The player controls an oriental martial arts fighter, who must traverse a warlord's territory to find lost scrolls. The territory is formed by a labyrinth of horizontal scrolling environments in both directions with a profile view; the backgrounds are shown in perspective but the game is two-dimensional. The enemy base is on a volcano and you have to go through jungles, caves, buildings and swamps.

Along the way you can meet, one at a time, enemy fighters with different skill levels. At this point the game becomes a one-on-one hand-to-hand fighting game with 17 moves available, very similar to a match in The Way of the Exploding Fist, but in this case each contender has an energy bar and the fight is up to death, unless you choose to flee. There are also other dangers, such as panthers and poisonous gases.

When the character finds a temple, he can meditate to recover lost energy and, in proportion to the opponents he has defeated, also to increase maximum energy. Also, if you have one of the eight scrolls, each identified by a trigram, and take it to the corresponding temple, you get an ability to complete the adventure and win a life (initially if you only have one).