And so it begins...

“If someone is reading this… I must have failed.”

With those words begins an epic adventure that consumed several weeks of my childhood. When most people think back to their favorite games of yesteryear, they fondly reminisce about the NES classics such as Zelda, Metroid, or Mario–but not me. If I think long and hard about my top five NES games, The Guardian Legend is definitely in that list.

In 1989, when The Guardian Legend came to North America, it arrived with little fanfare. While games like Dragon Warrior, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Ninja Gaiden were stealing the spotlight and taking up multiple rows of shelf space in my local video store (yes kids, we old folks used to have to rent our games from video stores), there was a lone yellow box at the end of the row with a cool looking piece of art on the cover. I shrugged, rented it, and the rest is history.

The Landers act helpful most of the time, but they are shady merchants...

I will never forget my first experience with The Guardian Legend. From the pictures on the back, I took it to be a Zelda-like, top-down adventure game. When I pushed the power button, I was met with a sweeping spacey soundtrack. I pushed “start”. With no fanfare, I was instantly hurtling towards a rogue planet, as a spaceship; shocked to find that I was playing a fast paced shoot-em-up. Stunned, I died immediately. There was no second chance, no “lives”, just a rapidly depleting shield, and tons of enemies hurtling towards me that I could only weakly fend off with a slow, single-bullet cannon.

Game over. 30 seconds after it started. Oh, you kids have no idea how good you have it nowadays. Back then, games were hard.

I regrouped, shook myself off, and jumped back in, this time prepared to fire and dodge immediately. I made it to the end of the level, and fought a giant battery of robotic cannons as a first boss battle. Then, my ship transformed into a cybernetic female warrior, with wings and a gun. At the tender age of 12, I was in love.

New areas are accessible only after you have proper key

The story behind The Guardian Legend is deep, and is revealed to you through messages left behind by a mysterious survivor. It goes something like this: Earth scientists discovered a huge planet hurtling towards the homeworld at an alarming rate. They have sent you, their half-human, half-machine Guardian, to investigate. Upon breaching the planet’s outer defenses (the opening shoot-em-up level), you land in a control room where it is revealed to you that the planet is called Naju, and it has been taken over by evil beings who slaughtered all the natives and have turned it into a galactic weapon; their destination? Earth, of course.

You are not alone, however. There is a race of helpful merchant beings called Landers that upgrade your weapons, sell you information, and enable you to access new areas of Naju as you progress. And there is the matter of the lone person who left all these messages for you…

The goal of the game is to explore each of 10 alien zones, find a hidden corridor that leads down into the core of Naju, and activate the self-destruct mechanism at the bottom. Once all 10 self-destruct mechanisms are activated, Naju will be destroyed.

A mutant cyclops-fish is one of the bosses in the underwater zone

For an NES game in 1989, this was a huge world. This was probably one of the first games to ever utilize the “hub” concept; there is a large central area that you keep returning to after clearing each of the ten alien zones, slowly being able to access new areas as you get weapon and item upgrades, and revealing more and more of the story through computer terminals and Lander shops.

The Guardian Legend is a “mixed-genre” game. In the hub area, it is a top-down exploration game like Legend of Zelda. Once you enter one of the ten alien zones, it becomes a top-down adventure/shooter. Each alien zone also contains two stretches of vertical-scrolling space shooter levels, as well.

The shooter levels are no slouch; this is not a “tacked-on” gimmick; The Guardian Legend could have been released strictly as a shooter, eliminated the top-down hub and exploration zones, and still been an awesome game. The bosses are wildly varied, some of them are exceptionally difficult, and the action and bullet spam gets intense.

The pacing is perfect: the mix of shooter and exploration/combat is extremely well balanced. You finally beat an intense and wild shooter level, your heart is beating rapidly, you’re sweating, and you don’t think you can take anymore: it’s an awesome relief and change of pace to land and walk around the surface, exploring, finding items, and upgrading your weapons.

There are bosses and difficult encounters in the top-down levels as well; they don’t only appear in the shooter levels. In fact, the exploration zones are probably more difficult overall, in terms of number and strength of enemies. When you enter a screen that has a boss, an alarm sounds and you have about two seconds to back off before you are walled in with the boss. Once the walls go up, it’s Thunderdome: Two enter, one leaves.

There are many RPG elements as well. Your main gun is relatively weak in the beginning. You soon realize that this is because you can only carry 50 “Chips”, and the strength and speed of your gun rely on Chips. Chips are like the currency of Naju; you start with a “wallet” that can carry only 50. When you get your first wallet upgrade, your main gun suddenly doubles in size and speed. The gun’s power works on a tiered system. At 100, 200, and so on, the gun gets progressively more powerful.

You can spend your Chips, though. You get access to dozens of secondary weapons; everything from frag grenades and laser swords to screen-filling fireball-hurling monstrosities. Each shot with these secondary weapons spends Chips, however–so as you use them, your main gun weakens. Luckily, Chips are relatively easy to come by as random drops from enemies.

There is a strategy involved in using the secondary weapons; occasionally they can be extremely helpful, but sometimes it’s better to keep your Chips full so that your main gun stays at full power.

As an added twist, the architects of Naju created doors that could only be opened in certain ways. There is a puzzle element to opening some of the corridors. For example, some of them require a hit from a special secondary weapon,  and some require standing in a certain spot and waiting. You can find the answers to these puzzles by searching every computer terminal and talking to every Lander.

For a Nintendo game, in 1989, the breadth and scope of this game was pretty remarkable. Besides the sheer size of the world and its 10 zones, the variety of zones is exceptional. There are underwater, desert, jungle, and volcanic areas just to name a few. This was a pretty snazzy technical feat back in the days of NES cartridges with 128K of space on them. I remember thinking, even at the limited experience and technical knowledge of a twelve-year-old kid, “Wow. This is really advanced.”

I'm reasonably sure no language on Earth uses f with umlauts.

There are some minor complaints. The password system is horrendous. I’m pretty sure that they invented a bunch of letters for the passwords. It’s understandable, because the amount of character customization that had to be stored was intimidating in a time before battery-backed-up save games. Still, writing down and re-entering the passwords in this game are an exercise in madness. They may has well have put them in hieroglyphics. Luckily for us modern kids, emulators take care of this onerous part of it. The NES purists out there, however, will have some hairpullers with the passwords.

The game gets exceptionally difficult towards the end; the bosses are extremely fast and powerful, and the unforgiving system of zero lives can induce those “chuck the controller” moments. You get passwords at Lander merchants, and those can be very far away from some of the harder boss fights. Dying, re-entering the maddening passwords, and making your way all the way back to the boss can ruin your day.

Other than that, The Guardian Legend is basically a perfect game. Take a vertical space shooter. Toss in a top-down overworld exploration and fighting game on a massive scale. Add in an RPG with upgradeable weapons, armor, and items. Mix in a few puzzles. Throw in a well-written and compelling storyline and top it off with great graphics, hours of gameplay, and a fantastic soundtrack. They did it twenty years ago, and ended up with The Guardian Legend.

PS: Amazingly, you can still buy this game on Amazon. Wow.