Ironsword: Wizards and Warriors II

As a alluded to yesterday I think I was spoiled by Ironsword. I just found the original game to be pretty boring by comparison. This game, its sequel, while being a bit more complex, was a whole lot more fun and required pinpoint accuracy to win. I never actually won, but I got real close, which counts for something, right?

I don’t really know how this game ties in with its predecessor, all I know is that you have to kill off fiends in the form of four elementals: wind, water, fire, and earth. Then you have to kill them off again, but all at the same time. The evil wizard from the first game is involved somehow, but don’t worry about that too much.

Each stage has two parts to it. Part one has you meandering around a landscape, killing things, collecting treasure, spending (or gambling away) your treasure in the local shops, all looking for a golden item of some sort. Bird wants an egg, frog wants a fly, etc.

Find the Golden Thingus(tm) and you get to go to the second part of the stage, where the boss lives. There you have to find the spell that… erm… spells doom for the boss (you can’t hurt it without it), find the boss, kill it, and move on to the next area.

Like in the first game, Kuros is almost completely harmless with a sword. You press the attack button and he just kind of waggles it in front of his face. Maybe he thinks that’s menacing enough to scare off the monsters, I don’t know. But he is quite the jumper. You have to carefully maneuver him across the various landscapes. Leaping from tiny platform to tiny platform at breakneck speed. One wrong move and you’ll slide down the most inconveniently-placed slides I’ve ever experienced in a game.

The game does get a bit maddening after a while, but it has some of my favorite music of any NES-era game. A lot of the time I spent watching others play this game was just to hear the soundtrack, which in hindsight sounds kind of sad. But, hey, it was a cheap way to keep two kids entertained for weeks on end.

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