Castle of Dragon Review

Brothers and sisters. This game is weird. That’s all. It’s just weird. I can’t explain the idea behind it or the thought process that went into it. It’s just weird. I don’t want to play around with this too much so let’s just dive in, ok? Ok.

Deep breaths.

Castle Of Dragon is a game, I feel like, I was dared to play.

Darklarza, the Dragon master, has been a jerk to Offeria for a long time. King Boros has been exiled off to the mountains in Menlary. Meanwhile Geraden, the Duke of Menlary, fought of the legions of the undead. That’s all well and good, but Darklarza ain’t havin’ none of that.

So Ol’ King Boros promises his daughter, Princess Amoreena to Geraden because he’s such a cool dude. However, being the cool dude that he is, Geraden says he’s not tying the knot till Darklarza has been given the old kick in the can and sent packing.

Something like that, anyway.

So after like twenty years of prep The Duke finally decides it’s time to get down to business.

Something like that, anyway.

Game play is basic fantasy side scroller style. The game, being all fantasy like, borrows a lot from your Castlevania and Ghouls ‘n Ghosts games. We walk, jump, attack, and (fantastically enough) can manage our shield to actually defend ourselves. This is good and bad.

The Duke also knows how to use a few different weapons and needs to find a few artifacts to finish the game for real.

Levels are basic “Walk to the right, kill things, try not to get killed by things” style. The game isn’t terribly long but it run at what looks to be an astounding 15 FPS and is VERY clunky. So it feels longer than it is.

Duke gains EXP which increases your health. You have one life and no continues. You level up to increase your health bar and pickup armor to basically double that health bar. If you do die (you will) and have to start over (you won’t want to), you at least get to start over with whatever health bar you had when you died. You start with 16 health and it’ll top out at 32. With the armor that ends up being 64 in total. Get it? Got it? Good.

After you make it though a portion of each level you’ll have a boss. They are often just slightly more annoying than the usual enemies you’ll find in the same stage. Do that a few times, fight Darklarza, win the game. IF you have all the artifacts. If you don’t, do it again.

On paper it doesn’t sound too bad. Kind of Castlevania 2 without the open world wandering around. But because the same is so difficult to play it really isn’t a good time to be had.

Something like that, anyway.

If I had to pick one nice thing to say about the game it’s the graphics. They’re sufficiently fantasy enough. The enemies generally don’t look too bad, The Duke looks pretty good. The bosses are ok if not REALLY weird. Like the Dragon Chicken thing near the end of the game. It’s legit a green wyvern body with a chicken’s legs and head.

Something like that, anyway.

The music over is… pretty bad. I think the best track is the map theme and it’s just a 3 or 4 second loop. The music sounds kind of weird for the NES too. Almost like this was a port from something like the Commodore 64 or the Amiga. It wasn’t, as far as I could discover, but it kind of has that budget home PC vibe from 40 years ago. You can play it with the sound off. I encourage it.

Something like that, anyway.

It was an arcade game though and had two different release dates in Japan, both in 1989. The game was developed by Athena and they didn’t exactly make real winners, which is weird because they were making games up till 2018. An SNES release of their 16 bit games. I have yet to find any real information about this game other than it just exists. Their final North American game was Super Bowling for the N64 in 1999. It was 10 years before they had another NA release and that was a series of Mahjong games for the iPhone.

Athena was a weird company. They developed another game in 1992 called Sword Master which Activision released and it is almost exactly Sword Of Dragon, but with more money put into it. No joke. Compare the two.

Something like that, anyway.

So… like I said. It’s a weird game made by a weird company. It’s playable. Barely. It’s visually interesting. Barely. The audio is. Audio. Barely. One thing we can say for sure though is that Castle Of Dragon is a video game.

Something like that. Anyway.