This is a game I've heard quite positively talked about for a good while, and it being a Zelda-like game, it's absolutely in one of my favorite retro genres, so it was always one I've planned to get around to. I was excited ages ago when I heard it was coming to Switch Online, and then I promptly forgot about it as I always do X3. Then yesterday I accidentally rediscovered that it'd been added to the service! I launched it up and started playing, and before I knew it I'd just wound up finishing the game outright I'd been having so much fun x3. It took me about 6.5 hours to finish the game in English via the Switch Online Genesis service, and I never actually needed to save or anything (managed to not die a single time ^w^), so I never actually ended up using save states or rewinds or anything.
Crusader of Centy follows a young boy (whose canon name is amusingly enough, Corona) who is given a sword and shield on his 14th birthday as is the custom in the kingdom of Soliel. He sets out on an adventure to save the kingdom from the resurgent monster threat! It's an interesting enough premise, and while it does have some major twists in the narrative, I don't think it succeeds exceptionally hard in what it's going for. It falls into the pitfalls that a lot of pro-tolerance/pro-peace games do where the anti-violence message/goal is still, nonetheless, achieved through the power of bravery and violence (not to mention the bigger takeaway messaging of what actually happens in the conclusion is truly quite ghastly if you try and apply it to real world analogues in any way ^^;). The story really isn't the big reason to play the game, granted, but it made me do a "wait a minute, what the fuck???" double take hard enough that I couldn't omit mentioning it here x3
The real meat and potatoes of this game is the gameplay, and as mentioned before, it's a top-down action adventure game very much in the mold of The Legend of Zelda. The big gimmick here is your sword. While the sword itself may have kinda abysmal hit detection, that's not so much of a problem at the end of the day (and not just because the actual combat difficulty isn't terribly high). You very quickly gain the ability to throw your sword like a boomerang, and slingshotting your sword around towards and back through enemies makes for a quite satisfying combat experience despite the bad hit detection. Additionally, while this game doesn't have sub weapons or proper items, it has animal companions you can befriend along the way. You can equip up to two at a time, and while some of them have active effects, most of them just augment your movement speed or sword abilities in some way. Some animals even give special effects when the two of them are equipped at the same time~. They're both neat systems that make for a fun and satisfying adventure that's also just different enough from stuff like Zelda to help set it apart.
The overall dungeon and combat design is, as mentioned before, not terribly difficult. It's not an especially easy game, mind you, but if you're a veteran of the genre, you'll likely end up dying only once or twice if ever. The biggest places you'll likely die at are the jumping puzzles, however. Most of the bosses aren't terribly difficult, but the true place the game will shave away health is with all of the bottomless pits. The dungeon and gameplay design overall has a quite heavy puzzle focus compared to most Zelda games (which gave it an almost Alundra-like feel at times), and while the puzzles were challenging but solvable enough that I enjoyed them while never having to look anything up, platforming is still unfortunately a meaningful part of these puzzles. Now mercifully, the platforming isn't nearly as unforgiving or dire as a game like Beyond Oasis's is, but there are still more than a handful of really mean pixel-perfect jumps that I was really not a fan of. The dungeon and boss design is overall quite good, but those bad platforming bits really take away from some of it. Like with the bad hit detection on the sword, this is another small but important misstep that takes what could've been a great game feel only just good enough instead.
The presentation is by and large very good. Coming out in 1994 and published by Sega, they clearly had the resources to make a game that looked and sounded very pretty, and they did it. The graphics are very nice and colorful, and while there are perhaps a bit too many luxury animations here and there on things like your turning circle, it never felt like it was getting in the way of the gameplay at least. The music is also very good, and it has a very Sonic-y feel to it (and not just because Sonic has a cameo in the game x3). Honestly it feels like Sega gave them a lot of sound samples that the Sonic games use, because there were even quite a few sound effects that even a relative Sonic non-fan like myself could recognize from the Genesis Sonic games x3. Again, not a complaint, really, but something fun to point out.
The only real presentation criticism I have is for Atlus's localization. It's honestly a pretty solid localization for the time, but there are some very sloppy mistakes here and there like text boxes that cut words in half or words that are just outright misspelled to begin with. It thankfully never makes any puzzles unsolvable or confuses the narrative or anything, but it's still a bummer to see such glaring localization mistakes in a product at least in part from Sega themselves. At the very least they're quite funny mistakes when they happen, which is a bonus of sorts~ x3
Verdict: Recommended. While the weird hit detection and difficulty of the platforming will definitely turn off some, if you're a fan of 2D Zelda games or just 2D action adventure games in general, I think you'll probably really enjoy your time with Crusader of Centy. It's not perfect, but it's got a good difficulty balance and just hard enough to be challenging but not frustrating puzzle design in a way that'll add a good adventure to your weekend or afternoon~.
Crusader of Centy follows a young boy (whose canon name is amusingly enough, Corona) who is given a sword and shield on his 14th birthday as is the custom in the kingdom of Soliel. He sets out on an adventure to save the kingdom from the resurgent monster threat! It's an interesting enough premise, and while it does have some major twists in the narrative, I don't think it succeeds exceptionally hard in what it's going for. It falls into the pitfalls that a lot of pro-tolerance/pro-peace games do where the anti-violence message/goal is still, nonetheless, achieved through the power of bravery and violence (not to mention the bigger takeaway messaging of what actually happens in the conclusion is truly quite ghastly if you try and apply it to real world analogues in any way ^^;). The story really isn't the big reason to play the game, granted, but it made me do a "wait a minute, what the fuck???" double take hard enough that I couldn't omit mentioning it here x3
The real meat and potatoes of this game is the gameplay, and as mentioned before, it's a top-down action adventure game very much in the mold of The Legend of Zelda. The big gimmick here is your sword. While the sword itself may have kinda abysmal hit detection, that's not so much of a problem at the end of the day (and not just because the actual combat difficulty isn't terribly high). You very quickly gain the ability to throw your sword like a boomerang, and slingshotting your sword around towards and back through enemies makes for a quite satisfying combat experience despite the bad hit detection. Additionally, while this game doesn't have sub weapons or proper items, it has animal companions you can befriend along the way. You can equip up to two at a time, and while some of them have active effects, most of them just augment your movement speed or sword abilities in some way. Some animals even give special effects when the two of them are equipped at the same time~. They're both neat systems that make for a fun and satisfying adventure that's also just different enough from stuff like Zelda to help set it apart.
The overall dungeon and combat design is, as mentioned before, not terribly difficult. It's not an especially easy game, mind you, but if you're a veteran of the genre, you'll likely end up dying only once or twice if ever. The biggest places you'll likely die at are the jumping puzzles, however. Most of the bosses aren't terribly difficult, but the true place the game will shave away health is with all of the bottomless pits. The dungeon and gameplay design overall has a quite heavy puzzle focus compared to most Zelda games (which gave it an almost Alundra-like feel at times), and while the puzzles were challenging but solvable enough that I enjoyed them while never having to look anything up, platforming is still unfortunately a meaningful part of these puzzles. Now mercifully, the platforming isn't nearly as unforgiving or dire as a game like Beyond Oasis's is, but there are still more than a handful of really mean pixel-perfect jumps that I was really not a fan of. The dungeon and boss design is overall quite good, but those bad platforming bits really take away from some of it. Like with the bad hit detection on the sword, this is another small but important misstep that takes what could've been a great game feel only just good enough instead.
The presentation is by and large very good. Coming out in 1994 and published by Sega, they clearly had the resources to make a game that looked and sounded very pretty, and they did it. The graphics are very nice and colorful, and while there are perhaps a bit too many luxury animations here and there on things like your turning circle, it never felt like it was getting in the way of the gameplay at least. The music is also very good, and it has a very Sonic-y feel to it (and not just because Sonic has a cameo in the game x3). Honestly it feels like Sega gave them a lot of sound samples that the Sonic games use, because there were even quite a few sound effects that even a relative Sonic non-fan like myself could recognize from the Genesis Sonic games x3. Again, not a complaint, really, but something fun to point out.
The only real presentation criticism I have is for Atlus's localization. It's honestly a pretty solid localization for the time, but there are some very sloppy mistakes here and there like text boxes that cut words in half or words that are just outright misspelled to begin with. It thankfully never makes any puzzles unsolvable or confuses the narrative or anything, but it's still a bummer to see such glaring localization mistakes in a product at least in part from Sega themselves. At the very least they're quite funny mistakes when they happen, which is a bonus of sorts~ x3
Verdict: Recommended. While the weird hit detection and difficulty of the platforming will definitely turn off some, if you're a fan of 2D Zelda games or just 2D action adventure games in general, I think you'll probably really enjoy your time with Crusader of Centy. It's not perfect, but it's got a good difficulty balance and just hard enough to be challenging but not frustrating puzzle design in a way that'll add a good adventure to your weekend or afternoon~.