Sword Master NES Game and Spyro the Dragon Original Series Crossover

While it feels kind of limp, it’s also nice to have a breather level before the final stage eats a quarter buffet with your wallet as the table. Stage two throws out more than enough spike crushers and pitfalls to make Castlevania green as lime jello, but all level five offers is a vertical climb filled with somewhat annoying demon trees. These stages tend to focus more on platforming than on combat, though the fifth level (and the penultimate one in the game) is surprisingly easy to most other levels, even compared to the second one. Two of the levels (2 and 5) don’t have end-bosses and merely require you to pick up a key. Lose about two-thirds health and you’re stripped down to nearly nothing, and you in fact resemble a poor man’s Conan the Barbarian. However, if you take about a third of damage, part of your armor gets knocked off to reveal a somewhat dorky head beneath. By default, you’re decked out in an impressive set of blue (red if player two) armor which makes you resemble a prototypical form of Soul Calibur‘s Nightmare. The important thing is that you can take up to two knights on your six-stage journey. That’s as grade-school of a plot as you can get, but almost no arcade-made games have enough of a story to fill a fifty-page novella. The kings Duke and Narda take up their sword, shield, and armor to slay Zuriv and rescue the princess. Published by Seta, another game company approximately as obscure as Athena, Castle of Dragon naturally involves a dragon, Zuriv, who invades the kingdom of Wenlary and captures its princess. Take Castle of Dragon (or its Japanese title Dragon Unit), a straightforward hack-and-slash actioner that’s all about slicing and dying. They also released a pretty neat arcade shooter by the name of Daioh revered by space shooter fans, but while shoot-em-ups may be what gave them their recognition, they did release games of other genres.

Athena is a fairly obscure Japanese developer which never really found much success outside of its native Japan, but it built a modest reputation with the Dezaemon series of “make-your-own-shoot-em-ups” construction games.

Sword Master NES Game and Spyro the Dragon Original Series Crossover