The Guardian Legend

Have you ever been in the situation where you want to play a vertical shooter but you wanted something with a bit more substance to it? You know, have your weapons get stronger as you progress and maybe have your life bar get bigger? Those games are kind of short too, maybe if it was a bit longer. Five or six hours ought to do it. Maybe it’d be good to throw some RPG elements into it. In fact, how about if we put gameplay elements from Zelda into it. Things like shops and puzzles and cute little mascot characters. Why not just go all out and put some top down action RPG style exploration in it.

The folks at Compile must have thought the same way because that’s exactly what The Guardian Legend is. The first time I played the game was at a friend’s house and it looked a lot like a Sci-Fi version of Zelda. He was getting hearts, selecting weapons from a sub-screen with a map, and running into shops to buy items off of blue blob creatures. I immediately tracked down a copy for myself and was really confused when the game I plugged into my NES looked similar to a shooter like Zanac, nothing like the game I had seen earlier. I thought I bought the wrong game at first. After beating the first boss, I was dropped into the more familiar game I’d seen. At the time, I wasn’t very good at shooters so the game was a bit too hard for me. I actually shelved it for a few years because of the difficulty. That was, admittedly, a mistake.

You take control of an unnamed female cyborg, known Miria in the Japanese version, who turns into a spaceship. I guess during the translation process they decided the name wasn’t important. You must explore the planet Naju and venture into all of the corridors to enable the self destruct sequence before it collides with earth. Some of Compile’s mascots will help you along the way! It’s unique, that’s for sure. So get your rocket boosters firing and your trigger finger ready. Let’s blow up a planet to save Earth!

The Guardian Legend blends together both the shooter and action RPG genres quite well and it was one of the first games to do it. It paved the way for other games that tried to cross genres like Sigma Star Saga for the Game Boy Advance. The style of stages alternate between vertical shooter, and top-down action RPG areas. Picture playing Zelda, except every time you walk into a dungeon you have to go play a stage of Blazing Lazers.

There’s 10 areas that you explore in the action RPG mode and 21 corridors which are the shooter stages. Naju has a lot of places to explore, especially if you want to collect all the power ups and items. I suggest you do this, as the beginning is fairly easy but It gets ridiculously hard towards the end. Every bit of life and every weapon upgrade counts. While the exploration parts are okay, they don’t really offer a lot of puzzles. The biggest stumpers I had were opening some of the doors to the corridors. The rest were more along the lines of guessing which side of the red barriers takes you somewhere and which are dead ends.

Once in a while you will come to a room that blocks you in and makes you fight a mini-boss. Usually they will drop a weapon, life, or power chip upgrade. The power chips serve a few purposes. They’re money, the higher they are the more powerful your main shot weapon is and they’re also energy for your secondary weapons.

While the action RPG portions aren’t breaking any new ground, the shooter parts are pretty special. The first few corridors are easy but the difficulty ramps up exponentially about halfway through. I don’t often white-knuckle NES games. You keep the same weapon upgrades power ups and subweapons from the action RPG portions, even the laser sword. Although your arsenal is still fueled by the precious power chips, the game throws you a bone fairly often with more power chips or some life. Most of the corridors are fairly short, and the same bosses are recycled a few times. You’re going to be sore if you missed some upgrades, so make sure you backtrack and get everything.

One thing most shooters have in common with each other is a rocking soundtrack, and The Guardian Legend doesn’t disappoint. While a lot of tracks are reused, the music is pretty spectacular. In fact, the music is what stood out the most to me the first time I played it. I’m not the only one, either. Some of the remixes have been among the most popular on OverClocked Remix.

The graphics are standard late 80’s/early 90’s fare. Nothing stands out as great. A lot of the same bosses are used a number of times, but there’s also a fair number of them. Considering the quantity of the shooter stages, even if they’re short, I think it’s acceptable to see some recolored sprites. A lot of the environments were just recolored as well, and I know they could have done better. It’s all in hindsight, really, as I don’t think it takes away from the game. Aside from that, the only thing that kept coming to mind was how many enemies I fought looked like they belong on a salad. They tried to go with about four themes across most of the game but I feel like I fought an awful lot of shrimp and mushrooms.

The game’s a decent length, about as long as the original Zelda. Possibly longer than that, even. You certainly got your money’s worth. Unfortunately you’re given a password system instead of battery backup which is a bit rough considering the amount of time you’ll invest. 32 characters is pretty long for a password and to make things more complicated there’s punctuation marks and umlauts. Yes, umlauts. Most people won’t beat it in one sitting unless you’re a marathon player. There’s no excuse for the lack of battery backup.

The other thing there’s no excuse for is the box art. The European box art isn’t bad, but the US box art doesn’t really portray anything about the game. It’s a far cry from the original box art on the Japanese release. Take a look.

It’s done by Naoyuki Kato, the artist who worked on “Macross” and “The Legend of Galactic Heroes”. If you can’t read Japanese it was originally called “Guardic Gaiden”. That implies exactly what you think it does. The Guardian Legend is a sequel of sorts to Guardic which appeared on the MSX in 1986.

If you’ve played the sequel, you’re going to notice a lot of familiar music, enemies and, of course, the blue mascot character. The game itself plays similar to Galaxian or Cosmic Gate (Wait, was that a real game? Arino, what have you done!). The play field is stationary but after you complete each screen you choose where to move to next, sort of moving through a maze. Instead of collecting upgrades along the way, you allocate points at the start of each screen. Guardic was nothing to write home about and wasn’t very well received. I’d only suggest checking it out if you’re a big fan of The Guardian Legend.

While there isn’t a digital release or any ports, you can find The Guardian Legend fairly easily at flea markets or anywhere that sells older games. I picked up a copy for a dollar just so I didn’t have to rummage through the attic. If you don’t own it already, It’s worth blowing the dust out of your NES for. I’d even suggest it to people who don’t like the action RPG elements. Just enter the password “TGL” which enables arcade mode and play it like one of Compile’s many great shooters. You don’t want to overlook this one.

Played it? Got frustrated at it? Couldn’t figure out how to open corridor 4? I want to know! Comment below or hit me up on Facebook or Twitter!