Dragon Spirit: The New Legend — You Are the Dragon

Dragon Spirit: The New Legend (1990) is Namco’s vertical-scrolling shoot-’em-up with a great hook: you don’t fly a ship, you are a dragon. You breathe fire at air enemies and drop bombs on ground targets across lush, monster-filled stages.

Power-ups can grow you extra heads (more firepower) and upgrade your breath, and the difficulty is no joke. Bandai published the cartridge in North America in June 1990. In Japan it came out a year earlier, on April 14, 1989, with Namco as publisher.

From the arcade to the Famicom

The NES game is both a sequel and a remixed port of Namco’s 1987 arcade Dragon Spirit, and it plays like other vertical shooters of its kind, such as 1942, 1943 and Tiger-Heli.

The arcade game supplies the power-up rules. Bombing eggs releases orbs: a blue one gives you an extra head and an orange one strengthens your shots once you have three. The dragon can take two hits. Critics praised the arcade game’s graphics, its soundtrack and its Paleozoic setting, and Game Machine ranked it sixth among table arcade units in July 1987.

The arcade original reached Japan on May 15, 1987, with Atari Games releasing it in North America that July. It has nine stages and casts you as the dragon Amur, who has to rescue Princess Alicia from the serpent demon Zawell. Shinji Hosoe, originally a graphic designer at Namco, wrote the music, and much of it was accidentally wiped partway through development, so he started over. The game is dedicated to Shouichi Fukatani, a Namco programmer who died in 1985. Tatsuya Ishikawa did the graphics, after drawing character art for Rolling Thunder. In Japan it was the fourth highest-grossing table arcade game of 1987.

One reviewer calls the game half port and half sequel, and says the home version adds a story and more power-ups than the arcade original. The console version carries a new story. King Amul, whose name is Amru in the English text, defeated the demon Zawel, and peace followed. Then the sorcerer Galda resurrected Zawel and kidnapped Princess Iris. Prince Lace, Amul’s son, takes up his father’s sword and becomes a gold dragon to rescue her. The game has nine worlds, which one reviewer called long for a shooter, running from the Paleozoic Era to a parallel universe called the Evil Palace, where the final boss waits. The final battle pits a two-headed dragon against the evil monster of the abyss. Masakatsu Maekawa composed the NES score. Between levels you rescue maidens, who loosely advance the plot. On the NES, the golden dragon game and the blue dragon game share these worlds, but the gold path skips several. Sources differ on the developer: one listing names Now Production, and one review credits Namco.

Two dragons

The opening is where the NES version differs most from the arcade game. The opening level doubles as a difficulty check. Survive it and you play the normal game as the blue dragon. Die in it and the game hands you the golden dragon, an easier mode. The gold dragon moves and attacks faster, can take more damage, and gets power-up transformations that can clear most or all of the enemies on screen. Many of the harder levels are cut, which shortens the game, and its story differs from the standard one. One reviewer counted five stages in that mode.

On the blue dragon game, one review points out that there are no health recovery items, so mistakes cost you. The same reviewer found the difficulty uneven compared with the arcade original, citing smaller hit detection, power-ups that come too often, and bosses that are easier to defeat than to reach.

Power-ups and stages

Red orbs raise your basic firepower, with three needed for a step up. Blue orbs add heads, up to three, which triples your firepower at the maximum. A white dragon form gives three-way fire to all heads. Two small dragons act as options, and being smaller makes you harder to hit. The pink dragon form makes you invincible and temporarily powerful, but you lose every power-up when it ends. Taking a hit also costs you a power-up.

It’s a stylish, slightly off-the-beaten-path shooter that stood out in a library full of spaceships, and being the dragon never gets old. The stages vary more than the shooter template suggests. Glacier Land has a high-speed section and ice barriers you can destroy. In Dark Quarters the lights flicker on and off instead of a spotlight covering the whole level. A cave road closes walls in on you. The last stages are castle levels with new end bosses, which one reviewer found overlong.

Other versions and the series

Reviewers who want a faithful port point to the TurboGrafx-16 version, which NEC published in North America. Other home versions of the arcade game appeared on the X68000, Atari ST, Amiga, MS-DOS, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, and home reviews were more mixed, with criticism of high difficulty and weaker graphics and music. Namco followed the NES game with Dragon Saber, a 1990 arcade game on Namco System 2 that adds two-player co-op and charged shots.

The 1987 arcade game also appears in several Namco compilations and was re-released on the Virtual Console and in the Arcade Archives line.