Dragon Spirit: The New Legend (1989)

Beat on slow mode, mostly as the green dragon with 2 little side dragons. Took a bit to understand the power ups and I looked them up after a few stages. There were simple firepower and speed upgrades, temporary buffs like screen clearing and invincibility, growing extra heads for more shots, and color. Extra heads were mutually exclusive with the little dragons. I found the little set up better because it spread shots out more and made the dragon smaller, plus the little ones had no hit box. Color was shot pattern with blue being basic, green like a focused laser, and white spread. There were also bad power ups that made you worse so you had to be careful not to pick up everything. This was one of those shoot em ups with both flying and ground enemies, only your ground shots had no crosshair, could be spammed and had pattern from the color. So it was not difficult to hit ground targets. It had fairly standard enemies all with giant monster theme instead of space ships. The stages also had hazards such as traps, moving walls, dead ends and stuff that had to be cleared. There was some bullet hell but I mostly got hurt by the hazards and the difficulty was not that hard. The bosses were way too easy though. It felt like they should have had 20x hp because they all died so very quickly. Then I did normal speed easy mode which was enabled by dying at the beginning to be the gold dragon. It had more hp and fire rate and skipped about half of the stages and the final boss to give a silly it was just a dream ending. It reminded me of the dragonlance shoot em up except that it was much more traditional in design. It had some cool heroic fantasy vibes in the little bit of story and presentation, as well as well drawn girls to rescue. Pretty good game whose only big flaw was the absurdly low boss hp.

7.0/10

Like the arcade game, the beginning transformation animation and music is soooo good, but I couldn't connect with the arcade game's mechanic of making it hard to discern when enemies are on the grounds vs coming up vs parallel with me. I miss when shmups weren't obsessed with that antic. But I suppose people wanted something new (I like the same thing over and over for the rest of my life, but that's just me haha)

This version/sequel-esque has great music in the level, and the gameplay is great for an NES shmup. Tho I dunno why they had to include the see-up-skirt animation in the good ending (it's at least hidden behind a secret tho.. and I suppose they had a shirtless masc character in the Japanese version too, so I shouldn't judge too harshly).

Unfortunately, the graphics in this Japanese version are pretty terrible. Even for 1989