Video game release dates are unfortunately spotty in the 80s and early 90s. The markets were fragmented and the industry wasn’t taken seriously enough at the time for accurate bookkeeping. After all, video games are just sophisticated toys, right?
Well, with a vague release date of March 1992, today might well be the 34th anniversary of our next Mini-Gaming feature: Alisia Dragoon. I was originally going to make a joke about how the year is 199X and all of the good Genesis games at Blockbuster have been rented out. All that’s left is this oddball-looking game about a magical Amazon-looking woman… ok sure I guess I’ll take it out. But when I saw that release window I couldn’t help but notice the coincidence.
Alisia Dragoon is a hard game to classify. It’s a one-off Genesis exclusive that combines platforming, shooting, and light RPG elements with an original setting and story. You control Alisia herself through eight stages of action, shooting your way through enemies and defeating bosses of ancient, futuristic, magical, and alien origin. Alisia shoots auto-targeting lightning from her hands, governed by a power meter that runs down as she shoots. When not shooting, the meter replenishes, with stronger attacks reserved for the very top of the meter. This establishes a cadence of shooting and waiting to allow your attack to be strong enough to be effective.
But Alisia is not alone. By her side is one of four miniature dragons, or dragoons I suppose. Each one can be called upon at will and offer their own auto-attacks along with Alisia’s. One shoots straight fireballs, one shoots boomerangs, and one unleashes a screen-clearing bomb at regular intervals. The last is more of a sprite than a dragon and doesn’t shoot anything, but does damage any enemy it comes in physical contact with. This seemingly useless helper wound up being a surprise asset when it came to some bosses, and the strategy became less about shooting them and more of lining up Alisia to make the sprite strike the boss for a quick defeat.
Alisia Dragoon is a console game that thinks it's an arcade game. You have one single life for the entire game—the collectable 1-ups are not extra lives but continues. You are given a rather generous health bar and while enemy hits are weak, but they are very frequent. This is one of those games where you will just constantly take damage and you have to be okay with that. Most of the stages are quite short but incredibly dense, loaded with enemies, items, and secrets. You’ll want the manual handy as the glyphic items are hard to distinguish, nothing about them indicates it’s a level-up or a heath restore aside from the fact they look ‘magical.’ Many of the better items only appear if you stand on a particular point in the level, so keep a look out for conspicuous areas. The game presents itself frantically with semi-respawning enemies and your large lightning attacks, but blowing through it will do you no favors. You really need to dissect each stage and find as many upgrades as you can, as well as health restores to top you off as you constantly get hit by something you couldn’t avoid.
It’s an odd balance: Alisia trudges along, getting hit constantly while you wait for your power meter to fill up, then your massive attack clears out everything only for a new enemy to swoop in and attack you. Holding your attack on a larger enemy will eventually kill them too, but then your power meter is decimated. Mind you the meter refills very quickly but they become the longest few seconds of your life. The game regularly doles out health potions as you progress, acknowledgment that this is just how the game is. It becomes an endurance match after a while, and eventually you don’t beat the game as much as you’ll just outlast it.
The game is very eager to end you and bump you back to the title screen, but not before giving you a results screen showing how far you made it and awarding you an arbitrary rating. Repetition is clearly the key to Alisia Dragoon, as you’ll have to keep replaying to memorize the stage layouts, enemy patterns and find the secret level-up items that will bolster you for the later levels. You’ll find hidden items to extend the health bar and raise the attack power of not just Alisia but your four dragoons as well. As you develop your playstyle and know what’s coming ahead, you’ll have to strategically choose who and what to level up when.
As I tried to play as genuinely as possible, it took many playthroughs to claw forward through the game, and the repetition did generally help. But nothing helps when a new enemy or boss gives you no chance to learn its pattern and kills you straight out; now you’re back to the title screen with nothing but your dumb in-game rating to show for it. Maybe you’ll make it back to that late-game boss after another arduous playthrough and you’ll last a little bit longer, dodge an old attack and lose to a new one, Game Over once again. And as the nature of Alisia Dragoon is to keep damaging you, you never feel like you’ll achieve a perfect run. It can be a little disheartening knowing you’ll eventually beat the game but never be particularly great at it. The playthroughs get repetitive after a while too, as you’re trying to re-collect all the secret level-ups over and over for a chance to get back to where you were last time. Combing all the secrets in each stage gets stale. That’s when the save states begin to tempt you, and luckily we have the access to them today to just finish the darn game.
For what it’s worth, the game has a lot of charm and a lot of heart. The music is wonderful and the sound effects are honestly fun to listen to. Each various item has its own twinkly, gamey flourish, and they sound as rewarding as they are. Even every stage intro has its own opening jingle. There are also a few cutscenes where the game will take over the controls, flashing ‘DEMO’ in the corner when you attempt to override. There is a rote story in place, and the game does a good job in its presentation to get you vaguely interested without overreaching.
So did I enjoy Alisia Dragoon? It’s really hard to say. It’s a unique experience; a combination of familiar game genres and systems that make a game you’ve never played before but could swear you have. It is compelling to play with the mechanics and see how far you can go with the working knowledge you gain, the secret items you can stumble upon. But again locking in to finish it can be a chore. This is not a game that you get quicker at as you replay it, and the enemy hits are intentionally relentless no matter how methodical you play. The visuals and especially sounds do help try to boost your morale, but overall it becomes clear why this is a one-off game that few remember or cherish.
Honestly though, good for Sega for digging Alisia Dragoon out of the vault and placing it in the Genesis Mini. Many other games could’ve taken its place but Alisia stands proudly in the lineup. This really showcases what a ‘designated rental’ game was like back in the day, an odd release that has a lot to offer, at the very least just something different to cleanse the palette. It may not have sold well or risen above cult status, but these retro experiences are still valuable and when it comes to exploring ‘new’ old games, the diversity is really the strength.
