Say what you will about Sega today but back in the 16-bit era they gave the Genesis excellent support. If third parties would or could not support the system they licensed their titles and created ports themselves. They also aggressively went after brilliant games from small developers. Thanks to that we got future classics like Gunstar Heroes, Ranger-X, and Landstalker. But not every import game was gold. At first glance Dahna: Megami Tanjo looks like a winner. But thanks to an exceedingly high and unfair difficulty it is less than it could have been. I can kind of see why this one was left in Japan.
Dahna is the story of two daughters, Regine and Dahna. Both were born with incredible magic power, especially Regine. Her power was so great that forces from the underworld killed their parents and kidnapped her. Dahna escaped, and was raised by the sorcerer Magh. When Magh is kidnapped by an evil sorceress the now grown Dahna sets out to save him.
It would be easy to draw comparisons to Golden Axe by giving Dahna a cursory glance. In reality it is closer to being the Rastan game we never got for Genesis. And yes, I’m including Rastan Saga 2 in that. Dahna has a variety of sword attacks similar to Zelda 2. You have a standard three hit sword combo, can upstab and downward stab. You have a magic meter that builds up by defeating enemies or collecting items. Depending on the amount gathered you can perform one of three spells.
Mechanically Dahna is sound. The problems come from the stiff controls. Anything that doesn’t involve attacking has a slight delay. If an enemy leaps behind you Dahna is slow to turn around and attack. You can both crouch and crawl along on the ground. But doing either is very slow as you have to manually get back up in steps when performing either action. There is a considerable amount of platforming and for the most part the controls are serviceable. The times where the high jump won’t perform on command is cause for much frustration however.
What ultimately ruins the game is the insane difficulty. Dahna gives you a single life and five credits to reach its conclusion. That is far from ideal considering the massive undertaking ahead. There are bottomless pits at every turn and with the less than ideal controls chances are you’ll fall into more than a few. The game does not refill your life bar between levels which is insane. In fact life restoring items are rare: at most you’ll restore three or four bars of health. That is nothing. The only way to fully restore your health is to reach one hundred thousand experience points, which also increases your max health. But that is a milestone that will only happen maybe two or three times during the game. They do everything but break your controller to deter you, I swear.
The most disappointing aspect of Dahna is that it could have been solid. There are plenty of elements within the game that I really like. There is a great deal of variety from one stage to the next. Stage 1 begins with you on the back of a giant. It is incredibly similar to the Bizarrians in Golden Axe and I would have loved to see more of that. The following level sees you on horseback as you ride down a mountain. Later on you even fly on the back of a dragon. When everything is working right combat can be fun. The game is very bloody and has creative bosses as well. But you have to tolerate a lot of jank to appreciate its good points. A few slight tweaks would have gone a long way.
Visually Dahna definitely looks like an early Genesis title. The color palette is very dark which fits the tone of the game but does nothing for the game’s visual variety. The sprites are about medium sized but are blurred and sometimes lack detail. This is an incredibly bloody game for the period with enemies leaking blood when cut. One boss in particular losses his extra arms as the fight progresses and returns later in the game sans limbs with blood gushing where they should be. Occasionally there is a pretty background but it can’t make up for the rest of the lackluster presentation or weak music.
In Closing
Dahna could have been a good game. The action is nice, the world is interesting, and there is a decent amount of variety. But the stiff controls and ridiculous difficulty ruin what should have been a solid game. It says a lot that Dahna was left behind in Japan at a time when the system was starving for games.
