The King of Dragons! The best Capcom beat em up nobody ever seems to mention

[awbacon]

 

It's a bummer The King of Dragons never enters into the same conversation as some of Capcom's other CPS and CPS 2 beat em ups as I think its legit as good if not slightly better than a lot of them. You can totally see how this was the precursor to the D&D games on CPS 2 as well.

 

Anyone else love some King of Dragons here?

[Tanooki]

I do, own the game for years now on SNES and it's quite faithful thankfully, later came the whole Belt Action collection.  I don't remember if I ever saw it in the actual arcade, and yeah they're totally with the RPG mechanics the prequel to the D&D pair of titles.

[roots.genoa]

Frankly, I said it already, but that's the game I like the least in the Capcom beat 'em up collection. It's very pretty, yes, but each character has a grand total of 2 moves (attack, and jumping attack) afaik. ? I guess it's better played with friends of course, even if that (probably) means you can't switch character too often to add a little variety (I don't remember if two players can use the same character).

 

Knights of the Round is so much better in a similar style imho, but bear in mind I'm among the people who find Final Fight overrated for example.

Beat 'em up is one of my favorite genres, and I guess I'm hard to please. I really like the ones with tons of moves, like Streets of Rage 2, Die Hard Arcade, and Double Dragon Advance.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

40 minutes ago, roots.genoa said:

Frankly, I said it already, but that's the game I like the least in the Capcom beat 'em up collection. It's very pretty, yes, but each character has a grand total of 2 moves (attack, and jumping attack) afaik. ? I guess it's better played with friends of course, even if that (probably) means you can't switch character too often to add a little variety (I don't remember if two players can use the same character).

 

Knights of the Round is so much better in a similar style imho, but bear in mind I'm among the people who find Final Fight overrated for example.

Beat 'em up is one of my favorite genres, and I guess I'm hard to please. I really like the ones with tons of moves, like Streets of Rage 2, Die Hard Arcade, and Double Dragon Advance.

I'm mostly in agreement on this although I wouldn't say it is the worst. I too am not a huge fan of Final Fight either and would much rather play any of the SOR games on my Genesis pretty much. But Knights of the Round was one of the reasons I eventually picked up an SNES in the early 2000s as I always enjoyed the arcade game and the SNES port was the only home port of it that I knew about. I eventually picked up most of the capcom releases on the SNES with King of Dragon's being maybe the second one I picked up. Glad I did when I did as the game can go for some money now.

 

[+GoldLeader]

I like the game,  even if it's not really my favorite game or genre,  but I never saw it in the arcade and only know of it from the Super Nintendo.   What's funny here is that at one point in time,  before I got a SD2SNES,  I was trying to get a SNES repro cart made of (SFC) KING OF DEMONS.  Through a miscommunication,  and me not proofreading carefully enough, I ended up with a SNES repro cart of KING OF DRAGONS!  I sold it with a game lot for SNES as prices were starting to go nuts.  It was clearly labeled as a repro in the auction and the clean label had the word REPRODUCTION stamped right on it.  My camera sucks so...Here's a fuzzy pic of it and the rest of my auction games (which were almost all duplicates in the collection ...It's on the left.

 

[SlidellMan]

I remember renting that back in '94, and got as far as stage seven with the Elf.

[Cynicaster]

On 9/1/2021 at 4:51 PM, roots.genoa said:

Frankly, I said it already, but that's the game I like the least in the Capcom beat 'em up collection. It's very pretty, yes, but each character has a grand total of 2 moves (attack, and jumping attack) afaik. ? I guess it's better played with friends of course, even if that (probably) means you can't switch character too often to add a little variety (I don't remember if two players can use the same character).

 

Knights of the Round is so much better in a similar style imho, but bear in mind I'm among the people who find Final Fight overrated for example.

Beat 'em up is one of my favorite genres, and I guess I'm hard to please. I really like the ones with tons of moves, like Streets of Rage 2, Die Hard Arcade, and Double Dragon Advance.

 

I could not agree more with the basic sentiment in bold above.  This is why for the life of me I cannot understand why everybody my age has such a hard-on for TMNT and Simpsons.  The games look great but I just zone out when I play them because all I'm doing is mashing a generic "attack" button 99% of the time.  Heck, even Double Dragon and Renegade keep me way more engaged despite their rough edges.  

 

I've never played Die Hard Arcade but SoR2 and DD Advance are high-water marks for sure, at least on the home game front.  I tend to prefer arcade games in general; I really like Ninja Baseball Batman, Sengoku 3, and a bunch of other lesser-known arcade beat-em-ups that I play on my MAME cabinet with arcade controls.  I think Final Fight is decent because you have at least some variety of attacks but I agree that there are definitely more enjoyable options out there with a bit more depth.  It's pretty crazy how many games blatantly ripped off the Final Fight template, though.  I pretty much lump all those games together.  My fave is probably Night Slashers for the cheesy zombie gore and cheesy characters - the guy with the mullet and robot arm wins the 90s for me.  

 

  

[Razzie.P]

Yeah, I'm a fan.  Never saw it in arcades back in the day, though, but it would have been 100% my kind of thing.  I liked the genre, but anything with a fantasy/sword n' sorcery vibe would have topped the "real word" setting of Double Dragon, Streets of Rage, Final Fight, etc.

 

Not saying it was better or those were bad, or anything like that.  I just love me some good ol' fashioned fantasy stuffs. 

[mr.bill]

I had picked one up a king of the dragons in a bulk arcade purchase. I took to cax 4 years ago and john bought it for his museum in banning. The museum closed and It just resold over the weekend..

[awbacon]

On 9/14/2021 at 5:56 AM, mr.bill said:

I had picked one up a king of the dragons in a bulk arcade purchase. I took to cax 4 years ago and john bought it for his museum in banning. The museum closed and It just resold over the weekend..

bummer