The Sega Saturn was host to a lot of games with cool ideas that most people never got to play, because the system just wasn’t a huge market success. Guardian Heroes is one of them, and it operated on the premise of combining Final Fight with Street Fighter and sprinkling in a high-fantasy plot with accompanying RPG mechanics. It’s the sort of thing that could have easily been a mess, but the folks at Treasure did a very good job and this modern re-release should appeal to fans of either the brawler or fighting genres as well as anyone who just enjoys a good arcade style action game.
While there are a few different modes to play, they all share some common controls and ideas. Set in a fantasy kingdom gripped in oppression, Guardian Heroes has you pick from a wide pool of characters and dish out a beating to whoever gets in your way. Every character occupies a ’row’ or ’lane’, but they’re able to hop between rows at will. Most attacks can only affect targets on the same row (though a few spectacular ones can reach wider areas), so it’s up to you to determine which one to be on at any given time; ideally you want to be out of your enemy’s row when you’re not in position to attack, but on it when you’re ready to strike. If that’s not possible, jumping and blocking can help keep you safe until you see an opening and they’re vital skills for dealing with multiple simultaneous attackers.
Each character has their own set of moves and special abilities, so while they have similar controls they play differently enough from one another. One character might have excellent regular attacks but bland or risky special attacks, while another might be their opposite by having weak and short-ranged attacks backed by some of the best spells in the game. The story mode, which lasts about thirty minutes to an hour on any given run through it, offers a more limited cast of characters but offers branching paths and multiple endings to keep things interesting. It’s suitable for both solo and co-op play, and you’ll want to go through it a few times anyway since your major reward for doing so is unlocking new characters to use in the other modes.
Versus mode is the other major part of Guardian Heroes, taking the row-based scrolling brawler mechanics of story mode and doing away with boss fights and hordes of generic enemies. Instead, it lets you play as almost any character from the story (and there are easily dozens of them) and put yourself in a brawl with up to around ten or so opponents at a time. Local play obviously forces you to max out toward a lower player count, but online matches let you cram more people in. While the 2D fighting game mechanics are important in story mode, they’re even more prominent here. With so many opponents running around, you have to have good positioning, timing, and know when to just back off and block a barrage of attacks until you find a chance to regain momentum. The two genres blend pretty seamlessly, and building combos is pretty easy (it’s more about knowing the rules of the system than having insane hand speed) so becoming proficient is easy once you understand the mental aspects.
