Capcom brought us Megaman, Street Fighter, and Resident Evil; all really good games in their own right. If there was anything else I did remember Capcom for, it was for bringing us side-scrolling brawlers that you and your friends could play together, such as Final Fight and Knights of the Round. One of these brawlers other than the latter is a medieval fantasy-themed game called The King of Dragons.
In The King of Dragons, the Red Dragon, Glidiss, causes terror over the kingdom, and you and up to two others play as any of five brave people: the Elf, the Dwarf, the Fighter, the Wizard, and the Cleric. As you go through each stage, you fight monsters and bosses for experience points. You also collect gold and precious stones for experience points, food for health, and magic crystals for special attacks. As you collect experience points, you will level up and increase in health, but there are also weapon upgrades in many of the stages for you to collect that boost your attack, defense and/or magic power.
Each player has their own special traits and means of attack: the Fighter's high attack and low magic, the Cleric's high defense, quick level-ups and low jump, the Elf's high speed and low attack, the Dwarf's high jump and high attack speed, and the Wizard's low starting power and high ending power.
The controls and mechanics are very simple in the game. You have one jump button and one attack button. Each player also has an extra joy attack to get them out of a tight spot, but it saps their health with each use by hitting both of them together. The joystick allows for you to move eight ways on the field similar to Final Fight or Knights of the Round. Unlike some of the other brawlers, however, there is no means by where you gauge the enemy's health unless they are a boss. There are no combo moves to be executed or special tactics to use either, thus making this game a quick pick-up.
The music of the game does nothing less to hype up the setting. For many stages, the music is well structured to accommodate a fast-paced adventure or an oncoming disaster. Even though the game is not as deep in its mechanics as many others, the music reassures that you are going to have to work fast and work as a team to get to the next goal.
The Super Nintendo version that I remember is a very faithful port of the arcade. The sprites were reduced significantly and there is only room for up to two players per the limitations of hardware on the SNES. The music sounds a bit more realistic than what the CPS1 is capable of, but that is all to be expected since the SNES was relatively newer. The one thing that I could not put up with, however, is that there is a certain amount of continues available to you as you play the game. All in all, if you cannot find the arcade version, the SNES version does pretty well not unlike the ports of Street Fighter II.
The King of Dragons is an otherwise underrated game. Not only is it an easy pick-up, but this game is one of Capcom's good examples of a team brawl game. The RPG elements keep it from being boring like any of the other ones.
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