Dragon Spirit: The New Legend (1990) [NES]

There was time between the waning age of enchantment and the dawning age of logic when dragons flew the skies, free and unencumbered.

-The Flight of Dragons

It’s a game about family. Dragon Spirit: The New Legend is a creative high fantasy shmup that discards the military themes of vertical shooters like 1942, or the science fiction of a Gradius or Raiden, for dragons and magic. As the game’s central draconic protagonists, players are flown through a variety of levels full of inventive power-ups and the gloriously huge enemy bosses over their black screens, as was the fashion at the time. There’s also a loosely told story with parenthetical intermissions featuring elfin characters. It’s a fantasy textured game but at its core, there’s a relationship between father and child.

Amru the hero transforms into a blue dragon to fight off a host of baddies and a slew of D&Dish names like Zawel and Galda. Galda kidnapped one of Amru and his wife Arisha’s twins, Iris, leaving behind one child, Lace. It was the ’80s, remember.

One of the more inventive things on display right away is the fact you can play as either Amru the father or Lace the child. Amru represents a normal difficulty playthrough and Lace an easy mode. However, you can’t select either mode from the start screen. You can only discover easy mode and subsequently play as the gold instead of blue dragon if you die on the first stage (as Amru).

The golden dragon seems to have more health, better speed, and increased firepower compared to the blue dragon who must start the game with whatever the drake equivalent of a pea-shooter is. Additionally, the golden dragon’s playthrough is shorter with the most difficult levels removed and an adjusted final encounter with the end boss. The complete (and toughest experience) is with the blue dragon. It’s remarkable to see a game of this age with a kind of dynamic difficulty scaling system built right into it.

Besides this dynamism, Dragon Spirit boasts a number of different power-ups to enhance your winged serpent’s speed and offensive capabilities and even its size and number of heads…? Bizarrely cool! A three-headed hydra multiplies all of its attacks, both its forward shot and its downward bombing blast (not official terminology), but shrinking your dragon to teeny tiny makes it nimbler and harder to hit. There are even twin satellite ghost dragons as well as silver dragon form that has a wider attack, impermanent invincibility, and a pink dragon that seems to be a temporary power-up.

But be forewarned, taking a hit means losing a power-up. Three heads reverts to two and two to one. Being able to take a few hits before going down is one of the more forgiving elements in the game, which itself is mostly rather easy to play. It’s the latter stages on the blue dragon’s path that can be particularly cruel. There’s no shame in taking the golden dragon route to get that practice in!

The 8-bit Review

Visuals: 6/10

While it can’t compare to the games that came at the end of the NES’s lifespan, Dragon Spirit has some great boss sprites to show off and the personality lent to it by its intermissions and characters are more than welcome. Being able to see the power-ups you grab physically alter the shape and form of your draconic hero, instead of just its attack, is especially awesome.

Audio: 7/10

This boss battle theme. I love it. I can recall it to mind, more so than the music for other stages, however, this soundtrack has unique tracks for each level (or nearly so). That aural diversity is appreciable.

Gameplay: 8/10

I was really impressed by the game’s speed and pace. Sure, the levels don’t scroll by too quickly, most of the time, but your dragon and its enemies can move about rather quickly. This is further developed thanks to a bit of intriguing level design. The earliest stages are wide open for flight in any direction but the game soon funnels you among tree branches that must be destroyed before collision or the enclosing walls of a shifting cavern or a gamut of ice and cliffs with blockades of frost. The final level is the interior of a castle, providing almost an entirely different shmup experience than the rest of Dragon Spirit.

Accessibility: 4/10

Dragon Spirit stumbles a bit here and this is understandable within the context of its era and platform. A lot of these games were designed with the intent of the player owning the manual. I’m not sure the developers at the time could envision any number of devices that could play a game like Dragon Spirit today sans manual. I’d vouch for including digital manuals with all future ports of NES games, but as it stands, I wasn’t exactly sure what all the power-ups in the game did right away. They’re not clearly marked and their iconography isn’t well communicated, so some trial and error and online research was needed before I could get real choosy about what power-ups to grab and which to avoid. Do NOT grab the skull power-up.

Challenge: 8/10

I’d say most of this game is easy enough. You can collect a number of power-ups early on and transform into a flying battleship capable of shredding through bosses in mere seconds. Provided you’re careful about being hit (easier with a wide-shot silver dragon), you can keep shredding for a chunk of the game. This all falls apart at the climactic dark castle, though. You are given a number of continues and extra lives but they are finite, and many a time, I blew through the lot of them in the dark castle.

Replayability: 6/10

As far as shmups go, there’s a decent amount of replay value here with its dynamic difficulty modes and the two very different playthroughs. There’s a relic of the arcade age with a high score, but I didn’t get the sense it impacted the game very much at all.

Uniqueness: 8/10

I walked away from Dragon Spirit after about a half dozen attempts to complete its blue dragon run thinking it was quite the unique take on the shmup genre, indeed. I think a large part of that is simply the setting. It was nice to forget about jets and airplanes for a bit. I’m sure there are ports to consider under this score, as well.

Personal: 7/10

I enjoyed Dragon Spirit: The New Legend. This “Romancing Shooting Game” was new to me. That’s one of the most exciting things about exploring the library of a system I love. Even though I’ve played NES since the days when it was current-gen, I haven’t played everything. It’s a little ol’ system that can still impress, at least it can impress me, even after all these years.

Aggregated Score: 6.8

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage or Mage Cast.