Players navigate environments from a side-scrolling perspective, choosing from six character classes to fight in the style of a beat 'em up and acquiring loot through repeated dungeon exploration.

Originally set to be published by UTV Ignition Entertainment, that company's withdrawal from the gaming market led to Atlus taking up the project.

Dragon's Crown is a two-dimensional (2D) side-scrolling action role-playing game in which players take on the role of an adventurer exploring dungeons in the kingdom of Hydeland.

After returning to the town hub, players can spend gold to appraise the item, which gives it an altered selling value compared to its unappraised state.

All female classes (the Amazon, Elf and Sorceress) have a high luck statistic, giving players the chance of finding more valuable loot.

[16] An eleventh dungeon dubbed the Tower of Mirage is unlocked on the Ultimate difficulty setting, featuring a larger number of randomly generated areas and bosses.

[15] The adventurer arrives in Hydeland and gets involved with fights against surging monster attacks from ancient sites across the land, and a political coup attempted by the Prime Minister against the next heirs, siblings Vivian and Dean, following the disappearance of the king.

The king killed himself to thwart a ritual by the malevolent Morneon religion to summon a powerful ancient dragon, sealed in the Illusionary Lands by the world's goddesses.

The Vita, with its PS3 crossplay functions, was chosen due to the success of the multiplayer-focused Monster Hunter series as UTV Ignition wanted a multiplayer experience.

[29] The team put a large amount of effort into development, which left them no resources to aid in the localization of their previous title Grand Knights History.

He also asked veterans of those days the games they best remembered for inspiration, and typically they recalled Capcom and Sega's arcade titles of the time with fondness.

[17] The earliest plan was for only a town and dungeon environments like the Wizardry series, but the background art team created exterior landscape designs and thus expanded the game's visual scope.

[18] Early plans for expansion packs themed after ancient Egypt and the Sengoku period were abandoned due to the extra workload.

[18] While he incorporated standard fantasy visual elements found in Dungeons & Dragons and The Lord of the Rings, he wanted to give them a unique spin.

[19] While using the basic design of their earlier titles, the team added a pixel shader which Ohnishi compared to a gamma corrector, allowing water effects in the 2D plane.

Within his score, humans lived life to the full regardless of their morals, nature was impersonal and could provide support, and monsters were supernatural things divorced from everything else.

The album, which featured a jacket illustration from Vanillaware staff, included exclusive piano arrangements of the themes "World Map" and "City Street".

[29] In an interview, Oda said that overseas responses to the game were strong, pointing out the positive reputation of Odin Sphere and Muramasa as reasons for this.

[47] Dragon's Crown received downloadable content (DLC) post-launch, which allowed the narration to be changed to one of the six character class voice actors.

It features enhancements for the PS4's Pro model, replace/redraw hi-res sprites to support 4K resolution, English and Japanese voicetracks, a rerecorded soundtrack, cross-platform play, and all previous patches and DLC.

[66] Dragon's Crown Pro was the first time Vanillaware had sought to update an existing title in this way, which proved a challenge as they needed to do bug fixes and balance adjustment based on the latest patch version of the game.

While they needed to reduce some in-game storage space to make room for some of the patch features, they considered it a fair trade as they included elements originally cut from the base game.

[83] Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu gave a positive review to both the PS3 and Vita versions, praising the gameplay and nostalgic style.

[76] Martin Robinson of Eurogamer was less positive than other reviewers, praising some elements but disliking the artstyle and finding it overly long and archaic.

[78] GameSpot's Peter Brown found many elements of the visuals either distracting or offensive, but praised the gameplay design and skill system.

[4] Justin Speer of GameTrailers praised the game for breathing life into its genre, saying players who were willing to push through its repetitive aspects would find a lot to enjoy.

[b] The multiplayer was lauded by reviewers as superior to AI-controlled companions despite its unlocking requirements, although many complained that the number of on-screen effects obscured their characters.

[75] Mollie L Patterson, writing for Electronic Gaming Monthly, admitted that the only improvements were to the graphics and audio, but felt that the gameplay and art still made it a worthwhile purchase.

[77] RPGFan's Alana Hagues praised the existing upgrades and enjoyed the game, but was disappointed by the lack of additional features and content as seen in other Vanillaware re-releases.

[23] Dragon's Crown drew significant controversy in pre-release coverage during April 2013 for its exaggerated character design, particularly the Sorceress' breasts and Amazon's buttocks.