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Rygar: The Legendary Adventure
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PlayStation 2 - Tecmo - Action/Adventure - T - 1 Player
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| Though I missed out on the original Arcade Rygar due to that whole just being born/not being able to hold my head in an upright position thing, I would consider myself a fan of Rygar’s exploits on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Rygar: The Legendary Adventure does what many other remakes of classic franchises have failed to do, and that is to capture not only the aesthetic of the original, but also its feel, and it succeeds in bringing that into the third dimension. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Rygar has been said to play like Castlevania, a three dimensional Symphony of the Night, if you will. And while the comparison is fitting, one could go as far as saying that it’s Symphony of the Night that plays like Rygar. The 8-bit Rygar, along with games like NES Strider, Kid Icarus, Simon’s Quest, and Zelda II were precursors of what was to come in the action adventure genre. And as this game is being billed essentially as a revival of a classic franchise, Rygar can’t be faulted for going back to its roots. On the contrary, I think it should be seen as an example of how to go about a videogame remake. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Rygar is not nostalgia overload. Sure, those rolling worm guys from the NES game make an appearance, but the game isn’t full of what could only be described as fan service. The plot and setting of the 8-bit adventure have been dropped in favor of a new scenario that delves a bit into Greek Mythology. Since the games script is a tad sketchy, it helps if you actually know a little something about mythology beforehand to give the plot some weight, but it’s not necessary. I have never once come across the mention of an ‘Icarus-Aristotle’ anyway. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| What really matters is that the game places you in a world that could have been ripped straight from one of Homer’s epics. You’ll travel through beautiful marble halls and into the bowels of Hades itself, marveling at how beautifully everything around you is depicted. Sure, Rygar and your enemies are rendered well enough, but it’s the environments that are the game’s selling point from a visual standpoint. The world begs to be explored, pillars beg to be smashed, statues to be knocked down. It has been said that destruction is in itself a form of creation, and create you shall. A fair share of everything you see can be torn down. That in itself becomes an addiction. Tearing up the landscape during the heat of battle is so natural that you’ll wonder why it doesn’t happen in games more often. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Though you’ll be seeing your fair share of combat, Rygar isn’t a straight up action title. Rygar is of the action/adventure mold popularized by the Metroid and Castlevania series’, so you’ll be doing your fair share of exploring along the way. Rygar is organized into seven levels and a main hub of sorts. And while none of the game’s levels are as maze-like as the ones featured in those aforementioned titles, if you want to find all of the game’s secrets, you’ll have to return to previous areas once you learn new abilities. A good deal of this is optional, and if you follow the natural progression of things, you should find the game to be rather straight-forward. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| At the outset of the game, Rygar receives the Diskarmor, which serves as his main means of attack, and eventually as a grappling hook of sorts in a nod to the original title. A spiked shield fastened to Rygar’s right arm that he swings around on a chain, the Diskarmor is quite possibly the most unorthodox weapon ever wielded by an action hero, unless if you count that yo-yo from <I>Star Tropics</I>. Capable of impaling enemies and twirling them around the screen, the Diskarmor of Hades is the first weapon you receive, and the most well rounded. The Heavenly Diskarmor is a slower, more free-swinging variant of the standard Diskarmor and tends to be the preferred means of dealing with a crowd. The last weapon you receive is perhaps the most difficult to use, with no range but lots of speed and combo potential, it allows you to effectively engage in hand to hand battles. Combat is handled by means of dial-a-combos, as this seems to be the most efficient way to get your character to perform complex moves onscreen while keeping the control scheme simple and user friendly. While dial-a-combos do allow you to posses a moderately sized move list, in the long run, predetermined string combos tend to hurt the game’s depth, as anyone who has played a Mortal Kombat game past the second installment can attest to. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Even though your Diskarmors can accomplish quite a lot, the game never puts you in a position where you really have to be all that creative. There are only a handful of regular enemy types present throughout the game, and most of them can be dispatched rather easily. And while the game’s numerous boss encounters (the boss count actually outnumbers the count of regular enemies by a few) test your skill, they do so by forcing you to evade their attacks and counter rather than by forcing you to exploit the combat system. Truthfully, I didn’t use a good part of my move list until late in the game when I stumbled upon an optional 30 floor gauntlet, where you’re swarmed with enemies non-stop for a good hour and twenty minutes. Only then, when given the opportunity to experiment, did I grow to appreciate the game’s combat system. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Experience-gaining is handled similarly to how it was handled in the 8-bit Rygar, and that is to say that your character doesn’t actually gain levels to get stronger. Points can be collected, which in turn can be used to upgrade your weapon levels, and items are found to increase your strength, defense, and life meter. These increases to your stats, as well as items called Mystic Stones that can be equipped essentially as ability enhancers (such as making you invincible during a jump, increasing attack power, or enabling you to effectively parry enemy attacks) can be carried over into a new save file once you beat the game, increasing the replayability quite a bit. And while Rygar does offers unlockable difficulty levels, and some new skins for your Diskarmor (my favorites so far being the “Pizza of Hades” and the ability to turn your weapon into a Fender Strat, Gibson Les Paul, or Flying V, respectively) it’s the desire to experience the game and all that it has to offer again that will bring you back for another play-through. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Like its predecessor, Rygar: The Legendary Adventure is a game that will probably be mostly overlooked. The exploration aspect of Rygar isn’t going to give Metroid a run for its money, and when compared to straight up action games like Devil May Cry, GunGrave or Shinobi, Rygar’s dial-a-combos just can’t hang. But even so, there are enough redeeming qualities here to keep me replaying the game, repeatedly sitting through the whole thing in a damn near a single sitting. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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