Dragon Egg!

In Japan the PC Engine was a strong platform for action games and platformers, because its video hardware handled a large number of sprites and produced cleaner colour than eight-bit competitors. Dragon Egg!, released in 1991, uses those strengths: a bright, readable side-view platform game built around a heroine and her dragon companion.

The companion is the core of the design. It is not merely a helper that occasionally attacks, but an element that changes over the course of play and changes your options in combat with it. Japanese platformers around the turn of the 1990s returned to this model repeatedly, because it gives the player a reason to hunt for collectables and to think about managing the companion's strength between sections.

The moment-to-moment play is classical: jumps across gaps, enemies on predictable paths, and stretches that punish rushing. Difficulty is measured, and the game reads as an approachable title rather than a hard test, which suits its presentation.

Dragon Egg! belongs to the part of the PC Engine library that never really spread beyond Japan, since the console received only limited support in Western markets under a different name. That is precisely what makes it interesting today: a competently built platformer from a system most European players never saw in person. Here you can run it straight in the browser, with no emulator to configure and no cartridge image to track down, which is the easiest way to sample that library.