Veterans, today we must chat about this mobile game called "Dragon Contract"! To be honest, when I first saw this name, the first thing that popped into my mind was not a dragon, but the time when I, holding my crumpled pocket money, sneaked into the game console store at the back door of the school, and said "Old man" to the boss like a secret code. "Boy, are there any new GBA cassettes?" - At that time, we didn't know anything about genuine pirated copies. We only knew that the cassette with the yellow cover and the stickers printed crookedly could light up the familiar Nintendo when inserted into my old SP. logo, that is equivalent to having a whole afternoon of happiness.
I still remember that at that time, there were dozens of games hidden in a pirated joint card, and the title screens were all with weird names like "Super Mario 6" and "Dragon Quest 8 Enhanced Edition", but we still played with gusto. The most frustrating thing is that some of the cassette save batteries are out of power. After working hard all afternoon to refresh Pokemon, I turn off and on again and go straight back to the starting point - that kind of despair makes me laugh when I think about it now. But it was these imperfect cassettes that kept me going through countless nights of hiding secretly in bed and shining a small flashlight on the screen.
Talking back to "Dragon Contract", once you get started with this game, hey, it really feels like the arcade simulator back in the day! The simple sticker-style picture looks clean, but the layering is very detailed, just like the small details secretly added by the art teacher hidden in those pixels. The more you look at it, the more interesting it becomes. The operation is simple and rough, just click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click.
The most amazing thing is its on-hook placement system! Now that we have all grown up and become social animals, how can we still have time to squat in front of the TV for an entire afternoon? This game understands us very well - when we are fishing at work, we secretly click a few times, and when we are busy, we let it go wild and hang up. When we get off work, we look at it, oh, the resources have been saved, and the dragon pet has been upgraded. Isn't this kind of "taking time out from the busy" gameplay just like hiding behind textbooks and secretly clicking on the screen?
To be honest, "Dragon Contract" allowed me to regain the kind of relaxation of "having things in hand and nothing in mind". The pirated cassette back then has long been gone, but that pure joy has been restored in this game. Now I play it on my mobile phone. I don't care about ranking or showing off to others. I just want to live in my own little world, raise a few dragons, swipe around the screen, and say to my past self, “Hey, I still remember your favorite skill.”
This thing about youth is probably like this - you thought it was gone, but one day you clicked on a game, heard the familiar BGM, saw the familiar pictures, and it sat down next to you, arm-in-arm with you and said: "Brother, want to play one more game?" 😭