The Guardian Legend/YMMV

• Breather Boss: There are more of them than not, if you use the proper tactics and weapons (usually a well placed Laser Sword of some sort, but not always).
  • Special mention goes to red Bombardier at the end of Corridor 21, he is fought at the end of the Boss Rush right after Grimgrin and before It.
• Demonic Spiders: In the last few corridor levels, there is a blue ship enemy that loves to fire lasers. Each laser does more damage than any of the bosses can do to your character, even after having all the armour upgrades. The fact that this enemy comes is large numbers doesn't help, either...
• Goddamned Bats: Many of the small mooks, especially the various multicoloured jumping jellies in the labyrinth stages, as well as countless types of enemies in the Corridor stages. The labyrinth areas have bats, but those are not the enemies you should be worrying about.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • If you have enough chips, you can buy all of the items in the shops where the Blue Landers are offering you multiple objects for sale by pausing very quickly as you make your first purchase.
  • Upon having 5 or more shields, not only do you walk faster, but you can also walk through the unpassable red pyramids by moving diagonally and then moving between the cracks, making navigation much easier.
• The Jimmy Hart Version: The intro stage's music sounds suspiciously similar to the overworld theme of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The Password Save feature despite (bizarrely) being the major selling point on the game box. The Guardian Legend was released towards the end of the era of password saves, when games were getting too complex for passwords to be efficient, and it shows. How bad were they? They were 32 characters long, including both upper and lower case, plus numbers, and the symbols "!" and "?". The awful passwords were considered to be the game's greatest weakness by far.
• That One Boss: Pretty much anyone that's not a Breather Boss is one of these.
  • Grimgrin, the monster with the mass of eyes... and it bombards more of them at you as they take damage. The Final Boss, It, does the same thing, in addition to having Combat Tentacles, which make it harder to attack from the front. And it's got homing missiles too.
  • On the surface-traveling stages, the jumping balls of seaweed, especially the blue and red ones. And then there's also the one-time-only "dinosaur skull" miniboss and "ice crystal" miniboss, both of which spam homing projectiles and do ludicrous amounts of damage to you.
  • There's also Optomon, the boss that looks like a tangled lump of seaweed with an eye in the middle. They also fire long lines of vines that will inflict an unbelievable amount of damage to you in a short amount of time if you get caught by them. The green one is mildly challenging, but the blue one is very, very tough to beat. By the time you get to the red one, however, you're much stronger and better prepared to deal with it, so while still challenging, it's not as hard.
• Vindicated by History: Although it did get nominated for a few awards in Nintendo Power, most other professional reviews of the game at the time of its release were negative, with Electronic Gaming Monthly in particular calling it "only average at best", and the highest rating it ever got was almost an 8 out of 10. Fast forward to the 21st century and you find it on a lot of lists of best NES games, with IGN calling it "one of the most influential games in the history of the gaming industry" in 2009 and Gamasutra calling it "one of the best games ever released." Most of the credit for this rests with the game's complicated, 32-character long Password Saves which were a huge downside at the time, but not so much anymore since most NES gaming these days is done with computer-based emulator programs, where save states remove the need to worry about those obnoxious passwords.

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