07 September 2012

Review: Rygar: The Legendary Adventure (Playstation 2)

Everything starts on an island called Argus. The princess Harmonia is holding a ceremony in which Rygar recieves a wreath (totally worth it) for his victory in a war he has been poking around in. Suddenly the party is crashed by the titans, also known as the not so happy campers, with Echidna in front. Echidna and Ikaros kidnaps the princess (you do not say!) and a furious minotaur pushes Rygar down a hole in the ground. Rygar obviously survives the fall and immediately finds the Diskarmor, the shield we remember from the arcades and the NES game. Rygar is briefed by the gods to stop the titans and save the princess in order to create justice, peace and all that. The story in this game is as shallow and sloppy as the game itself. It is cheesy, filled with embarrassing voice actors and... and... pretty graphics. Does not look to bad at all.

Pretty soon you get control over Rygar and the very first thing you notice is that the camera is not playing nice. Incredibly stupid (and locked) angles that changes without warning rendering the player blind or Rygar falls off a cliff or something since the controls get switched around together with the predetermined angles. In some narrow spaces it can get almost impossible to understand where you are or if you are in fact going backwards again.

When Rygar attacks, he freezes. And there is no target system available so if you miss your opponent with an inch then they can go around and hit you from the side long before you regain control of Rygar again. If you happen to press the button a second or maybe third time in all haste your attack becomes even longer and more time consuming. The battle system (and the HUD) reminds me of God of War that way, only much much worse. By the way, this came along three or four years before God of War - maybe Rygar inspired the people at Santa Monica? Anyway, you get a few different shields to play with (and switch between, again, just like in God of War), that can be upgraded with the points recieved from killing enemies (you know, like in...) and you can also put Mystic Stones on them. Nothing seems to matter all that much, I did not do especially much more damage in the end of the game compared to in the beginning, despite the fact that I maxed everything. During the course of the game you also unlock new skills and attacks, for example summons where you can call in different creatures to help you. But they miss as easily as the regular attacks and in two out of five times you wasted your magic.

The surroundings are very nice. It is beautiful and there is a lot of platforming to deal with, even if not all is great. There is many things to explore and loose threads that get left behind so that you can come back in a later stage of the game when you are better equipped. What really bugs me is the enemies. They are as mundane as they are few - there is maybe three different enemies throughout the game, and two of them are just variations of each other. They die from a couple of hits and become perfectly harmless really fast - you kind of just regard them as point containers instead of opponents - and that makes you feel very safe which of course makes you feel very bored. The save spots become redundant both because the low difficulty and the high frequency of them.

Every now and then a boss emerges, some cooler than others, and they all have one thing in common. Place Rygar in front of them and just spam the square button. They do however present some challenge when you are closing in on the end, but to just make every boss really easy pretty much except the last boss in its three stages is just unbalanced.

Rygar: The Legendary Adventure is short. It took me three hours and two minutes to finish it - and that is even after counting the times I got lost. This is being compensated by having a load of unlockables in form of images, videos, game modes and other surprises. You can play certain stages one at a time, you can play on Hard (and after that; Legendary) and there is even a mini game where you enter a stage, kill every enemie, rince and repeat. Depending on how well the player did during the game there is also different versions of the weapon - I got the option to play the whole game again with a pizza, which sounded fun, but the game is to bland to go through again.