Blades of Vengeance (Mega Drive)

 I wrote a few years ago about Sword of Sodan, a western-developed barbarian game that's infamous as being one of the worst on the Mega Drive. Blades of Vengeance is also a western-developed Barbarian game, but it's thankfully a lot better, and in pretty much every way! Though to be fair, it was also made specifically for the Mega Drive, and also came out a few years after Sword of Sodan.

 

You play as one of three characters, Huntress, Warrior, and Sorcerer. Huntress and Warrior are very eighties fantasy-looking people with perfectly chiselled bodies and long, luxurious hair. Sorcerer is a balding, dirty-looking elderly man with a beard. He gets the last laugh, though, as later in the game, you can buy an "armour" item that completely upgrades your character, giving them a new look and weapon. Warrior gets the worst of this, replacing his cool axe with an awkward-looking flail. Huntress covers herself up a bit and gets an incredibly useful crossbow in place of her sword. Sorcerer gets a voluminous white robe worn over a short red dress and fishnet stockings, plus a more powerful staff for his spells. 

 

The game starts out taking place in hellish mountain/volcano landscapes, later changing tack towards labyrinthine castles and dungeons. It also feels like this change in location marks a change in the design style of the stages, too: the wilderness stages are mostly straightforward platform stages with a few secret rooms hidden around, while the later "man-made" stages focus more on switches, keys, doors, and ladders, looking and feeling a lot more like the Bitmap Bros. game Gods. As well as the stage design, something else worth mentioning is the inventory system. The only items you'll get a lot of use from are the healing potion and the keys, but there's another subtle design choice in the inventory that seperates the early game from the late game.

 

Early in the game, enemies and chests will drop a moderate amount of coins for use in the between-stage shops, but as you get later in the game, money becomes a significantly more scarce resource. But there's a rare item you might find here and there (and which is available in the shop, too): the Midas ring. Using this kills all onscreen enemies instantly, and turns them into money. I don't think this change is something a lot of players might notice on their first play, and I think it adds a little extra strategy to the gathering of a resource, so different players will end up with different amounts at the end of each stage, dependent on more than the time they spent finding hidden rooms with more chests in them.

 

There's a lot of other little things to like about the game, too. It all looks great, but one thing the I liked especially is that a lot of the early one-hit enemies are a lot shorter than the player characters. It looks weird at first, but then you realise that they're the exact right height to make it look like Huntress and Warrior's attack animations are smashing their heads in when they get killed! And the fact that all three characters have two complete sets of sprites and animations for when they power up is great, too, and something not seen too often in games from the early nineties.

 

It's a little odd that I've never seen anyone talking about Blades of Vengeance in real life or online (other than a post I vaguely remember seeing on Livejournal around twenty years ago). It's an EA game, and back then, everyone seemed to have at least a few of those distinct tall cartridges with the weird yellow tab on the side. Furthermore, it's actually pretty good, too, and the Mega Drive's library and its high points have surely been combed over enough times to have brought it to light by now. Anyway, it's not an incredible all-time classic or anything, but it is definitely a game that's worth your time if you haven't played it before.