Alisia Dragoon. A game that makes me nostalgic for a time I never had. Let's jump right in.
Ah yes, the good old days. I'm a bit disappointed that there isn't a blaring S E G A right at the front screen, but the animated shine is a nice touch.
The logo fades out onto a scrolling background reminiscent of Mayan mythology. The music has a nice folksy tone to it, but also has that characteristic genesis grunge mixed in. The background seems somewhat important and impossible to read properly... until it reaches this.
I'm guessing there's an epic story somewhere in here referencing characters and stories in the game. There's a lot of polish in the title screen alone; this should be fun!
I haven't played a Genesis game in quite awhile, but I know two things about these games: we can take a look at the controls and difficulty is probably hidden in the options. There's an entire discussion to be had about asking players to pick a difficulty right at the start of a game, but luckily we don't have to make that choice in older games; it's already been set at a default for us.
Normal and Hard is a bit unusual for difficulty. If the game has a difficulty setting, you can usually pick easy. Most difficulty modes are just the number of starting lives or maximum health anyhow, so we'll leave this alone. I'm much more interested in the controls - monster select, thunder, jump. All of the other control types have jump not on the C button, which is a bit disappointing, but the default looks fine anyhow.
Enough plot contrivances, let me get to the game!
Wait, what was that? There was some kind of bouncy sound effect and a bunch of sparkles and something? I had to restart the game and get a proper screenshot just to see what went on; the animation happened in less than a second
Alisia, of course! I didn't know she could fly. I'm impressed... by the amount of speed she can put out, of course. Not the legs showing all the way up to the hips or size of the bust or anything, I swear!
We don't have full control over the character to begin with. Notice the demo marker; that only appears when the player is trying to take control during a cutscene. Instead of getting right into the gameplay we watch Alisia walk in from the side of a large structure that resembles a castle. There's a nice sunny day in the background and the music positively drips with adventure.
I like the idea of setting up the scene by bringing me in from the outside world into this fantasy land. It has the feeling of being transported into an unfamiliar land, brimming with danger and excitement. The cutscene goes on for just long enough that I drop my guard and...
Ah, I see a problem. You can't see the problem or the character at all in this screenshot because the character is flashing on and off rapidly to represent an invincibility window. I've never really liked this technique because of the kind of headaches I can get from watching them for too long, but just taking a bit of damage should be fine.
Thunder is something I'm a bit more worried about. The whole attack alternates between multiple sprites with the same kind of alternating flashing missing frames that invincibility causes. I'm sure it looked better on CRT TVs, but it's one of those things that hasn't aged well. We have a lot more awareness about what flashing lights can do to people nowadays.
On the UI there is a bar that charges over time. It decharges fairly slowly while in use, recharges quickly up to the yellow mark, and slowly after that. When it's full and you push the thunder button...
A huge swathe of thunder moves in two arcs from front to back and front again. It's flashing like the other thunder attack, but isn't so bad. In fact nothing of these flashing attacks really bother me, so I should be fine playing this game for a few hours. Let's move on...
Almost forgot about the monster select button.
Thunder homes in on enemies. These green creatures come flying out of the side of the screen in groups of 10 and thunder takes them all out in a second. Running and instantly zapping everything that can possibly come your way is definitely the best part of the game. You're going to be spending a lot of time doing this, so it's best that the core gameplay is the best part.
Alisia's dragon buddy seems to change color as they get damaged. That's a good way of showing the player that they need to take care of their pet without relying entirely on the UI.
On my first playthrough I got to this point and promptly lost. It's not that far into the level so I'm not too torn about that. Besides, these kinds of games have a life system so I can just start up from the beginning again and...
Oh.
That's pretty brutal. Very few games will take an arcade style game and end it immediately on the first loss. I can't say I'm happy with that idea. It smells... off. There aren't any good reasons to be this punishing in a game that you have confidence in.
There are only a few reasons I can think of to do this:
1. Artistic vision
2. Lack of development time to implement systems
3. Artificial difficulty enhancement
4. Artificial extension of game time
There are some other problems later on in the game that will make the answer to this oddity more clear. For now, take it as a sign of what's to come.
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