Dragon’s Lair is a 1983 arcade game by RDI Video Systems. Its most well known for featuring animation by Don Bluth of An American Tale and The Land Beford Time. Gameplay involved hitting the correct buttons to match what was happening on screen, basically what we call quick time events. The interactive animated feature film look really stood out compared to other arcade games of the time. But what do you do with the game when trying to put it onto platforms that don’t support that kind of video?

The simple answer is, you don’t. Today, I’m looking at Dragon’s Lair for the Super Nintendo, a game that does not resemble the arcade game at all. Sure, it follows the same plot. You play as knight Dirk the Daring on his quest to save Princess Daphne from the titular Dragon’s Lair. But this isn’t an interactive cartoon at all. Instead, it’s a pretty basic platformer.

The game seems to take most of its inspiration from the classic Castlevania series. Just like those, you move across a stage, jumping over hazards and slaying monsters. You have a primary weapon, a sword, but also a secondary one that can change from different pickups you can collect. Those come from things in the environment that you hit, much like the candles in Castlevania.

Unfortunately, that’s where the comparisons really end though. While Castlevania is a famously challenging game, Dragon’s Lair is borderline impossible. Dirk is extremely slippery to control, often sliding directly into instant death long after you’ve let go of the D-pad. His jump is unruly, often causing Dirk to hurl himself straight off cliffs. And the enemy placement is often brutally unfair. In my play session, I game over’d several times, but never got past the second level. I eventually had the first level down to a science, but I can’t imagine having the patience to do that for the whole game.

On the plus side, the game does look pretty good. If this was a movie tie in video game for a movie, I think most people would agree that Don Bluth’s distinctive style comes through in the characters really well. It’s a little weird because it’s an adaptation of an arcade game that looks like a movie, but realistically, I think the models look as good as they could.

This is kind of a shorter post, but overall, I don’t really care for the Super Nintendo version of Dragon’s Lair. There was never any possibility of making a straight port work on the SNES, which makes me wonder why they even bothered with this. I would say that it was just for brand recognition, but even if they were to use an original IP, this simply isn’t a good game and is not worth anyone’s time.