NOTE: Scroll down for summary and rating
If you haven't played Dragon's Lair 2, or any of the Don Bluth games in general, imagine a cartoon animation fused with Geometry Dash. Highly difficult, fast reactions, trial and error, and memory. Dragon's Lair 2 is a challenging full motion video game where you must push the arrow keys and space bar at the right moment.
The story continues from the first Dragon's Lair. After the protagonist Dirk the Daring freed Princess Daphnie from the dark magic of the Dragon's Lair, she gets kidnapped by the evil wizard Mordoc, and must use a time machine, which is oddly the nicer brother of Mordoc and talks. He must travel through different time zones and worlds to save Daphnie once again.
In gameplay, your mission is to push a button according to where a yellow flashing light appears. You have less than a second to react. The button depends on which direction it is from Dirk, the player character, or if Dirk's sword is flashing. If so, use the space bar. For experience, I too found the game pretty challenging. One death and you start over a level. Major levels are about a minute long each, the first level has two checkpoints, and the last two are pretty short. I ALWAYS play without a move guide for the most thrilling game experience. Just like what Nostalgia Critic stated in his review of Dragon's Lair, it's cheating! Without the guide, reaction times are quite slim. However, if you replay some levels and get used to the moves, it shouldn't be that stressful, especially if you are forced to replay the whole game if it tells you you missed a special "Treasure", which brings us to the next feature. Each level has at least one treasure item that flashes with the next move. Collect them all to enter the level were you fight Mordoc. There are also two modes called "Original" and "Director's Cut". In Original, you HAVE to collect all treasures to proceed to the Mordoc fight. In Director's Cut, the treasures are not required, but grants an alternate, easier Mordoc fight when they are all collected. One last thing about level gameplay, most of the levels have a chance to be mirrored, making it harder and disorienting if you played the level before.
For presentation, Don Bluth directed and animated the FMV for this game. Bluth was the legendary animator for some of our favorite nostalgic movies like Land Before Time and An American Tail, and he was called down to do a series of games by Digital Leisure, like this one! The level concepts are really clever and creative. Seeing how Dirk travels through different time zones, there are typical eras like the Prehistoric Times fighting flying creatures. There are even crazier-looking levels like the one where Dirk slides "Through the Looking Glass" into Wonderland! This is one of the most innovative video games I have played, and love it. This is why I like replaying this game. I'm not only watching an animation, I'm playing it!
To conclude, the game is okay. The appearance is outstanding and really takes me back to when I saw "All Dogs Go to Heaven" and "Bartok the Magnificent" as a kid, which were other movies he did by the way. But I do think it should be longer, or the price lower, speaking of price, I purchased this on sale and so should you, my opinion. Bluth is also trying to get back to animation and developing a Dragon's Lair movie. I sure hope he does it!
I rate this game 8/10. To summarize: Great animation, innovative gameplay, creative concepts, but a bit too high for price and a bit too short for length.
