The Guardian Legend (1988)

Beat in slow motion mode. Even at 40 frames per second the opening shoot em up sequence was too fast but not too difficult. Then I was into the Zelda style adventure aspect. I had no trouble navigating around due to the map and was impressed with the graphics, music and controls; smooth 8 direction shooting with 1 button for the basic shot and the other for a special weapon, and select to go into weapon select. These controls transferred to the shoot em up parts too, other than the directional shooting. I did not do much exploring of the starting area and thus missed the wave shot until later. Instead I went for the objective and found the aimed shot. This just fired a bigger shot which didn't seem worth using, but once I got into the shoot em up this shot allowed 8 directional shooting with limited ammo called chips. I absolutely loved this design and had a blast juggling 2 different weapons and aiming. Aimed shot was great for hitting to the sides and behind, and both weapons could be fired simultaneously forward for more dps. As the game progressed many more special weapons were unlocked and could be freely swapped between on the fly. This was so much better than other shoot em ups that this might be the best I have ever played. How is it that later games never adopted this kind of tactical depth? The shoot em up stages became crazy difficult as the game went on, but the generous health and ammo drops plus the rpg nature of upgrading weapons, attack, defense and hp made it manageable. The bosses were well done though many were more difficult repeats with a different color. Their challenge varied wildly with many of the later bosses being trivial with the weapons and tactics I was using. 2 stood out as giving me a lot of grief. An early lobster looking boss that moved all over the screen spamming little claws. It took me a lot of save state scumming to win that, though it was mainly due to my limited weapon options. A walkthrough said to use the wave beam but I did not have it. The 2nd was late game against a giant head that shot eyes. When it got low on hp it went crazy with shooting eyes and bullets to the point where I was overwhelmed. Walkthrough said to use wave beam again but that did not help. Maybe mine was not high enough level. I was using the fireball on him to good effect but just could not survive the amount of projectiles. What worked was using the screen clearing bombs, the only special weapon with its own ammo count. I had 250 and I just spammed those to get rid of all projectiles while shooting the boss with the basic shot. Soon though the dead eyes dropped hp and I was able to safely go back to using fireball. The final boss was pretty tough, mostly because his homing missiles tended to hit my rear. It took a few attempts and during the winning go I survived for quite a long time at 1 hp.

My favorite weapon was the side light sabers. While holding shoot it put a short beam on both sides of the ship that did impressive damage. With this I did not have to worry much about aiming as I could slice enemies with melee while the beams also destroyed projectiles. There were many times using them where I was surprised that I came out without a scratch. This was how I beat the final boss, most bosses, and the hardest shoot em up sequences. Best shoot em up weapon ever, other than the screen clearing bombs. There was only 1 type of regular enemy which I had to switch to bombs for; the blue circle things that exploded into a circle of blue homing projectiles. The side beams just did not protect against that. The side beams were not very useful in adventure mode though due to the full directional movement. It did come in handy during the crab mini bosses where I could stand next to it facing up so my regular shot destroyed the projectiles while the beam killed the enemy. My favorite adventure weapon was the forward light saber, which I never used at all in the ship. It functioned just like the side beams only went straight ahead for very good dps. I used it to burn down enemies that were too close, and for mini bosses that either stood still or were too fast to kite. Some of those mini bosses I barely scraped past at 1 hit from death only thanks to the incredible damage of the sword. My next favorite was fireball, which was a big slow moving high damage shot. It took careful timing to hit bosses with it but was the fastest way to beat them when they had too much lateral movement to risk the side beams. I didn't use it in adventure mode. Then was the laser, which was like a weaker but faster version of the fireball. I only used it for a few bosses and tougher forward enemies before I had fireball, and it was the only special weapon that could not be used at all on foot. Another good weapon made a ball rotate around the character. It constantly drained ammo and the only way to turn it off was to switch weapon. I used it for 1 or 2 mini bosses that rode my ass so hard that I could not stop to shoot, but I did not find it that useful as the ship compared to the much better side beams. The other weapons I barely used. There was an arrow shot that fired in both down diagonals, the wave that did a very fast forward shot, a grenade that did area damage and I assume could be thrown over indestructible barriers. It could be aimed in the ship but had extremely slow firing rate. The big ball did a spiral pattern shot and stayed on screen for quite some time and could not be fired again until it left, so it was not very good. The last zig zag shot summoned 2 balls that homed in on enemies while staying on the screen doing repeated damage. I went back to try it on the final boss and it did very well. The 2 balls stayed on the boss doing constant damage while all I had to do was evade damage. They did not protect me from projectiles and I ran out of ammo, having to use nukes to farm for more. Side beams still the best. All weapons were level 3 except arrow, spiral and laser which were 2. I had 22 hp, 4000 chips, 4 attack and 7 defense, which was everything according to the walkthrough. No idea about rapid fire since that was not shown. Just before the end I let myself die to see if it would be a free hp and ammo restore. Despite never saving it spawned me at the last save room I visited with full hp and ammo, and no lost progress. I didn't keep that though since it brought me further away from the end, then I reached 2 million score and got full hp and ammo restored. I didn't even realize score could do that. I spent some time farming hp and ammo on easy enemies but most rooms I skipped through before the enemies materialized. This was probably the biggest flaw of the game. Why should you be able to just walk through most rooms without threat? The rooms really needed to be more threatening with Zelda style environmental puzzles, including kill all enemies. Even something simple like having to press a switch to open the exit while dealing with enemies. I also did not like what passed for puzzles to get past the locks to the shoot em up stages. They were either ridiculously simple or so weird that I had to look up the solution, even though every solution was listed in side rooms. I still had to wonder if I was doing the right thing sometimes.

This was an amazing top tier NES game. The shoot em up part definitely stood out with the more Mega Man style of special weapons, but better because of simultaneous use with the basic shot. The adventure part was just a little inferior to Zelda 1 due to rooms being just there rather than discrete challenges. Fix that and add in some Metroidvania elements to get some upgrades and a way to play the shoot em up stages again and this could have been the best NES game.

9.0/10