Arcade Archives CASTLE OF DRAGON
Switch eShop (Arcade emulated)
Athena
1989 2025
Sometimes you gotta play a little jank to be reminded of what a decent arcade game looks like. And damn is this one janky. Castle of Dragon was released in 1989 by Athena. No, Athena didn't make Athena -- that was SNK. This Athena was also responsible for the Dezaemon series (a "shmup maker" series, basically) plus an absolute assload of riichi mahjong games. Castle of Dragon has a simple premise. A knight must travel through six stages to rescue a princess from (you're not gonna believe this) a dragon. For some reason the princess looks like a lemming on the world map. Not a realistic lemming. A lemming from Lemmings.
Gameplay is fairly traditional, the game's a side-scrolling action title, though there are two main stage types. There are traditional platforming stages, plus those with two "planes" to travel upon with the ability to swap from one to another (think Guardian Heroes or Code of Princess though Castle of Dragon is MUCH simpler). The game begins with a "planes" stage, which just feels wrong. Each environment only takes a few minutes to traverse, and with unlimited respawn continues here in the Archives the entire thing can be wrapped up in under 20 minutes.
The difficulty (ignoring credit-feeding for a moment) is actually pretty high, due to the absolute deluge of enemies and instant death traps. There are additionally far too many power-ups (weapons will be swapped out constantly); the entire game feels too cluttered for its own good. Some of these stages are pretty sloppily designed, and the lack of enemy variety is appalling. Stage two has the knight beating up on the same anime warrior girls over and over. There is a lifebar, and I appreciate the visual degradation of armor as the hero is injured. It is odd how he transforms from a knight into some Conan guy though. Usually you'd see one hero archetype or another.
Speaking of laziness, some stages end with bosses and others just... end. Bosses are very large and in the traditional stages their attacks are nigh unavoidable. The final boss (the oddly thicc dragon) is an absolute slog. Controls for attacking and jumping are fine, but ducking is mapped to the A button (as up and down switch planes) and is thus incredibly awkward in the heat of battle. You also can't do anything while ducking -- jumping or attacking will cancel the duck and activate those moves instead. Just an awful design flaw, especially with such a large character sprite.
Backgrounds are pretty damn cool, especially the graveyard and vertically scrolling cavern. Also, I love the brief cut scenes, even if the princess has a giant head. The music is terrible. It's supposed to be some heavy metal guitar stuff but it's super cheesy, compressed up the ass, and drowned out by the incessant sound effects. Now, this Arcade Archives version of the game is sadly censored. I don't know if that's because a specific regional variant was used, or if Hamster made the alterations themselves. In any event, other versions of the game have a topless Medusa and a photograph of the developers presented upon completion -- with one of them flipping the bird!! Shame to miss out on this.
Not a great game but unironically worth playing once.
Rating: 2.5/5
Reviewed: 02/09/26