Review - The Guardian Legend (NES)
Like I wrote about with my post on playing Little Nemo on NES, I was inspired by a video Hungry Goriya posted on YouTube about 9 NES games you should play. I've made my way through the 2nd of the 7 I plan to tackle (as two of them I'd already played through). This time I tried out The Guardian Legend, and boy was I in for a surprise. When it came to Little Nemo, I had played that through rentals a few times as a kid, and had tried it again a few times through emulation as and adult. This one though, I was playing for the first time ever. And I've got to admit, I was blown away.
The game is mixture of two gameplay styles that I hadn't seen blended together before in an NES game of this era. It's part top-down exploration, and part vertical scrolling shooter! The top-down portions feel a bit like The Legend of Zelda, or maybe more appropriately, Blaster Master. You'll start off in a large hub zone called Area 0, gradually exploring and collecting keys that will open doors to the other ten Areas. The screen scrolls in a single screen style similar to the first Legend of Zelda game. You start off with just your main gun, but you'll earn several secondary weapons throughout your journey. In each area you open up, you typically will come across two minibosses as you explore, as well as find entrances to two corridors. These corridors take you to the other half of the game, the vertical shooter playstyle, as our heroine suddenly transforms into a jet and takes off!
The vertical shooter segments are pretty typical of the genre. You automatically fly forward and can move up, down, left and right while always facing the top of the screen. You'll fly over various vistas that change from stage to stage, either green plains, desserts, mechanical or even some kind of biological style backdrop. I haven't played that many vertical shooters in general, so I don't have too much to compare this part of the game to. I will say there are a wide variety of enemies, each with different attack patterns, and HP, so it never feels like it's getting stale. The levels also feel pretty short, with a large boss at the end of them. The main draw in these vertical shooting stages I think is that any weapons or upgrades you have in the other top-down mode will transfer over here. Upgraded your gun to shoot three bullets in a wide row? You'll have that extra cover now when you enter here. Same goes for your secondary weapons, they all work while you're in your jet form, which means you eventually have a lot of different options on how you'd like to fight as there are quite a few secondary weapons you'll find as you make your way through the game. Everything from grenades to lasers to homing attacks and satellite protectors that circle around you, you'll have lots of options for tackling the levels and the bosses.
It's these secondary weapons and powerups that truly make this game feel like something special. And it's probably also why I keep thinking it feels a bit Zelda-ish. It's that feeling of constant progression. I think every boss battle rewards you with something, and not just the flight shooter stages, but the minibosses you fight while exploring top-down areas too. It feels like you're always acquiring a new weapon or upgrading your weapons or your strength. It's a feeling of constantly leveling up, and then going back through areas you've been in before and absolutely plowing through enemies that used to give you a bit of trouble before. It feels really empowering to do!
The music in this game is also fantastic, and I will be adding several new songs to my video game music playlist now that I've played Guardian Legend. My favorite track is probably the one that plays when you're in Area 0, the main hub. Which I guess is a good thing, since it's the song you're probably going to hear more than any other. A lot of the Areas have their own music, and the flying levels have unique songs for different themed areas. Even the short music sting that plays as the heroine does her transformation and starts flying really does a good job of getting you pumped up for the intense action that you're about to fly into.
As I started playing this game, I was wondering how I had never heard of this game before. Or, to be clear, I'd heard of it before, and had seen the boxart at rental stores, but knew nothing of the gameplay itself. My first thought was that it must not have been featured in Nintendo Power magazine, which back in the day was my primary source of gaming news and info. But no, as it turns out, in the November 1989 issue the game a multi-page feature, complete with maps of the first four areas. I have no recollection of these pages, and I know I had this issue. No, I can only assume the main reason I didn't pay attention to this game back then was staring me right in the face. With its large, red eyes. I totally blame this box art. Even today, as a fan of the game, I look at that box art and find myself so disinterested in it.
I guess it's supposed to be one of the bosses? It's so vague, it doesn't really tell you anything about it. I decided to see what the box art looked like in Japan. Unsurprisingly, the main heroine is the focus of the box. That explains a lot actually, as game companies in the 80s and even 90s were primarily focused on the young boy market and were probably convinced no boy would play a game with a girl on the box. At least they didn't go so far as to change the character in the game, so I guess I'll be thankful for the small victories. The Japanese box art is an improvement but is strangely evocative of H.R. Geiger and not the tone I would have expected. But then I saw the European box art, and wow, this one nailed it! There's the Guardian, named Miria in the Japanese version, looking much closer to what I would expect a transforming anime girl who turns into a jet would look like. She's also much closer in style to how the Guardian Legend manga depicts her.
Playing retro NES games like The Guardian Legend get me really excited about what else I might find out there! I know there's probably tons and tons of retro games out there that are super good and just slipped by me without me ever realizing it. I look forward to the next hidden gem I find and hope it's as good at this one. In the meantime, I highly recommend giving this title a try if you haven't before, don't let this one go unplayed any longer! Happy gaming, and may your quest for retro treasures be as rewarding as mine!