test: Dragon Saber

~ DRAGON SABER ~

Namco

HuCard

1991

This is a heck of a lot better than Dragon Spirit. I had my doubts when I first powered the game up, as I felt a disturbing sense of deja vu due to the visual style (the animation, specifically); but, before long, this title proved it has much more going for it in virtually every area than its overrated forerunner. While Saber's animation is indeed similar to Spirit's, the graphics on the whole are much improved here. Stage 4's flower patches work because they look good, a concept unheard of in Spirit. Stage 6's tight ice caverns are reminiscent of Spirit Stage 5's laughably basic and ugly rock mess, but much nicer to look at (not to mention that the action is more engaging, and the level design, more interesting).

You can tell that far more effort went into boss design this time around; in fact, there are many more "big and cool" baddies here in general, and you get a number of new attack types to destroy them with.

And the soundtrack, with some particularly cool tunes late in the affair, is far more assertive and attention-grabbing than Spirit's (which some dub "legendary" but I've always considered less than stellar).

So yeah, Saber is paradise compared to Spirit, and a pretty good shooter in its own right, but I wouldn't quite rank it among the Duo's elite verticals. After all, you can't have a DS review without mentioning the stupidly huge hitbox. I mean, you play enough shooters and you develop a feel for where your ship/creature/whatever is in relation to everything else, and then the DS beasts come along with their enormous wingspans and toss that feeling out the window. And the journey is too stretched out at nine levels, as some strips and bosses end up throwaways. The game's mechanics simply aren't suitable for Stage 5's "speed run," which feels like a sloppy mess.