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.
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.