Dark Seal (World) 1CC w/ Wizard

I finally managed to 1 credit clear a Data East title! It was really sloppy but I managed to slay one of my gaming white whales!
The game was played on MAME 0.260 with no auto-fire on.
This is a dungeon crawler that reminded me a lot of Gauntlet albeit this title is a bit jankier, haha. I initially gravitated towards it because the Wizard character gave me a "Tharja but designed in the 90's" vibe. Funnily enough both this and the first Fire Emblem came out in 1990. I'd actually would really like to know what influenced the Wizard's design!
This game is pretty short, but there are some things to keep in mind during gameplay. For one thing, you have power-up management, the strength and speed power ups are on timers and are pretty essential to defeating some of the bosses. Dying in bosses makes you lose everything, so if you die during a fight, chances you'll have to reset. In fact, that's the main reason I picked the World version for this run, as the U.S. version of this game (called "Gate of Doom") actually shortens the time that power ups last. The World version plays like the Japanese version but it has an English translation so you can get an idea of what's going on even though this game is pretty light on story.
The second hurdle is magic management, you have a magic meter that builds up by defeating enemies, and the magic you get is on a rotating cycle indicated by a spell book on the top of the screen. This system is pretty unbalanced in my opinion, since there are some spells that can make certain sections of levels trivial, most notably the Tornado and Medusa spells and there are others that are really useless like the Plant spell.
You'll see me standing around during gameplay waiting for the right spell to show up so I can skip chunks of the levels lol. However, you can't abuse this as the game has an invisible timer and if you stand around too long a green reaper character will spawn and petrify your character which results in an insta-death (You'll actually see him during the ending sequence, it's pretty funny).
Lastly, bosses have really awkward hurtboxes that don't exactly line up with the sprite, so in most cases you do more damage by not doing direct hits to the weak spots but rather slightly above or to the side of those weak spots.
Keeping these three things in mind will definitely make runs smoother, however looking up some 1CC runs on KZbin doesn't hurt either, I watched many vids ranging from LordBBH's 1CC playthrough and some Korean players and picked the strats that worked best for me, so I didn't find any new groundbreaking tech haha.
I may try to No Miss this title eventually, but the last boss is basically a wall I can't get across for that, so I'll more than likely focus on practicing the sequel before I come back to this one. I've seen it done so I know it's possible!
It'd also be pretty cool to get a mod or a hack that dives deep into this game's code and see how it works internally, unfortunately this game is pretty obscure and there's not a lot of documentation on it. But it did get ported to modern consoles and PC, so if you're interested check it out! Of course, you can always use MAME as well.

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