Console History: Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll (Hiryou No Ken: Ougi No Sho)

This is Console History, a special sub-series of my more general History Lessons series, covering console role-playing games, action role-playing games, Metroidvanias, and action-adventure games in nominally chronological order starting in the late 1980s. The chronology is garbled in the beginning as the scope of the series expanded, but it gets more organized later on. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

The Great Console History Reorganization marches ever onwards. Our last post covered Deep Dungeon: Madou Senki, a dungeon crawler from HummingBirdSoft that released in December 1986 for the Famicom Disk System in Japan only. If I’d had my timeline in order, the next post would have been about Shiryou Sensen: War of the Dead, followed by Zelda II: The Adventure of Link and Dragon Quest II. But I’ve already written about those! So now, we move on Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll by Culture Brain, who would go on to release The Magic of Scheherezade in September 1987. But Flying Dragon: The Secret scroll was originally released as Hiryou no Ken: Ougi no Sho in Japan on February 14, 1987 for the Famicom, before being localized for US release on the rebranded NES in August 1989 (this is the version I played). It’s actually the second game in the Hiryou no Ken series, coming after Hokuha Syourin Hiryou no Ken (AKA Shanghai Kid) in arcades in 1985.

Flying Dragon is a fighting game, which should put it out of scope for this series. But I decided to include it for two reasons. First, it incorporates some action-adventure/role-playing elements which brings it closer to the remit of this series, and second, I’m completely unfamiliar with the fighting game genre before the smash success of Street Fighter II brought it into the mainstream in 1991. What were fighting games like before Street Fighter II created a new standard? I decided to find out.

“Hiryou no Ken” approximately translates to “Fist of the Flying Dragon”, hence the English title of the game. But the title is the only place where it’s translated; despite a fully English script, the US version of the game still refers to “hiryou no ken” often. It’s the ultimate kung fu technique, you see, but the mysterious and evil Tusk Soldiers attacked Master Juan and stole the scrolls with the secret of hiryou no ken. Players assume the role of Juan’s pupil, Ryuhi, as he tracks down the Tusk Soldiers and recovers the scrolls. Ryuhi’s adventure has two alternating phases: the Journey, in which he travels to his next destination while fending off Tusk Soldiers, and the Tournament, which pits Ryuhi against a series of opponents in one-on-one martial arts duels.

The game opens with a Journey segment, and it doesn’t make a good first impression. Journeys are basically side-scrolling platformer levels, but — perhaps because Flying Dragon is primarily a fighting game — they’re controlled in an awkward way. Ryuhi’s movements are slow, and he jumps by pressing up on the d-pad rather than one of the face buttons. Those, naturally, are mapped to punch and kick, despite there being no mechanical difference between the two. When I started the first Journey, I barely had time to register where Ryuhi was and how to move him around before some Tusk Soldiers charged in. They were easily dispatched with a single punch or kick, but they just kept coming, and Ryuhi walked so slowly that I ended up just standing still and knocking out his assailants over and over. Soon the sky turned dark, the music changed, and a girl in a school uniform appeared and started throwing hairpins at me. What was going on?

I eventually worked out how the Journeys work. Defeating enough Tusk Soldiers will cause one of the Tusk Beasts to appear, the first of which is that girl. These are tougher opponents who take many hits before they go down, but each one will drop a label that confers an upgrade. These are always the same upgrades, in the same order: more attack power for Ryuhi, a higher jump and faster movement, the ability to fire a “cosmic saucer” ranged attack from Ryuhi’s punches (finally differentiating punches and kicks), then the ability to fire two cosmic saucers in quick succession. The fifth Tusk Beast will drop the key to the gate at the end of the Journey. It’s possible to reach the end before finding the key, in which case the stage loops. That means it’s actually a good strategy to stop and fight like I did in the beginning, but not for too long, because the Tusk Beasts can do a lot of damage. If Ryuhi proceeds along the stage, he might find a health-restoring medicine bottle (or another useful item) when he punches one of the dragon statues scattered around.

Tusk Soldiers only appear in some parts of the Journey Stages. Other parts are focused on jumping between platforms at discrete elevations. There are some instant-death pits, but Ryuhi’s jump is so high (even before the upgrade) that they’re rarely a problem. Mostly, the jumping segments are about finding those dragon statues in case they’ve got a useful power-up hidden inside. Ryuhi can drop down from a higher platform to a lower one, but not in the way I’m used to from more recent platformers. This process was eventually standardized: press down and the jump button to drop one level down. Here, however, players must jump normally and then press and hold down in order to fall through platforms. They must remember to stop holding down once they want to land, or they’ll keep falling through the platforms, possibly sending Ryuhi plummeting to his death. This felt weird at first, but eventually I appreciated it because it added some complexity and challenge to what are otherwise simple level layouts.

The Journey segments reminded me of Kung Fu Master, the 1984 arcade classic which was ported to the Famicom/NES in 1985. The charging Tusk Soldiers are essentially copies of the standard enemies in Kung Fu Master, and they are similarly dispatched with just a single attack. But Kung Fu Master introduces more varied enemies, and has more variety in its combat: punches doing more damage but with less range than kicks, for example, or the ability to perform jumping attacks. Flying Dragon’s only variety comes from the Tusk Beasts, but even these are often the same in different Journey stages. The Journeys therefore feel formulaic, and once I figured them out they were simple to navigate and over quickly. Ultimately, they’re just breaks from the main attraction: the Tournament sections.

The first of these isn’t really a tournament, it’s Ryuhi’s training at the Shorinji temple, where he learns Shorinji Kempo. This also acts as training for players, making Flying Dragon the earliest game I know of to feature an in-game tutorial. And it’s very helpful, because the combat in Flying Dragon’s duels is completely different from the fighting games I’ve played. The training begins with defense. When facing off against an enemy, a red mark will appear on Ryuhi’s body, either on his head, torso, or feet. This indicates where the enemy will strike next, so players must quickly adopt the correct defense. Pressing up on the d-pad will defend against a high attack, pressing towards the enemy will defend the torso, and pressing down will defend against a low attack. Launching one’s own attacks works similarly, with indicators on the enemy’s body showing where to target. To attack, the same d-pad buttons must be pressed in combination with a face button to launch a punch or kick at the right spot. If players are feeling fancy, they can press both face buttons at once to perform a spinning kick instead, which does more damage but is easier to evade.

That’s right: opponents can still block or evade Ryuhi’s attacks, even if they’re aimed correctly (usually because Ryuhi was too slow). Pleasingly, performing the incorrect attack can sometimes connect, too. The red indicators are not guarantees, they merely show where attacks are most likely to land. There are nuances to duels beyond the indicators, too. Ryuhi has a few special moves up his sleeve, my favorite of which is the trick throw. Block an opponent’s high punch, and Ryuhi has a split second to press down and punch to turn it into a throw, doing a big chunk of damage and earning a burst of applause from the crowd. Foes can also do this to Ryuhi, so it’s best to stick to kicks most of the time. And of course, Ryuhi can also unleash his hiryou no ken, but only if his KO gauge — filled when hitting enemies, drained when taking hits — is full. Players need good reflexes to keep the KO gauge topped off, but it transforms Ryuhi’s high spin kick into his hiryou no ken, a dramatic leaping spin kick that does a ton of damage. As long as it’s timed right, and his opponent doesn’t dodge it.

These duels reminded me of Punch-Out!!, which hit arcades in 1984, but wouldn’t be ported to NES until September 1987, seven months after Flying Dragon. Both games emphasize defense, timing dodges or blocks at the right times to avoid taking damage, and biding one’s time until it’s the right moment to attack. They’re also both about real sport fighting. There are no street fights in Flying Dragon; Rhyuhi’s Tusk Soldier targets are masquerading as martial artists competing in the World Tournament, so Ryuhi’s matches take place in a ring, with an audience. Enemy combatants use approximations of real martial arts styles, including karate, Muay Thai, wrestling, and boxing. That means that, in between the standard attacking and blocking, players sometimes need to deal with special attacks like holds or dramatic jumping attacks. This keeps each bout interesting.

Defeat in any bout in the Tournament sections costs Ryuhi a life, and when he’s out of lives he must continue from the last Journey segment (either immediately, or with a password for the next game session). Given that each Tournament is a bracket with multiple opponents, this felt harsh at first. Then I realized that those bottles that occasionally flew across the screen are medicine that Ryuhi can collect if he jumps correctly, and then use with the Select button (of all things) to restore a bit of health. That helps a lot when surviving the tougher fights, and I soon started to make good progress.

But simply defeating all of Ryuhi’s opponents will result in the “bad” ending. In order to recover the stolen scrolls, Ryuhi must unmask the disguised Tusk Soldiers before defeating them. The first is unmasked simply by defeating his disguised form, but others require a specific sequence of actions. For example, one requires Ryuhi to refrain from attacking or defending, and just jump to evade the opponent’s attacks, until the enemy’s weak point is revealed. Others require specific combinations of defensive and/or offensive moves. This forces players to engage with Ryuhi’s full moveset and come to a full understanding of the combat system, giving me a greater appreciation for it.

It’s actually not possible to get the good ending on one’s first time through the game, even if players unmasked everyone. They must play through again (skipping the training segment, thankfully) and find some new secret items in the Journey stages to face the true villain at the end. But unmasking Tusk Soldiers is still worth it, because each of the stolen scrolls they carry offers an upgrade to Ryuhi’s dueling abilities, like extra defense or various improvements to his hiryou no ken move. Unfortunately, unmasking the Tusk Soldiers creates some big difficulty spikes that saw me relying on save states to repeat specific duels over and over.

Near the end of the game, one opponent must be defeated with a hiryou no ken to unmask him. That means I needed to keep Ryuhi’s KO gauge maxed out, but wait until my enemy had only a small amount of health left so my hiryou no ken would actually knock him out. But this guy has a flying kick move that’s nearly impossible to evade, so Ryuhi’s KO gauge kept depleting. Timing everything right to land that final attack was frustrating, and arguably took as much luck as skill. The final duel, also, is really hard. Unmasked Tusk Soldiers don’t fight fair, firing projectile attacks that must be leaped over, and the final baddie does a ton of damage with every hit. Ryuhi can use his own cosmic saucer attack for these fights (but not for regular duels, that wouldn’t be sporting) but I never figured out how to reliably do it. Instead, I needed to land multiple hiryou no kens in a row to defeat this guy, which meant filling my KO gauge and then hoping I could get the timing right for all of my big flying kicks. It was a nice thematic finale, but took me many, many tries.

That meant I faced the final enemy’s disguised form a bunch of times too, and I started to realize that some of his attacks came in set patterns. Soon, I could anticipate when my opponent would try a high punch, letting me use the trick throw on him. This once again brought to mind Punch Out!!, which also asks players to learn each enemy’s attack patterns and specific sequences of dodges and counters to knock them out. Facing these extra-tough duelists in Flying Dragon would have been really annoying back in 1987 (or 1989, for US players), because I would have had to start back at the Journey stage and go through them all again. But it would have made me even more intimately familiar with the fighting system, and each enemy’s quirks and patterns. It would also have extended the length of the game considerably; a master player could breeze through Flying Dragon in just an hour or two, but learning to get that good will take a lot longer.

In the late 1980s, that would have been a good thing. We weren’t overflowing with games to play back then, so we had time to tackle a tougher challenge. I would have been too young to really get to grips with Flying Dragon’s fighting system, but players of the right age could have learned the intricacies and eventually become a Kempo master. I certainly found a lot to appreciate with the duels, and even the less successful Journey sections contribute to the feeling of playing through a cheesy martial arts film. Mostly, I was struck by how original the design is. I doubt that Flying Dragon is representative of fighting games before Street Fighter II came along, but it’s fascinating to see unusual ideas explored, before genre conventions had solidified. Why not look to Kung Fu Master and Punch-Out!! for inspiration for a martial arts fighting game? And Culture Brain put enough of a spin on those ideas to make Flying Dragon feel like its own thing, its martial arts bouts testing players’ reflexes and quick-thinking tactics.

Flying Dragon certainly didn’t reach the success of its inspirations — I’d never heard of it before, even though it had a US release — but the Hiryou no Ken series saw many more entries, all the way until the year 2000. I don’t know if those follow on from the ideas in Flying Dragon, or if they eventually pivoted with the rest of the genre in the wake of Street Fighter II, but I’m curious to find out. I’ll include the next game in this series once my timeline reaches that point. If you’re curious to try Flying Dragon yourself, aside from appearing on the now defunct Wii U Virtual Store, the only way to play is to source an original cartridge, or use emulation as I did. As usual for the NES/Famicom, I used the Retroarch frontend and Mesen emulator core to play.

If I’d had my timeline in order from the start, next would have been Esper Dream, then The Goonies II, Golvellius: Valley of Doom, and Rygar. But since I’ve already written about those, we’ll instead jump to April 1987 for our next game. Stay tuned!

Next on Console History: watch this space!