I can confidently say I have completed "Phase 1" of this game on a Gameboy (color). Its certainly possible to do it, but its the fact you need to do it in one sitting is the challenge. Thankfully the game does give you a code to input at the title screen in order to skip to Phase 2. (Up, Down, Left, Right, A). Interesting facts: The maps are huge. 80x100 tiles, and it is a spiral rather then cylindrical. - What I mean by this is if you start at the top left corner of the map (Coordinates 0,0) and hold right you might expect to eventually loop back to 0,0 but instead you'll loop back to 0,1. Keep holding right and eventually you will get to the bottom half of the map. Another thing about the map: If you get enough experience you learn the map spell and with it you can see a couple of names spelled with blocks and coins. I am fairly certain these are the credits to the port since the port was done by Epoch Co. and the names match some names on other Epoch Co. games. In Phase 1: Yuji (Yūji Akagiri?), ♪Turcy (Takashi Kutsukake?), Masato (??), "シ台" (I think thats what it says, its cramped and looks like they were running outa room), and "HORIEL'DA"? (Im guessing Masayuki Horie, who apparently got credited as "Horieruda" in 'Kiteretsu Daiyakka' on the NES. In Phase 2: "Torajima" (Not sure if its Tora or Tera, Im thinking its Tōru Terashima who worked on Dragon Slayer Gaiden), and "JUN" ?
And in case anybody asks about the music: Antonín Dvorák: Slavonic dances/7, 1st theme op. 46/7 I know I've heard this one in other games, but hell if I could remember which.
1. Collect the coins to the bottom of the start, as well as the powerstone to the upper-left of the safe area, then return to your house to power up. 2. From the cross below where you start, head one screen down and keep going right until you see a warp point, keep warping until you find the sword, then make your way back to the start (with a powerstone preferably). 3. Continue collecting nearby coins and powerstones until you can defeat successive enemies in one hit, but do not defeat the "head with top hat" enemies, as doing so will spawn a powerful enemy that hits hard and can drain your attack permanently. 4. After you find the key, which will probably have been taken to a random point on the map, try to unlock as many chests as you can before your key is stolen. Your priority should be to unlock the horizontal chests toward the bottom, as they prevent you from pushing your house below them. 5. Push your house to areas where chests have been unlocked. After you power up to a certain extent, as long as you haven't defeated the top hat enemies, all enemies will cease to pursue you, giving you the freedom to power up as much as you want. 6. When you have over 400,000 attack (about 500,000 is recommended), you will be able to kill the dragon heads (attack diagonally). Also try to have at least 50,000 EXP so you know the fly spell. 7. Some recommend encircling the dragon with crosses to prevent the crowns from being carried off after killing the dragon, but I find the process tedious, so I just use the fly spell to search for the four crowns, but note that you will have to bring them back one by one this way, so the choice is yours.
I played the heck out of this game as a kid. I actually made it to phase 2 and recall you also gained abilities while levelling up such as spells (flight, flash etc) and the ability to take diagonal steps.
In addition to Legacy of the Wizard, they also released Faxanadu for NES in the West prior to this, which was a spinoff from Dragon Slayer 2: Xanadu ("Famicom" + "Xanadu" = "Faxanadu"). Then the released Dragon Slayer 5: Sorcerian as just Sorcerian for MS-DOS computers in 1990. I will never understand why they released three Dragon Slayer games over here but never made any effort to connect them like they did with the Ys games. It's like they specifically didn't want the series to develop a following here or something.
I still remember playing this game and the satisfying feeling after finally earning the "Fly" magic. Flying though out the land as a sparrow, seeing the blocks and house being passed by, accompanied by such a dreamy music, and imagining flying over a beautiful mountain range surrounded by a fantasy villages instead of this misbegotten game. This gave me such a blissful feeling back then.
I kind of can't help but to wonder if the overheating game boy was caused by using an incorrect ac adapter, over volting it, or just a crappy ac adapter in general. I used to use an ac adapter all the time as a kid and it never destroyed my gameboy.
I beat this in the 90s when I was a kid. Power running out on batteries after beating phase 1 taught me to be plugged into power the whole time. I don't remember how many tries it took. The first time my power got drained by a monster, I was shocked. Through trial and error, I found the trick to not take damage with movement patterns. Optimized a quick way to get the first sword. Pushed my home around the world. Trapped all the cloud looking item thieves as it spawned next to the slayed dragon with a wall of crosses so that it can't fly away with my hard earned crowns. What a horribly inaccessible game, yet so satisfying to figure out and finish.
Man i thought this game was just a fever dream. This is my first difficult game that I never manage to finish(because the game cartridge got broke) and I didn't know that the game had multiple stages. As a 7yr old kid I thought the game would only finish when all enemies are dead including after killing the dragon which is an endless Horde of enemies and the more you keep killing them they keep spawning stronger enemies to the point where 1 monster who has 99999 something stats that literally 1 shots you to oblivion. But man I have so many memories of this game and it was the first action RPG game that I ever played. PS. Did no notice it was a strength ring as a kid I thought those were strength shrooms like Mario mushrooms.
Points for ending the video with a clip of Rush. Another Japanese GB title lost to time, and certainly something I don't feel bad that it was never ported. Interesting bit about the overheating Game Boy systems - it would be interesting to know if any Japanese GB players from days of yore experienced any of that.
Also, one last thing: the monsters you mentioned zapping your strength genuinely aren't a real issue: Only a few types of monsters (maybe only one) do this, and they're in high enough tiers you're never going to see them until you've long passed the strength level that lets you kill them in a single hit, which will replace them with a higher-tiered monster that drains HP again. Since your attack strength is wholly unconnected to anything you gain from killing monsters, as long as you focus on gathering power stones and ignore unnecessary fighting, the game will never put you in any actual danger. Even the dragon can't hurt you unless you walk in front of it, which there is absolutely no point in doing.
There are 2 monsters that drain STR. Only the first one is really is an issue because it has 300000 HP but only 9000 defense. The other one, in a later tier, only has 47000 HP which you can OHKO most of the time.
I had no idea there was a gameboy port to this since wikipedia only lists nihon falcom's original PC titles and localized ports. It sounds a lot more accessible to play than the remastered saturn version (since you can play it on a gba SP or gameboy player/ super gameboy. I'll have to give this a try someday.
Jeremy, Dragon Slayer I DOES have an option to save progress. Every time you beat a level you're given a push button code that serves as a password for the next level.
My comment was slightly hasty there, since I've been trying out the game myself here. What I can tell you though, is this: First off, the game does have levels. An entire two of them. Beating level 1 gives you the password for level 2 as I mentioned... sometimes. When I beat the level, it didn't give me one, but there are several videos and text guides that say it is supposed to, with pictures and all... so my guess is that you have to beat the level without dying to get it. Sounds harder than it is, when I beat it I just died once near the beginning. The level (and most likely the game as a whole, but I didn't mess much around with level 2 yet) is relatively simple to beat, just rather tedious. A complete walkthrough is as simple as this: 1) Go to the closest warp and get the sword from the other side. Grab as many coins as you can on the way. 2) Return to your home grab the nearby ring, start pushing it around looking for power stones and the key. Deposit the stones as you find them. 3) Kill monsters that get in your way to grind your way to the Break spell, but avoid too much unnecessary combat, since you don't want high level monsters around 4) The key will probably be somewhere completely random due to the ghost, so once you find it hold on to it and travel around unlocking chests, particularly the huge treasure vaults.Use the map spell to help you. Try unlocking as many chests as you can before dropping the key again, otherwise the ghost can steal it. Pick up all the coins and potions first to clear space, then drag the home over and start depositing power stones. 5) Use the warp to enter the enclosed room and open all the chests, then warp each power stone out individually instead of breaking the wall and dragging the house in Once you are relatively strong, warp in and kill the respawning monsters until you reach 30000 exp and gain the diagonal walking/attacking ability then warp back out. Doing it like this will prevent the stronger monsters from leaving that enclosed room. 6) Once you've emptied all the major treasure rooms, use the Jump spell to hopefully warp to some area with a power stone, then use the Return spell to warp back to your house and deposit it. You don't need magic for much other than this, and you should have picked up over a hundred potions at this point, so this makes the last bit of strength grinding much much faster. 7) Once you are above 600000 strength, go to the dragon, destroy the blocks near its heads then attack the heads diagonally and it can't hurt you. 8) Once the crowns appear, walk (don't warp with Return) to the northmost part of the dungeon, then walk eastwards towards your starting location. The corridor directly northwest of your house is a good grinding spot since monsters will only come from the east here. Kill monsters until you reach 60000 exp and learn Fly. 9) Use Fly to quickly skim the entire dungeon for crowns. Once you find one, land, pick it up and walk to a warp zone and deposit it nearby those are nice landmarks. 10) Once you have all four crowns deposited in once place, pick all four up, walk towards your home, then drop all four when you get close and cast Flash. Finally, pick the crows up again and quickly enter the house. It's not particularly difficult, but the game is slow and tedious and you need to deposit a ridiculous number of power stones one by one to get strong enough to defeat the dragon. It took me about two and a half hour to beat the level, and is probably doable in under two if you're familiar with the game, so even if you don't get the password, the entire game can presumably be beaten in a five hour sitting. The question is if you'd WANT to. The idea of it being impossible seems to come from Hardcoregaming 101 mistakenly assuming the game had ten levels instead of just two.
Ok, I can confirm. If you beat level 1 without a single death, you get the password for level 2. If you die one or more times, you just continue on without a password. That's... unique.
Aaand I managed to beat the game. Level 2 was surprisingly different from level 1 to the point of feeling more like a rom hack or a spinoff: rather than more of the same mess of endless block arrangements, it's instead split into three disticnt areas: a maze you start of in and have to navigate largely itemless, a huge open plain full of enemies and items where you have to gather initial supplies and then retreat back to your house in the maze via warps, since you can't move the house out of the maze until you gain enough exp to get the Break spell, and finally a castle area of sorts that can only be reached via warps or the Fly spell due to a "moat" of warp panels. It's surprisingly inventive even though the maze is just dumb old trial and error and that impenetrable moat adding to the tedium since it means you can't move the house into the castle and instead have to warp back and forth on way too many endlessly long trips to get the power stones in the castle. It took me about four hours to beat, which involved a fair bit of figuring out where I was supposed to go, and I also discovered the dragon is beatable with much lower strength than 600000 - even as little as 450000 should be enough, since he literally can't attack back in any way if you hit him with diagonal attacks, meaning level 1 can probably be completed in a bit over an hour (I also realized the ghost that steals the key near the starting position before you can get to it will always place it in the same place every game, despite the otherwise random nature of these things. Makes getting the key very easy, which means you can start seriously powering up right from the start of the level). Playing both levels in one sitting is incredibly tedious and probably not what Epoch intended, and it's going to require an atrociously long play session for a handheld, but it's definitely doable on a single set of batteries. So that's that myth busted. As for the game itself, I agree with you that there's definitely a fun game with a very addictive sense of constant progression hidden behind all the flaws. This is the only version of it I've ever played, but if the computer versions are indeed much faster paced, I'm willing to believe those are genuinely GOOD games. The addictive nature is what made me stick in there to the end. (Oh, and the ending sucks)
Years ago I played this on one of those "57 in 1" cartridges. Prepping myself for a rainy afternoon play through, I used the AC adapter only to have it overheat and turn off somewhere in hour 5 or 6. To hear that this game is impossible to beat doesn't surprise me at all.
You can't finish it with the Game Boy. After all the graves were closed It took half a day to kill a dragon that only had a slight collapse in its power. To complete the first Act, Act 2, you will encounter a large maze, which is only navigable. Playing on a computer requires screen captures to create the map. This allows the entire scene to play out efficiently.
Not an engineer or anything but if you keep something in an adapter for a looooong time it will heat up and can even destroy your stuff. Of course that's only experience with low quality drills but I wouldn't say it's impossible.
Doubtful. That Z80 is meant to run at full tilt as it's a game machine. More likely that the game slowly corrupts memory in some way over time and eventually freezes.
@@lft7917 Your probably correct. The map is 80x100 tiles. I haven't dug into the code but I believe the AI for any enemies that are significantly off screen is skipped, probably to save on CPU cycles, and it just wouldn't be fair to have enemies from the other side of the map chasing you down. Now the goal of the game is to slay a 3 headed Dragon, gather the 4 crowns back to your house. However once you destroy one head of the dragon the game takes a dramatic shift. Your house teleports back to its starting position, Enemies stop spawning from graves, and start spawning from the house. And I don't mean a little bit of enemies, I mean a LOT of enemies (possibly over 21), probably the whole map's worth, in one spot. Sprites will start to flicker due to sprite per scan line limitations, and I want to say there is a bit of slow down, but Ive never gotten that far on an actual Gameboy so I can't confirm that. I wouldn't doubt the average person would believe these issues are caused by the Gameboy Overheating. Something tells me there is a bug in the games logic if the AI loop takes too long to complete, which would happen if there are a ton of enemies in the area, and that only happens pretty far into the game, furthering the idea that its the Gameboy Overheating. A bug like this would probably never be noticed because I doubt any of the devs ever played it far enough to know it was an issue in the first place. Fun fact: Horielda worked on this port - Who is that? No idea. They put their name on the map though. The only reference to them I could find was that they were a director for Parasol Henbē for the Gameboy, a game that came out 3 months after this game. and was published (but not developed) by Epoch (The makers of this port) Fun Fact 2: Turcy Lupa did the music. Because Yep. Their name is on the map as well, this time with a music note next to it. They also worked on Parasol Henbē for the Gameboym and did the music for that game. EDIT: Rushing to get the map spell I found more names (made out of coins or other items the player or ghosts might pickup before they get the Map Spell) And it seems like more people who worked on Parasol Henbē, worked on this game. Yuji - Likely (Yuji Akagiri), Masato (Masato Hirai), and I think "シ台" who... I have no idea.
It's possible, and you can find videos here on YT of the game's (awful) ending. I personally have neither time nor inclination to try, though. Spending another half-dozen hours on this game wouldn't provide me with any deeper insights or make for a better video.
I can confidently say I have completed "Phase 1" of this game on a Gameboy (color). Its certainly possible to do it, but its the fact you need to do it in one sitting is the challenge.
Thankfully the game does give you a code to input at the title screen in order to skip to Phase 2. (Up, Down, Left, Right, A).
Interesting facts: The maps are huge. 80x100 tiles, and it is a spiral rather then cylindrical. - What I mean by this is if you start at the top left corner of the map (Coordinates 0,0) and hold right you might expect to eventually loop back to 0,0 but instead you'll loop back to 0,1. Keep holding right and eventually you will get to the bottom half of the map.
Another thing about the map: If you get enough experience you learn the map spell and with it you can see a couple of names spelled with blocks and coins. I am fairly certain these are the credits to the port since the port was done by Epoch Co. and the names match some names on other Epoch Co. games.
In Phase 1: Yuji (Yūji Akagiri?), ♪Turcy (Takashi Kutsukake?), Masato (??), "シ台" (I think thats what it says, its cramped and looks like they were running outa room), and "HORIEL'DA"? (Im guessing Masayuki Horie, who apparently got credited as "Horieruda" in 'Kiteretsu Daiyakka' on the NES.
In Phase 2: "Torajima" (Not sure if its Tora or Tera, Im thinking its Tōru Terashima who worked on Dragon Slayer Gaiden), and "JUN" ?
You’re mad, but I am grateful for your madness
And in case anybody asks about the music:
Antonín Dvorák: Slavonic dances/7, 1st theme op. 46/7
I know I've heard this one in other games, but hell if I could remember which.
THANK YOU. I was trying to place it the whole time the video played.
I love it. It's my favourite thing about the game. I could play for hours listening to that bleepy 8-bit melody.
Never in my life I thought I would hear "it's faster to shove your home to a cache of jewels". Lmao
Video games are just full o' surprises sometimes.
1. Collect the coins to the bottom of the start, as well as the powerstone to the upper-left of the safe area, then return to your house to power up.
2. From the cross below where you start, head one screen down and keep going right until you see a warp point, keep warping until you find the sword, then make your way back to the start (with a powerstone preferably).
3. Continue collecting nearby coins and powerstones until you can defeat successive enemies in one hit, but do not defeat the "head with top hat" enemies, as doing so will spawn a powerful enemy that hits hard and can drain your attack permanently.
4. After you find the key, which will probably have been taken to a random point on the map, try to unlock as many chests as you can before your key is stolen. Your priority should be to unlock the horizontal chests toward the bottom, as they prevent you from pushing your house below them.
5. Push your house to areas where chests have been unlocked. After you power up to a certain extent, as long as you haven't defeated the top hat enemies, all enemies will cease to pursue you, giving you the freedom to power up as much as you want.
6. When you have over 400,000 attack (about 500,000 is recommended), you will be able to kill the dragon heads (attack diagonally). Also try to have at least 50,000 EXP so you know the fly spell.
7. Some recommend encircling the dragon with crosses to prevent the crowns from being carried off after killing the dragon, but I find the process tedious, so I just use the fly spell to search for the four crowns, but note that you will have to bring them back one by one this way, so the choice is yours.
or just wall off every graveyard
Enemies taking strength? Got to love how much Wizardry effected RPG in Japan
They loved the crud out of Wizardry. It's way more annoying here than in something like Mystery Dungeon, though.
How come?
My god that box cover art is pure awesomeness 😳
I played the heck out of this game as a kid. I actually made it to phase 2 and recall you also gained abilities while levelling up such as spells (flight, flash etc) and the ability to take diagonal steps.
The music has been burnt into my brain for the last 25 years.
had this game on some 105-in-1 bootleg cartridge, never understood the game, but i will never forget the music.
In addition to Legacy of the Wizard, they also released Faxanadu for NES in the West prior to this, which was a spinoff from Dragon Slayer 2: Xanadu ("Famicom" + "Xanadu" = "Faxanadu"). Then the released Dragon Slayer 5: Sorcerian as just Sorcerian for MS-DOS computers in 1990. I will never understand why they released three Dragon Slayer games over here but never made any effort to connect them like they did with the Ys games. It's like they specifically didn't want the series to develop a following here or something.
Will Mistretta the TG 16 also got Dragon Slayer: Legend of heroes here in the states.
I still remember playing this game and the satisfying feeling after finally earning the "Fly" magic. Flying though out the land as a sparrow, seeing the blocks and house being passed by, accompanied by such a dreamy music, and imagining flying over a beautiful mountain range surrounded by a fantasy villages instead of this misbegotten game. This gave me such a blissful feeling back then.
I kind of can't help but to wonder if the overheating game boy was caused by using an incorrect ac adapter, over volting it, or just a crappy ac adapter in general. I used to use an ac adapter all the time as a kid and it never destroyed my gameboy.
I beat this in the 90s when I was a kid. Power running out on batteries after beating phase 1 taught me to be plugged into power the whole time. I don't remember how many tries it took. The first time my power got drained by a monster, I was shocked. Through trial and error, I found the trick to not take damage with movement patterns. Optimized a quick way to get the first sword. Pushed my home around the world. Trapped all the cloud looking item thieves as it spawned next to the slayed dragon with a wall of crosses so that it can't fly away with my hard earned crowns. What a horribly inaccessible game, yet so satisfying to figure out and finish.
I've always enjoyed the Dragon Slayer series for some reason. I go out of my way to collect them even though I can't read Japanese at all~
This one requires zero Japanese literacy... just lots of free time.
Every Jeremy Parish video is the best thing on youtube, pass it on.
Man i thought this game was just a fever dream. This is my first difficult game that I never manage to finish(because the game cartridge got broke) and I didn't know that the game had multiple stages. As a 7yr old kid I thought the game would only finish when all enemies are dead including after killing the dragon which is an endless Horde of enemies and the more you keep killing them they keep spawning stronger enemies to the point where 1 monster who has 99999 something stats that literally 1 shots you to oblivion. But man I have so many memories of this game and it was the first action RPG game that I ever played.
PS. Did no notice it was a strength ring as a kid I thought those were strength shrooms like Mario mushrooms.
Points for ending the video with a clip of Rush. Another Japanese GB title lost to time, and certainly something I don't feel bad that it was never ported. Interesting bit about the overheating Game Boy systems - it would be interesting to know if any Japanese GB players from days of yore experienced any of that.
Also, one last thing: the monsters you mentioned zapping your strength genuinely aren't a real issue: Only a few types of monsters (maybe only one) do this, and they're in high enough tiers you're never going to see them until you've long passed the strength level that lets you kill them in a single hit, which will replace them with a higher-tiered monster that drains HP again.
Since your attack strength is wholly unconnected to anything you gain from killing monsters, as long as you focus on gathering power stones and ignore unnecessary fighting, the game will never put you in any actual danger. Even the dragon can't hurt you unless you walk in front of it, which there is absolutely no point in doing.
There are 2 monsters that drain STR.
Only the first one is really is an issue because it has 300000 HP but only 9000 defense.
The other one, in a later tier, only has 47000 HP which you can OHKO most of the time.
Without this the Trails series wouldn't exist.
This seems like a textbook Game Genie game to me.
I had no idea there was a gameboy port to this since wikipedia only lists nihon falcom's original PC titles and localized ports. It sounds a lot more accessible to play than the remastered saturn version (since you can play it on a gba SP or gameboy player/ super gameboy. I'll have to give this a try someday.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Slayer_(video_game)
its on the right gameboy
it was made by another company im not surprised
I beat it. It requires less than 10 hours. It is pretty easy. Just requires a lot of grinding. It is very archaic, yet it is oddly addicting.
10 hours is a long time to look at a Game Boy screen, tho
@@JeremyParish maybe these day it is better to try it through emulation. So you can save midgame too
Jeremy, Dragon Slayer I DOES have an option to save progress. Every time you beat a level you're given a push button code that serves as a password for the next level.
Good god, there are levels!?
My comment was slightly hasty there, since I've been trying out the game myself here.
What I can tell you though, is this:
First off, the game does have levels. An entire two of them. Beating level 1 gives you the password for level 2 as I mentioned... sometimes. When I beat the level, it didn't give me one, but there are several videos and text guides that say it is supposed to, with pictures and all... so my guess is that you have to beat the level without dying to get it. Sounds harder than it is, when I beat it I just died once near the beginning.
The level (and most likely the game as a whole, but I didn't mess much around with level 2 yet) is relatively simple to beat, just rather tedious. A complete walkthrough is as simple as this:
1) Go to the closest warp and get the sword from the other side. Grab as many coins as you can on the way.
2) Return to your home grab the nearby ring, start pushing it around looking for power stones and the key. Deposit the stones as you find them.
3) Kill monsters that get in your way to grind your way to the Break spell, but avoid too much unnecessary combat, since you don't want high level monsters around
4) The key will probably be somewhere completely random due to the ghost, so once you find it hold on to it and travel around unlocking chests, particularly the huge treasure vaults.Use the map spell to help you. Try unlocking as many chests as you can before dropping the key again, otherwise the ghost can steal it. Pick up all the coins and potions first to clear space, then drag the home over and start depositing power stones.
5) Use the warp to enter the enclosed room and open all the chests, then warp each power stone out individually instead of breaking the wall and dragging the house in Once you are relatively strong, warp in and kill the respawning monsters until you reach 30000 exp and gain the diagonal walking/attacking ability then warp back out. Doing it like this will prevent the stronger monsters from leaving that enclosed room.
6) Once you've emptied all the major treasure rooms, use the Jump spell to hopefully warp to some area with a power stone, then use the Return spell to warp back to your house and deposit it. You don't need magic for much other than this, and you should have picked up over a hundred potions at this point, so this makes the last bit of strength grinding much much faster.
7) Once you are above 600000 strength, go to the dragon, destroy the blocks near its heads then attack the heads diagonally and it can't hurt you.
8) Once the crowns appear, walk (don't warp with Return) to the northmost part of the dungeon, then walk eastwards towards your starting location. The corridor directly northwest of your house is a good grinding spot since monsters will only come from the east here. Kill monsters until you reach 60000 exp and learn Fly.
9) Use Fly to quickly skim the entire dungeon for crowns. Once you find one, land, pick it up and walk to a warp zone and deposit it nearby those are nice landmarks.
10) Once you have all four crowns deposited in once place, pick all four up, walk towards your home, then drop all four when you get close and cast Flash. Finally, pick the crows up again and quickly enter the house.
It's not particularly difficult, but the game is slow and tedious and you need to deposit a ridiculous number of power stones one by one to get strong enough to defeat the dragon. It took me about two and a half hour to beat the level, and is probably doable in under two if you're familiar with the game, so even if you don't get the password, the entire game can presumably be beaten in a five hour sitting. The question is if you'd WANT to.
The idea of it being impossible seems to come from Hardcoregaming 101 mistakenly assuming the game had ten levels instead of just two.
Ok, I can confirm. If you beat level 1 without a single death, you get the password for level 2. If you die one or more times, you just continue on without a password. That's... unique.
Pikachu132 Good god, that's an atrocity.
Aaand I managed to beat the game. Level 2 was surprisingly different from level 1 to the point of feeling more like a rom hack or a spinoff: rather than more of the same mess of endless block arrangements, it's instead split into three disticnt areas: a maze you start of in and have to navigate largely itemless, a huge open plain full of enemies and items where you have to gather initial supplies and then retreat back to your house in the maze via warps, since you can't move the house out of the maze until you gain enough exp to get the Break spell, and finally a castle area of sorts that can only be reached via warps or the Fly spell due to a "moat" of warp panels. It's surprisingly inventive even though the maze is just dumb old trial and error and that impenetrable moat adding to the tedium since it means you can't move the house into the castle and instead have to warp back and forth on way too many endlessly long trips to get the power stones in the castle.
It took me about four hours to beat, which involved a fair bit of figuring out where I was supposed to go, and I also discovered the dragon is beatable with much lower strength than 600000 - even as little as 450000 should be enough, since he literally can't attack back in any way if you hit him with diagonal attacks, meaning level 1 can probably be completed in a bit over an hour (I also realized the ghost that steals the key near the starting position before you can get to it will always place it in the same place every game, despite the otherwise random nature of these things. Makes getting the key very easy, which means you can start seriously powering up right from the start of the level). Playing both levels in one sitting is incredibly tedious and probably not what Epoch intended, and it's going to require an atrociously long play session for a handheld, but it's definitely doable on a single set of batteries. So that's that myth busted.
As for the game itself, I agree with you that there's definitely a fun game with a very addictive sense of constant progression hidden behind all the flaws. This is the only version of it I've ever played, but if the computer versions are indeed much faster paced, I'm willing to believe those are genuinely GOOD games. The addictive nature is what made me stick in there to the end.
(Oh, and the ending sucks)
This game got me into Dvořák
This game looks like my idea of hell.
Years ago I played this on one of those "57 in 1" cartridges. Prepping myself for a rainy afternoon play through, I used the AC adapter only to have it overheat and turn off somewhere in hour 5 or 6. To hear that this game is impossible to beat doesn't surprise me at all.
Would this also overheat a Super Game boy in a SNES I wonder?
Not even possible.
Nihon Falcom seems to have a thing for item-based exploration.
I found this game difficult when I was a kid.
Another fantstic, interesting and humerous video, easily one of the best videogame channels on TH-cam, thanks Mr. Parish. :)
You can't finish it with the Game Boy.
After all the graves were closed It took half a day to kill a dragon that only had a slight collapse in its power.
To complete the first Act, Act 2, you will encounter a large maze, which is only navigable. Playing on a computer requires screen captures to create the map.
This allows the entire scene to play out efficiently.
Love anytime get to hear RUSH!!!!!
Can you complete it on the Gamecube’s Gameboy player?
I wonder how a "modern" version of a game like this would do nowadays
Hmmmmmm
Have you considered: Tokyo Xanadu or Trails of Cold Steel
I will say though that Nihon Falcom is my all time favorite developer. Their Legend of Heroes series is my top all time favorite RPG franchise.
They need to remake dragon slayer 4.
another great episode!
Dragon slayer should have been released in the USA in the first place. 😀👍🎮
will this shit destroy my computer if i try to beat it on an emulator?
Only if you forget to turn off the Turbo button on your 386 when it starts to get warm.
"Overheated their GameBoy"?
...how?
Not an engineer or anything but if you keep something in an adapter for a looooong time it will heat up and can even destroy your stuff. Of course that's only experience with low quality drills but I wouldn't say it's impossible.
TheApachacha
I doubt the GameBoy draws enough current for this to be a problem
Skawo
I dunno. Especially with old electronics, I have no idea.
Doubtful. That Z80 is meant to run at full tilt as it's a game machine. More likely that the game slowly corrupts memory in some way over time and eventually freezes.
@@lft7917 Your probably correct.
The map is 80x100 tiles. I haven't dug into the code but I believe the AI for any enemies that are significantly off screen is skipped, probably to save on CPU cycles, and it just wouldn't be fair to have enemies from the other side of the map chasing you down.
Now the goal of the game is to slay a 3 headed Dragon, gather the 4 crowns back to your house. However once you destroy one head of the dragon the game takes a dramatic shift. Your house teleports back to its starting position, Enemies stop spawning from graves, and start spawning from the house.
And I don't mean a little bit of enemies, I mean a LOT of enemies (possibly over 21), probably the whole map's worth, in one spot. Sprites will start to flicker due to sprite per scan line limitations, and I want to say there is a bit of slow down, but Ive never gotten that far on an actual Gameboy so I can't confirm that. I wouldn't doubt the average person would believe these issues are caused by the Gameboy Overheating.
Something tells me there is a bug in the games logic if the AI loop takes too long to complete, which would happen if there are a ton of enemies in the area, and that only happens pretty far into the game, furthering the idea that its the Gameboy Overheating. A bug like this would probably never be noticed because I doubt any of the devs ever played it far enough to know it was an issue in the first place.
Fun fact: Horielda worked on this port - Who is that? No idea. They put their name on the map though. The only reference to them I could find was that they were a director for Parasol Henbē for the Gameboy, a game that came out 3 months after this game. and was published (but not developed) by Epoch (The makers of this port)
Fun Fact 2: Turcy Lupa did the music. Because Yep. Their name is on the map as well, this time with a music note next to it.
They also worked on Parasol Henbē for the Gameboym and did the music for that game.
EDIT: Rushing to get the map spell I found more names (made out of coins or other items the player or ghosts might pickup before they get the Map Spell)
And it seems like more people who worked on Parasol Henbē, worked on this game.
Yuji - Likely (Yuji Akagiri), Masato (Masato Hirai), and I think "シ台" who... I have no idea.
can you wait for the batteries to get low, plug it in, and swap for new batteries then un plug it?
Over heating Gameboys???? That's a unique "game feature" :D :D :D
Love this game
Dragon Slayer? More like Game Boy Slayer.
…I’ll see myself out.
i beat it on the pc-8801, real hardware. i wouldn't want to do it again.
Great job but there are passwords in the game you just need to beat a phase and then you well get one
"forgettable portable mess" for sure not!
I hated legacy of the wizard never understood what the point of that game was
I love rush.
Best game ever!
Can you at least beat this game in an emulator?
It's possible, and you can find videos here on YT of the game's (awful) ending. I personally have neither time nor inclination to try, though. Spending another half-dozen hours on this game wouldn't provide me with any deeper insights or make for a better video.
Jeremy Parish Trust me, I wasn't asking you specifically to do it; just wondering if the universal 'you' could do it.
Right then - here is a video of a dude doing the deed: th-cam.com/video/cjP9pZEGPUI/w-d-xo.html
Awesome, thanks, Jeremy.