Legend of the Dragon is a rare thing nowadays, a 3D fighter for the Wii. Traditional 3D fighting games are a "digital" genre by nature -- Tekken and Virtua Fighter are built around learning and replicating perfectly-timed sequences of inputs. It's an odd fit with Nintendo’s new console, which is a very "analog" system, emphasizing freedom and creativity of control over exacting precision.

This is mainly just running off at the brain, though. The fact of the matter is that Legend of the Dragon would have sucked on any system. It's worse on the Wii than it otherwise might have been, but the difference is merely academic. With any control scheme, using any collection of sticks and buttons, running on any piece of hardware from the last 10-12 years or so, this would be ugly, barely-playable crud. You could buy a better 3D fighter for the PlayStation in 1995.

Out of Control

Initially, Legend of the Dragon seems to play like a game using a conventional control pad. You move with the stick on the nunchuk half of the interface and attack with the buttons on the Wiimote. The nunchuk's buttons do their part by triggering instant dodge commands, towards or away from the screen, along the lines of the sidestep move in the older Bloody Roar games.

This setup has a couple of problems to start with, mainly the fact that the nunchuk stick isn’t precise enough for quick direction and double-tap inputs. The game makes a mistake it can't recover from, though, by using Wiimote motions to trigger special attacks.

After transforming into a character's super-powered alter ego, there's a collection of Dragon Ball Z-style energy blasts that you trigger with the Wiimote. Hold down few buttons on the nunchuk and D-pad, wave the Wiimote just so, and in theory a big mess of mystical shinola blows your opponent to smithereens.

This, of course, is the theory. As you might guess, in practice, these motions aren't so easy to execute (especially if you follow the instructions in the manual, which misprints the buttons required to trigger them). The game recognizes Wiimote inputs more or less at random. More often than not, it doesn't recognize them at all. This is ridiculously frustrating, because to counter an enemy's energy attacks, you need to mirror their motions with your own. As such, the CPU AI can use these attacks, and likewise defend against a human player's, with no trouble. Meanwhile that poor human flails around in a panic trying desperately to make something happen, eventually giving up and launching his Wiimote out a second-story window.

Calling Central Casting

If Legend is frustrating to play, it's almost embarassing to look at. Arguably the only entertainment on offer comes from laughing at the character designs, which make the B-movie rejects from the original Mortal Kombat look like the height of originality. Even Tattoo Assassins, a game so lousy that Data East threw the entire project in the trash bin, had that goofy figure-skating character. Legend of the Dragon doesn't have anything even creative enough to make much fun of -- just bland, basic cartoon kung-fu archetypes, drained of any individuality or detail. To call them clichéd is an insult to clichés everywhere. Most of the background graphics are similarly bland, familiar Virtua Fighter and Soul Calibur backdrops with anything that might have been interesting to look at scrubbed away.

Predictably, the character animation is choppy and none too varied. There’s a fair number of fighters to pick from, but none of them have especially sizable movesets, or fighting styles you wouldn’t see coming a mile away. In terms of how they play, you could probably sum almost all of them up by their size, like the skaters in the old NES Ice Hockey game – big slow guy, small fast guy, and medium-sized…well, medium guy.

One of These Days

There’s more abuse left to be heaped on this game, but at this point the point has been made, that point being that you certainly don’t want to buy it.

To go back to running off at the brain for a moment, though, maybe there’s a lesson to learn here as well. Nintendo’s promotional line with the Wii is that this is a console designed for new kinds of gameplay, and to a pretty fair degree it’s been able to prove that marketing patter true. It follows that the reverse might also be the case – trying to use the Wii to power a complex gameplay model designed for an older generation of controllers might not be such a good idea.

Someday, the Wii may host its own quality 3D fighter. If it does, though, it’ll be something like Super Smash Brothers Brawl – something built from the ground up for this console. Otherwise, maybe you just can’t teach a new dog old tricks.

Article by: D.F. Smith
Video produced by: Paul Bonnano