Dragon Buster

Dragon Buster is a side-scrolling platformer with RPG elements where you control Clovis, a hero rescuing Princess Celia across multi-level stages. It introduced the double jump—a mechanic now standard in platformers—and uses a vitality meter instead of lives. Combat is hack-and-slash: swing your sword at enemies while navigating vertical and horizontal scrolling levels. The game connects stages through a hub world you traverse between rescues. Namco built it on modified Pac-Land hardware to handle vertical movement, a technical trick for 1985 arcades. Later ports reached home systems. If you're curious about early action-RPG hybrids that shaped genre conventions, this is a functional snapshot of mid-'80s design before those ideas became ubiquitous.