I’m kind of stupid about dragons. I have been since I was a little girl. You might’ve even noticed the critter in the banner for this site.

I occasionally fool myself into believing my obsession isn’t that deep. So when I reviewed Dragon Mania Legends from Gameloft, I said to myself, “OK, I’ll play the game for as long as I need to review it. Then I’ll just delete it.”

Two weeks later: “Oh my God! I made a jelly dragon!”

Indeed, there is a staggering amount of dragons to breed and collect in Dragon Mania Legends. One in particular recently caught my eye because I wonder (and hope) if it’s a reference to Sega’s lost Panzer Dragoon series. It’s the Armoured Dragon:

All right, first things first: I didn’t name this poor dragon “Derr.” If I have one major complaint about Dragon Mania Legends, it’s that you can’t name your animals. When I played DragonVale, I scraped up every dragon name I could remember for my beasties, and I never did hit rock-bottom. That’s how dumb I am about dragons.

Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I look at the blue skin, the silver armor, the segmented tail, and I think of Panzer Dragoon’s famous blue dragon. It’s lacking the elongated head piece (perfect for stabbing any evil dark dragons in the neighbourhood), but that’s not a surprise since each dragon in Dragon Mania Legends adheres to a template for ease of design and movement. It’s really the colour scheme that makes me tilt my head.

Some people might regard a Panzer Dragoon tribute in a mobile game as blasphemy, but I’m pretty OK with it! Maybe we’ll see the real thing again someday. Who knows. It’s a nutty ol’ world.