Take To The Skies! - Playing Dragon Spirit on TurboGrafx-16 for the First Time

The latest game in my TurboGrafx journey is Dragon Spirit, a shmup where you pilot a fire-breathing dragon instead of a spaceship! 

Dragon Spirit was released in December 1989, during the TurboGrafx's first year in the U.S., and is a port of the arcade game of the same name.

While the overall essence of the game is extremely similar, the arcade is a lot harder and throws different enemy types at you much earlier than the TurboGrafx-16 version.

In general, Dragon Spirit plays similarly to Xevious, where you have both airborne enemies and ground-based enemies that you have to watch out for, and you can only destroy with the corresponding type of attack.

You pick up various power-ups as you defeat enemies and bomb egg-shaped ground targets, which can grant you additional firepower, and even add an extra head (or two) to increase the overall number of projectiles your dragon can fire at one time.

As you progress, you also start to run into stage-based hazards, like in the second stage where lava erupts into the air from volcanos on the ground, and will hurt (or even kill) your dragon if it comes into contact with it.

You can see some gameplay of my first few runs in Dragon Spirit in the YouTube video below:

Overall, I'm not the biggest fan of shmups, but I did really like Xevious back in the day, and what's not to love about playing as a kick-ass dragon?

While the console version is much easier than the arcade, it's still pretty difficult, and thus far I haven't even made it past the second stage.

If you want to see some of my gameplay from the arcade version, you can check out the YouTube video below:

If I had owned this back in the day, I'm sure I would have pulled it out from time to time and tried to see how far I could get, but I also think I would have given up pretty quickly, since these kinds of games aren't really my thing.

Seems like a good game in its own right, however.

The next game in my TurboGrafx journey is:

I've played the Sega Master System version before, but I've never gotten to play the TurboGrafx version. I'm interested to see how it compares, and I'll be sure to capture gameplay of both versions for comparison.

Until next time Turbo Troops!