Killing Monsters With A Shield Instead Of A Sword

Remember when I talked about Genji: Dawn of the Samurai immediately following one boss battle with another? Genji's got nothing on Rygar: The Legendary Adventures.

In less than the last half-hour of the game, Rygar fights dual-sword wielding Icarus* on an island in the sky, then leaps after him into Tartarus to finish the job only to be confronted with a five-headed monster. Instead of the heads being dragons, or snakes, something mundane, they were human baby heads**. Fire-breathing human baby heads. That was followed by about five minutes of running across paths in Tartarus and fighting cannon fodder, before I battled an invisible Minotaur. I don't know why it was invisible, it just was. Right after that, Rygar is forced to fight the product of Chronos trying to form a new body by merging with Rygar's mother***.

The game calls the monster "Echidna", but its head is more similar to Moasaurus (an illustration of which I've included in the post). It has huge, useless paws, and two long tentacles, like a squid. It also has lightning powers, and can send out swarms of spiders that release poisonous fumes when killed or they suicide crash into Rygar. Beat that, and Rygar has to square off with Chronos himself, who is a dual sword wielding floating skeleton in a suit of armor. Metal. Beat that, and you win. Good thing, as once again I was one hit from death when I triumphed. It's too bad, I find that diminishes the sense of accomplishment, and replaces it with relief. It's better than coming close to victory only to fail, but it's too near a thing to enjoy right then. That's what end game cut scenes and the credits are for.

There's a save point after the Minotaur fight, but no spot where the health is replenished because I reached a different level or anything similar. Health boosts will come along if you're lucky, but have to try and ration those. I didn't win by any flashy or clever method. I kept summoning up the Siren, one of the beings the various Diskarmors can call forth, to freeze them with her powers. It hurts them a little, and keeps them in one place long enough for me to hit them some more. I wasn't as good at avoiding attacks with Rygar as I was in Genji, but Rygar's not as agile as Yoshitsune, either. And the times I remembered I was carrying a shield, and should perhaps try blocking attacks, they were attacks I couldn't block.

The backstory is kind of insane. Something about Alexander the Great going too far, and when Aristotle and a woman they both may have loved tried to rouse the people against Alexander, it backfired. And now some of the folks are reincarnations, and I'm not sure who Rygar's dad was, Julius Caesar, I think (his name's Caesarion), and I'm not sure how that's supposed to tie-in with the Hellenic stuff, but there it is. Fortunately, that stuff only really comes out if you a) bother to read the tablets and scrolls you find, and b) if you pay attention during the overly dramatic cut scenes. If you want to ignore all of it, and just focus on "save princess****, kill ugly monsters" that works pretty well, too.

I wish there was more freedom to use the Diskarmors various skills. You can swing from place to place with it, or use it to scale ledges, or pull things towards you. That could be a lot of fun in a wide open explorable environment, like what they had in the Spider-Man 2 game, or Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. You are able to go back to earlier places in the game once a power-up has been acquired, so Rygar can reach things he couldn't before, but it's still pretty limited.

* Not the cutsey one from Nintendo's Kid Icarus, but a shirtless blue guy with the lower half of his face covered with cloth.

** Not that each head was an entire human baby. Each head was simply the head of a human baby. Still very freaky looking. I think Rygar died a couple of times before I got past how freaky it was and could fight back successfully.

*** Who is Cleopatra. Yeah, and Icarus is the soul of Aristotle corrupted by the blood of Chronos or something to that effect.

**** Ever since X-Play pointed out the resemblance in their review of the game years ago, I can't look at the princess in Rygar without seeing Britney Spears. I don't know if it's intentional or not, but it takes me out of the game, because it amuses me for a moment.