GAME CLEAR No. 59 -- Guardian Heroes

Guardian Heroes (1996, Saturn/Xbox Live Arcade)

Developer: Treasure
Publisher: SEGA
Clear Date: 11/6/2021
Clear Version: Xbox Live Arcade
Clear Platform: Xbox Series X via Backwards Compatibility

Guardian Heroes has been on my to-do list for a good while now. As one of the most expensive Saturn games in the western aftermarket, I originally bought a Japanese copy under the mistaken advisement that there wasn’t a lot of text in the game. There absolutely is! So that copy continues to languish on my shelf.

The Xbox Live Arcade version, on the other hand, is just $5, and it can still be purchased today and played on any Xbox console since the 360. Props to Xbox and presumably SEGA for making that possible. I’ve praised Microsoft/Xbox before for their backwards compatibility efforts, and I still appreciate that.

Anyway, the game’s pretty good! The eponymous Guardian Heroes are a group of warriors that have discovered a sword of great importance to their world, which instantly makes them targets of a number of interested parties. They must battle through a number of beat-’em-up-style levels until they discover more about this sword, the resurrected skeleton warrior who weilds it, and ultimately the fate of their world. The game presents a number of choices and diverging physical paths throughout the game that determine what levels you’ll play and what ending you’ll get. It’s only about 90-120 minutes long, and it’s clearly designed to get you to play through it multiple times. For what it’s worth at time of writing, I’ve only finished it once.

Anyway, when the game starts, you select one to play as, and they all control much like a traditional fighting game, complete with combos, quarter circles, etc. You will level up naturally during play, and at the end of each level, you’re presented with the option to invest points into your character’s various attributes. This reminded me a bit of the more recent Castle Crashers. It’s neat, but I was playing on Easy, so I frankly didn’t have to think about it a ton. This meant I got to focus on the gameplay, which I found quite fun. The characters’ movesets are sophisticated enough that I had to reference them from the pause menu multiple times, but I consider that a plus. I felt like I was better at the game by the end of it than I was at the start, with plenty of room to grow. That’s a great feeling, especially for a game designed to be played through multiple times.

The game’s story is just so-so. It’s all explained at a rapid clip in-game, and I think the game expects you to read the exposition in the manual (as many games of the time did). I already forgot basically everything about it, which is certainly damning. Basically, there are a few intelligence species/deities in the game involved in a power struggle, and you have to decide whom to side with. I ended up killing god or something? Like I said, I forgot most of it.

However part of that could be because I played it as a couch co-op game, a role I think it plays quite nicely! It’s relatively short game you can breeze through in a quick session. On Easy, you have infinite continues, but on higher difficulties, you have a pool of credits (from which both players draw), which I was advised online would almost certainly run out on a first playthrough attempt. In the interest of actually finishing the game with my friend, I decided Easy was the way to go. I’ll have to give higher difficulties a try on subsequent solo playthroughs, and maybe I can focus a little better on the story by myself as well.

Single playthroughs of games like Guardian Heroes arguably don’t do them justice, but that’s where I’m at right now. I do feel drawn back to it, but not with any real urgency. I think that leaves me unable to paint a complete picture of the Guardian Heroes experience, but I think I can confidently say that I’ve already gotten $5 worth of fun out of it. So I guess that makes it a pretty damn good value proposition. And in a world where great couch co-op games remain rare, it’s an easy recommendation if you have a compatible device.

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