This game have a lots of things that were really neat for the time. It's a mixture of platformer adventure with a sprinkle of RPG in it.

The platforming part is ok at best. It's not bad, but it isn't good as well. For the adventure parts, the nice thing about it , is that you have some section of side-scrolling and some top view action. The mix of both is a really nice change of pace. The attacks that your character have is really original with his spinning shield. The last part is the RPG element. So, when you beat a whole bunch of enemies, you will gain XP. When you do, you gain a level and your strenght/HP is upgraded. At the time, the XP mecanic is not really exploited yet, so it brings a new flavor to this game.

However, since the game is not fully polish and not that memorable, I can only give it a 3.

Game #29 of my challenge

I've owned a physical copy of this game for eight years. It took me until this very week, assisted only by the broken English manual, to gather the patience to sit down and actually learn how to play it. And it's fun! The exploration and discovery are high points, the boss battles are low (very low) points. Ultimately fun but very slight, which is probably a good summary of the entire NES library.

My personal favorite part of the whole experience: the manual translates what should clearly be "Bestiary" as "Animalized Men Wiggling Eerily"

Lets play “Guess which is the real name of a place or character from Rygar, and which is the one that I made up”:

The Realm of (Algool/Altheen)
The evil Lord (Morback/Ligar)
The plains of (Garloz/Glemur)
The first boss (Wirf/Eruga)
The cave of (Elslim/Sagila)
The palace of (Dorago/Bimbor)
The land of (Shilfrizz/Ragau Sando)
The frozen wasteland of (Lapis/Drobe)
Another boss (Belzar/Zemor)
The tower of (Garba/Durmo)

If you scored 7-10 correct points, then congratulations! You’ve, uh, played Rygar before

I played Rygar all the time as a kid, it was one of the four NES games that my daycare had, and much like Zelda II I never got very far in it. This too created an air of mystery around Rygar, and I'd occasionally find myself wondering what lied beyond that first area. But, more importantly, I wondered why nobody seemed to talk about Rygar. It was a classic, wasn't it? Everything I played as a kid is a classic.

Nobody talks about it because Rygar is just not a good game, and frankly it's not even bad in a way that's interesting. It's just junk. I know that now because I went back and beat Rygar, and literally anything else I could've done with that time would have been more productive and enjoyable.

Rygar is a search-action game, which means you'll see people compare it most often to Metroid, though I would liken it's feel to Castlevania 2 more than anything. Rygar goes between an open world (this one presented in a top-down perspective) and segmented levels, unlocking new routes in old areas and collecting secret items along the way. It's not as densely packed or as claustrophobic as Metroid, and puzzles are a fair bit more obtuse. Though they never quite reach Simon's Quest levels of baffling, Rygar is definitely a Player's Guide kind of game.

This would perhaps be more forgivable if Rygar was any fun to control. Combat is miserable, enemies respawn at set points, which means if you scroll the screen just enough and find yourself needing to go back, enemies will respawn right in your path. This was a fairly common thing in old games, but the sheer amount of enemies that spawn on the screen in Rygar is ridiculous, and often you'll be respawning old enemies while a horde of new enemies are right up your ass. It not only becomes overwhelming and difficult to contend with due to Rygar's lousy attack, but it introduces a lot of slowdown and sprite flickering that make the game nauseating to look at. Also, Rygar controls even worse on the overworld map, so... you got that to look forward to!

Generally speaking, I think search-action games were in a truly awful place during the 8-bit era. It was a new genre, one developers were still trying to figure out, and they weren't helped by hardware that was especially limiting for the sort of games they were trying to make. Rygar definitely suffers from these growing pains, but it's also just crap in its own right, and not something that's worth checking out even as a curiosity.

I love this game. I've been playing it for 30+ years and it's a great one to go to when I just need good music and a discarmor.

It's a very early Metroid-like, but much smaller and with less backtracking. There is a plot, but it's barely there and has to be pieced together from poorly translated things bald giants tell you, nothing is explained, monster design is solid, and so much is left to the imagination.

It's made up of six areas, with kind of a hub, and you have to find items to access each section but it's over in a few hours if you know what you're doing. It's not quite as tight as Metroid is, and it doesn't encourage speedrunning, which is ideal, because there is a bit of a grind to this thing.

But that opening level's music and sunset have been etched into my head for just about my entire life. I love it.

A somewhat overlooked game, Rygar is surprisingly good. It's an action game featuring both side scrolling segments and segments with a top-down perspective (similar to Blaster Master, if you've played those games). Although this is already kinda neat, the most interesting part of Rygar is that it's also built kinda like a Metroidvania (despite releasing before Metroid!), in the sense that progression is not linear and you'll have to return to old areas as you obtain new tools for your moveset.

Overall, it's a fun game. Like many NES peers, it's a little janky and the difficulty can get kinda BS at times, but for the most part it's a good game.

The original Rygar for arcades was quite possibly one of the most mindless and messy games that I have ever played. While it wasn’t completely terrible, it primarily just consisted of you holding right and sometimes the jump button, going through way more levels then there needed to be with no variety added into the mix to make the game more fun or tolerable, especially after about 20 or so of these stages. Thankfully, however, they decided to give Rygar a second chance at life with an NES game, but, instead of just making a simple port of the original arcade game, they decided to completely change the game around, making something completely unique while keeping a bit of what was present in the original arcade game. Needless to say, this change was very beneficial not just for my own enjoyment, but for the game as a whole.

I myself knew about this version of Rygar way before I even knew about the arcade original, back when I worked on a video that was centered around the game. When I first saw it, I had wanted to check it out, considering how it combines different game genres together, which I have always been a fan of when games do that, and considering it was on one of my favorite old-school systems, it made me wanna check it out even more. And so, after almost a full year since that video (an appropriate amount of time, I would say), I decided to give it a shot, and I’m glad I did, because I found it to be pretty good. I wouldn’t say it is a must-play title for the system, as it does have several issues, but for what we have here, it is a massive improvement over the original arcade title, and it was enjoyable for the hour or so that I spent with it.

The story, from what I could tell, is basically the same as the original arcade game, except, of course, practically no info is given to the player in the game itself, the graphics are good, providing several unique environments to travel through, although a good number of the enemy sprites do look pretty… weird and off, the music is ok, with a good number of tracks to listen to, but none of them are really all that memorable, and they do tend to blend in with each other more then not, the control is very good, with no real issues in terms of your main attacks and commands, but when it comes to interacting with other objects involving a grappling hook or crossbow, that’s when things tend to get a little wonky, and the gameplay is familiar in plenty of areas, but inventive for the time by taking a lot of these elements and combining them together.

The game is an action-adventure platformer mixed with RPG elements, where you take control of Rygar himself, travel through plenty of areas filled with deadly beasts, take on said beasts to gain EXP and increase your health and attack to take on even stronger foes, gather plenty of health items and important key items to help you progress through plenty of areas throughout the game, and take on fearsome, yet simple and annoying, bosses along the way. What makes this game special amongst the rest is how it takes plenty of familiar elements seen on this system, those being platformers, adventure games, and RPGs, and combines them all together to make a unique experience. Nowadays, there are MANY different games that take multiple game genres and combine elements from them together, and yeah, this wasn’t the only game on the system to combine elements together, but it still very refreshing to see one of these kinds of games on one of these systems.

Yes, the combination of all these elements is very appealing, and it works well, but how is the game itself? Well, like I said, it is pretty good. There isn’t too much complexity to it, with you just needing to get from Point A to Point B a lot of the time, but there is enough room to move around in for exploration and experimentation, even if said exploration may not lead to anything that substantial rather then just finding an old man. Not to mention, with the items that you get later down the line, you do get more opportunities for exploration and experimentation, which is always appreciated, with you needing to return to previous areas in order to progress in some cases. Other then that though, there isn’t too much else it has going for it, so if one were to play this game and get bored pretty quickly, I wouldn’t blame them really.

However, with a game like this around this time, there is bound to be issues, and while Rygar doesn’t have too many issues, one issue that plagues the entire game, aside from the lack of originality of the world, would be a severe lack of polish. With the way this game executes a lot of ideas, naturally, not everything is going to be as fine-tuned as one would hope for, and there are plenty of instances throughout the game where you will run into issues with hitboxes, especially against surfaces in the top-down sections, the weight of attacking your enemies feeling off, how you approach using several of the items you get, and the lack of mobility in certain situations, especially when you are surrounded by a giant group of enemies, and trust me, this will happen on several occasions. It feels as if this game needed a little more time in the oven before it could be baked to a crisp perfection, being able to properly handle everything that it presents to the player without snapping in half. For what we have here, it is functional enough, but even still, I can see where there is room for improvement.

Overall, despite a lack of originality in the world and characters, and a lack of polish, Rygar is still an interesting experiment of a game for the NES, and a definite improvement over the mindless, lackluster original arcade game that it was based on. I would definitely recommend it for those who are looking for something to do to kill an hour, and for those who somehow liked the original Rygar game, but other then that, it isn’t a title that you need to jump on immediately, but it is somewhat worth it when you do. Especially to see some of the weird-ass enemy designs in the game, looking like they crawled right out of the mind of some demented teenager.

Game #325

Rygar tem elementos incríveis de game design. Temos aqui um "protometroidvania" com características que hoje sabemos fazer parte desse subgênero/modelo de design, mas que é contemporâneo dos grandes clássicos e pais do gênero.

Itens que desbloqueiam setores e adicionam habilidades novas, exploração dos níveis com interconectividade e movimentação livre desvinculada de "fases". Temos também uma espécie de "barra de poder mágico" que pode ser usada pra recuperar vida ou fortalecer as habilidades.

Contudo, a trilha sonora em loop começa a se tornar um tanto irritante, o surgimento de inimigos é aleatório e incessante, além do reconhecimento de subir em cordas e cair em plataformas ser um tanto bizarro e incoerente, devido a limitações e a falta de habilidade dos devs em contorná-las.

Bugs visuais também são bem comuns e causam "miragens" frequentes. Não há um sistema de save, mas há um sistema de checkpoints que você precisa deixar o console sem desligar. Acaba sendo útil no emulador poder usar os save states sem se sentir "trapaceando", já que basta utilizar os checkpoints.

Um sistema rudimentar de experiência auxilia a ganhar pontos de vida extra, suavizando a dificuldade.

Eu não achei ele tão estimulante pra prosseguir, mas é bem interessante pra história do gênero.

Atypical title that mixes 2D platforming with overhead phases. The difficulty is quite high, but never feels cruel: the idea of experience to increase life and strength foreshadows the system of Zelda 2, but perhaps in a less punishing way, since magic is indexed on another bar and requires no level per se. The title tries to create a sense of exploration, but the map hardly makes sense geographically, so you don't fully grasp the universe presented. However, there is a certain magical aspect with the castle in the sky (as in Gulliver's Travels) and the towers of the wise men, which rise into the sky as spires. One may regret the weakness of the bestiary or its lack of global coherence, but the title charms with an epic breath that proves to be grandiloquent.

I was born in the mid-80s but my first console was a Genesis, and so games from the 8-bit era - which I saw friends and relatives playing but narrowly missed out on experiencing for myself - hold a kind of mystique for me. I see it as an era of charming jank, a time of experimentation as the steadily-growing home console industry started to find its feet as a medium. Some games flopped, a rare few games hit on the perfect storm of good design and are still iconic today, and I'm realizing more and more that most games ended up like Rygar - where the ideas were great and some parts of the execution were good, but a mix of hardware limitations and naivete meant we ended up with half a good game.

Rygar controls well, with his limited moveset feeling satisfying and tight enough in the moment-to-moment gameplay; however, the other half of the combat - the enemies - are pretty hideously unbalanced, with some being either laughably easy or nearly impossible depending on how you approach them. Pretty early on, you have to face a short enemy on a small platform whose attacks leave you a miniscule timeframe to jump onto the platform, crouch, and kill him before he knocks you off the platform to your death - however, you can take advantage of a glitch by simply walking backwards and causing him to disappear. In a more 'legal' example of this imbalance, most bosses have attack patterns that are extremely difficult to evade but are trivialized if you have access to the 'Attack and Assail' spell that allows you to hit them from anywhere on the screen. This makes most bosses either an easy but tedious exercise in grinding spell charges, or something that requires cuphead levels of precision, with nothing in between. (Thankfully, the game seems to realize how hairy some parts of its difficulty curve are and offers unlimited continues)

The exploration elements of the game are similarly mixed: the gradual opening up of the world through finding items is remarkably polished for such an early game, but there are too many trial-and-error moments (such as knowing to throw your grappling hook upwards without any indication of anything there) for the game to feel fair.

Still a very creditable effort, with the RPG and exploration elements doing enough to distinguish this from the more straightforward arcade original. There's probably an alternate timeline out there where this game released late in the NES lifespan and was more refined as a result, and everyone today talks about "Rygarvanias".

Not sure what I was expecting Rygar to be when it was announced for NES Online, but I wasn't expecting a Metroidvania action RPG. It's a pretty shallow rendition of both concepts, but it still makes for quite a fun little hidden gem! The game feels well-polished and does a lot of cool things given the time it was released, and it doesn't feel overly long or difficult. There are a few janky moments, such as enemies spawning out of thin air, sometimes literally right next to you, and classic NES screen lag where pixels will disappear but still deal damage, and super intense slowdown at a few moments. But all that is fairly minor when the game feels so satisfying to get through. Even though Nintendo is shit at managing there service, I do appreciate them finding these fairly obscure games which are actually fun to play. Sort of makes all the garbage on the service a bit less annoying. 4/6