Review: Dragon's Lair: The Legend (GB)

[Zovistograt]

Yes, I had great fortune at Gamestop today.  I found a cartridge with a very familiar name on it: DRAGON'S LAIR.  If you are not familiar with Dragon's Lair for the NES, go play it on NFES and come back when you give up.

This game is a sequel (I think) to that amazing game, and keeping with the spirit, it is full of
-dungeon crawling
-attempting to stay alive
-trial and error
-frustration
-men with weird red outfits (no actually this is a lie because it's grayscale)
and more!

Wikipedia says about it: "The Game Boy version (entitled Dragon's Lair: The Legend) in particular has almost nothing to do with the source game aside from Dirk as the protagonist, Mordroc as the villain, and saving Princess Daphne as the objective. In fact, the game is a port of a five-year-old ZX Spectrum game, Roller Coaster, the result being a platform game where Dirk has to negotiate a series of thinly-disguised fairground rides."

Ok, so they basically threw a somewhat successful title onto a failure of a game from the system that brought us other amazing and slightly trippy games like Wizard's Lair.  Yeah.


Now then, let's get on with it.

PLOT

The plot is Dirk the Daring is going to go into some lair where a dragon is and do stuff while circumventing numerous obstacles.  Not much in this department.

SETTING



Since, apparently, this game is two things smashed together, I suppose the confusing and odd setting makes some sense after all.  You have Egyptian ruins, hills, trees, clouds, small gnome-like houses, flying wizard hats, strange platforms that really don't need to be there, and of course, dungeons!

Basically, in keeping with the original (even though this isn't an actual sequel), the setting is probably the thing that's going to kill you.  If you go left one pixel at the start of the game, you instantly die because of tiny spikes that aren't entirely obvious of their nature.  Other things that will kill you: some lamps (not all of them, but they kind of look the same), tiny spikes that almost look like rocks in the scenery, and hills (which were probably the rollercoaster tracks in the ZX Spectrum game), to name a few.  You don't know half the time if where you're stepping will kill you, so really, it's a game of trial and error, and sometimes just luck.

This brings us to

GAMEPLAY

Gameplay is very simple in this game.  Go left, go right, and jump.  Jumping is extremely limited, but luckily, you can jump on sometimes visible but usually invisible platforms.  Often, scenery that looks like it's just scenery is actually a large amount of successive platforms that are easy to ascend but a pain to descend.  That is, of course, if this alleged scenery isn't just going to kill you.

There are no actual enemies that I've seen thus far, and I haven't gotten lucky enough to get far enough to see any boss...but from the beginning, I'd say this game is as populated as a barren wasteland.

edit: I found out that the game just loops a bunch of worlds until you get all the coins, so there is no dragon and no real lair and no point to the game at all.  Wow.

SOUND

Music is incredibly forgettable, so much so that I don't remember what it was and I just played it about an hour ago.  At least a lot of GB music is catchy.  This isn't.

GRAPHICS

If the setting and game mechanics aren't confusing enough, the graphics aren't the best ever.  Yes, this is the Game Boy we're talking about.  But they could have tried a LITTLE BIT more to make things more obvious.  Sure, the Egyptian ruins look nice, but that's just scenery...I think.  The places that really do matter are too crowded with strange platforms that jerk around frantically like they're spazzing out to make any unified setting discernable.

OVERALL (TL;DR)

This game is worth the $1.63 I bought it for today--if not for laughs, then for the enjoyment of seeing your friends fail miserably trying to figure out how to not die.

[SkyMyl]

I was not aware there was a sequel to the game. But it sounds just as bad. D=

[Zovistograt]

I was not aware there was a sequel to the game. But it sounds just as bad. D=

There are actually two sequels, Dragon's Lair II and III, not including this one.

[Tupin]

You know, there's actually the arcade version of Dragon's Lair on GBC.

It really pushes the system, here's footage of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC12ZNkUj-c

That game however, looks like crap.