"Woooo...where am I?" (Astyanax says wooo a lot for no real reason. I think he means to say "whoa")
"What is this????? Is this really a castle?" (Asked by a guy who had been transported from his world to another by a fairy. The castle is the most normal thing he sees in the game)
"Ha ha ha.....you are a noisy fly" (It's true)
"You will see me controlling this world after you die." (Because that's what dead people do)
"Can you defeat me?" (Asked by Astyanax before his big showdown with Blackhorn. Is he begging for Blackhorn to beat him, or is he just asking so he can avoid getting into a fight he can't win?)
Anyway, the dialogue is painful and the gameplay is worse. Even though the intro says you are a freshman in high school and you look like a standard 98 pound weakling in the cut scenes, you are this gigantic knight. You can have one of three weapons which you get by breaking these totem pole things. You will either have a regular sword, a battle axe, or a sword that looks suspiciously like the one on the Demon Sword cartridge. There is no noticeable difference between the weapons and no way of knowing which is best. You have very limited arm motion in swinging your weapons, and the collision detection is so poor that you can't always tell if you're hitting your enemies. Your enemies respawn after a very short period of time and after moving a short distance. This can be a problem. For example: if you're fighting one of the awkward-moving skeletons and it bumps you back a little after defeating him, you'll have to defeat him all over again when you get to the spot where you originally saw him. It's frustrating.
The levels are laid out in such a haphazard way that you wonder if they play tested this piece of crap at all. Here's what irks me: if you are on one of the many platform levels where a fall means certain doom, they will place enemies on short platforms so that you are sure to be bumped off and die if you don't kill the enemy first. It's frustrating because some of the enemies don't appear until you're on top of them. Also, due to your short arms the only way to kill an enemy on another platform is to use some of your magic, which you won't always have unless you're using cheat codes (without my Game Genie I would not have made it through this game). So basically the game tries to kill you in ways that you can do almost nothing about. That's always a nice feature.
Eventually you fight Blackhorn's right hand man who is a large skeleton. His name? Thorndog. I'm going to just brainstorm here and come up with better names for a skeleton than Thorndog. Here we go: Ol' Bones, Skele-man, Skullface, Bonehead, Ribsy Bonepants, Skullhead McGee, Broncanus, Dr. Lotsabones, Napoleon Bonaparte, Boney McBone, Vertebrae Vinny, No-Skin Sam, and Cuddles. That took me less than two minutes and every one of those names is better than Thorndog. Anyway, after you fight Ribsy Bonepants he tells you in another excruciating cut scene that in killing him, you have allowed yourself to be trapped by his spell. Cutie sacrifices herself to break the spell and you're on your way.
You fight a bunch of guys and eventually kill Blackhorn, who isn't a very hard boss at all. Then you'll meet up with the princess who sends you back home. Your prize for beating the game is that Cutie is still alive and she's not a tiny fairy anymore. She's a real girl that you can smooch and everything. The end.
As I stated all throughout this thing, I hated playing this game. It was tedious and poorly designed. If I weren't determined to play and review all my NES games I would have quit this game after the first level. Because it was such a terrible experience, I'll give it the lowest rating I've ever given...
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