Dragon Buster

Arcade original mazy 2D hack & slash platformer. There are eight worlds, many of which have different paths with alternative levels. It's not possible to explore every level even on two separate plays. The game gets very repetitive after a while, same monsters, tilesets and even maze designs are repeating, with different placing of items. Big thanks to creator of maps found at Eggerland, saved me lots of time having to explore everything myself. I tried to go through most rewarding routes to get lots of items, but didn't take many long detours, sometimes skipping most of large levels.

I'm not sure about all items. Some grant active abilities (magic / spells) such as fireball attack, immunity to damage or destroying every monster on screen. One special skips a dungeon, but didn't use that. Rest of the items might give some passive abilities, but IRDK about that. There's also some kind of experience system, but not sure about how that works either. Extra damage, resistance to damage and health do accumulate along the way.

Besides being repetitive it's not a bad game, but controls are not that good. Hitboxes seem too large causing often unnecessary damage. It's possible to take damage before having time to react when changing screens, because screen doesn't scroll and spawn points are not fixed properly. Real bummer for example when climbing a rope up and then falling down after spawning into occupied space with an enemy at next screen. Climbing is super hard and catching a rope requires pixel perfect accuracy. It's nearly impossible to catch a rope when jumping towards it and even from ground it's very hard to get "on track". Some higher platforms can be reached with double jumps, but timing doing that is equally frustrating to get right. Only with savestates it's possible to show how game mechanics should work if the game was done properly.