Speed run of Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II done during September 2004. This one is tops on my list of annoyingly hard games (can anyone say "collision detection?"). If this wasn't a Wizards and Warriors game, I wouldn't have given it a second thought. But, since I happen to enjoy the other games in this series, I had to at least beat the game once, just to say I did. What you see here is that one time.
There's a glitch employed by the emulator people that allows you to bring keys, magic power, and "elemental spells" past the end of a level. I don't use this trick because I think that this is cheating (plus, it's banned by TG). You're supposed to start each level without the above items because that's what normally happens when you collect a piece of the Ironsword. This is important because having the extra stuff allows for some HUGE shortcuts on some levels that are supposed require the collection of new items (ex: getting the Golden Fly in the forest level without the Waterspout).
That aside, this run has a bit of room for improvement, particularly the last battle, where I accidentally get stuck in the subscreen with no spells (the darn thing takes several seconds to tell you that you're empty-handed!). I also get bounced around quite a bit by the last boss(es). Who knew that they were powerful enough to hit you from the other side of a mountain? :)
