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Advance Guardian Heroes

Side-scrolling beat-em-ups in the vein of Double Dragon and Final Fight are generally known to be simple affairs. Punch, punch, punch, kick, punch… And so on and so forth. While the lack of depth generally hurts a game’s longevity, beat-em-ups are often appealing because of this simplicity, where you can just pick it up and play. Many games like this have tried adding intricacies to the battle system to make them less repetitive, but generally they still remain widely accessible.

Advance Guardian Heroes, a sequel to Treasure’s Saturn cult hit, doesn’t play quite like the original, but still attempts to find the same balance of depth and simplicity that endeared the original to many Saturn owners. Unfortunately, its biggest failing in my mind is a complete disregard for accessibility in every facet of the game, from the storyline to the gameplay. Very few gamers I know actually bother to read the instruction manual before playing any game, let alone a beat-em-up. However, this game outright demands it, not because it’s particularly complicated, but because it doesn’t make any damn sense.

This begins with the game’s story. While the story in games like this is generally expected to be little more than placeholder to give you a vague idea of who you’re fighting and why, the storyline of Advance Guardian Heroes is nonsensical to the point where it detracts from the action, and completely indecipherable unless you consult the instruction manual.

The game’s poorly-translated story begins with a nameless warrior and a princess (apparently named Princess) seeking out the grave of the undead hero, a figurehead of the first game. Upon finding it, they’re greeted by the villainous and ambiguously gay Zur, whose cronies promptly kill the brave warrior. This is a good thing. W-what? Cringing with loathing as I reach for the instruction book (the game itself offers no explanation), it explains that he’s sacrificing himself to be possessed by the spirit of the character you chose to play as. Ohhhh… That makes sense… I guess…

While you can unlock multiple characters as you play through the game, the three choices you’re given to start out with are… well, they’re all the same guy. Oh, they have different magic attacks (Fire-, lightning- and ice-themed, in a show of extreme originality[/sarcasm]), and start with different stats (more on this in a bit), but all three are palette swaps with the exact same repertoire of moves.

The characters’ moves are thankfully varied, though they often seem to put him on autopilot, making a jump kick automatically bring you to the enemy, or having the flying bodies of those you thrashed conveniently headed on a collision course with other enemies more often than not. Most enemies seem to be easily disposed of by standing in place and pounding the ground as they stupidly run into range of the attack over and over again. Others with projectile weapons are just as easy to counter, just tapping the counterattack button repeatedly to deflect their projectiles. Unfortunately, when fighting against projectile-users and stronger characters in groups, strategy goes out the window as they gang up on you.

While your moves may be varied, there’s no clear strategy for what works when you’re up against dozens of enemies at once. Trying all manner of various moves and combos, it’s difficult to see any way of fighting as more effective than another for a given situation. Try using magic, and you’ll find that most spells take so much time to cast and do so little damage that they’re often pointless. You could also try to counter-attack, something that requires spot-on timing, which is absurd when you’re fighting multiple enemies that are trying to beat on you simultaneously (Which is just about always).

It doesn’t help matters when the game is hit with one of its frequent bouts of slowdown, making the game’s already unresponsive controls virtually unusable. You often find yourself flailing away at the controller in hopes of finding a solution, without any clue what you should be doing.

The game’s RPG-styled level-up system is another peculiarity. Many enemies drop gems that can be used to purchase stats at irregular intervals in the game, but what you need to do to get them to drop them is yet another under-explained facet to the game. Once I attacked a group of enemies with an attack that left no gems, but using the same attack on the same group later, they all dropped one. Without any consistency, there’s no way to plan how you level up your character. You just go into battle and hope for the best.

The game’s graphics are a mixed bag, with characters small and poorly-detailed, but with occasionally inventive and impressive environments, such as a stage that has you fighting as you barrel downstream on the deck of a crashed aircraft in pseudo 3D as it banks and bounces down a river. Mostly, the graphics are sufficient but nothing truly awesome.

I suppose it’s worth mentioning that there’s a multilayer mode here (up to four players), but why you’d want to force a friend to buy another copy of this game, let alone three, just to slap each other around a bit is beyond me. Four people playing a crappy game doesn’t strike me as having any more merit than one person playing a crappy game, so I’d just as soon leave this one alone.

Summed up, Advanced Guardian Heroes is a confusing mess whose convoluted nature is all the more conspicuous in a genre known for its simplicity. It’s sloppy, frustrating, and quite frankly it’s a mystery how Treasure could bring us two masterpieces (Astro Boy: Omega Factor and Gradius V) and this slipshod disaster in such close proximity. Did they slap this together in their spare time? Did they slip it in amidst the high praise of the other titles in hopes that the success would rub off? Was this simply the result of an off-day? Whatever the reason, this game is a blemish on Treasure’s shining reputation for impeccable game design, and one that should be avoided even by fans of the original game.

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Posted by Jake McNeill on Oct 22nd, 2004 and is filed under GBA Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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