Retro Reboot SHMUPtember 2025 | The Guardian Legend (NES)

Hmm, am I cheating a bit with this one? As it splits between modes, and is more of a dungeon crawler, than a SHMUP, I consider The Guardian Legend to be a great blend of both. It has always been one of the NES's most overlooked games, even at the height of retro collecting in the late 2000's and early 2010's, it can be found for mere dollars at most trade-in stores. But in the last decade has received the accolades many felt it deserved, and the spirit in this game has carried on to many Compile-developed titles.

The game’s story is simply this; You take control of Earth’s guardian, a gynoid, and you arrive on a space colony called Naju, which has been engulfed in bloodshed from five invading alien species. The Najuans are annihilated, save for one, whom in an attempt to quell the chaos, attempts to activate the planet’s self-destruct sequence with the use of ten keys. He/She was not able to finish the job and left this dying message to whomever may hear it, in the hopes that they finish off the task. As this could potentially become a threat to Earth, it is up to you.

Right off the bat, the overhead platform stages put me in the mind of Master Blaster. Each of the ten areas (including area 0, the game’s starting point) look very different and boast a unique color scheme and layout. With the exception of Samus, I can’t think of any other NES game where the protagonist was a lady, and a transformer no less. I was amused that the European cover art depicted a fully clad young lady in what looks like an Exo-suit from Orguss, but the in-game sprite is clearly a dark-haired girl in bikini bottoms. she looks vaguely like Mica from the silly 90's anime OAV Hyper Doll, with Macross VF-1 Valkyrie parts stuck to her.

The vertical shooting stages look very similar in style to Gun Nac. You fly over various terrain, dodging stuff and shooting stuff out of your way until you encounter a vicious boss battle. These are some wicked-looking bosses, too. Kind of like the Darius series of shooters, most of the creatures seem to be derived from oceanic life forms. I think that is totally boss, since most sea animals look like science fiction monsters.

The goal of GL is to collect and active the ten keys. In order to access the keys, you have to enter an area, travel through the corridors and defeat the boss that has the key. The overall controls are pretty tight. Unlike Zelda, where you progress on a grid, you can move in all 8 directions, giving you free range movement to avoid obstacles and enemies. Your primary weapon is a forward projecting blaster, which can be powered up the stronger you become. So, what exactly do you use when you have a lot of enemies in your way? Well, a lot of weapon combinations to blow them up with.

Legend gives you plenty of secondary weapons to work with and it’s a pretty diverse inventory. You get everything from short-length beam sabers, fireballs, grenades, wave beams, enemy-seeking projectiles, and (one of my favorites) the Enemy Eraser, which destroys, everything on-screen. There are even defense-based weapons like a revolving orb that crushes anything that gets close to you, dual beam sabers that project each side of you, and blasters that fire from your 9 and 3.

Some corridors require a brief bit of puzzle solving to enter them. You’ll have to do things, like touch around the room, or go in and out of the corridor to open the doors to activate them and the hints provided are self-explanatory. Entering these corridors launches you into the shooter portion of the stage, and I have to say that the first time I saw the transforming animation, I thought it was the most awesome, badass transition sequence I’ve ever scene on the NES (and I still do).

The dungeon crawling portions do lean on repetitive, as there is a TON of backtracking in the game. The map is helpful, and it's fairly easy to navigate, but The Guardian Legend can be a weighty playthrough. Given the straightforwardness of its gameplay, to defeat this game can take hours; it's not short, and there's so many times where I had to update my passwords. Speaking of, the complex save system can be a pain in the ass, and could've been resolved with a battery back-up. With upper and lower case letters, along with numbers and punctuation, I have forgotten or written down the code incorrectly, losing untold amounts of progress.

The vertical shooting portions are relentlessly filled with enemies, flying rocks, and loads of projectiles hurling at you. Depending on the Area, the scrolling is either moderately paced or you’re flying warp speed fast enough to make you dizzy!! It’s at this point you realize how fast you can die if you aren’t careful.

These sections of the game still utilize elements of the crawler half of the game, and because some enemies can annihilate you in a matter of seconds, it's ideal to develop a system. One of the nitpicks I have about this game is that it lacks that brief invincibility that occurs when you get hit, meaning a large foe can kill you very quickly with a cheap combo and you can’t do too much to save yourself unless you destroy it first to get it off of you.

BUT WAIT!!! THERE’S MORE!!! The more mini bosses you defeat, the more shield icons you can acquire, which boosts your constitution. This can help reduce those cheesy kills considerably. You can also level up, something I wasn’t even aware of years ago. after killing enough enemies and rack up a score (I believe it’s every couple of 100,000s) you can gain a level which increases your life bar. This game has thought of everything. Since it's rather open-ended in a lot of regards, there's different ways you can approach the exploration. And if a vertical shooter stage is too hard, you can back out and acquire more chips to power yourself up considerably.

While some aspects of it have aged a little poorly over the years, The Guardian Legend is still one of the more ambitious games on The Nintendo. With great music, a stimulating challenge, the free-range exploration, a very deep weapon system, and the hybrid style play, the replay value does hold up. There can be some hiccups, like remembering which warp panels take you where, or keeping track of the mini-bosses for power-ups. I mostly attribute those to the spoils of modern gaming that streamlines those details in a HUD.

Providing the password system doesn't drive you insane, The Guardian Legend is a very fun game that was ahead of its time, holds its place as one of the best, yet overlooked NES titles (joining Faxanadu and Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll. Compile got the best out of the 8-bit NES.