The Guardian Legend

The Guardian Legend is allegedly an underrated entry in the vast NES library. I sure as hell had never heard of it before scrounging around the internet and uncovering it among the scrolls of games on Nintendo’s first home console. It’s also apparently the fourth and last entry in a series called Budruga released on the MSX, but this information is Greek to me. Still, its esotericism is what beckons me to play it. The internet promised me that if I burrowed under the surface and brushed past Mario, Mega Man, Castlevania, and all of the other medium molders on the NES everyone is familiar with, I’d be rewarded with an 8-bit title that only so few have had the pleasure of experiencing - a Hellraiser cubic puzzle box of sorts. The curious glow of The Guardian Legend’s reputation as a hidden gem is what allured me towards it, and caving into curiosity resulted in playing one hell of an NES title…for the most part.

The Guardian Legend’s plot is a tad more involved than the average princess-saving narrative fare seen from the utmost high-ranking titles on the NES. In fact, The Guardian Legend has ostensibly taken a progressive, feminist note from Metroid and placed a woman named Miria in the starring role of this galactic adventure. The damsel(s) in distress here is the collective populous of Earth, as they are unknowingly about to be invaded by a whole habitat of hostile aliens whose mothership is their entire planet of Naju. To prevent condemning all life on earth to a terrible fate of either enslavement or total obliteration, Miria must unlock Naju’s self-destruct sequence by rooting around the planet’s ten different corridors.

The game’s direction doesn’t treat this potentially harrowing prospect with gripping urgency, but it’s fitting for a game with constant adrenalized action such as The Last Guardian. Immediately, the player is rocketed (literally) into the first half of The Guardian Legend’s gameplay: a scrolling multidirectional space shooter a la Gradius. Whenever she stumbles into one of these sections, Miria will launch herself into the dim, anti-gravitational pull of space and gracefully fold into a spaceship like a piece of paper into an origami swan. For approximately two to five minutes, she’ll blast through a smattering of Naju’s eclectic ecosystem surviving the onslaught of enemy fire until reaching the level’s boss. If you’ve played any games of this ilk before, The Last Guardian doesn’t offer much that you wouldn’t already anticipate. Still, the effectiveness of this game’s particular usage of this commonly-used mechanic is in its pacing. I generally enjoy the zooming action found in games from this genre, but the repetitiveness that comes with the constant coaction of aiming and dodging tends to overstay its welcome. The short bursts of multidirectional shooting interspersed with other pronounced gameplay elements better ensure my attention is preserved. Plus, after the introduction, the space shooter sections are all allotted to vital points of progression, giving weight to what is usually too superficial with overuse across the genre.

The other half of the gameplay hybrid in The Last Guardian sees Miria traversing through Naju’s grounds. Here, the multidirectional shooting shifts to a top-down perspective where Miria is on foot. Considering the contrast between the two directions, I initially thought that The Last Guardian’s primary influence was Sunsoft’s NES magnum opus Blaster Master. However, The Last Guardian is instead reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda, and not only due to the top-down view we see our protagonist from. Naju’s interior is designed as a labyrinth just as Hyrule was in the first entry of Nintendo’s high fantasy franchise, where its entirety can be mapped out on an X-Y grid (that the developers have fortunately plotted in the menu after Nintendo made the unperceptive choice to omit one). Every new screen that shifts broadly introduces a wave of enemies that are optional to engage with, which leaves goodies for the player if they oblige. The objective hidden across the intricately zigzagging pathways is finding the corridors, which is where Miria launches herself back as a space vessel to shut down its power. Some of these corridors are locked with typical cryptic rubbish common in this primitive era of gaming, so Miria will need some guidance in order to meet her goals. An omniscient guide will constantly be in Miria’s ear to aid her, and he looks like a blue jawbreaker with googly eyes glued onto it as opposed to the archetypal wizened sage that told Link it was too dangerous to prowl Hyrule without a sword in hand. The not inanimate inanimate object also provides wares to Miria in deep corners of the map like a certain old man. Call it derivative, but I fully declare that The Last Guardian uses the hindsight of the first Zelda’s mistakes and improves upon it. Miria’s gun doesn’t jam after losing a smidge of health, and the improved visuals make the map easier to traverse. Still, finding one’s way back to the area with the green astroturf at the center can still be irritating after the blips of interest dissipate when Miria completes her objective. Above all else, setting the space shooter portions as this game's “dungeons” with the Zelda direction provides such a magnificent dynamic between both gameplay types.

Besides her standard blaster, Miria’s inventory of additional firepower is also as stacked as Nintendo’s boy in the green tunic. In the same menu as the map is an array of supplementary weapons that she scrounges up as the game progresses. When one of these weapons is selected in the menu, the player can activate their deadly potency with the opposite button on the controller. It’s recommended to mix the rapid fire of the standard blaster with these auxiliary tools for full effect, as it's liable to blow the enemies to bits much quicker. My weapon of choice was the double-sided lightsaber that stems from both of Miria’s hips as swinging it around in circles made numerous groups of enemies drop like flies. Other alternate weapons include a spinning circle of red death, a fiery laser beam the size of the one that blew up Alderaan, and a juggernaut one that just blows everything on screen to kingdom come. I presume that “EE” stands for “extreme explosion?” All of the alternate weapons translate perfectly to the space shooter sections, which is where the player will likely find them most effective. Offering a myriad of additions to Miria’s arsenal ups the ante of the gameplay variety wonderfully, especially at a time when games had so few actions altogether.

Alas, the glowing praise I’ve been slathering The Guardian Legend with stops here when I discuss the game’s approach to difficulty. Given that it’s an NES game, I never expected the game to give me the grapes of luxury. Still, it should shock and appall everyone when I inform you that if you die once in The Guardian Legend, it’s quite literally game over. No, not offering one continue. One. Fucking. Life. The penalty for dying once erases all progress, forcing the player to start from the very beginning. The Guardian Legend doesn’t borrow the limited continues from the arcades like all of its NES contemporaries that is already harsh as is: it spits the quarters back at the player with the force of a whizzing paintball and tells them to fuck right off. The game does provide the player with constant health items from enemy drops and stat boosts to stave off this untimely demise, but it only does so much to match the brute force of the Naju opposition. The later space shooter levels have a nauseating amount of things on screen that actually slows the frame rate considerably, and some of the bosses are no laughing matter. That red version of the big-mouthed boss with the multiple eyes is actually one of the hardest goddamn fights I’ve ever faced in my years as a gamer. However, not all hope is lost as this game features a password system to save an approximate amount of progress. Still, not only are the passwords overblown, but it seems the developers have attempted to integrate umlauts into the non-existent gibberish lexicon. It’s as frustrating as it sounds, and having to type in this rubbish over and over again diminished the game to practically performing paperwork.

I’d almost like to forget that The Guardian Legend exists. I feel as if I’ve unearthed the video game equivalent of the Arc of the Covenant: an indescribably beautiful presence that melted my face off as a consequence of engaging with it. It’s The Legend of Zelda in a science-fiction setting that manages to triumph over its fantasyland inspiration with some quality-of-life enhancements. The hybrid of multidirectional shooting and the way they are mixed across the game is as delectable a blend as chocolate and peanut butter. However, the bread melding this concoction together in a sandwich is made of glass, bloodying up my gums and causing me excruciating pain. The brazenly cruel difficulty stipulation in The Guardian Legend is a freshly laid turd in my finely shaken cocktail. Try not too hard to visualize that. Still, I have to remind myself that without the turd, The Guardian Legend would be one of the greatest games on the NES, and probably would’ve gone down as such in the history books. Who would do such a thing to ruin something so extraordinary? Why did the turd need to soil it so? Why indeed.