DragonHeart: Fire & Steel (PS1) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
241A playthrough of Acclaim's 1996 movie license-based Sony PlayStation platformer , DragonHeart: Fire & Steel.
At its core, DragonHeart isn't much more than a simple platformer that's been fancied up with prerendered sprites (a la Mortal Kombat) and a combat system that provides for a shield, sword, and bow. It's got a few interesting quirks - each of the friendly knights, wizards, and whatnots that you meet during them game can grant you larger life-bars, special moves, and items.
The life-bar extensions are by far the most necessary to make sure to get, because each time your life bar increases, so does your stamina bar (the green line at the top left). Each move takes a particular amount of stamina to pull off, and if you run down your energy too quickly and start swining while your exhausted, you'll just whiff the attack and slump over, hands on your knees, breathing heavily like a geriatric trying to smoke after taking off their oxygen.
The levels are pretty straightforward, but many of them do have occasionally splitting paths where loads of secrets can be found. These are necessary to find if you wish to see the true ending of the game - if you kill the final boss at the castle with a completion rate below 90% (this includes secrets found), you're told to do it all over again with at least 90% to go any further before being shown a short FMV clip and being dumped rather unceremoniously back at the title screen. I didn't get a full 100%, but I was pretty close.
It's a fairly fun little game, but the controls are beyond clunky, and that's the major gripe that I have with the game. It's a bit plodding in its pace, and there always seems to be a bit of a delay between when you hit a button and when your character actually performs the move. This isn't usually too much of a bother, but there are a few spots that can get painful because of this - just try to get past the swinging axes if you have to jump part of the way without being hit. It can be done, but you aren't likely to ever do it.
Hahaha - what can I say. It's a lump of vanity, cash-in potential, 90s sensibilities all rolled into one, and it still manages to be entertaining.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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