This week, Seth Lukas Hynes looks at an interactive movie making waves on the internet.
Mia and the Dragon Princess is a middling interactive movie video game from Wales Interactive, who are the new leaders in FMV (full-motion video) games.
Mia (Noa Bleeker), a hapless barmaid, runs into a mysterious woman (Dita Tantang) with phenomenal martial arts abilities, and must protect her from a nefarious businessman.
In the nineties, many developers began featuring video sequences, often with real actors and physical sets, in their games. The nineties saw a boom in FMV interactive movies, but the sub-genre died out by the end of the decade for technological and creative reasons: to fit multiple lengthy video segments on a CD-ROM, you had to compress them to almost unwatchable quality, and most game developers didn’t know how to make a good movie, interactive or not.
Unfortunately, Mia and the Dragon Princess feels like one of those inept FMV games from yesteryear.
As for the positives, the fight choreography is outstanding, Tantang is a great physical performer – both in her fighting and manic expressions – and Paul McGann (who plays the Eighth Doctor in Doctor Who) is charismatic and deeply intimidating as the villain Walsh.
You play as Mia and choose the course of events at several points, but even with these necessary forks in the road, the plot has very erratic, jerky pacing. Many of Wales Interactive’s games, including The Complex and Late Shift, are fun schlocky experiences, but Mia and the Dragon Princess has shallow characters, incredibly corny dialogue and soap opera-level performances. The camerawork is annoyingly shaky, and the staging has a poor sense of geography and direction.
You can play Mia and the Dragon Princess on Mac, PC, Nintendo Switch, iOS and Android, but there are real movies and better FMV games that are more worth your time.
– Seth Lukas Hynes
