The Secret Shame of Dragon Power
Mar. 29
J.C. Fletcher at Engadget's Wii Fanboy has written up a ragingly awesome look at the old NES title Dragon Power. It's actually based on Akira Toriyama's now-ubiquitous Dragonball franchise. At the time, Bandai decided it was the adventures of Goku and Nora on a trip to find Crystalballs.
Bandai's effort to de-Japanify the game backfired spectacularly. Dragon Power makes absolutely no sense in its current form. At least had it been a Dragon Ball game it would have had a chance of a story, even if it was a story from some unknown Japanese comic. As it is, the dialogue, locations, objectives, and even items... are totally inscrutable most of the time.
This is must-read stuff because the practice of localizing games based on licenses by removing the license was surprisingly common back in the day. Did you play U.N. Squadron for the SNES? Actually an Area 88 game. The TG-16 pack-in title, Keith Courage in Alpha Zones? Based on Sunrise's crazy kids show Majin Eiyuuden Wataru. That's just off the top of my head; I'm sure there's more.
Comments
Wasn't there some kind of Fighbird game that got imported as Firebird?
That seems to just be a patched ROM. Emphasis on seems.
Wow, thanks for the writeup! If my article was a game, "ragingly awesome" would go on the back of the box.
Strangely enough, I wrote about Keith Courage recently as well. Something about anime games with the licenses excised makes them more interesting than normal licensed games. I guess I prefer games that make NO sense at all to games that try and fail to have narratives!
You already did Keith Courage? Sweet. I'll have to go dig it up!
I just can't get over how they opted to use a scrubbed license game for the TG-16's pack-in, when pack-ins were such a big deal for selling a system.
I mean I can sort of understand trying to cash in with a decent game that happens to be licensed, but there had to be a dozens of better candidates to stake the success of a new system on.
I can't link to it in this comment, but clicking on the "Virtually Overlooked" category tag should get you there.
It baffles me that Keith Courage was the pack-in when there was so much amazing stuff out at the same time, like Blazing Lazers. Pac-Land came out around launch, too.
If Blazing Lazers had been the TG-16 pack-in, then I'm pretty sure we'd both be blogging about the TG-256 for a living.
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