Dragon Spirit: The New Legend (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
665A playthrough of Bandai's 1990 fantasy-themed shoot 'em up for the NES, Dragon Spirit: The New Legend.
Dragon Spirit was originally a 1987 arcade game by Namco that takes more than a few knocks in the conversion to the NES, but still makes for a solid, unique shooter that's worth playing.
The game's short opening stage decides the way the rest of the game will go. In this stage, you play as a man-turned-dragon rushing into battle with an evil figure named Zawel. If you defeat him, you are treated to an "ending" that serves as the game's introduction sequence. After defeating him, you are no longer quite what you were in your prime, so when the evil inevitably returns, you pick up as his son - the blue dragon rises from his budget Mount Rushmore and sets out to save the day.
If you don't successfully finish the opening stage, the game doesn't end. Instead, you play will then play as the gold dragon, but there are fewer levels, easier enemies, and a bad ending waiting in store for you. It's a pretty neat setup, and the beginning instantly makes it more memorable than the majority of the NES shooter library.
The gameplay itself is fairly standard for a top-down vertically scrolling shooter. A full upgrade system is in place, but since you aren't flying a ship, you dragon will change colors, size, and number of heads as you pick up various powerups, and all of these provide different boosts to your base abilities.
Want to blaze through a boss without even breaking a sweat? Take a green dragon with powered up fire breath with you and the boss will never touch you. Need to cover a large area with sweeping projectiles? The three-headed white dragon can cover the screen pretty effectively with it's spread-style shot.
The system allows for several different ways to attack the stages, though I will say that the higher powered dragons tend to make the bosses way too easy. The stages themselves are far more challenging than their guardians seem to be.
There are a number of short story cutscenes between each stage (in a shooter? neat!), and each stage has its own theme, and usually a gimmick. Some levels will have volcanoes spraying lava at you, while others have the walls closing in on you as you try to fly through narrow passages.
Given the effort put into the gameplay and the story, Dragon Spirit is a bit odd in that it falls directly on its face when it comes to the quality of the graphics. It tosses a fair number of objects around the screen at a time, but flicker runs rampant, the enemies lack any real detail (just compare them to the TG16 and arcade versions!) and some of those backgrounds are downright hideous and painful on the eyes thanks to the clashing bright colors, but it does move pretty smoothly, and some of the bosses are cool to see. The music fares a lot better - most of the tracks are standard background fare that you'll tune out instantly, but a few of them are memorable and sound good on the NES hardware.
Overall, Dragon Spirit: The New Legend is a fun shooter, and one that offers enough creativity to avoid feeling like a clone of previous games. It's not very difficult and you might need to wear sunglasses to play it, but the game has a lot of character that helps to make up for its shortcomings. A lot of Bandai's games seem to follow this pattern (Frankenstein, anybody?)!
As long as you don't turn it on expecting to find a AAA title like Gun-Nac or Crisis Force, I'm sure you'll be pleasantly surprised.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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