Always fun to revisit a childhood classic. Gauntlet Dark Legacy was one of my first games I can remember playing (that and Mortal Kombat Trilogy), and I always kept fond memories of it since it was one of the very few games my parents would ever play with me, let alone at all. I think a lot of those positive feelings about the game primarily come from nostalgia, but I still hold Dark Legacy in somewhat high regard, despite its many issues.

I guess it's worth noting first that I played Dark Legacy through emulation. I have a physical copy for the PS2, but for some reason, I can't find my PlayStation. Don't ask me how you can lose an original, bulky model PlayStation 2, because I honestly can't tell you. Anyway, I used Dolphin to get Dark Legacy up and running, and with that, I noticed a lot of issues that I couldn't honestly tell you if they were issues with the GameCube port, or problems through emulation.

To start, what I know was an emulation issue was the several crashes I had while playing. I pumped close to 15 hours into this current, singleplayer run of Gauntlet, and with that, I experienced around three hard-crashes (the program froze and shut itself out), and two soft-crashes (the screen wigged out, went black, but audio and controller inputs still registered despite zero visibility). Crashes are frustrating, but it never got too much under my skin; annoying, yes, but nothing deal-breaking.

From the usual crashes, I had other weird experiences with this port. First off, I was rather baffled to see that mini-bosses and full-on bosses have no health bars. I was rather used to being able to see where boss health was at because it made for at least somewhat easier strategic planning to encounters. I also found two boss items not registering at all. One: for the dragon fight in realm 2, there's an ice ax you can find later on that should freeze the dragon for a bit, giving you the advantage to wail on him a bit without taking any damage, yourself; the ax didn't freeze the dragon at all. Two: the scimitar used to fight the chimera didn't lop off the middle head like it was supposed to, which greatly decreases the difficulty for the fight since you're attempting to fight basically three enemies at the same time. Besides weird quirks, I had plenty of framerate issues in-game, with it chugging many, many times, especially in the hub world, and when there were tons of enemies on screen. For all of these issues, I cannot say whether or not they're emulation-related, or if they're linked with the GameCube port as a whole, but they were a bit frustrating to say the very least. I'm also curious about the chimera fight, primarily because Nintendo was still being super stingy on their in-game content at the time. I would like to guess that maybe the sword worked on that fight by decreasing overall boss health, but there was no decapitation, because Nintendo were so restrictive on more mature content on their systems; whatever the case may be, I have no clue.

Anyway, for Dark Legacy, itself, for anyone who's played Gauntlet before, you know what you're getting: repetitive combat encounters bordering on button-mashing (if it wasn't for the fact you can hold down the attack button to spam attacks) in an assortment of differently themed, yet mechanically similar worlds. Your character choices are all cosmetic, with extremely light changes to gameplay functionalities such as how magic can affect inanimate objects once you reach certain levels, and a base stat that's generally higher than other ones compared to other characters. Dark Legacy is about what you'd expect from a grindy, yet simplistic light-RPG experience; it's nothing special, but it works, and it's a lot of fun.

Generally speaking, if you have a base tolerance for repetitive game design, this is definitely up your alley, but Gauntlet has always been an "acquired taste" kind of game; I understand if you cannot stand these games at all. Anyway, despite the grindy nature of the game, and how samey most of the content is, I still can't break away from it and it always drags me back in. I love this game for what it is, jank and all, and while it isn't perfect in the slightest, it's still a ton of fun and one I would definitely recommend if you can find a copy for it. If you don't have a multi-controller port for the PS2 and want to play this with friends (the more the merrier on this game), I'd recommend the Xbox version over any of the other one's, since it runs better, looks better (although that isn't saying much since this is a N64-era game retouched with new features), and has native four controller support, without any possible Nintendo nonsense injected into it.

Unnnnnnggggghhhhh...

We had this game at our punk house for some reason. I think my housemate liked it a lot. Well, it is annoying. You just run around smashing things and having the game announcer yell his narration at you while the absolutely terrible sound effects play. I feel like this maybe was supposed to be a PS1 game or something? The graphics are poor and the game play, as mentioned, is annoying and repetitive. I guess there's, like, secrets and crap and maybe the 3-D view was sort of groundbreaking, but in general I'd probably never play this game again, if given the opportunity.

Crystal noise.

Review from thedonproject.com

I played through Gauntlet: Dark Legacy in co-op with a friend and had a lot of fun. Gauntlet is an arcade top-down shooting game with a few extra mechanics—bump attacks, heavy melee attacks, blocking, special moves, and a variety of item power ups—on top of this there is a leveling up and gold system, which can be used to buy items or stat upgrades. There are a number of character classes, and each one has a different set of starting stats—the knight is slower but more powerful, the wizard has stronger magic attacks, the jester, who I chose, is faster but starts weaker. As you level up your character across the game, each character becomes more and more like the other. Since you can buy stat upgrades—which I did almost every chance I got, in leuie of buying health items between mission—you have some say in how your character develops. By the late 70s or early 80s level, my jester had their speed and strength all the way maxed out.

The game is pretty economical. There are different enemy models for each world, but there are only a few different character classes that have more damaging tiers—rushing enemies that blow up, long range enemies, short range melee enemies, commander style enemies, and small type enemies that can be overwhelming in large numbers. Then there are unique minibosses like golems, grim reapers, and dragons that take and do more damage than the usual enemies.

The basic loop is working your way through a series of themed levels finding collectibles and keys. You unlock different worlds through finding colored stones, and can move between worlds at any time from the hub area. Each world will have a special item in it that will do major damage to the boss of another world, so you're incentivized to explore the available worlds before taking on the each world's bosses. My favorite levels were the jester levels, which are all fantastical and dreamlike, EC Escher inspired. I also liked the Doom-inspired flesh-wall/blood level.

The game is mindless fun, but I wish there was just one more layer of something to it. What I really felt was missing was a way to avoid damage. Taking damage in regular levels is usually pretty harmless, but since boss fights have a ton of moves you can't dodge, they mostly feel like rote HP checks—can you dish out enough damage before dying? Usually, you can. But I would have liked a dodge roll or a stronger block move or something like that, which could have made the boss fights feel a little more active.

I had a good time playing through this—it took about 11 hours. It made me curious about the earlier Gauntlet games.

Pros:
Soulful atmosphere and soundtrack, perfect for October's spooky season.
Fun, simple gameplay.
Well-designed levels (with the exception of the Battlefield levels, those are a tedious maze).
Game teaches you how to interact with its mechanics through gameplay.
Fun rewards system that keeps you playing to the end and gets the dopamine flowing.
Voice acting.
Cons:
It's too long to the point where it overstayed its welcome.
Bosses aren't very good in single player, you just end up tanking their hits for a few minutes and killing them through attrition because they move way too fast.

One of those random old games I've had on my mind for over twenty years. I played it with a friend back in the day and I think even borrowed it from him for a while, but I never beat it, and for some reason it has stuck in my craw as unfinished business ever since.

Ironically, in finally, finally returning to it, I may have discovered why I never followed through back in 2003 - it's kind of boring. Levels are very long and the combat is (obviously, for this franchise) as simple as one could possibly imagine, so it gets to be kind of a snooze! Honestly, I think it's just the collectathon and hidden item and unlockable character aspects that made this lodge itself in my brain, and those things are cool. But you really gotta be committed to this thing to see it through and I'm not 100% sure it's worth it.

Maybe I will once again spend two decades nursing an ever-growing urge to revisit this and the cycle will repeat itself in 2043.

A western Musou that avoids that series' flaws by being really greasy.

Even back when this game came out, Dark Legacy had middling reviews and looked just awful, one of the ugliest games across any of the various skews. I'd argue it actually looks worse than Legends just because of what you had to compare the game against. The music's a slightly (?) less compressed version of the Arcade/Legends tracks. Nothing in here is going to stand out as all-time great video game music, but the tracks that are included are varied and add to the atmosphere of each level. Nacho cheese fantasy tracks, which is preferable to boring.

This game gets a four because, as a co-op multiplayer game it's a great time. The RPG elements add to a sense of progression, but this isn't Diablo, or even Dark Alliance, you're not selecting a build and variations between characters aren't super meaningful. You find a power up on the ground, and bludgeon waves and waves of braindead mooks with them, and it's works. The enemy variety is relatively small, considering most are just reskins of "a guy way that walks forward, tries to bonk you on the head and dies in 1-3 hits", but the level design and visual variety makes it so that you don't really care. The amount of enemies on screen at once also contributes, the game can chug but it doesn't dip to anything unplayable and for larger waves the slowdown starts to approach shmup slowdown in the sense that it's kinda helpful to pause the action.

There's a lot of content in this game too. The game rewards exploration and experimentation, although the game's piss poor visuals can obscure what you're looking at sometimes. With four players, the game can last about three 2ish hour play sessions. Level-ups happen frequently, the game showers you in a healthy collection of powerups and gold to buy more powerups or stat increases, there are unlockable secret characters, there's a collectathon's variety of shit to look out for to advance to new levels. It's design is very obnoxious and loud, but in a way that successfully covers up the games weaknesses.

If you don't have friends to play this game with, skip it, there's not much here for you. If you got 1-3 other people who are looking for a couch game to play through, this an easy recommendation.

Updating this one as I've played through it again and my feelings are very different between 14 and 29. Honestly, this era of Midway is some of its best design work, with the enemy variety, sound design, and overwhelming number of magical bursts and explosions translating into an exciting experience whether in the arcade or at home.

It's one of the grindiest games ever made, but if played like an arcade game, in bursts separated by a few days per realm, it doesn't feel quite as long. And throughout, classic arcade design like rotating power ups and having multiple unlockable character classes, make the repetitive levels feel more exciting. Only the last two or three realms really feel boring due to their level length, but the challenging boss fights at their ends make up for it quite a bit.

I recommend whole heartedly if you can get some friends together to play as a team. It's a fun night!