Dragon Wang (SG-1000) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
167A playthrough of Sega's 1985 beat 'em up for the Sega SG-1000, Dragon Wang (ドラゴン・ワン).
No matter what the designers might've set out to accomplish, in hindsight it seems unlikely that any game called Dragon Wang would ever be known for anything but its name.
I mean, really. That is a name outright guaranteed to appeal to every grown man's inner eleven-year-old's sense of humor. It certainly makes me smirk whenever I think of it.
But alas, the game has little to do with wyrm phallus on the literal level, if that's what you were looking for. Metaphorically, well, who's to say? Let your imagination go to town.
It does feature a lot of shirtless guys kicking each other, though. And a maniacal robot that sort of looks like the one in that old movie Chopping Mall.
It's a *very* early example of the console beat 'em up, culling most of its ideas from Irem's 1984 arcade game Kung Fu Master (released as Kung Fu on the NES: https://youtu.be/IQjzFt8Sqpk ). You fight the endless conga line of yellow and pink guys as you make your way toward a boss, and you are climbing a tower trying to rescue your girlfriend who is being held captive.
What distinguishes the game conceptually from Kung Fu is the open maze-like layout of the stages. In each round you have to collect a certain number of keys, each held by a boss lurking somewhere in the area. You can tackle them in any order you like, though I find that the best bet is to take on the hardest first since any progress in the current round is lost when you die.
The concept is cool and the structure of the levels was my favorite part of the game, but it is immediately clear that, compared to Kung Fu, Dragon Wang's execution is a bit... limp.
Dragon Wang lacks all of the fluidity and precision of Kung Fu's gameplay. The controls are reasonably good, but it's virtually impossible to line up a jump kick, and some of the boss fights (*cough* Warpman and Jonathan) are stupidly unfair.
That's not to say it's unplayable. As least, I didn't think so. I had a lot of fun playing it and learning the nuances, but it can be extremely frustrating. I'm thoroughly convinced that winning the last boss fight is more luck than anything else. In case your wondering why I ended the game the way I did, once you've finished four rounds, the fourth round just repeats again and again. There isn't any ending but the game over screen.
So it's janky as all get out, but I enjoyed it in the same way as I used to enjoy really old computer games. I just didn't think of it as something to be compared to an NES game. It came out in 1985, sure, but the SG-1000's hardware wasn't nearly as capable as the Famicom's - at least, not until the platform evolved into the Mark III, and eventually, the Master System. But for a SG-series My Card game, it's really not bad. I enjoyed my time with it.
(Of course, it's Master System sequel, Kung Fu Kid, was *much* better. https://youtu.be/F4viK6YoXjA )
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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