A playthrough of Broderbund's 1989 action-adventure game for the NES, The Guardian Legend. In this playthrough I went through all of the optional corridors and picked up all of the upgrades. Lots of people have requested this one over the past several years, and since this video marks the 600th entry in my NES playlist (
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3gSj_kh1fHtxy0_CDUwa6UPCO3PSf87- ), I wanted to do something special for the occasion. And The Guardian Legend is nothing if not special. The Guardian Legend is as unique a chimera as you're likely to find in the gaming world, pairing the fast action of vertically-scrolling shooters with the exploration and light RPG trappings of the action-adventure genre. It was created by Compile, the legendary development house behind hits like Zanac, MUSHA, Puyo Puyo, Golvellius, Blazing Lazers, and Devil's Crush, and it serves as a real showpiece for the skills that they had honed to this point. The game begins as Naju, a planet teeming with alien life, is hurtling through space on a collision course with Earth. You play as the Guardian, a bikini-clad android who has flown to Naju in order to avert the looming disaster. Inside Naju lies a huge network of corridors that connects its core to several different areas that can be accessed from the labyrinth on the surface, and the planet's self-destruct mode can be activated by defeating the creatures that protect the gates in each area. The Guardian's task, then, is to explore Naju, destroy the gates, set the planet to blow, and escape before she becomes collateral damage. She searches the hub area and the ten major outlying areas on foot for clues, upgrades, and the entrances to the corridors. These areas play out a lot like the overworld sections do in The Legend of Zelda, and Naju is a big place that'll take quite awhile to fully explore. You don't have to find everything - the gate keys are the only things that are absolutely essential - but taking the time to max out your defense, shot power, and fully upgrading all twelve of your weapons will make life much easier when you're facing off against some of the game's harder enemies. If the overhead areas in The Guardian Legend are comparable to Zelda's overworld, then the corridors would be this game's equivalent of dungeons, and this is where the game flips the script: when she enters a corridor, the Guardian transforms into space fighter jet and the game suddenly becomes a vertically-scrolling shmup. In these stages you can freely switch between the weapons you've collected in the on-foot sections, and when you defeat the boss at the end of the corridor, you'll be rewarded with a power-up, a key, or a gate will be destroyed. There are twenty-one corridors in total, and to beat the game you only have to finish the first ten, but as I said before, it would really behoove you to collect all of the upgrades, and many of them can only be won through beating corridors 11-21. Both gameplay styles are done so well that they could stand just fine on their own. If you split The Guardian Legend in half, you'd have two excellent, very different games. But the true success here lies in how these halves complement each other in such a way as to elevate the entire experience. What happens in one directly influences how you'll experience the other, and this interaction between them does wonders for selling the game's premise and for justifying the bizarre crossing of genres. Once everything clicks into place in your head, the two styles start to feel like natural extensions of one another, making for a pretty fantastic experience that I've yet to see matched in the thirty-three years that have passed since The Guardian Legend's release. It's not by any means flawless: the password system is obnoxious, some of the environments can become repetitive after awhile, and sprite flicker runs rampant through the busier shooter stages, but those are minor quibbles. There aren't many games out there that get as much right as The Guardian Legend does, and it's one of the very best games the NES library has to offer. _____________ No cheats were used during the recording of this video. NintendoComplete (
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