[AC] Dragon Spirit - ALL Clear - 480,700

Channel:

Jaimers

Subscribers:

26,700

Published on July 13, 2019 10:29:52 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LqZgaym6mY

Game:

Dragon Spirit (1987)

Duration: 39:00

2,091 views

61

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Entry for the Calice Cup Tournament.

Dragon Spirit is an arcade shmup released in 1987 by Namco. It was a pretty important game for its time, it was one of the first games to have a very unique setting and soundtrack. Instead of flying a plane and shooting military stuff, you were controlling a dragon going through a fantasy world shooting all kinds of weird creatures. It paved the way for some of the other classics that we know, like Mahou Daisakusen.

Despite being so old, it's actually quite playable. Easily one of the best shmups from the 80's.
That is not to say that the game doesn't have its fair share of jank though.

You have a main shot and a shot that targets the ground, kinda like Xevious. Ground targets can only be hit with the ground shot and air enemies can only be hit with the main shot.
Your hitbox in this game is VERY big.
You can take two hits before losing a life and being send back to the previous checkpoint. The first hit will still take all your powerups away from you though.

This game has a whole bunch of different powerups.
- Red orb: collecting three will increase your shot power by one.
- Blue orb: gives you an extra head and makes you shoot an additional stream of bullets. Also increases your hitbox.
- Heart orb: collecting three will give you an extra life.
- S orb: makes you small, thus decreasing your hitbox.
- W orb: gives you a three-way wide shot. Can not upgrade above level 1 power.
- White orb: 100 points.
- Gold orb: 10k points.
- Skull orb: completely de-powers you.

There are also powerups that last a limited amount of time:
- Dark blue orb: makes you shoot flames that split up and curve around the screen.
- Earthquake: makes all ground enemies die instantly and automatically uncovers all eggs.
- Shield: makes all bullets bounce off you.
- Flame: powers you up to a level above max shot level.
- Yellow orb (stage 8 only): increases the size of your view cone.

Red eggs always drop red orbs and blue eggs always drop blue orbs. All the other powerups are dropped completely at random though. This is kind of an issue with scoring, seeing as how much the gold orbs are worth... Scoring is therefore mostly checkpoint milking the final checkpoint and hoping you get a lot of gold and heart orbs.

You don't really want to upgrade above level 2 power. At level 3 you get huge holes in your shots that enemies can slip through, making you a lot more vulnerable. You also don't want more than two heads, as your hitbox becomes obscenely large. Two heads is a nice balance between power and hitbox size.

There is a bug with the walls in the final stage that you can exploit. If you keep holding down, you'll not die and go straight through the walls.

Stage 8 has probably the worst gimmick I've ever seen in a shmup. It's pretty incredible.

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