Alisia Dragoon

In Alisia Dragoon, the player controls the protagonist, Alisia, in her quest to save the world by defeating the evil forces that killed her father. The game consists of eight levels of side-scrolling environments; Alisia has to jump across gaps and kill the enemies that stand in her way. Each stage is completed by defeating the boss at the end.

Alisia attacks by shooting streaks of lightning from her hands. The attack automatically targets enemies in range but gets weaker with each volley as Alisia's power is depleted. Her power recharges when she stops attacking; when fully charged, it allows her to unleash a multi-target attack, hitting every enemy on the screen. The energy system introduces an element of strategy, encouraging the player to manage Alisia's power to have her able to defend herself at critical moments.

Similar to most action games on the Sega Genesis, the plot in Alisia Dragoon is simple and short. The game goes straight into the action, tasking Alisia to demolish everything in sight. After defeating the final boss, the player is treated to a cinematic cutscene of Alisia's triumphant return to her home.

Much of the backstory is described in the manual. Alisia is the daughter of a sorcerer who attempted to stop the prince of all things evil, Baldour. As a child, her father was tortured to death in front of her eyes by Baldour. Although the world has not fully recovered from the devastating effects of Baldour's last visit, Baldour's aide Ornah manages to transport his dormant cocoon back to Earth. Now a woman with magical ability rivaling that of her father, Alisia sets out to destroy Baldour's cocoon before he can awaken.

In 1992, Japanese animation studio Gainax was in a collaboration with Game Arts, the makers of the Lunar role-playing games, to produce an action video game. Gainax's video game product line tended to target a niche crowd who generally preferred dating simulations and anime-based adventure games. Alisia Dragoon is a departure from this tradition. The animation studio handled the artistic end of the production, writing the story and creating the artwork that would be used for the design of the game's environments and characters.

Several of its founders had worked on Hayao Miyazaki's animated films, and the influences of Miyazaki's 1984 science fiction animated film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind were evident in certain levels of the game. Similarly, due to the predominance of mixing science fiction with fantasy themes in the Japanese animation circles at that time, Alisia Dragoon featured high-tech spaceships and robots alongside mythical zombies and dragons. The composition of the soundtrack was delegated to Mecano Associates, who had produced the music for other works from Game Arts, such as the action games Fire Hawk: Thexder 2 and Silpheed. Game Arts, however, did most of the work in producing Alisia Dragoon, adapting the artwork into environments and creatures that can be rendered by the console hardware and writing them as lines of software code.

Alisia Dragoon sold few copies upon its release in Japan. The game was published earlier by Sega for North America. However, it was a subdued release; Sega did not place major advertisements for the game in the media. To localize the contents for the Western market, the video game publisher made several cosmetic changes to Alisia Dragoon.

Instead of a big-eyed heroine drawn in typical anime styling, Alisia was portrayed as a golden bikini-wearing barbarianess on the box covers outside Japan. The Western depiction of Alisia was likened to the scantily clad females in artist Boris Vallejo's work.