Dragon's Lair 3D: Return to the Lair brought its own soundtrack, with plenty of good music to go along:
The game's main theme, called Move 8, which plays on the title screen and in a few of the later levels of the game, carries a dark, mysterious tune that fits exploring a dangerous old castle.
Hero2 is an epic piece that befits a heroic knight on an adventure, seeking his lost princess.
Singe's theme, which plays during his actual boss fight after Dirk has claimed the Magic Sword and the penultimate level that houses the sealed portal to Mordroc's realm. A grand tune that mixes in an upbeat, heroic sound befitting of Dirk's courage and resolve, but also the terror of facing such a powerful beast.
Better as a Let's Play: As per Don Bluth tradition, the game's animation is absolutely gorgeous to look at. Unfortunately, the game's notorious difficulty which relies on players to think quick on their feet means that they wouldn't be able to appreciate the animation.
Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The majority of people find the animation beautiful and fun to look at (being Don Bluth animation), but the actual game to be frustrating and difficult.
Ensemble Dark Horse: The Lizard King, who made such an impression that more fans remember him, than either Singe or Mordroc.
Memetic Loser: The NES version of Dirk for dying just by walking into a door.
Narm: Daphne's voice actress could be very annoying for some fans.
A more literal version of this trope was the Sega CD port, which featured a smaller display, grainy graphics with muted or greyed out colors, and a slightly reduced FPS.
Being able to know what command you're supposed to do is a complete and utter crapshoot. Some scenes will make a flash, and some enemy attacks are obvious to counter with the sword, but most of the time in the original game, you had to completely guess when, what and where you're supposed to press something. And in certain cases, that meant a bunch of unmarked inputs back-to-back with absolutely no indications or else you started the room over. This made the game a hellish quarter muncher. Both the sequel and most modern ports fixed this by kindly showing every input you need to press.
In a blatant case of Padding and drawing a player's patience on their current quarter out, there's a number of scenes and rooms that can be reused in a single playthrough. Sometimes they're flipped to switch it up. Other times, they're not, so you're just repeating a room for the sake of it.
Special Effect Failure: For a game of 1983, the laserdisc footage is excellent and quite ahead of its time as a concept. Too bad actually chaining together the shots and scenes is a bit wonky; not only are many cuts blatantly just screen flips to keep reusing the same footage and just flip the input challenge, but every new room just cuts to Dirk already there rather than any seamless transitions, or how correct inputs may result in jarring jumps forward in the reel. And even worse, there's a number of scenes where the input suddenly replays up to the last second rather than continuing from the end of the shot. The limitations of the hardware can really throw you off as a result, especially when playing modern ports with clean footage that make it just more blatant how jarring all the cuts can be.
The battle with the Lizard King; fifteen seconds of waiting followed by five seconds of split-second button inputs. Dirk's badass reaction to clearing the room is worth the pain, though. He's much easier to beat on the DVD player port.
Be prepared to lose a lot of lives on the electric checkerboard room, especially if you play it on the real hardware. In contrast to the Lizard King, this room is much harder on the DVD player.
Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp
Contested Sequel: Despite having the same core concept and gameplay mechanics, opinions are split on which game does it better. The second game is certainly less iconic than the first, but people who like it will cite how it's much more accessible to newcomers due to the flashing light always indicating what your next action should be as opposed to only once in a while, and the fact that since the game does not throw you into randomly chosen dungeons, it's easier to correct for mistakes you make. On the other hand, those who don't like it say that there's less variety to go around and that there is too much Checkpoint Starvation, as well as disliking the treasure-collecting gimmick. The entire game being one giant Disney Acid Sequence is also a point of contention.
Ensemble Dark Horse: The Eve that Dirk runs into at the Level 4. If you read the comments on the videos of the game on Youtube, you'll find a huge amount of fans in love with her.
The first part of Level 3 that involves Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Queen of Hearts.
The level in Eden, where an obese Eve confuses Dirk with Adam and tries to kiss him. Dirk screams desperately and run, chased by Eve.
Hilarious in Hindsight: As Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 plays entirely in the background of Level 5, you have to fight off a fire-breathing cat while going through the skies of light and darkness during his creative gust and collecting treasures, one of them a "golden butterfly". Nine years later, there's Fantasia 2000, where Symphony No. 5 does indeed play, and though there are no people or musical instruments, there are indeed objects that are shaped like butterflies (though not golden) and bats as they fly through skies of light and darkness, with the latter ultimately conquered by light.
Inferred Holocaust: Dirk's presence ends up causing the fall of Eden in Stage 4. What's worse is that this was the only level without a confrontation with Mordroc, meaning he didn't even need to travel there in the first place!
Narm: Daphne's cries for help in stage 2. One would assume Mordroc must've force-fed Daphne a full tank of helium shortly after kidnapping her.
In the Alice in Wonderland level, we have the Cheshire Cat laughing as he's being swallowed alive by the Jabberwock.
Mordroc placing the Death Ring on Daphne in the opening movie. When it happens in the game, we're looking at Dirk's POV so we can't see it too well, but the version seen in the opening is up close through Daphne's POV, showing her and hand gruesomely transforming and having her make a terrified, painful scream, highlighting the Transformation Trauma and Body Horror she goes through.
No Yay: Near the end of Level 6, when Dirk unwraps the "mummy", believing it to be Daphne, he finds that "she" has Mordroc's head before morphing back to the wizard himself, who gives him a kiss on the cheek before Dirk pushes him off. This is pretty Squicky and a bit of Fan Disservice.
Sequel Difficulty Spike: Where the first game's scenes were short and easy to memorize, the sequel has longer, structured levels with few checkpoints. And even though the prompts are now consistently telegraphed, the more elaborate animation can make it difficult to tell which button to press. On top of all that, each of the treasures requires an alternate input to collect, and they have even less warning than the main action.
Special Effect Failure: At the beginning of Level 5, when a few objects flash upon being triggered by each button press, no "flash" sound is emitted; and it continues in this way until you fall into the skein and Mordroc shouts out, "Princess Daphne is MINE, YOU FOOL!"
Tear Jerker: When Dirk believes he's failed and that Daphne is dead, his anguish is pretty clear to see. Thankfully, he's proven wrong a few moments later.
The Movie
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Netflix cancelling the original project in favor of a Live-Action Adaptation did not go over well with fans of the original or fans of Don Bluth in general. While Bluth is thankfully still overseeing the movie's production, many have complained that making it live-action defeats the entire purpose, as it was meant to bring 2D-animation back and on a mainstream platform to boot.
