Dragon Dance is a Breakout-style game, much like
Arkanoid. Basically, you bounce a ball around to break colorful bricks, especially the most frustrating last one.
.vbm quick test
Your "paddle" is some sort of green Chinese dragon of some 2-5 segments in length. Losing the ball or getting hit by a hazard reduces this length by 1 block, and if you would go less than 2, you lose. The length carries over between stages, so you might be crippled for a while if you lose a ball or two. A shortened length is almost certainly not an issue in a TAS. One interesting control aspect is that you actually do have slight control over your height, which can give much finer control over where that ball ends up.
In addition, if you destroy multiple blocks without the ball touching the paddle in the interim, a meter at the top of the screen fills up. When it has filled up enough, you can transform the dragon into other colored dragons! Triggering said transformation will empty out the meter and keep it emptied for as long as the change lasts (
it expires over time, but it's a rather long time). However, this meter does carry over between stages, but not the transformations, do be aware.
The first available transformation freezes the timer and lets you freeze the ball in place once. The "freeze the ball" part is recharged when the ball hits the "paddle".
The next one lets you reflect the ball in mid-air once. If the ball is traveling upwards, it's a left-right reflection. If it's going down, it will reflect up. This reflection power is recharged when the ball hits the "paddle".
The third effect produces a horizontal wall. Stays until you get rid of it. Recharges in a short time.
The last one, when the meter is nearly full, lets you shoot fire. Classic Arkanoid lasers effect, really.
When the meter fills up completely, a time-wasting scene takes place. It wastes time, and lots of it. Regardless, it could clear out random bricks (
including otherwise indestructible ones), restore your "paddle's" length, or set your remaining time to 99. So before it fills up, I suggest you use a power to avoid such time-wasting scenes.
There's 100 levels. 10 of them are sort of "boss battles" or something. The ball does travel quick at speed 10. I've noticed some lag while making a small TAS attempt up there. There's a significant wait at the end of each level, though. In that attempt, I actually did set REFLECT to SPECIAL (
trust me. The graphics during the fade-out lies, I tell you!), which lets the RNG play a more prominent role in how the ball bounces.
I'm just raising awareness of this game. I have no plans to make a full run myself. If it's interesting enough, great. If not, I wouldn't be upset at the loss of this thread anyway.