Dragon Saber (TurboGrafx-16) review "Take an average shooter and just add dragons!"

While Dragon Saber is a fun game, it was impossible for me to avoid strong feelings of deja vu while playing through its nine stages of vertically-scrolling shooting action. Nothing against Namco, but that’s the sort of thing that happens when you put your game in a fantasy setting, but still manage to load it up with so many of the same things a person can see in so many other shooters.

The final stage takes place in the sort of high-tech base setting that’s a common location to fly through in the average sci-fi shooter. A bit earlier, you’ll travel through a red-hued stage based on the “intestinal” levels found in games such as Salamander. As a person who’s regularly griped about how nearly every shooter has a large snake-like creature serving as a boss, I was less than pleased to see that this game has two of those.

All in all, I figured I better get my review of Dragon Saber written shortly after completing it, as waiting too long would put me in a position where I’d struggle to remember much more than the basics simply because so much of this game is pretty interchangeable with any number of other shooters I’ve played — whether released before, after or in the same time period as this PC Engine port of a 1990 arcade game.

Designed as a sequel to Dragon Spirit, you’ll control a dragon as it flies through a variety of levels. This is one of those games that has both air and ground targets, with you using one button to shoot flying monsters and another to bomb stuff on the ground. In a nice touch, both forms of attack are automatically set to auto-fire, so you just have to hold down on both buttons to flood the screen with your projectiles. However, by not constantly firing, your primary attack will charge, so it can be quite handy to not simply hold both buttons down, as the additional power a charged shot provides can often be useful. After all, while there are plenty of foes that can be killed with one shot, they aren’t all that easy to dispatch!

Since you’re a dragon, your default weapon is fire. By collecting power-ups, you can cause your dragon to grow additional heads to double and even triple that attack. Or you can pick up different power-ups to change your weapon into something else, such as a wave attack or electrical beams.

Overall, this is a pretty accessible shooter because you have a life meter. And I’m not talking about the kind where you can take multiple hits, but only have one life per credit. You’ll have the usual allotment of lives, with each able to withstand a couple hits before perishing on the third. Anyone who’s played a lot of shooters knows that many tough levels throughout the genre would become a fair bit easier if you didn’t immediately die the instant a stray bullet clipped your wings, forcing you to continue with a vessel stripped of all the power you painstakingly worked to obtain via collecting all sorts of upgrades.

Here, you’ll lose one life bar and, assuming you’ve collected some number of power-ups, some of those. That three-headed dragon now will have two and if you’ve improved your weaponry, it will fall a bit closer to its weak default status. But, unless it was your dragon’s last hit, you won’t be sent back to a checkpoint, so you’ll still have a chance to regain what you lost while continuing to make progress.

And when Dragon Saber wasn’t reminding me of other shooters with its locales and enemies, it was providing me a number of enjoyable challenges. I really dug the large spider that was the boss of the third level, as well as the fourth stage’s evil tree and the demonic foe that closed out the final level. After the first two stages took place in wide-open settings, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that several others placed your dragon in confined and claustrophobic locations with tight corridors and moving walls conspiring with the enemies to thwart your quest.

The sixth level might have been the best of that bunch, placing you in a corridor bracketed by lethal-to-touch icicles. That occasionally move back-and-forth to make your journey more hazardous, while bat-like foes hide behind them, swooping out when you get close to their locations. After all, just because a shooter is more accessible than most doesn’t mean it has to be easy.

Overall, Dragon Saber was a fun game that provided a lot of good action without ever getting frustrating, at least beyond such annoyances such as picking up a power-up I didn’t want due to being in a confined area. It isn’t exactly the most original shooter out there, as it manages to toss in a number of settings and foes that are in the lion’s share of these games, even if they don’t naturally fit into its fantasy world theme. Still, I had a good time blasting through it and felt it was a game worth playing, even if it doesn’t provide the sort of memorable jaunt that the best shooters deliver.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (February 21, 2025) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.