I have to wonder, how many people have wanted to try this game just from viewing the cover? Well there’s at least 1 and that’s me and I’ve known of this game for so many years and always meant to play it but just never did. Actually I remember trying it once but not liking it after stage 1 and gave up. I decided for honestly no reason to try it one more time and see if I could beat it and I did. Here are my thoughts on it.

Here we have an odd one for the genres. At first it may seem like a beat em up but it’s rather more so an action platformer with some beat em up movement. You’ll be going through 6 stages having to go save your sister from evil and you’ll get help along the way though Dahna is capable of doing things on her own. She can swing her sword by holding the attack button and you can also do this from a crouch. You can crawl but you can’t swing your sword, I really only found it useful for dodging those orc enemies. Jumping is a little weird to get used to but you can swing in the air and even stab down. If you want to do higher jumps then you can hold up as you jump. Oh you can also stab up though it’s barely much of an attack.

You can also use magic which is nothing too special with the first level being fire magic that I think does damage? I actually never used it but the manual makes me think that’s what it does. The second level is mist where you’re invincible until the mist ends. The strongest level is thunder magic that hits anything on screen for hazardous damage! It’s nothing all that deep and you’ll collect green pickups to up the bar of magic but be warned that using a continue removes any magic you had.

Level design is rather linear as to be expected but what you probably won’t expect is the variety given in Dahna. It starts out with you on a giant ogre like beast and it feels awesome. You’re jumping on countless bad guys and punching them and you feel strong though it won’t last too long. The game really has some nice setpieces like going up a burning building, running downhill on a horse, doing tight platforming in the night, and by the end you are jumping out of a crumbling building. There’s even this flying level on a griffin where you hit enemies with your sword though it doesn’t feel tested too well as it's easy to sit on the bottom middle and kill a lot of the enemies that way. This game really just wants to keep you engaged and it was something I kept noticing throughout the game and I rather admire it even if you can argue it might be done to make you look past some of its weaker elements.

That said however the game can be pretty challenging. The game is rather stingy on health pickups and they only heal one bar. You’re not even heal after beating a section or even beating a stage. The worst part however is you only have one life which wouldn’t bother me so much if failing on platforming didn’t equal instant death. You’re only given 5 continues for the whole game and you may think to use the level select but you won’t get to keep your experience. That’s right, there’s an EXP system! Get enough EXP from killing enemies and your max health rises, it’s also one of the only ways to heal. This means you can’t even use the level select cheat as you start with no EXP meaning very low health. This game isn’t impossible or anything but practice is essential if you want any mental chance of getting through the game. The only time I can call foul on bs level design was the first time showing off crumbling platforms under instant death which no one will see coming.

Bosses are a mixed bag as they aren’t all bad but none of it feels satisfying? Maybe it’s the hit sounds or maybe it’s because they just kind of end anticlimactically for me but I can’t really say much about them besides stuff like that one boss where you cut off its limbs and it bleeds which is brutal I might add. There’s also one where I think you fight your sister? Honestly I just took a game over and brute forced my way through it, not a fun fight. Even the knight on a horse could be annoying for some but once you learn jump slashes are the way, it’s a bore.The final boss is also just an enemy rush for the 2nd phase which is really lame!

Graphically this game looks pretty awesome for a late 1991 game. I love the look of this game with its dark themes and undertones. While some sprites aren’t the most impressive, the environment left me thinking if it was part of the reason it didn’t come out here. Maybe they thought it was too dreary? The magic also looks decent but nothing outstanding that will wow you away. The cutscenes however look pretty bad and sometimes it feels like they forgot what Dahna even looked like with how ugly she looks in a couple of scenes. Shoutouts to the box art btw for being so cool looking. The music is decent but I can’t remember most of it for some reason. I saw a lot of people compare it to Castlevania. Even after listening to the music while writing this, still nothing in my stupid noggin!

Before my final thoughts, let me give you a fun fact about this game. While it officially stayed in Japan and Korea, it did see release through other means. Idk how this happened but some dumb bootleg team must have gotten ahold of this game and decided to edit the title screen and packaging to be themed after Disney’s Hercules. The game itself seems to be the same after that which just confuses me. Dahna looks nothing like him so why even bother?? What’s even weirder is you have max health in this bootleg so I guess EXP really is worthless. If you want to get even weirder, it was when it was time to make a bootleg based off that PS1 Hercules game, it was called Hercules 2! This is all just so confusing…

So much about this game makes me wanna love it but I’m left conflicted. I like things about it but am annoyed at other things. It’s unrefined in the best and worst way you could imagine. It’s a game that’s really hard to recommend. I honestly thought it was a game people would all hate but looking at stuff like comments for the longplay of this game on Youtube made me realize how many people like this game. I almost feel bad being negative at times but that’s just how it goes in the world of Angel_Arle reviews. I could see myself coming back to this game and who knows, I might one day have a different opinion. I’m just happy I finally got to play this through. Also don’t go hoping you’ll find this game cheap because it goes for hundreds of dollars now so emulation is your best option. The game is some hallways away from being in the good club but I still respect the attempt this game makes.

This game has good ideas for its time, but it controls.. pretty badly. It combines beat-em-up and platforming in a way where both of them feel just okay (at the best of times). You get to drift in the air to platform better, but it controls unintuitively. There's a magic system, but there's no real control over it as what spell comes out is entirely dependent on how much magic you have available. The invincibility spell you get at 3-4 magic flashes the screen pretty badly, too. On the plus side, there's multiple sections in the game where you control one of three different mounts, shaking up the gameplay a bit, but some of those sections make it hard to tell what you should be doing to avoid getting hit. At least, the difficulty curve is pretty fair and it looks great for a Genesis game.

Genesis action games typically suffer in difficulty scaling and roughness but they're still usually a great time because of how tightly the game feel is and how much energy the setpieces have.

Dahna is more polished and professional-feeling than most Genesis games but it plays like complete ass and it knows it. It's the most chunky hybrid of a platformer and beat-em-up and it has to constantly throw you gimmick sections to cover up the fact that none of what you're doing feels good. If there weren't several frames of windup for all of your actions it would probably be a perfectly acceptable game, but it's just no fun to engage with as-is.

Backgrounds have nice color choices at least