Rygar: The Legendary Adventure

I wouldn't want to have to pay the electricity bill in these evil lairs.

Were gladiators really the Roman equivalent of Vinnie Jones? As great fighters as they are, there can be no surprise at most of them wearing what look like leather skirts, but when one destroys a building with a sharp edged shield on an elastic rope, you tend to take notice. Rygar: The Legendary Adventure is a remake of the 1986 arcade game, giving you the chance to take control of Rygar once more, in the fight against the evil Titans (kind of like Gods, but with more pointy teeth and red eyes).

This new Rygar reminds me a lot of the Devil May Cry games, in that you are shown Rygars progress through a rather fancy 3rd person camera, and leap around the terrain fighting off the various fiends that dare to stand in your way. The actual gameplay seems very similar too, only with a nasty aiming system and a useful block button, but we’ll get onto the specifics later. Let’s start right at the beginning.

Introductions and tips

A gratuitous picture of the female lead. The animation's great too!

After slipping the disc into my PS2 I sat back and lapped up the tremendous FMV intro, which as has become standard is more of a teaser to the game. Choosing a new game left me a little surprised that there was no chance to choose the difficulty level, although I later discovered that harder (and easier, if you die a lot) difficulty levels are unlocked by playing through the game. An in-engine cinematic sequence occurred and I was still impressed with the cinematography and the general standard of the creation, and a couple of minutes later I was playing.

Down in a dungeon, your Goddess friend gives you simple tips to get you started mastering Rygar’s veritable field of movements. Swinging the Diskarmor around looks incredible, and even more in a fierce battle, when it seems to destroy half of the world in which you’re inhabiting. Knock over pillars and entire roofs come crashing down, fortunately harming you in all but the rarest of situation, although these few harmful rock destruction sections are disheartening when throughout the game you’re taught only to fear things directly hunting you down.

“Ha ha, you missed me!”

See? I told you the worlds were destructible.

Admittedly it all looks beautiful (not least helped by the lack of troublesome boarders in this PAL version), the seven worlds are detailed and varied, and the animation looks natural and fluid; even dust clouds and piles of rubble react beautifully, with sand pouring through cracks in the ceiling, but the aiming system could use tweaking. Some would blame my skill, although I did manage to waltz through the game in just over three and a half hours, but I got increasingly frustrated with the aiming system, or lack of.

More often than not, once you’ve committed to an attack which comprises swinging your Diskarmor around like an extended horizontal yoyo trickster you can’t stop it, and since the camera angle often aims to show you the most impressive and aesthetically pleasing angles, not necessarily the easiest to play, you will regularly miss your target and leave yourself vulnerable to attack. Not the best thing to happen in the middle of a multi enemy swarm-a-thon, and the camera sometimes becomes a problem in a platform jumping section, although you do not get penalised more than playing time for falling. The good thing is that missing and hitting scenery could throw up dust and cause it to come crashing down revealing a bonus. Of course a negative aspect to this is the tendency then to spend ages hitting everything in the hope that it will reveal some kind of bonus.

Audeal pleasures await you

Beautiful scenery to go with the splendid soundtrack.

As frustrating as it can be, you can find and use different Diskarmors that have different attacks that have a wider range, so the problem isn’t that big a deal, especially when missing an enemy and taking out a wall in the process does look so impressive. It isn’t just the graphics that are of a good standard; the sound and music have definitely been worked on.

To be honest, the music is absolutely fantastic almost entirely throughout, and even the tracks that aren’t hummable work well for the game situation. Many times throughout the game I got caught up with the music, which was recorded by the Moscow philharmonic orchestra, explaining why it sounds so brilliantly cinematic, especially with thuds and crashes from the falling scenery.

Bosses aren’t for everyone

This thing is huge, and with three sections attacking at once, you'll be glad of the range of your Diskarmor.

There are unfortunately some games that really don’t work well with bosses; larger monsters that take a lot longer to kill than your regular folk, and that normally have their own special way of defeating them. Thankfully, Rygar: The Legendary Adventure is not one of those games. It’s wide selection of bosses complement the worlds in which they inhabit well, and always look powerful and yet beautiful, although the best tactic with dealing with these evil creations isn’t to stand around complimenting them on their looks and detail.

Most types of bosses in video games seem to fall into two categories. The first is the standard enemy with more health and more dangerous attack patterns, while the second is a creature who cannot be beaten by ordinary means, such as the tentacles from Half-Life, who required you to basically turn on a rocket above them to wipe them out. Rygar’s bosses fall into the first style of boss, they can take more pounding, and have more complex attack patterns for you to learn. This can lead to a level of scepticism with their power, since you can often defeat them by repeating the same string of moves, although to manage this will take an extraordinary amount of skill.

More of a challenge

It's a pizza. Yes, carbohydrates can kill even monsters.

Much of the game can be quickly passed through, as I found out in my first play through, but there is still a lot to pull the average player back for another spin. Throughout the game there are magical stones littering the areas that enhance the natural ability of your Diskarmor, and the more you strengthen this weapon (by picking up ‘build up points’), the more stones you can use with each one. I managed to find about a quarter of the stones throughout my playing time, so secret areas are quite plentiful and difficult to find.

In these secret areas or objects to destroy, you may also find items that unlock outside elements for you to browse in a gallery reached from the title screen. This includes the music from the soundtrack, concept art from the development and movie sequences from in-game cinematics to promotional videos concerning the game; you can even change your Diskarmor to other things like a pizza. Unlocking different levels of difficulty from Easy up to Legendary will bring a challenge to the experienced player, although I can’t claim Normal mode isn’t challenging. The icing is the inclusion of extra game modes, such as ‘One World’ which allows you to go back to any of the seven worlds and try and beat your time and ranking on it.

The Legendary Conclusion

Summon a bad assed demon dog from hell, in this case Cerberus, to stun your enemy for a few easy hits.

To be honest, there is very little not to like about Rygar, with decent enough voice acting, brilliant graphics and stunning sound and music (one of the characters even sings a song at one point that is repeated for the end credits), but aside from the rather unique weapon and ability to destroy a lot of the scenery there is a lack of much truly originality, although it does comprise a lot of great elements from varied games. Even the Final Fantasy series gets a look in with the ability to summon creatures to attack your enemy.

Of course as far as purchasing the game is concerned, if you liked the Devil May Cry series and are partial to the gladiatorial period, there is one question that may help you come to your decision. If it isn’t broken, why fix it?