Donkey Kong is a happy, friendly little ape and he'll take you on a fun adventure with cute sprites and bright, colorful worlds, but as you near the end of your quest, Donkey Kong is no longer your friend. Instead he traps you in labyrinthine nightmares from which there is no escape and then laughs at you as you keep falling down ravines over and over again. What's that? You're twisting in the air and your controls have inverted? Go to hell, here's a spike pit for you to fall in. You're in Donkey Kong's world now, loser.

In the 21st century, you're going to end up with one of two mindsets when you play through Dragon's Lair; either it's an antiquated fossil of a game that's as advanced as a bonus feature off a Harry Potter DVD and you'd much rather watch someone else's playthrough on Youtube, or the interactive 80's animated movie feel of the game kind of makes playing through this game (and dying many, many times) honestly kinda charming and you kinda don't care that the game is one giant QTE because you end up losing yourself in the game's general "groove".

I fell under the latter camp. I will admit that I probably would be a lot less kinder to this game if I was actually playing the original coin-consuming 1983 Arcade version rather than the Switch port collection that helpfully allows you to restart as many times as you want and has an on-screen button guide so the game isn't as ridiculously obtuse, but I'm glad time has been kind to Dragon's Lair and that they've now released a version where the picture is so crystal clear that you can practically see the animation cels' imperfections. Perhaps one day I'll pop off the training wheels and actually play Dragon's Lair "the way it was intended to be played" but for now, I'm glad to have finally experienced this piece of gaming history, even if I know that it's not that meaty of an actual game and that most of the game's charm comes from the Don Bluth animation.

By all accounts, a game with less than a year of development time, with a lot of resources and manpower diverted to making an online mode in the PS2 era, even more resources and manpower diverted to working on a separate game engine, and all the fun horror stories of cut features arising from this game's development cycle should've made a complete trainwreck of a game but instead this is one of the best games in the franchise and ended up creating the franchise's most iconic villain so clearly some black magic was at play at the Insomniac studios in 2004. The cut side-games of this game - the races and the ship battles - don't hinder the game so much as trim the fat and as a result I think this game has a more streamlined experience than Going Commando and brought me the gameplay that I enjoy the most from this series.

But mostly, I must reiterate, this game brought us Dr. Nefarious, who feels like he was created mostly for Insomniac to flex on the competition and go "look at how cartoonishly animated this PS2 character is", and I'm glad he's survived well into the PS5 era where they can raytrace that doofus and make him lavishly animated on modern hardware. Am I speaking from a bias? Possibly. But I think this game's faults would've been way more noticeable if the villain wasn't good and if we didn't get that banger of a song from Courtney Gears midway through the game.