Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll (NES) Playthrough
166A playthrough of Culture Brain's 1989 action game for the NES, Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll.
The video shows the game played on the Professional difficulty level.
Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll, originally released for the Famicom in 1987, is the direct sequel to the 1985 arcade game Shanghai Kid ( • Shanghai Kid (Arcade) Playthrough ), and it was Taiyo System's first game to be published under their new name, Culture Brain.
Master Juan, the man who raised Ryuhi (the "Shanghai Kid" from Shanghai Kid), has been attacked, and the secret scrolls of the Hiryuu no Ken have been stolen. In his dying breath, Juan asks Ryuhi to seek out the Shorinji temple's kenpo grandmaster and to recover the lost scrolls.
Ryuhi then spends the next several years training at Shorinji. One day, he receives an invitation from the Tusk Clan to participate in a worldwide MMA tournament. When Gengai, his teacher, tells him that the Tusk were responsible for Juan's death, Ryuhi sets out, determined to recover the scrolls.
Each leg of the adventure is comprised of two parts. The first, "The Journey," is a platformer-style stage in which Ryuhi has to make his way to the site of a tournament event. In these areas, he'll have to fight through waves of thugs until Tusk operatives appear. Once he has defeated five Tusks and collected their "labels," the door to the next fighting venue will open.
Upon arriving at the venue, Ryuhi competes in a series of 1v1 "Mind's Eye" fights that mirror the hybrid real-time/turn-based format used in Shanghai Kid. After winning these fights, Ryuhi continues on to the next leg of the journey, and the cycle repeats from there.
Flying Dragon feels like a greatly expanded remake of Shanghai Kid. The tournament sections play out much the same as they did in the first game, and the platforming segments and story interludes add the substance needed to bring the experience in line with what was expected from a mid-gen Famicom release. It wasn't quite the role-playing game that Culture Brain marketed it as, but it did have a lot of depth and variety for a 1987 release, and though it had clearly aged by the time it arrived in North America, it was still fresh and engaging enough to find a niche audience in 1989.
It's an odd duck, to be sure. Culture Brain's "everything but the kitchen sink" approach to design began here, and like most of their games, Flying Dragon wasn't perfect. The graphics were rough and the platforming controls were incredibly awkward, but overall, it was an exotic, fun game unlike anything else on the market, and that gave it a lot of lasting appeal.
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