Little-known fact: In addition to being terrific killing machines, dragons have great abs.

One of the zillion or so great things about the App Store is how it's bringing beloved Asian role-playing titles to a new audience. One of these is Wild Frontier, the story of a young hero who must venture across an unknown new continent and prevent an army of demons from crossing over into the world.

While this is well-trodden fare for role-playing titles, Wild Frontier does it well, wrapping in colorful graphics, good sound and music, an interesting story, and a fun item creation system. As in classic role-playing staples such as Diablo and World of Warcraft, you head out into the world, collect items and treasure from slain enemies, and sell anything you find upon encountering a merchant, the profits being funneled back into improved items and equipment.

Actually, "little people" is preferable.

But level grinding on the iPhone can be skipped, or at least shortened, with a little real-world cash, and Wild Frontier does this to an almost surprising extent. Need a few extra first aid kits on the fly, or some materials for crafting a new item? Tap on a hovering menu and you can easily spend 99 cents via in-app purchases for whatever you may happen to need.

Other nice touches add to the value. Beyond the decent story, the game's controls begin to feel natural after 30 minutes of gameplay, and a solid battle engine makes it easy to approach an enemy and fight the way you want to. A good skill tree makes it relatively easy to boost your character's abilities upon leveling up, and it becomes fun to see your novice character become that much stronger and more capable.

The Emblem of Mokar: Now available at finer jewelry stores everywhere.

Unfortunately, a few areas need improvement. While the game's controls are serviceable, the menus feel buried and much harder to access than they should be. Instead of tapping directly on a menu option itself, the game requires you to tap on the set of controls you use during the game's battles and standard gameplay, the end result feeling as if the title had been hastily ported to the iOS from a PlayStation 2 version of the game. Finally, the fact that you'll occasionally run into signs that have yet to be translated from Korean to English indicates that additional work ought to be done.

The bottom line. These shortcomings aside, there's a great game here that's as fun as anything you'll find on the iOS. Still, a few changes to the menu system and tightening of the translation wouldn't go amiss. For 99 cents, it's hard to go wrong with Wild Frontier.