Are you ready gamer? Are you ready for the sheer unadulterated terror that is the animalized men wriggling eerily?

Well, if you weren't then you didn't read the manual. We love instruction manuals, we can't get enough of being instructed and looking at funny pictures of the enemies with names like "Rolpher", who rolls at you! Demorobruzer, the dinosaur riding on the tank reminds me of something I'd draw while bored at school, which disappoints me that I wasn't allowed in the timeline where I grew up with this instead of Karate Kid. The absurd word choices in the manual would've been like Shakespeare to toddler me, and would most assuredly had taught me to always type EVIL in all caps. What's most astounding about the localization for both this and the arcade game though, is that they decided to call the mysterious undead warrior of Argus "Rygar", which for all intents and purposes is essentially the same name as "Ligar", the main antagonist. What's the correlation between these two characters other than being the main driving forces of the plot? Nothing else besides that, perhaps the massive lion headed snake thing with dragon hands is the dad and it's Ligar Jr.? It's a mystery to all.

Once you're done reading the manual, you'll have your handy dandy map to the main overworld, and the locations of the Indora War Gods who await to give you one of their sacred treasures to help you defeat your apparent dad. It's here that I realized that the manual actually can't make up it's mind on whether the fighting gods themselves are called "Indora"s, or if they're a collective of buff bearded men belonging to someone named "Indora", but in-game at least one of them calls themselves "Indora", and talk like they're just named Indora. My personal headcanon is that it's just one huge dude going between rooms quickly to talk to you, because you're the first person besides an animalized man who wriggles eerily to finally drop by the main overworld. Either way, if it isn't already apparent, this is an early search action/indy jones-like, and it's a very ambitious title.

So ambitious that the game suffers from many funny glitches, and flickering sprites are commonplace due to the game giving no shits sometimes about how many enemies it spawns during the side-scrolling sections. This is actually a boon however, because as a tip for you and anyone else interested in trying this, it pays to kill everything you come into contact with in Rygar. That's right, Tecmo was making Musou games way before their Koei half had even the inkling of the idea to turn a Romance of the Three Kingdoms fighting game into a beat'em up war simulator. Failing to kill enemies in this game only makes the game harder, as you deny yourself the ability to improve your "tone" and "last", which is your attack and durability respectively, as well as nabbing potential mind point drops, which is what you use to cast one of your three magic spells. One of them being a super useful health recovery that requires a full meter of seven whole mind. With infinite continues and forgiving checkpoints, this only gets easier as you play it unless you max out. Another tip I have is for the Pully you get from the first Indora. The manual says to aim for Rygar Jr.'s torso for trying to get on the zipline, and for best success try and wriggle (like an animalized man wriggling eerily) around in a circle until you hear "clink". It's alright, the game's held together with duct tape, and sometimes even the doors will require jiggling the handle to get through. I love it for it though.

Rygar's most interesting trait to me though, is that a lot of the soundtrack was changed for the western release. This funny four-note song that feels like the composer shitposting or forgetting to write the rest of it was actually changed from this pretty rad sounding piece. What was the reason? No one knows. Maybe Michiharu Hasuya thought we wouldn't get it, much how they figured we couldn't possibly get this and Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde at the same time. It certainly wasn't malevolent or anything, because we still at least got this groovy cave theme that keeps me from actively denouncing the NES version, ignoring my irony-fueled love of the four-note Castle of Dorago shitpost, and my craving to think of headcanon as to why Dorago is trying to drive Rygar Jr. crazy with his mad piano skills.

As of this post, I've beaten this three times in the last week and it's only gotten better for me on each subsequent replay just like many other search-actions of it's time like Simon's Quest. Rygar/Warrior of Argus Extreme Great Charge has not only been a consistent cushy fun romp, but also full of surprises thanks to it's mysterious programming. When I find myself casually strolling along and enjoying the scenery of Primeval Mountain only for six dragons to suddenly show up and attempt to drop eggs on my head with the frame rate dropping massively as the music struggles to breathe, that's just the peak of the goddamn medium right there. That's a fucking game. A really interesting and memorable game that I would've adored much like Metroid growing up.

Beastorized gentlemen squirming weirdly.