Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (video game)

Gameplay

Players control Lee, and must defeat the sailor from the dance in Hong Kong, the chefs from the Chinese Restaurant in San Francisco, the martial arts master who challenges Lee, amongst others to progress through the game, recalling major action scenes from the film. However, the video game leaves out valuable plot information from the film and most of the romantic content between Bruce Lee and his future wife.

Players can use a variety of martial arts moves to defeat their enemies and build up a chi meter, which can help unleash special moves on their opponents. The player has three continues, and if lost, they must fight The Phantom (the personification of Bruce's fear who takes the form of an armored Japanese Samurai) to continue, though he is near invincible. They face The Phantom Samurai again at the end as a final boss.

The game supports up to three players simultaneously, playing through the game co-operatively, or against each other in a battle mode. Characters other than Bruce Lee are not playable, and so the additional players only control clones of Lee, differentiated by different colored trousers.

Version differences

The Jaguar version has considerably more frames of animation than the Super NES and Genesis versions without running any slower, resulting in smoother animation. However, the Jaguar version predates the release of the Team Tap, and thus only supports up to two players.

Master System and Game Gear versions

The Master System and Game Gear versions are a platformer / beat'em up game, rather than a one-on-one fighting game as Super NES, Genesis and Jaguar versions.

Reception

Electronic Gaming Monthly gave the Jaguar version a 4.4/10, calling it "More or less your run-of-the-mill action fighter game". They commented that the game was released too long after the movie (which came out well over a year before) to benefit from the license. Atomic Dawg of GamePro similarly commented that the game "lacks fire", elaborating that the graphics are moderately impressive, but the gameplay is crude and requires little skill due to the limited set of moves.

Reviewing the later Genesis port, Johnny Ballgame of GamePro criticized the unimaginative graphics and weak music, and summarized "There's nothing special about this fighter". A critic for Next Generation said the Super NES version plays much better than the Jaguar version, but that the game is still poor. He elaborated that "this is the only fighting game we've ever come across that not only has no special moves to speak of, but also enables you play as only one (count it, one) character, namely Bruce Lee, even in VS mode." He also criticized the fighting system, and gave it one out of five stars.