Guardian's Crusade

"Boring, short and shallow. Even for kids, there's gotta be something better."

It's been said before, and it's true: Guardian's Crusade is suitable only for younger audiences. This ‘RPG-light' game contains a couple of innovative mechanics, but overall lacks any real depth or much enjoyment. From its pet caregiving mechanic, through the use of toys as sidekicks, to the glaringly pink game disc, everything about this game screams to stay away if you're over 13 years of age.

The story of Guardian's Crusade is skimpy and unengaging. The main character, creatively given the default name of ‘Knight' (though you have the option of changing it – please do!), has absolutely zero personality, and provides absolutely no motivation for why he's going around and doing the things he does, ultimately leading up to ‘saving the world'. Other RPGs with silent protagonists are still able to imbue them with at least some character and drive, but not this one. The storyline is equally empty, rehashing only the very basics of this type of game, where a young boy with a destiny sets out to defeat the millennia-old evil that is being unleashed upon the land. Really, that's all the detail that the story goes into. Various boring events such as the standard ‘fall off the ship and wash up on an island beach', and ‘fall into the river and wake up in a cottage inn' send him around the world to various towns with little quests to complete before moving on, most of which involve ‘go into the dungeon and defeat the monster, then go to the next town'. Even once the Big Bad is revealed, absolutely nothing happens as a result: he goes up into the clouds and waits while you gather the sacred armor or whatever and then fly up to defeat him. Ooh, how threatening. Truly, this game's storyline is utterly forgettable.

The banality of the plot and characters is shared by the monotonous gameplay. You run across a 3D world map where almost every environment looks the same (identical winding paths leading through flat terrain peppered with trees and rocks). Monster encounters take place when you run into a ‘ghost' on the world map, all of which look identical despite the variety of the actual beasts that you fight on the battle screen. These tadpole-like floaters do come in 3 sizes, reflecting the strength of the monsters in relation to your own. Each town you reach contains the same assortment of shops (inn, item store, and armory), a mayor's house, and several nondescript houses with interchangeable interiors. Though there is enough design variety that you can tell the different towns apart, tedium still sets in quickly. Battles quickly become dull once you realize that for any particular monster (and depending on the area, you will often just encounter the same one dozens of times in a row), all of its attacks do the same amount of damage. Good use of status effects by many monsters adds a bit of variety and challenge to some fights, but elemental effects (you know, the whole fire vs. water thing) modify damage by only 20%, making them virtually negligible. Overall, battles are merely a way to level up as you go along, and offer almost no excitement on their own. And traveling the world becomes an exercise in patience, as no matter what vehicles you obtain to travel over sea or air, your actual speed is no better than a slow walk.

Character design is one area where the game falls even shorter. The main character looks like nothing so much as a stretched-out Lego man, with a cylindrical head, pie-plate eyes, and pipe-cleaner arms and legs. Heroes don't get any dorkier than this. Your primary sidekick, ‘Baby', has the best character model of any of them, but even here the design choices are questionable. I mean, a fat pink pig-rabbit? Just try telling me this isn't a kid's game. Monster models are adequate, but unimaginative. The worst of all, however, is the design of your ‘Living Toys', summoned helpers that perform various functions in battle. They are all based around the basic design of an egg with a giant wind-up key sticking out of its back, with various embellishments. Almost without exception, however, they end up looking like someone puked them onto the screen, with indistinct, highly pixelated features and jerky motions.

Environment designs are equally pain-inducing, as the world is made up entirely of right angles. Coastlines are jagged series of blocks, as are any walls or delineations between surfaces. It's as if the whole world is composed of gigantic pixels. Towns are slight better, but building interiors mostly contain the same blocky furniture. All in all, the only good things that can be said about the game's graphics are that it contains maybe two good lighting effects in battle, and that the color palette is bright and cheerful.

Guardian's Crusade is just as grating to listen to as to look at. Every piece of music represents the worst jazzy synth-pop imaginable. The sound effects are no better, consisting largely of a lot of Pac-Man era blips and bloops as your pink sidekick bounces around after you, or the throat-clearing sounds of sword or monster attacks. Every speech window also opens on an annoying blip. It's a rare game that I suggest playing with the sound turned down, but this is definitely one of them. There must be something better on the radio you could listen to if you must play this game.

Now, I did mention in the opening paragraph that there were a couple of innovative features to this game, and it wouldn't be a fair review without mentioning them. The use of Living Toys is quite unique. You can find up to 70 toys throughout the game for use during battle. Some of these stay in battle continuously attacking each turn, some appear once to apply some effect (e.g. healing or causing status effects) then disappear. The functions of each are quite varied, ranging from straight attackers, to a bomb that explodes in 3 turns causing heavy damage to both enemies and allies, to a fight commentator who will announce the play by play. However, aside from experimenting with new acquisitions as they come along, you'll end up using less that a dozen of these regularly, as a lot of them just aren't all that useful. On the plus side again, finding all of the toys becomes a side quest, as there are a couple of ultimate toys that you can receive only after finding all of the others. Accomplishing this, however, can only be done at the end of the game, leaving you little to do with your new toys except speed on to the final fight).

Another innovation is the use of on-screen monsters on the world map to trigger battles. If you're careful, you can avoid a lot of these fights by dodging the ghosts as you travel from place to place, or you can hunt them down if you want to fight more often. The way that the ghosts are presented in 3 difficulty levels (slightly stronger-than-you pink ones that seek you out, very-stronger-than-you white ones with horns that really seek you out, and weaker-than-you white ones that run away from you) provides a constant adjustment in the difficulty level as you progress through the game. By fighting the monsters that chase you and ignoring those that run away, you can be assured that you will gain experience in the right amount to achieve an appropriate level by the time you leave a given area. This management of difficulty level becomes offset towards the last third of the game, however, as you can easily buy equipment that far outshines even the supposed legendary armor you have to quest for, and the last dozen bosses present very little challenge, dying well before you would expect them to, including the final big boss.

And lastly on the plus side is Baby, your sidekick and driving plot element (the whole point of the game is that a spirit appeared and tells you to bring this creature that you just found to the God Tower, or else the world is doomed). Baby follows you on the world map and fights with you in battle, but you do not control it directly. It will pretty much do what it wants in battle. The only way you can influence it is by keeping it happy, which only requires feeding it lots of stuff and keeping it healed in battle. Do this, and it'll accept your suggestions more frequently. If you let it get too upset, it'll attack you in battle instead. This pet-raising feature is not carried out with any significant depth (as stated, you can just feed it tons of stuff and it'll be permanently ecstatic), but it is unusual for a Playstation-era RPG.

Despite these lowly innovations, the game overall drags and disappoints. Zero character development, zero motivation, crappy graphics and audio, and pedantic dialogue make for an extremely shallow game. Add to this the measly 15 hours (!) of game time, and it quickly becomes clear why this RPG is best left to young newcomers to the genre (though personally, I see no reason why any 9 year-old can't start off with Final Fantasy VII or some other fully developed RPG). At least the short experience means that if you do choose to play Guardian's Crusade , you'll quickly be able to move on to other more fulfilling gaming experiences.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 01/23/06