Saturday 15 March 2014

The King of Dragons Revisited - Completed with Fighter.


Been a little busy lately, looking for a new job and moving in to a new apartment but decided to take a little break during the past few nights to go back to playing a bit of The King of Dragons on the Super Famicom.

Was a bit more lucky this time playing through, somehow managed to find all three hidden Yashichi continues and it was enough to help me complete the game. Although I had read there were continues hidden in the game, I wasn't sure where they were or even how many there were so I was quite lucky.

One of them was hidden on I think stage 6 behind the pillar (at the beginning of the stairs section IIRC), and the other two were hidden at the bottom of the screen where you have to fight mummy monsters.

Have included a few images of the ending screen:






Also since I completed the SFC version, I decided to check out the arcade version via MAME to check out some of the differences between versions.

I think the most obvious difference would be that the game looks better, and I thought was a little more difficult compared to the SFC version.

When you pick up items the game shows you the points value of items, and when you hit the arrows/spears that are thrown at you it also shows you the points value.

There's also a thief, that's not in the SFC version, that sometimes pops out trying to steal your treasure. (This reminded me of Dragon's Crown a lot.) If you hit him he drops a gold pouch with a question mark on it.

The Black Knight boss also has two dragons on each side of the screen which shoot fire at you.

There were probably a few other differences but I can't think of them at the moment.

Anyways, managed to complete this version also. (Considering you can pump an infinite amount of credits into MAME, it wasn't such a great achievement.)




Overall, have enjoyed playing this game and would recommend it to anyone. I think if you are going to play both versions it's probably better to play the SFC version first as although it's a decent port there are still a few things missing. I could probably appreciate the arcade version a lot more as it felt more like a 1.5 version of the game lol.

Will probably continue playing it to see how far I can get with some of the other characters, may do another write up in the future with my progress.

Edit: Just went back and played the SFC version again and removed some of the differences that I made a mistake about. Also found out the continue Yashichi seems to have some kind of requirement, couldn't get it this time around. 

4 comments:

  1. Good going, I have also taken into "revisiting" some of the old classics that I own, and it's a pretty heart breaking experience (like, I needed to practice a few days to get "half as good" as I was when a kid). I haven't ever cleared this one without continuing, but I'm getting inspired to try it out due to the game being a topic; it's gonna take a lot of practice, hahaha.

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  2. I know what you mean about going back to classics, I recently tried playing Super Mario World again and I'm really rusty at it now. Was able to fully complete it when I was a kid but kinda struggled to even go through the game normally now lol.

    Don't think I'd ever get to the point of doing a 1CC on King of Dragons xD

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  3. I had a pretty big shock with Megaman X. I was soo good at the game, that I could clear it with no danger or pressure at all while speaking through the phone at the same time (100% distracted and not even directly looking at the screen; after all the game is among the easiers plataformers on the SNES).

    The other day I popped it up, and I got a game over on the freaking 1st boss penguin ∑(゚Д゚) It took me a week round of practice to recover my pride and clear it easily. The same thing happened with X2.... And I was never good at X3.

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  4. lol funnily enough I bought X3 recently, I always feel like that now that I'm an adult I might get on better with Megaman games. (I was NEVER good at them)

    But it seems nothing has changed, I still suck at them and just sold it on eBay instead lmao.

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