Dragon Lair's: The Legend
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| Dragon Lair's: The Legend | ||||||||||||
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 Did they learn about their mistake about the NES port of the original Dragon Lair ? It's doesn't seem to.
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Dragon's Lair: The Legend is a 1991 side-scrolling platform video game for the Nintendo Game Boy developed by Elite Systems. The game is part of the Dragon's Lair franchise and stars Dirk the Daring, who explores the world attempting to collect all 194 fragments of the mythical Life Stone.
Why It's Not The Legend
- The game is again extremely difficult, to the point of being a very frustrating and terrible game and also being unbalanced. While some games, such as the trilogy of Castlevania on the NES, are hard and frustrating, but in a decent way, here it's trial and error.
- If you press select, you reset the game. This is a horrible game design, as you could sometimes accidentally press the select button instead of the start button. Not only that, but you can't go back or even get passwords.
- The game is also very short, lasting only 30 minutes if you know where to go and what you have to do.
- Abysmal collision detection: as you can get stuck literally everywhere, even in the cloud or on some platforms, you can even walk on them. Not only that, but most, if not all, of these are barely easy to know because they are platforms, making this game even more of a nightmare.
- The controls are extremely terrible and as bad as the one from the NES, as here they are extremely unresponsive to the point of being like the horribly unresponsive controls of The Grinch on PS1 or even 'Bubsy 3D, especially the jump. The jump is also not that tight, and it can cause a lot of cheap deaths.
- This is also one of the reasons why this game is so bad; the level design is not even adapted for the terrible controls of the game; see WINTL #7.
- Awful story that is nonsensical and full of cliffhangers (see WINTL #9).
- Awful level design, even by Dragon Lair standards, especially in the roller coaster section, these are so bad that you will likely die a lot in these sections.
- The box art is misleading, as when you see the art of the box, you can see both the dragon and Daphné, but the problem is that neither of them are even in the game, not even Daphné. Even worse, they say in the back of the box that it's the classic arcade game, but in reality, it's just a completely original game.
- Awful ending that is even worse than the ending from the NES port of Dragon's Lair, as once Dirk has collected all the life stones, he is able to awaken. The Dormant Knight immediately ends the game and displays the following text:
- Well done! You have succeeded in awakening the Dormant Knight. Together, you can face the evil of Mordroc's power. Another time... another location... the end.
- Yes, that's it. The entire ending and the end of the text make the game have a huge cliffhanger that will never be resolved.
- The game is also a huge resking of the ZX Spectrum game, Roller Coaster, with only the graphics reworked into a Dragon's Lair setting as well as making Dirk the main character. This is also extremely lazy.
- If you lose all of your lives, you will have to restart the entire game from the beginning since there are no more, making the difficulty even more of a problem.
- The graphics are somewhat poor, with the jewels looking more like cubes, for example; even games such as Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, Mortal Kombat II, and Mega Man: Dr. Wily Revenge look better than this, and these were released at the same time as this game.
- To beat the game, you need to collect all of the 194 jewels. This is extremely annoying since sometimes it is nearly impossible to get some of them, and to make matters worse, if you play with two players, you will need to collect 388 instead of 194, making this even worse than it's supposed to be.
The Only Redeeming Quality
- It's at least better than the already atrocious NES port of the original Dragon's Lair.
Trivia
- Dragon's Lair: The Legend was also an early working title for an unsuccessful attempt to adapt the franchise into a feature film, and the game shares a few elements with the pitch presentation, such as a legendary Knight whom Dirk must find in order to resist Mordroc's dark magic. Several of the film pitch's story ideas may have been incorporated into the Game Boy release.
- Contrary to the box art and the manual's story, Dirk is the only recurring character that appears in-game, although Mordroc is referenced in the congratulatory end game screen.
- The box art for this game uses the same art for the original arcade poster along with the Dragon's Lair video games on the NES and SNES (with a variation on the background).
- The game's manual included a mail-in promotion for a mystery prize for players who assembled both halves of the "Double Challenge Medallion" found in the booklets accompanying Dragon's Lair: The Legend and the NES Dragon's Lair game.
- Elite Systems utilized the franchise license again for their 1993 Game Boy release Franky, Joe & Dirk: On the Tiles.
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