Line #21 YMMV/TheGuardianLegend


1	* BreatherBoss: There are many of them, particularly if you use the right weapons. Some of the more notable examples are:
2	** [[MacrossMissileMassacre Bombardier]]. It teleports around the room and launches a ton of missiles each time it appears. Thing is, the missiles do very little damage and quite frequently drop life when destroyed. Bombardier itself is easy to dodge too, since it doesn't move save for its teleportation and it always gives plenty of time for you to move away before phasing in. Special mention goes to Red Bombardier at both the end of Corridors 19 and 21; he is fought at the end of the BossRush right after [[ThatOneBoss Grimgrin]] and right before [[FinalBoss It]]. He's basically just there for you to collect health drops from him and refill your life.
3	** [[OurDragonsAreDifferent Teramute]]. Like Bombardier only even easier. Teramute teleports around and launches a spray of fireballs in an arc in front and to the sides of itself. Like Bombardier, the projectiles do little damage and the boss is exceptionally easy to dodge. Unlike Bombardier, who launches missiles all around itself, all of Teramute's fireballs come from its mouth, so you can just get right below its face and hold down the saber laser, instantly destroying all the fireballs and doing massive damage to Teramute in the process.
4	** Glider, the boss from Corridor 16, if you know how to fight it. It's usually invulnerable and sweeps up and down the screen, but this attack is extremely easy to dodge. It then stops and opens itself up for attack in order to launch a few shots at you - hit him with the Saber Laser when he stops and he's done in about four hits.
5	** Zibzub, the flying squid. His up-and-down movement is easy to predict and can be dodged by just moving back and forth slightly whenever he moves back toward the top of the screen, and the tiny squid projectiles he launches do very little damage.
6	** The Eyeball Growths. They're both basically masses of eyeballs that function as stationary turrets similar to the first boss in the game, except by the time you reach them you have tons of weapons and health. Plus, there's tons of things in the battle for you to destroy for health pickups. Definitely a breather considering the region they appear in is also home to [[ThatOneBoss Grimgrin]]...
7	* CultClassic: Despite being unknown to a wide audience, the game is highly popular and appreciated in retro gaming circles.
8	* DemonicSpiders:
9	** In the last half of the Corridor levels, there is a blue ship enemy that [[BeamSpam 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.
10	** Near the end of the Corridor levels you'll start to run across hopping blue mechs. Not only do these mechs have the same extremely powerful laser as the above-mentioned blue spaceships, they also have a much more difficult to predict movement pattern, and are ''immune to [[SmartBomb Enemy Erasers]]''.
11	* DifficultySpike:
12	** Corridor 3, simply because of [[ThatOneBoss Optomon]]. This boss fought this early in the game is harder than anything in the game at that point and is required to proceed.
13	** Area 5/6. Your level 1 weapons will not be as useful anymore. Approach the floor areas carefully. Collect the Level 2/3 weapons before approaching corridors and sub-bosses.
14	** Area 7/8. Once the player arrives in the [[WombLevel Organic]], your special weapons and/or [[SmartBomb Enemy Erasers]] become essential for surviving the Corridors. [[BossInMookClothing former mini-bosses]] start roaming the halls of the Labyrinth. Upgrades become few and far between.
15	** Areas 9/10. Once the player reaches the Wasteland region, enemies you once fought early in the game suddenly get way more health and way more damage. Hopefully, you have all of the Red Landers at the time to max out to 4000.
16	* GameBreaker: Also counts as GoodBadBugs. A couple of things:
17	** Certain weapons can leave you with either smaller hitboxes or completely invulnerable Here are a few examples:
18	*** The Saber and Cutter. With the addition of doing multiplier damage, your hitbox window is reduced. Many players know that most enemy contact does less damage than their projectiles, so players can exploit this and quickly destroy enemies.
19	*** The "Fireball-Invincible-Walker" tactic, once you have 5 or more shields to increase your movement speed that matches Fireball 2 on land and Fireball 3 on Corridors. Fireball 2 plus walking makes you invincible while inflicting heavy damage; the strategy works perfectly fine with every enemy and miniboss in the game with little to no damage at all. Fireball 3 while flying in corridors, makes you invulnerable moving upwards; it is not as effective as Fireball 2 on land since the Fireball shoots upwards all the time, but can get you out of many dangerous situations involving enemy or projectile spam.
20	*** The "Grenade-Invincible-Area" tactic, once you have the Level 3 Grenades. This is similar to the above tactic. The damage area of the grenade explosion is an invincible spot for you until the explosion effect is gone. While the above has more situational use, this tactic is more effective on enemy/projectile spam like the Grimgrim fights.
21	** The "Special Weapon Reset Pause" tactic. Recommended for the above 2 weapons at Level 1 and at early stages in the game. At any point where a Fireball or Grenade misses the target, you are a vulnerable sitting duck until the projectile is no longer there. By pausing during a miss, you can pause, switch weapons, and unpause so that the projectile is no longer there, repause, switch back to the grenades or fireball, unpause, and shoot again.
22	** The EE (enemy erasers), once received at Area 3. Because this is not dependent on chip usage, you can just farm these until you get 255 EEs and go through Areas and Corridors with much ease while conserving your chips for more important tasks. There are a few things that are immune to this, but the ones that are immune can take significant damage to other powerful weapons.
23	** The "walk-through walls" technique. Once you get 5 shields and your speed increases, you are capable of walking through barricades horizontally by moving diagonal while shooting and then going through the vertical-lined barricades.
24	** The "buy out the store" glitch. On shops with 3 items, if you hold start during a shop and run to the item you want to purchase, the other 2 items will not disappear, allowing you to continue buying. If there are landers, it is best to collect that first so that you can reset your chips at MAX to purchase more. Being able to level up weapons much earlier will make the game much easier, especially corridors easier. The weapons you can upgrade earlier with this trick are the Bullet Shot (Area 2), Bullet Shield (Level 4), and the Front Wave (Area 7); the Level 10 shop are weapons you should have been able to upgrade by that time (Fireball and Area Blaster). For the Front Waves at Area 7, that weapon will make all of the corridors in the Bio area too easy due to both its efficiency and the only weapon to not care so much about the [[GoddamnedBats green eyeball things]] that null your special weapon on-screen.
25	* FanNickname:
26	** Some fans, not content to use the Guardian's codename for her (and not realizing the Japanese manual gave her the name Miria) have taken to referring to her as Alyssa or rarely as Irem.
27	** The game itself is occasionally referred to as "[[EyeScream Eyeballs: The Game]]" because of the many eye-related monsters.
28	** The game's MinusWorld has no official name, given that its very existence is a glitch. Fans have taken to calling it "The Lost Frontier".
29	* GoddamnedBats:
30	** Many of the small mooks, especially the various [[PaletteSwap 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.
31	** The green eyeball things in the Organic corridors. They don't attack, but they do absorb ''every single one'' of your weapons except the Enemy Eraser, and in order to beat them... [[ViolationOfCommonSense you run into them to instakill them]]. Not an easy thing to do when there's other enemies around, and your shots get blocked by these guys...
32	** The large blue crystals in the Corridor stages. These have a lot of health, attempt to slowly move into you to deal very heavy CollisionDamage, and are immune to the Enemy Eraser.
33	* GameBreakingBug: Overflowing the score crashes the game; this is unfortunately easy to do since hitting certain score thresholds boosts maximum HP and grants a full heal.
34	* NightmareFuel: A few of the bosses, but Grimgrin especially. Although his normal form -- a freakish floating head with lots of eyes-- is already creepy, it reaches a whole new level as your attacks [[EyeScream blow out his eyes, leaving gaping sockets]]...and then a flood of tiny, damaging eyeballs pour out from them, filling the screen.
35	* ScrappyMechanic: The PasswordSave 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, umlauts, numbers, and the symbols "!" and "?". The awful passwords were considered to be the game's greatest weakness by far. (
36	* SequelDisplacement: It's the sequel to ''Guardic'', a 1986 MSX shmup, hence its Japanese title ''Guardic Gaiden''.
37	* SuspiciouslySimilarSong: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2q0aIql0Qw The intro stage's music]] sounds suspiciously similar to [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHS5jM6xBHo&t=6s the overworld theme of]] ''VideoGame/ZeldaIITheAdventureOfLink''.
38	* ThatOneAttack: The Guardian has little to no invincibility frames, so any attacks that leave lingering effects on the screen hurt like the dickens. To wit...
39	** Optomon's strings drains a lot of health. At that point in the game, those can hurt you a lot.
40	** For any of the Clawbot fights (yes even the Corridor 14 and 15 ones), touching the loosened claws at the 2nd phase of the fight will do a ridiculous 128 damage (or 16 hearts without a shield), enough to put you to 0 health in 1 touch if you didn't receive any of the shield upgrades. This is the same exact damage that the final boss's missile attack does.
41	** The lasers from the mini-mechs and mini-ships in the corridors. These hit hard enough to do 196 points in damage.
42	** Later on, you will be dealing with the next phase of bouncing rocks. Do not touch them as they can do up to 256 damage.
43	* ThatOneBoss: Pretty much anyone that's not a BreatherBoss is one of these.
44	** The green Optomon (TGL Mode only), especially early in that stage. You are limited to certain amount of weaponry and power-ups, depending on how much TGL score you received. You are likely to have 11 Hearts at this point, but touching a [[ThatOneAttack string will kill 6 hearts per touch]], while regular bullets eat 1 Heart. In addition, there's no way of getting any powerups during this battle at all. We hope you got 30,000 TGL points to get the repeller, which is the most damaging weapon against it. Otherwise, you either have to rely on your regular gun (if you managed to get MAX 100 chips at that time you fight the boss), well timed grenades (dangerously risky but can end the fight quickly), or use the wave gun.
45	** The blue Optomon is similar to the green Optomon above, but required to defeat to progress in regular mode as well. This is notorious for [[ThatOneAttack its very damaging vines that came come slow or fast and hard to predict]]. Most playthroughs online show players getting close to 0 health, even with the Shield upgrade.
46	** The "ice crystal" miniboss is another tough one. It follows you around the room... sort of. Sometimes it stops, or changes direction abruptly, making it difficult to kite. Add to that the shots it fires which move in a strange arc which is difficult to predict.
47	** The red [[NightmareFuel Grimgrin, the monster with the]] [[ExtraEyes mass of eyes]] that it loves to throw out at you. [[ShowsDamage Break out its center eye]] [[TurnsRed and it throws even ''more'' of them at you]]. The weaker Blue Grimgrim is not required to progress, but it gives you the final (and powerful) Fireball powerup.
48	** The red leech plant bouncer mini-bosses that jump all over the place. Even with the speed increase after you collect 4 shields, the leech will outpace you. You would have to swerve back and forth like a infinity symbol (or sideways 8) to avoid getting hit and taking a lot of damage.
49	** Eyegore uses a similar attack pattern to Grimgrin, but launching skulls. Red Eyegore trades out the skulls for tiny (so they're harder to [[DestructibleProjectiles destroy]]) but highly damaging homing needle projectiles.
50	*** [[BreatherBoss Averted]] if you go under it and spam fireballs and grenades. Your fireball and grendare blasts will remove its projectiles. The laser blasts, despite lasers being commonly high damage, is bugged doing only 1 damage for unknown reason.
51	** There's also the one-time-only "dinosaur skull" miniboss, which flies rapidly and unpredictably back and forth and fires extremely damaging fireballs at you that travel like the ice crystal miniboss' shots.
52	** The [[FinalBoss It aka The Final Guardian]], uses similar attack patterns to boss Grimgrin, all the while launching countless waves of small spaceship missiles that home in on you and small balls that rain down on you from the top of the screen. Couple this with two CombatTentacles with nasty claws that make it difficult to get in front of him to attack. Oh, and "it" has a ridiculously high amount of health, so the fight will take long.
53	* VindicatedByHistory: 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 ''Magazine/ElectronicGamingMonthly'' 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 Save}}s which were a huge downside at the time, but not so much any more 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.

Context YMMV / TheGuardianLegend