If getting past the first screen is this hard, then there's a problem.
The Bad: Extremely slow; Almost everything kills you in one hit (including the door); Enemies take forever to kill; Horrible port that shouldn't have been made in the first place
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the aracde, you you would see games like Pong, Donkey Kong, Mario Bros, Asteroid, etc. Then you would see Dragon's Lair. Graphically, it was like comparing Halo 3 to Super Mario Bros. It was extremely appealing, so obviously it got it's gluttonous slot absolutely packed with quarters. Whenever something becomes this successful, you would expect to see a port of some kind. However, how in the world would you be able to take something like Dragon's Lair and port it to the Atari or the NES or the Master System. Well, they did anyways. As you may have already guessed, it sucked ass.
I have yet to see somebody beat the whole game (excluding on the arcade version). In fact, I've seen very few people be able to get past the FIRST SCREEN!!! Then if they get to the second screen, they usually die and give up. I love challenging games, but no game should be this difficult and tedious to get past the very first screen in the game.
First of all, your character walks like he had Mt. Everest chained to his legs, and he has an extremely delayed jump. If you can't even make the controls work properly, then right there is a major problem. His attack has a bad angle, and does very little damage. He has a rather impressive health bar though. So maybe he might be able to survive... Wait, what the hell?! He just TOUCHED THE DOOR and he died!!!!!! Okay, lets try this again... Okay, so up comes the dragon, he shoots a fireball at me, I press B to jump (which also is a weird control scheme at the time)... BUT I DIE!!! In one shot, my character dies, and it's because he has such a terrible jump! Screw this! May this game burn in hell!!!
If the above reaction is yours, then you're just normal. I would recommend that at this point that you do just forget about the game. It doesn't get any easier and just gets more annoying (if you can believe that). So overall, this game isn't worth your time. Though you may be asking, "What is the point of the health bar if everything kills you in one hit, including the ****ing door?" Well, I was asking the same question. Apparently, the bat that flies out of the door in the beginning only takes off like a millimeter of your health bar. So a still closed door can kill you instantly, but it takes forever for a vicious bat to kill you. The dragon can kill you in one hit, yet it takes you forever to kill the dragon. Well, there really is no point in trying to figure this piece of **** out. The only thing it should be making you ask yourself is why it isn't already in the garbage can.
Overall, this game is absolutely abysmal. There is no point in wasting your time with this filthy trash. It shouldn't have even been ported to begin with. The arcade version has nice cartoon animations on it, and that's what the whole game pretty much was. So why would you even think about trying to port this game to systems like the NES and co?! I guess that the saying that money is the root of all evil is very true in this case.