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".