The Guardian Legend

TGL is one of my favorite Nintendo games. I remember spending countless hours back in the day with it. The fact that it was one of the first games I'd played that had such different styles of gameplay is what I think did it for me.

The story is kind of cool. You play as a transforming robot girl thing, which is always awesome. You have to stop this huge space station/planet thing called Naju from destorying Earth. A pretty epic sci-fi story for a Nintendo game back then.

I saw obvious influences from Zelda and shooters as well. The labyrinths (shooter levels) are hard, but not impossible. Each one has a fairly different environment with some very interesting bosses at the end. The overworld is fairly bland, but is broken up nicely with minibosses and small puzzles needed to open up the labyrinths themselves.

But the thing that I love most about the game is the soundtrack. I highly recommend checking it out. I actually even recorded a remix a few years back, which I'm sure is floating around the internet somewhere. As far as I'm concerned the game is a must own if your a collector or even just a fan of action/adventure and/or shooter games.