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[drohne]

just picked it up and quickly played through the first 2 levels. don't have much time to write or play just now, but it's excellent. and very different from the original. which might alienate some fans, but was probably a good direction to take given the target hardware: a straightforward gba sequel would inevitably pale next to the saturn original.

anyway, it's much less of a straightforward beat-em-up. you can now freely traverse the z-axis as in double dragon, and there still are moments of straight-up gang fighting, but even this behaves more like astro boy than guardian heroes: your moves are simple, and enemies bounce all over the place. it feels like a classic treasure action game, with a scattergun attack of weird new ideas and challenges, and big bosses with elaborate patterns to learn and neutralize. the major new mechanic is a counter: you can deflect most if not all attacks by tapping the guard button just at the moment of contact. this will reflect projectiles and stun enemies who attack you physically. it takes a little while to pick up, but once you've got it down it's really satisfying. the timing is pretty lenient, and in a pinch you can just mash the guard button, but this will sap your magic meter. nice bit of balancing, there.

i haven't noticed any major slowdown, and i've played the level with the outrun-style scaling background that the ign reviewer complained about. the action intentionally stutters after a succesful counter or a heavy attack...maybe that's being read as slowdown.

complaints: controls are a bit sluggish. pressing forward and attack at the same time triggers a slow punch; if you want to use your combos, you have to keep the pad neutral. this takes getting used to. if there's any use for magic attacks, i haven't found it yet. translation is engrish, but utterly without bangaioh's charm. anyway, don't let lukewarm reviews scare you off. can't wait to get back to the game this evening.

 

[belgurdo]

BBBUT THE REVIEWS GAVE IT A LESS THAN NINE THAT COULDNT POSSIBLY MEAN PEOPLE COULD LIKE IT

 

[Matlock]

Sounds good, I'll have to try it out eventually.

 

[op_ivy]

nice to hear! thanks

 

[Soul4ger]

Damn, we didn't get it in over here yet. >:O I'll be playing lots of this and Astroboy on campus, I reckon.

 

[mosaic]

I'm kinda bugged that the counter system seems to be the only gameplay trait worth a damn.... Lots of button mashing otherwise... magic really doesn't seem to have much of a use in most cases.

The bosses DO rock though -- large, powerful, make you avoid and block a bunch of attacks before throwing out something wide-open for a counter....

Love all the graphics effects -- I think Treasure used every coding gimmick the GBA has. Hell, level 2 is more like Hydra than OutRun... Hydra! Each successive boss seems to get bigger and bigger... jeez.

Like the power-up system -- collecting crystals from fallen enemies and redeeming them later for ATK, DEF, MGC, etc is good stuff.

Game seems bitch hard compared to the original though... really have to get good with countering or the CPU will juggle you until you're dead.

The story is hilarious -- so Engrish it hurts... doubly tragic since you can tell there's serious stuff going on. The cameos from the characters from the original game are cooooooool.... and props to Treasure for making Zur a real recurrent pain in the ass. "Ya comb over!"

I think folks expecting a handheld Guardian Heroes may be disappointed in the battle system, the shallow combat setup, and the shoddy translation... but it is a pretty decent action game in its own right and there are enough instances of awesome to make taking the plunge worth the risk.

 

[Mejilan]

I just beat the game, it's fantastic. The slow down is worse than Astro Boy, but it is NOWHERE near as bad as that IGN review made it out to be. Not even remotely game breaking, and in fact, only made the timing of counters difficult in one relatively short part of the game. I actually like the game better than Astroy Boy, it plays something like that, only with freer controls, a cool magic system, and a more robust action system.

The translation is so ridiculous, however... almost All Your Base level at times.

Still, it made for many, MANY cheap laughs.

 

[border]

 

[BenT]

I trust drohne!

 

[enjoy bell woods]

I also like it.

 

[drohne]

i just beat the game as well. the last couple levels are just unbelievable. completely unhinged grand guignol chaos, excessive even by treasure's standards. and the simplicity of the mechanics makes it all navigable. when the gba was first announced, there was talk of a 2d renaissance; advance guardian heroes is among the very few games that fulfill that promise. tomorrow i'm playing it again with the difficulty cranked all the way up. this game kicks ass.

 

[border]

I agree with most of the criticisms, but am not as forgiving. It seems like maybe 60% of the game winds up being played during "slowdown". Intentional or not, it's annoying and it fucks with your timing....pretty lame. And I really can't stand that F+P is the "slow but powerful" attack rather than the combo lead-in. That's always messing me up, because you accidentally throw slow, easy-to-interrupt hits without really meaning to.

It's okay, but it seems really, really sloppy.....as much as I would like to say that this fulfills some kind of magical prophecy of 2D, it just has too many problems to really stand out as a classic.

 

[mosaic]

Yep. But the sloppiness seems to have been on Treasure's part and not due to any weakness of the GBA. The controls could've been tweaked better, I'm sure some of the slowdown could've been reduced, the character animation could be smoother overall, someone needs to go to jail for the translation, and certainly the difficulty levels could have been better balanced -- Easy is ridiculously easy while normal pushed my limits on many occasions. Hard is insane. And Very Hard... I'm too chicken to bother.

Nice to see that playing through on Easy still unlocks hidden characters. I unlocked a few there, got in a ton of useful practice, and now I can play the normal mode without getting into too many unfair juggle situations or having a boss hand me my ass.

I take back what I said about magic also... it is useless much of the time, but certain attacks are pure GOLD against some bosses. Enn's homing fireball attack that can juggle everything rocks me so hard.

BTW, for those that have finished it (highlight spoiler text) --

Spoiler

How did you feel about the very last moment of the game where it all comes down to hitting the R button with less than 2 tenths on the timer? I thought it was clever, but lame.

 

[drohne]

i swear i'm not seeing this massive "slowdown." if you mean the stutter when you counter or hit with a heavy punch, or when enemies collide, i think that's intentional. there are situations late in the game with tons of enemies on screen, and the engine handles this effortlessly - it only "slows down" in the specific situations i mentioned. which doesn't suggest engine shortcomings to me, unless it has a really hard time with collisions or something. i'm a treasure fanboy, but i certainly wouldn't try to spin or cover up flaws if i saw them.

i personally found normal mode far too easy, and i was always pretty bad at the original guardian heroes. i died several times on the first stage, and then once on the last stage, but not at all during the rest of the game.

Spoiler

i thought the endgame sequence was really cool and really tense...i nailed it on my third try at 0.06. do you know how many chances do you get?

Spoiler

and time attack mode is a really quick way to unlock new characters. an all clear is enough to unlock a character almost by itself. this is the equivalent of donating thousands and thousands of crystals to the lab.

 

[Mejilan]

I think you get as many chances as it takes, as long as you can execute the counter in less than .20 seconds, roughly. Got .13 the first attempt, he rebounded it, got .11 the 2nd attempt, and he rebounded that as well. Got .00 on the final attempt, and completed the game.

I consider the boss fight before that counter sequence to be the final boss, and it wasn't too bad.

I'd just like to reiterate that the slowdown is greatly exaggerated in the IGN review, imho. The game is NOT as polished as Astro Boy, and as a pure action game, I have to give AB the nod. But I'm having more fun with AGH, and I think it will last me much longer too.

 

[chespace]

yeah, this game has definitely exceeded my expectations after the crap screenshots and IGN review. the slowdown right now has been neglegible, especially for one who has played plenty of 2D games.

so far, i've gotten all of treasure's efforts on GBA (my favorite being hajime no ippo). glad they've still got it.

 

[Mejilan]

Is there a possibility that IGN got a slightly unoptimized review build?

Did the game come out in Japan yet? I know Astro Boy's US release included a few improvements, including less slow down.

I just don't remember this game hitting Japan yet.

 

[sprsk]

Is there a possibility that IGN got a slightly unoptimized review build?

Did the game come out in Japan yet? I know Astro Boy's US release included a few improvements, including less slow down.

I just don't remember this game hitting Japan yet.

maybe its cause they are playing on an emu?!!?!!? (i dunno if they are or not)

 

[border]

An emulator would presumably have less slowdown thanks to a stronger processor and the ability to skip frames. Assuming that all the slowdown is intentionally there, though, that wouldn't stop it.

I'm not going to play the "I just have better eyes than you" game (it could be my problem), but it still seems to me like this game spends a lot of its time in slo-mo, and not just after hard hits and counters.

 

[mosaic]

I'm playing on my old standby -- black GBA SP with Pelican 3X battery -- and I do notice slowdown here and there. It gets bad on the later stages when all of the flying dragon thingies are swarming around, and seems to crop up quite a bit throughout level 2 also.... not like it lasts and lasts, but it does throw off my counter timing a bit. Also seems to cause the system to ignore command inputs once in a while.

The slowdown is just unfortunate, but not a game killer... some of the time I welcome it because it slows the enemy down too

So many little niggles though. A month more of fine tuning probably would have fixed a lot of the problems. Treasure couldn't have taken much more than that with Astro Boy to clean up the US version (Sega sat on it for a long time).

I weep at the dialogue....

... and the absence of the undead soldier.

 

[chespace]

yeah, i said the slowdown was neglegible for me, not non-existent.

this game just feels like treasure through and through.