Alisia Dragoon

The game was later made available on the Sega Genesis Mini and Nintendo Classics service.

• Title — Alisia Dragoon • Developer — Game Arts • Publisher — SegaGame Arts • Programmer — * Naozumi Honma • Osamu Harada • Writer — Yoshimi Kanda • Artist — Masatoshi Azumi • Composer — * Fumihito Kasatani • Nobuyuki Aoshima • Mamoru Ishimoda • Yoko Sonoda • Mariko Sato • Genre — Platform • Modes — Single-player • Platforms — Sega Genesis

• Illustration — Gameplay involves action and platforming elements, as the player controls Alisia to jump onto platforms and kill enemies with the aid of her pets. In Alisia Dragoon, the player controls the protagonist, Alisia, in her quest to save the world by defeating the evil forces that killed her father. The game consists of eight levels of side-scrolling environments; Alisia has to jump across gaps and kill the enemies that stand in her way. Each stage is completed by defeating the boss at the end. Alisia attacks by shooting streaks of lightning from her hands. The attack automatically targets enemies in range but gets weaker with each volley as Alisia's power is depleted. Her power recharges when she stops attacking; when fully charged, it allows her to unleash a multi-target attack, hitting every enemy on the screen. The energy system introduces an element of strategy, encouraging the player to manage Alisia's power to have her able to defend herself at critical moments. Helping Alisia in her quest are her pet monsters. These creatures fly around the heroine on their own, attacking her foes, and blocking enemy attacks from hitting her. There are four pets, each with its own type of attack. The Dragon Frye spits fireballs, and the Boomerang Lizard hurls boomerangs. The Thunder Raven emits a thunder blast that affects enemies across the screen, and the Ball O' Fire burns enemies on contact. Only one pet can fight alongside Alisia in her quest, but the player can select any of the four (or none) as the active companion at any time. Over the course of the game, Alisia and her monsters can improve their abilities by collecting power-ups. These enhancement items are placed throughout the first seven stages, mostly in hidden locations. The various power-ups can heal Alisia and her monsters, increase their maximum life bars, improve their attacks, or grant invulnerability for a certain time. Life bars are lost by taking damage from enemy attacks and traps. When Alisia's pets lose all their life bars, they are removed from play and cannot be brought back until a "Revive" power-up is collected. If Alisia loses all her life bars, she can restart the level by expending a continue. The game ends if all the continues have been used. Alisia Dragoon has no features for saving the player's progress. After the game is completed, a screen is shown, charting the overall performance of the player based on the number of kills, the power level of Alisia's attack, and the frequency the pet monsters are used.

Similar to most action games on the Sega Genesis, the plot in Alisia Dragoon is simple and short. The game goes straight into the action, tasking Alisia to demolish everything in sight. After defeating the final boss, the player is treated to a cinematic cutscene of Alisia's triumphant return to her home. Much of the backstory is described in the manual. Alisia is the daughter of a sorcerer who attempted to stop the prince of all things evil, Baldour. As a child, her father was tortured to death in front of her eyes by Baldour. Although the world has not fully recovered from the devastating effects of Baldour's last visit, Baldour's aide Ornah manages to transport his dormant cocoon back to Earth. Now a woman with magical ability rivaling that of her father, Alisia sets out to destroy Baldour's cocoon before he can awaken.

In 1992, Japanese animation studio Gainax was in a collaboration with Game Arts, the makers of the Lunar role-playing games, to produce an action video game. Gainax's video game product line tended to target a niche crowd who generally preferred dating simulations and anime-based adventure games. Alisia Dragoon is a departure from this tradition. The animation studio handled the artistic end of the production, writing the story and creating the artwork that would be used for the design of the game's environments and characters. Several of its founders had worked on Hayao Miyazaki's animated films, and the influences of Miyazaki's 1984 science fiction animated film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind were evident in certain levels of the game. Similarly, due to the predominance of mixing science fiction with fantasy themes in the Japanese animation circles at that time, Alisia Dragoon featured high-tech spaceships and robots alongside mythical zombies and dragons. The composition of the soundtrack was delegated to Mecano Associates, who had produced the music for other works from Game Arts, such as the action games Fire Hawk: Thexder 2 and Silpheed. Game Arts, however, did most of the work in producing Alisia Dragoon, adapting the artwork into environments and creatures that can be rendered by the console hardware and writing them as lines of software code.