Castle of Dragon ・ ド ラ ゴ ン ユ ニ ッ ト
Developed by: Athena
Published by: Athena (JP), SETA (NA)
Release dates: February 27th, 1990 (JP), June 1990 (NA)
I’d like to invite you to join in on an imagination exercise with me, dear reader.
Picture a B-grade Hollywood movie that came out in 1988 or thereabouts. This is a contemporary family film with comedic elements conjured up by a board room of company execs looking to rake in a few coins over the summer season. Bland, inoffensive, will be forgotten two hours after being seen. I know you know the type.
OK, now I want you to imagine this: there’s a scene in this milquetoast flick where, in a suburban upper-middle class household of four, two kids are playing a video game on their LEGALLY DISTINCT NINTENDO-LIKE MACHINE while laying on the floor of their wood-panelled, brown carpeted living room. The kids are squabbling about grabbing the sonic sword power so they can defeat the dragon at the end of level six. The three second glance at the floor model Zenith TV the audience is privy to reveals the game the kids are losing their minds over.
To help bolster your mental image, here are some vague details: the sound is nothing like an actual game’s soundtrack, and the unusually large graphics somehow land in the uncanny valley despite being made to look 8-bit. Someone who actually plays video games can immediately tell that this game is about as real as the facelift of the overpaid B-list actor playing the role of “HAPLESS FATHER.” There’s no way a game this dumb and bland is real. The kids mashing the buttons and throwing the controller around only adds to the phoniness of the scene. Movie magic, people!
Thank you for playing that imagination exercise with me. Now here’s the part where I gag you with a twist; that hokey, hyper generic game you conjured in your mind’s eye that couldn’t possibly exist? I’m willing to bet a couple bucks that whatever mental image you cooked up bears a striking resemblance to Castle of Dragon for the NES.
Castle of Dragon isn’t just a video game. It is THE video game. People of a certain vintage who don’t know a lick about games – that being our grandparents, third grade teachers or well-to-do secretary aunties – probably think this is what all games are: a big dude with a sword bum rushing skeletons in a forest at a crisp 12 fps. Either that or Pac Man.
Castle of Dragon steals Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins visual identity and the vague idea of Castlevania’s gameplay, and puts them into a blender. The result is the muddiest smoothie you’ve ever had the displeasure of drinking. One look and you immediately know how it works. Walk to the right and hit one enemy at a time with your lame sword. Pick up lame power ups as you go. There’s an equally lame boss at the end of every lame level (though I will concede that “The Forest of Heresy” is one of the sickest stage names of all time). The whole thing clocks in at a lame 20 minutes if you can beat it without dying.
The controls are stiff by design, with the game eating inputs like so many afternoon snacks. This is especially frustrating when lots of the enemies/bosses require the ol’ reliable strategy of “hop over their head, hit them once, hop back, rinse and repeat.” It’s hard to pull off the precision movements needed to succeed when precision movements were not scrawled out in the game design binder someone left laying around the musty offices of Athena Ltd. And that’s not even getting into the pathetic little platforming sections with godawful collision detection; this is one of those games where the character has to land jumps smack dab in the middle of the platform, else they’ll just phase through the edges and die. By the way, did I mention Castle of Dragononly gives the player one life and no continues? I can’t tell you how many runs I had come screeching to a stop because I fell down a shitting pit. I’m tired just remembering it.
The garnish on this four course meal of pain is the fact that the game moves in an erratic manner; that 12 fps jab earlier wasn’t far from the truth. At one point after spending too much time with this turd, I had stopped noticing the jerky nature of the game, and began wondering if I had perhaps imagined the whole thing. Like, maybe I was just genetically predisposed to hate on Castle of Dragon and started conjuring up frame rate related illusions to justify it.
Anyway, after a few days away from it, I booted it back up and realized I was just being Stockholm syndrome’d into thinking it looked better than it really did. The character/enemy sprites are a good size for the NES, and the art is decent, but size doesn’t make a lick of difference when the whole thing moves like a jerky, nasty, shitey mess. I think there’s a joke in there somewhere, but I don’t know anymore man. What’s the point, we all die anyways.
At first, I felt bad talking smack about Castle of Dragon. I wanted to like it. The graphics are close to being good, the gameplay close to being entertaining. It has all the elements present to be great, but it just sucks. While I’m at it, the music is a travesty too. In particular, the “big boss” theme is used to push torture victims to their breaking point. Don’t listen to it. I feel bad for even linking it. Like, I’m gonna ruin’s someone’s day with that. I’m sorry.
Oddly enough, developers Athena must have had some genuine love in their hearts for this world they were building, because they essentially remade Castle of Dragon for the NES a few months after it released in Japan. Either that or they were deeply ashamed of the way CoD turned out, and felt as though they had to repent for their gaming transgressions immediately. The remake in question is Sword Master – a game I’ve tried and enjoyed in the past, but I doubt it’ll be popping up on this blog anytime soon, because that means I actually have to beat it first. But it’s so drastically better than CoD that it doesn’t make any sense that the two games were released by the same developer a mere six months apart.
What’s the story here? Did two separate teams work on these games? Was CoD rushed out the door while Athena chipped away at their real passion project in Sword Master? Did one of the devs sell their soul to the devil in exchange for godlike programming abilities? Unfortunately, the early history of Japanese game development isn’t very well documented, so we shall go on wondering. Or I will, anyway. This is the kinda thing that keeps me up at night.
So that’s Castle of Dragon. A clunky, frustrating hack ‘n’ slasher slumming it up at the bottom rungs of the NES library. It’s not the worst NES game…I GUESS I’d rather play this over The Addams Family or Goal! But I had a miserable time playing it, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of video games from the 8-bit era alone that you should be giving your time to over this tat. Go play Mario or something and thank me later.
Final score:
NESJunk 