A look back at: The Guardian Legend

This is one of the strangest games I ever had a look at, and seems actually not that bad given how unique it was, especially for an NES game.

Basically, you take the sidescrolling labyrinthian gameplay the Zelda and Startropics dungeons had provided, then you put up the top-down rail-shooter aspects such as Xevious, and the combination is The Guardian Legend, a hybrid game of sorts. Not an action RPG as I had erroneously called it back then. It's another one of those fun but extremely hard games, with most of the frustration in the shooter part really and truly.

The game itself has tons of enemies in both gameplay forms, and the character is a hybrid character of course, a guardian that transforms into a jet on the way to the alien ship Naju. It's a totally weird character but then again it was quite excusable for what it offered. The main currency is almost akin to Zelda's rupees, in that they are multipurpose, not just for buying "upgrades" but for using special weapons, kind of like Link's bow and arrows. The plot is the standard "find these devices to blow up ship" variant, involving ten devices, where the actual task is bigger than the plot itself considering just how much opposition is against the player. It's simple and to the point. Still though, it's a nice futuristic setting as opposed to the more common fantasy setting you'd see in most other action RPGs or action-adventures you might find back in the day. I realized I talked pretty much about everything this game had to offer, and, well, what else can you see, it's old school NES stuff, worth a look at even if you can't beat it.