Review - Dragon Unit is a side-scrolling action-platformer made by Athena that came out first in the arcades in 1989 and then it was converted to the Famicom in 1990.

The game was brought to the west by Seta under the name Castle of Dragon . Having played through the original coin-op, I can confirm there are some significant differences between that version and this home port. As a matter of fact, the Famicom version feels like an entire different game with obviously inferior audio-visuals but better gameplay.

Anyway, Dragon Unit is a pretty challenging fantasy action game with a standard plot. Some evil dragon has abducted the princess and you (in the role of a brave knight) will have to undertake a perilous quest to free her (after all, it was her turn to wash the dishes at home hehe).

Initially armed with a simple sword, you'll have to go through 7 different areas to get to your beloved and bring her back home. When I played the game for the first time, I thought it was horribly difficult. Be it because of the small health bar or for the underpowered sword, I got my armoured ass kicked several times.

Interestingly though, after I played a few games, I realized that my experience points, my health bar and the weapons collected in previous games were still available in new games.

So basically, even if you only have one life to complete the quest (and if you lose it, it's game over), you luckily keep the status of your last game played. Of course, if you switch the console off, the game resets to the original settings. This makes the challenge much more accessible and is actually a pretty cool concept (that was also used for the famicom-exclusive sequel Sword Master).

The difficulty of Dragon Unit is compensated by this intelligent mechanism and pushes the player to play several games one after the other in an attempt to complete the quest.

Personally, I played the game for 3 straight evenings and I was finally able to defeat the very hard last boss only with a LOT of determination. In all honesty, it can become really frustrating to go through all the levels and do great just to be instantly wiped out by the last boss. But going through the entire game from stage 1 isn't that bad when you start with a maxed-out health bar and the mace (the most powerful weapon in the game).

Luckily, Dragon Unit is such an addictive game that it won't be much of an annoyance to play the game many times. Levels are varied, and very well structured. Sure there are a couple of very unforgiving platforming sections but once you understand how to pass them, they won't pose much of a problem. The visuals are overall pretty decent. Levels all have a distinctive look and feel while enemies are fairly varied. There is some flickering and slowdown when too many things happen at once but this doesn't really get too much in the way.

The music and sound effects are appropriate although they don't really stand out.

To conclude, Dragon unit is a tight action-platformer, challenging but addictive with classic old school gameplay. If you are a fan of the genre, this game will certainly serve you well!

Bottom line: Completely different than its arcade's counterpart, yet more addictive and an overall better game. 8/10