This game has a certain charm to it and it brings back fond memories for me as I played and won this one in my younger years. I remember it being a fairly easy game and I also remember it being short and thus when I played it recently it was both of those things! There are a couple of stages that are difficult; usually, these stages consisted of you working your way upward and being constantly on the lookout for fire spewing demons that were built into the walls and could not be killed. Most of the bosses though were a breeze and the game was short. Very short. Let me rephrase that...very very very short. I won this thing in less than an hour! So it does play like a lot of Genesis games in that it is very arcade like, my guess is that this game was an arcade game first.
The story has a man who fights with magic trying to rescue the damsel in distress and defeat a man who is trying to revive a demon. Why do people always want to do that? The magician named Joe must use all his arcane magical skills to fight back the hordes of demons and monks and crazed lunatics in his quest to defeat the one trying to revive the demon or whatever it is. It may have just been another dark warrior or something, but that last thing looked more like something out of the Splatterhouse series of games.
The game play is okay, but it is annoying at times. Joe's attack consists of a very slow charging weapon, a fire attack that is even slower and a spread weapon that is slow and cannot really be aimed. He also has a groovy dragon attack that is awesome, but can only be used when you find the icon. The game is like most early Sega games, nice graphics that look superior to the Nintendo, but also simplistic. You can tell what everything is, but just not all that much detail. The music has that Genesis sound, but it really only has a couple of catchy tunes within. If they made it longer and gave the guy a mystic sword attack that was actually fast the game would have been better.
So in the end, a standard Genesis game. If one has played a lot of Genesis games during the years then they have most likely played a game that is very much like this. The Genesis was a good system, when the right company made games for the system as Konami was fantastic at designing games for the system (Contra Hard Corps, Castlevania Bloodlines), whoever did this game did all right. They did not use the music to the fullest and they needed to add a bit more to the backgrounds as there are a lot of bland areas in this one. Overall, it is okay if you are in the mood for an arcade type game. This review is a bit special for me for another reason as it is number 2000! I kind of like the fact that my 2000th review is going to end up being a review for an obscure game for a long defunct system...that is how I roll!
