held along with a direction to sprint. It's an ingenious system that maintains both simplicity and variety. Even other classes really only work in additional attention to a second button, ensuring an hypnotic pace.
The world is built with a similar "less is more" philosophy. Regardless of medium, quests across fantasy often objectify people although women get the brunt of it. Women can get confined as sex objects, such as a handful of NPC's in exaggerated reclined Venus poses. They get relegated to the sidelines as damsels in distress, just like many of women in Dragon's Crown waiting to be rescued. One of the most amusing quests involves picking up a trail of identical maidens to be protected along the course of a dungeon. A vampire boss can turn them onto her own side after a bite on the neck, meaning the player will just as quickly slay the maidens to complete the quest. By stripping away all pretense and leaving quest structures in their most bare, Dragon's Crown gets some laughs to draw attention to an often dismissed subject matter.
The classes you can choose from all certainly belong in this exaggerated world. The sorceress is both sex object and support character, mesmerizing friend and foe alike. The dwarf's masculinity overrides all other traits, with a beard so bushy that it hides his face. He has a weapon in each hand but he needs neither as his wrestling moves deal great damage. The Amazon feels like the most liberated character in the game as a physically imposing woman who makes no apologies for it. She has an aggressive play style where her strength lies in her high melee damage but she must work around her low defense. The fighter class is a man who embodies the knight so much that he might as well be a suit of armor. Underneath his helmet lies another due to the worst case of hat hair ever. The elf has a modest, almost monk-like design. She is at her best when she can keep her distance and fire arrows. The wizard has the least interesting design, with typical wizards robes and a hint of jester checkering to offset his otherwise somber and studious appearance.
The long term hooks here are the level and loot systems. These are perhaps not the additions you might think of in a beat 'em up (the reference points here are the Capcom Dungeons and Dragons games), but the level system is passive so as to not distract from the action and the combination really brings the whole game together. It provides incentives to learn about the world through quest rewards, but it does so more efficiently than a complex narrative could have ever performed. Even more, there is a potent connection between the power and sexual fantasies depicted in the visual design and the desire to level up and get better loot.
However, perspective prevails when it comes to the depiction of these fantasies. These characters' physical attributes allow us to understand the intent of the design, but their exaggerations stop them from actually being crude. Dragon's Crown definitely indulges in fantasies common to numerous other games. It even does so particularly well thanks to Vanillaware's ability to distill action, leveling, and looting down to their purest forms. However, Vanillaware does so with an awareness of how silly these indulgences are.