From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Rygar - Weekend Warrior
Why giving up too soon can potentially result in missing out on a game that would have become a beloved favorite.

If ever you required proof that there were such a thing as a slowly blossoming love between a person and a video game, then all you'd have to do is pull up a chair and listen on as I told you about my story with Rygar. For certain you'd come away having gained insight into how it's possible for mild interest to develop into extreme adoration.

Above all, you'd understand why I hold Rygar in the highest regard.

To think that it started so underwhelmingly.

Rygar, much like Trojan and so many others, was a game presented to me completely out of the blue. Sometime during the early-to-middle portion of 1989, on a day that held no great significance, my brother, James, emerged from the basement and hurried over to the den (which had forever been my domain) with an item in hand. It was a copy of a game titled "Rygar," about which he was excited to tell me. He spoke of it glowingly, but I found myself doubting his description because I could recall playing it briefly in arcades and coming away questioning why anyone would ever willingly subject him- or herself to such torture. Though, he assured me that I was mistaken--that Rygar was indeed a classic, and I was just playing it incorrectly.

James, like me, was an arcade-goer, but he'd been part of the scene for far longer. He'd been playing games like Rygar--and even those as old as Space Invaders and Asteroids--basically since they debuted. So he knew what he was talking about. That's why I didn't totally dismiss his opinion. Also, I didn't question his assumption that this, the NES conversion of Rygar, had to be a direct port of the coin-op game with which he was so familiar.

That was his usual mode of operation: He'd play a hot new arcade game (like Gauntlet or Marble Madness) or whatever was lighting it up in the computer scene (something like Shadowgate or Doom) and come away so impressed that he couldn't suppress the impulse to head right down to the game store and buy whichever port of it was available for a platform we currently owned (the 2600, the Commodore 64 and the NES). He never cared to look at the screenshots on the back of the box--to run even a baseline comparison--nor did he ever take into account quality differences. To him, such details just didn't matter. They were like the plot in a Sharon Stone movie.

Still, I couldn't say that I was terribly interested in playing Rygar. I mean, why would I be? I could, after all, clearly remember how poorly my experiences went when I played it in arcades. Sure--the game had some positive aspects to it: I was impressed with its graphics and presentation, and I was taken with its imaginative rendering of a mythological world. But none of that could disguise the fact that Rygar was a brutal quarter-muncher that felt designed to be unfair. Hell--it was an enormous struggle for me to even make it past the first few screens. One quarter's worth of action was all I ever needed to see.

Put simply: Rygar was the type of game I was apt to avoid. And that wasn't going to change simply because I could now play it for free.

But circumstances dictated that I give it a fair chance. Mainly, my brother kept nagging me to play it, since he wanted to see the game in action and gauge my reaction to it. Eventually I gave in. "Fine," I said as I snapped the cartridge into the NES.

Interestingly, we soon discovered, NES Rygar wasn't much like the arcade version outside of art direction. The characters and the setting looked familiar, yeah, but there was something glaringly different about the way the action was flowing. I wasn't traversing fixed-length "stages," as you did in the arcade original, no; rather, the gameplay style seemed more akin to what I'd experienced in recently-discovered action-adventure titles like Metroid and Rambo. This certainly wasn't exciting news to me, since I'd found the "free-roaming" variety of side-scroller--and particularly Metroid--to be completely impenetrable. For me, the concept of "nonlinear side-scrolling action" was still so very new and still so very bewildering; for whatever reason, I just wasn't able to fully grasp it.

Now, I wasn't prepared to cheat Rygar out of further assessment, no, but I'd be lying if I told you that I hadn't already decided, very early on, that Rygar probably wasn't going to be my kind of game. That being my mindset, I was only going to afford Rygar a limited amount of time and opportunity. Really, the odds were stacked against it.

However, during that first sampling of the game, there were some aspects of Rygar that managed to make a positive impression on me. For one, the eponymous Rygar's mode of attack was very cool; I was having a ton of fun putting to use his distinct main weapon, the Discarmor (or "the giant yo-yo," as we referred to it), which could be swung rapidly to wreak maximum destruction! Truly there was no other weapon like it in games--nothing that was as visually interesting. Nothing whose pummeling power was as viscerally satisfying.

I liked that Rygar was so nimble--that you were afforded full controllability over his jumps. Also, it was neat how you could bounce off of enemies Super Mario-style--rebound high into the air--and in doing so gain easier platform access and otherwise avoid having to remain grounded and constantly engage with monsters who were spawning in rapidly--sometimes at a ridiculous rate--and out of nowhere; I couldn't recall being able to do this in the arcade version (maybe because I was never able to live longer than three seconds?).

The visuals were striking, and the music was beautiful, particularly in the opening area, whose alluring background imagery--which depicted a spectacular scene wherein the setting sun could be seen hovering over lustrously shaded mountains and in front of a blood-red sky--and rousing musical theme combined to tell a powerful story. They were instantly burned into my memory.

And, uh, there were these creepy shirtless hermits who sat atop green pillars and gave you cryptic-sounding advice! And they were really buff! 

I mean, that certainly wasn't something you'd see in every game!

Oh, there were definitely a lot of unique ideas here.

But sadly the game's nonlinear style of action just wasn't clicking with me. I couldn't help but view it as inexplicable, and I had no confidence that I could ever adequately adapt to this type of game. My experiences with Metroid told me that I simply didn't possess the cognitive ability necessary to process and negotiate labyrinthine structures in the 2D perspective. Quite simply, these Metroid-type games and I weren't compatible. So I had no option but to shelve Rygar immediately following that first sampling.

I didn't know what I had.

But over time, things changed. When eventually I connected with Metroid, I did so in a big way. Suddenly I was a person to whom its style of gameplay made all the sense in the world. I discovered that actually I loved exploration-based action-adventure games--that before mine were stupidly narrow-minded assumptions about what side-scrolling action games were supposed to be.

By late August, I'd become so obsessed with Metroid that all I desired was to experience more of the type of action it offered. I found myself daydreaming daily about a Metroid sequel even though such a thing didn't seem likely (back then, a three-year span devoid of speculation about a potential sequel usually doomed the prospect of there being one). And because it seemed obvious that there wasn't going to be a Metroid sequel--at least not in the near future--I knew that there was only one other game to which I could turn.

On the last Friday of August, when the summer season was beginning to wind down and the dreaded school year was fast approaching, I made the move. When my friend Dominick and I returned to my house after engaging in our usual last-minute summertime activities, I convinced him that now was the time to discover what this "Rygar" was all about!

  
Our initial experience was reminiscent of my earliest encounters with Metroid: We had no idea what we were doing, where we were supposed to be going, or how the game's world fit together. About all we knew was that the main antagonist was a tyrant named "Ligar," and we owed that information to one of our bald, shirtless hermit friends. Otherwise, we deduced that the "Minds" we were procuring were useful for powering our three magic spells (Power Up, Attack & Assail, and Recover)--our "Potentials," as the inventory screen termed them; though, it took us a while to understand how the former two worked. 

And we figured out that our health meter (which was comprised of circular units that Dominick liked to refer to as "apples") would increase by one unit after a certain number of enemies had been slain; of course, the process had more to do with mathematics and all of that statistical information communicated in the inventory, but damned if we knew what the hell any of those numbers were supposed to be indicating.

"Why didn't you geniuses just reference the manual?!" you ask.

Well, there's a simple explanation for why we didn't or, rather, why we couldn't: See--whenever my brother brought home a new game, the first thing he'd likely do after removing it from the box was toss the box and/or the manual directly into the trash. No joking: His personal game collections amounted to boxes and containers filled with with loose carts and disks. And since I didn't yet have a subscription to Nintendo Power, and thus had no access to maps, we were pretty much left to our own devices. It was left to us to comprehend the game's labyrinthine layouts and (seemingly) complex systems.

Still, we were finding Rygar to be highly engrossing. We were so invested in it that our session extended into the nighttime hours. There were so many places to go and so many sights to observe. While traversing the game's areas, we'd continue to remark about how aesthetically pleasing their background work was. That opening scene, with the setting sun, was of course wondrous, as I stressed earlier, but it was also strong indicator of things to come; as it promised, Rygar's settings were rich with alluring visuals--with eye-catching mountainscapes, rock formations, ocean views, stretches of grassland, and forest backdrops. Quickly these became some of our all-time favorite 8-bit visuals.

Rygar conveyed an amazing sense of atmosphere, and we were happy to soak it all in.

Also, it featured a terrific soundtrack. Such became evident the moment you hit the Start button--at the very moment when that powerful opening theme kicked in and began infusing you with adventurous spirit. We compared it to Metroid's Brinstar theme, which likewise had a way of filling you with energy and encouraging you to charge forward; it made for the perfect accompaniment to a scene as spectacular.

Really, all of Rygar's music was like that. Much like Metroid's, it had an evocative, though-provoking quality to it. Whenever the game would introduce a new tune, we'd feel tempted to just stop and listen to it for a while--to drink it in and attempt to figure out what it was trying to tell us.

Rygar was replete with great music and rich visual imagery, true, but what really put it over the top for us was the discovery that it also contained overhead areas, like those we traversed in Commando and The Legend of Zelda! We learned of this upon entering Gran Mountain, the game's main hub, which introduced an entirely different form of movement and combat! I mean, what other game did something like that?! What other game contained both side-scrolling and top-down perspectives?! None that we knew. None that did it on this scale, at least.

We didn't know what we were meant to do here, no, but that didn't matter; for the moment, we were excited to hop around this new three-dimensional space, in every which direction, and check out all of Rygar's cool new animations. Finding out where we needed to be wasn't as important as exploring every corner of this "desert-looking area," as we originally identified it, and discovering where else it might transport us and the forms such areas might take.

You can only have one "first experience" with a game, we realized--one chance to form the most indelible memories you could ever have of a game--so we made this one count. If suddenly we found ourselves captivated by the atmosphere of a newly located area like, say, Rolsa Valley or Eruga's Forest, we'd make sure to hang around for a while and immerse ourselves in it; we'd use the time to take in the visuals, listen closely to the music, and get a sense of what was going on in a given area. That's what Metroid taught us to do. (Oh, if only I'd approach every new game with this mindset...).

If anything, Rygar was certainly satisfying my fetish for mountainous backgrounds in 2D video games.

What can I say? "Range of nountain types" and "degree of mountain use" are important metrics to me. I make no apologies for that.

After exploring the game's world for a number of hours, and making little progress, we decided to call it a session (it was probably getting late, after all). Though, we certainly weren't done with it, no. Far from it. From what we'd seen to that point, we were able to judge that Rygar was the real deal, and we agreed that it deserved further examination. We decided that we should play it again at a time when we could dedicate several hours to it. And that we did. We played it again the next week and then the week after that, each time inching our way further into its vast world.

That's how it became our first "weekend game." From then on, that label remained exclusive to Rygar, to which we returned week after week, Friday after Friday, for what seemed like years. In one session, we'd make it as far as the Den of Sagilla. The next time around, we'd reach the Palace of Dorago. Before long, we were finding access to all manner of menacing, frighteningly rendered fortresses and strongholds. All of them did in fact have their own names, but we didn't know what they were. The nearby hermits were dependably communicating them to us, sure, but it didn't matter because we were too dumb to pay attention or consider obvious connections. Frankly, it was astonishing that we were able to correctly identify even two of them. It was probably luck.

In time, we learned enough about Rygar's map structure, item system, and statistical conveyance to get a clear sense of what it was demanding from us. Armed with this newfound wisdom, we were eventually able to clear the five main areas and eliminate all of their twisted-looking guardians. This allowed us to open the path to the game's final area--to Ligar's floating Sky Castle, whose access point, we learned by paying attention, was hidden atop a tower in the previously traversed Rolsa Valley ("the stony place with all of the giant green pillars," as we referred to it).

And that, dear reader, is as far as we ever got. Every time we charged into Ligar's pillared boss chamber, ready to slay him, we met the same fate: crushing defeat. He'd cut us down in seconds, his sentient dragon-headed chain weapons effectively keeping us at bay while the endless storm of sharp, toothy projectiles overwhelmed us. Even if we possessed enough Minds to activate Recovery or even the useful Attack & Assail, it didn't matter; he was simply too powerful. We ignored Power Up because we still weren't convinced that it did anything; we were oblivious like that.

But we had no intention of giving up, and one thing would remain certain: Come Friday, after the school day was over and we'd had our fun hanging around the neighborhood hotspots or Dyker Park, we'd head over to my house and spend the nighttime hours attempting to take down the lion-like, dragon-wielding Ligar.

As we grew deeply enamored with Rygar, we began to build an entire culture around it. Dominick went out and bought a copy for himself and then proceeded to recruit his entire family into the effort. That way, he thought, we could play the game separately, attack it from different angles, and then meet up every so often to exchange information. Sadly, though, they could only make it as far as the Tower of Garba, which they called "The House of Horrors." Yet even something as simple as that--a funny way of labeling an area--was valuable to the further construction of this culture. I liked it so much that it became even my official label for the area.

Also, we incorporated Rygar's characters into our outside-world games and (weird) creative activities. We, for instance, lovingly mocked the game's crazy-armed bosses and the shirtless hermits/Indora gods in our "Master Criminal" series, the making of which entailed cutting out newspaper images, drawing over them, and then taping to their backs square notepad paper where listed were their names, comical powers, and reward-for-catching sums.

Wanting for once to be the guy acknowledged for discovering a cool secret in a game, I resorted to fabricating the existence of a special event that could be triggered via a very particular series of actions. The foundation for the secret was a glitch whose visual effect always made us laugh: What you could do was cause a hermit or an Indora god's pants to flicker (or "become distorted," as we'd joke) by spamming Discarmor strikes while at a jump's apex. "Maybe I should take it further," I thought.

So the next time I met up with Dominick, I told him that if you jump and flail, oh, a couple hundred times in a row, the hermit or Indora god will eventually get so annoyed that he'll hold his arm forward, point at you, and say, "You have insulted me!" And then I spread rumors of this secret all over the neighborhood, my thinking being that I made the conditions for activation so nebulous that, really, no way would ever be able to disprove it.

So wanting it to be true, Dominick and half the kids on my block spent days trying to draw this reaction out of any of the game's hermits or Indora gods, none of whom would ever oblige. Seeing their disappointment made me feel guilty, so I could no longer keep up the act; I had admit that it was all a lie. 

Hell--to this day, I still feel guilty about deceiving those poor kids. What dumb behavior.

Still, it was great that we were getting other people to try out Rygar. It was important to us to spread its lore anywhere and any way we could.

Though we suspected that any effort to defeat Ligar would ultimately prove to be futile, we continued to try. We got together every Friday, as had become tradition, and played Rygar in our usual way. We didn't want to abandon it. No--we loved it too much. Not being able to beat it wasn't going to stop us--not when we'd found so many other ways to extract value out of it. There was too much enjoyment to be had in listening to its amazingly evocative musical score. In exploring its wondrous locales. And in engaging in the joking banter as inspired by its interesting characters and settings.

We'd keep things entertaining by repeating all of the jokes and silly actions we'd cultivated over the weeks and months. One example was the scene that would recur any time we'd travel upon the Hourse of Horrors' third floor. In the very first room, I'd grapple up to the ceiling, directly above the arched window with its mountain view, and continue to perform Rygar's jerky climbing animation, which gave the appearance, I'd suggest, that he was "pissing on Lapis." For some reason, this always made Dominick and I chuckle, which pretty much gives you an idea of the type of material we found "funny" back then.

Of course, we were too ignorant to realize that a mountain range wasn't likely to be found in Lapis, which was actually a floating island in the sky, but, really, we didn't care to think about such things. We preferred to interpret Rygar's world however we pleased--to let our imaginations give it form (though, this may have been our way of covering for the fact that we had selective reading skills).

But you know what they say: Nothing can last forever.

As the months dropped off, and as new games were finding their way into my collection, we started seeing less and less of Rygar. Eventually our weekly tradition came to an end, and Rygar became one of those games we'd revisit only sporadically. The last time we played it together was sometime in 1993, on another day I probably saw as having no great significance. After graduating from high school, I lost contact with Dominick and most of my other game-playing friends and never felt the need to return to Rygar. "It just won't be the same without them," I felt.

Now, if you're familiar with me, you know that I'm not the type of fellow to leave things unfinished. It was true that I didn't need to actually beat Rygar to find great enjoyment in playing it, yes, but at the same time, I couldn't ignore that a certain weight had been building up inside of me over the years--over the course of time wherein despite my best efforts I was repeatedly getting destroyed by Ligar. Deep down, I knew that the game had gotten the best of me--that my pride had taken a blow. I mean, this was me--the guy who beat difficult games (well, the majority of them, anyway)! That's what I did. That's what I was known for. Yet here I was unable to defeat a stationary lion guy with silly dragon arms.

That weight stayed with me in the years following, largely suppressed.

Well, eventually it surfaced.

It happened during the summer months of 2000, when the emulation scene was booming and suddenly I was able to revisit all of those old Commodore 64 and NES games that had so tormented me when I was a kid. I'd become obsessed with finally conquering them. And that's when I remembered Rygar. That's when the warrior within broke free from his shackles and told me that I had a job to finish!

So one day, I loaded up Rygar determined to storm Ligar's castle, strike down the evil despot, and finally see what the game's ending held.

Sadly, it didn't work out: I continued to fall to Ligar just as I had way back when. I was repeatedly overwhelmed by his dragon-headed chain weapons and projectile storms. I gave it attempt after attempt and met the same fate each time: utter failure.

It just wasn't going to happen. It was over. There was nothing left to do but close the emulator and say goodbye to Rygar for the last time.

Though, for sentimentality's sake, I decided that beforehand I should make this closing moment count for something. So I made it a point to run around Ligar's castle for a few minutes, take in the sights, and have one final look at a game that represented an important piece of my childhood. And once I'd done as much, I could then, without regret, close the book on that chapter of my life.

That's when a series of events was set in motion.

There I was messing around in the fortress' penultimate corridor, beating up on its last sub-guardian--a shadowy reskin of Dorago--when suddenly something unexpected happened:

*gooooom - booda-badoop*

My health meter increased to ten units when previously I'd never gotten it past nine. I didn't know that such a thing could happen; I had always assumed that the leveling system was designed to max out right around the time you reached the final area. Consequently, I was able to kill the shadow Dorago quicker than I could before. So I kept it at: I continuously scrolled the screen up and down, causing him to respawn again and again, and carried on with the assault. Each time I was able to kill him more hastily. Before long, I was dispatching him in about four or five hits, which was allowing for me to boost my stats at an accelerated pace. Soon my stats were maxed out, my strength was at its peak, and my health meter stood at twelve units in total. "Could it be that I now have a smidgen of a chance?" I wondered.

I entered Ligar's chamber with a curious-but-still-kinda-doubtful mindset. Ready for a tough fight, I activated my Power Up spell (knowing now how it functioned), charged toward Ligar, and began flailing away like a maniac.

*frooooom-frooooom-frooooom-frooooom-frooooom-frooooom - BOOOOOOM!*

Just like that, the battle was over. I had destroyed Ligar in an almost-comical fashion, with a mere five or six strikes delivered over the course of maybe three or four seconds.

"That's all I had to do?!" I uttered, quizzically, shocked by the realization.

I was stunned by my ignorance on the matter, yes, but only for a moment. As the ending sequence began to play and the Door of Peace opened, I shifted into a state of euphoria. As I gazed upon that white bird--which was flying in place, observing the scene--and the sun-drenched Gran Mountain, whose opposing cliffs were now united by a rainbow, I felt that weight being lifted away. I was a "true hero," the game told me. And while I was probably a little short of that, I was feeling a sense of accomplishment and closure. It was a disappointingly brief ending, sure, but so what? All that was important was that it spoke of ultimate victory--of my ultimate victory. The only thing missing was Dominick, with whom I would have loved to share it.

I had completed Rygar, but in no way was I finished with it. No--certainly not now. Not after this triumph. Not when I'd come to possess full knowledge of the game's system and was now confident that I could defeat Ligar every single time!

Rygar had now taken on a completely new form. And from that day forward, playing it would amount to a whole new type of experience. 

Suddenly I was in love with it all over again. I resumed playing it regularly and found myself appreciating it more and more each time. I could always find a reason to return to it: If I felt as though a quiet Sunday could use the enrichment of its wondrous, nostalgia-inducing emanations. If I wanted to reminisce about the old days, when I played it with friends. If I felt like spending time exploring its Metroid-like secret world (to which you can gain access by jumping across the surprisingly unobstructed "boundary" of any farthest-left screen in Ligar's fortress). Or if, quite simply, I wanted to play a great 8-bit game.

And I'll continue returning to it any chance I get for as long as I live.

As time has gone on, my adoration for Rygar has only grown. For what it has provided me over the years--for how it's been able to perform so many different jobs for both the kid and adult versions of me--I have, as I told you way back at the start of this piece, come to hold it in the highest regard. It's a special kind of game.

What can I say? I love Rygar, flaws and all. I know it inside and out. I've mapped its every screen--its every arrangement of pixels--to my memory. If I want to, I can blow through it in about 40 minutes, but why would I? Doing so would amount to but an empty exercise. I'd rather take my time and savor it. Immerse myself in its world. Allow it to tap into my memories and thus inspire me to think about the days when there was nothing better than hanging out with friends on a Friday night and playing games. 

In that sense, Rygar is more than a game to me; it's a vessel that carries along with it wonderful memories of the time in life for which I long. Playing it always takes me back. In those hours when I'm adventuring my way through Rygar, everything is as it was. Everything is right in the world.

Sometimes I wonder if Rygar's creators are aware of the fact that their game--that their product as comprised of little more than the primitive sprite-based assets and simple chiptunes they crafted over a number of weeks--resonates so strongly with that kid from Brooklyn and all of the people who enjoyed it with him. It's great if they do, because they deserve to know that those people are indeed thankful.

I don't mean to undersell the game's technical achievements, no. I mean, really, Rygar is quite ambitious for something that hit the NES in 1987. That's only eight months after the arrival of Metroid, which at the time of its release was considered to be a technical marvel; yet when compared to Rygar, it's made to look very basic-looking with its single-color backgrounds and repeating environments. You're exploring both side-scrolling and top-down areas, grappling between screens, riding across ropes using a pulley, creating your own ropes via the use of a crossbow, battling giant bosses, and traversing your way through nine separate areas. What other games from 1987 allows you to do all of that?

Also, the composer, Michiharu Hasuya, was allowed the use of only two of the NES' sound channels, yet still he managed to produce one of the best 8-bit soundtracks of all time. Every one of his works is a classic (save for the bafflingly short Palace of Dorago theme, which measures in at only four notes long due to, I guess, a storage limitation).

Oh, sure--Rygar has its issues: Its sprite-detection can become a bit unreliable when you're attempting to interact with doors, ropes and portals. You can displace Lapis' boss, Belzar, by grappling down to the screen below and then climbing back up, doing which causes him to relocate to the ground floor where he's more easily assailable. And that "secret world" of which I spoke, while I'm happy that it exists, is evidence of both sloppy coding and a lack of play-testing. I can't deny that the game is glitchy as hell.

Though, none of these issues are game-killing. Really, they're minor nuisances at best. And I'd argue that they're all very forgivable when you realize that they're a byproduct of pure ambition--of the developers' determination to push the NES beyond its current limitations. 

Expressing as much makes me sad that Rygar currently lingers in obscurity. It never appears in classic-game compilations, and for inexplicable reasons it can't be found on any of Nintendo's Virtual Console services (while the less-relevant arcade version does). I remain hopeful that one day it'll be made available to mass audiences who will surely regard it as one of the shiniest of hidden gems.

My greatest lament is that Rygar didn't get a timely sequel. I mean, just think about what Tecmo could have accomplished on the NES post-1987, when cartridge technology was evolving. Imagine what a 16-bit Rygar might have been. Then hang your head in sadness at the thought that there was nothing--that the opportunity was squandered. Instead, we had to wait 15 years, until a 3D generation that was far removed. That's when we got the 2002 PS2 sequel Rygar: The Legendary Adventure, which was a solid God of War-style action game, yes, but not really what fans were looking for in a Rygar sequel.

To fill the void, I've since returned to the arcade version, which I've come to learn, as a result of making an actual effort to increase my skill-level, is a pretty good game--much better than what I'd given it credit for. I'd love to go into detail about the aspects that have impressed me (like its cool rope-shifting mechanic), but I feel as though they'd be out of place here; it's better that I save such thoughts for a future piece dedicated solely to the arcade version. Though, I will say in advance that it's worth playing if not simply to gain understanding into how NES version came to be--how aspects of a technically advanced arcade-style action game were transferred over and became the foundation for a wholly disparate 8-bit action-adventure game. It's quite the case study.

And that's my story with Rygar, a game I would have tragically missed were it not for my far-more-adventurous brother. A game that helped shape my childhood. A game with which I came to have an unending love affair. A game that remains an essential piece of my NES library.

It's fascinating to think that NES Rygar's wouldn't exist were it not for an unpopular Nintendo policy that was intended to stop developers from bringing straight ports to its platforms. Really, I'm glad that such a policy existed. It created for a gaming scene wherein we'd sometimes get two notable products bearing the same name--two wonderfully distinct games born from a single idea. That's how it was with Bionic Commando and Ninja Gaiden and especially with Rygar, whose name as a result is attached to two of the greats.

Though, I'm sticking with my opinion that NES Rygar is the superior version.

I look at it like this: Here I am, in 2014, still deriving entertainment from a $50 transaction made by my family way back in 1989. More than a quarter of a century later, Rygar is still providing me satisfying gameplay, still evoking great memories, and still inspiring me to create. That speaks of value. It speaks of its creators' laudable craftsmanship. And it tells me that Rygar is, quite simply, one of the best games I'll ever know.