Crusader of Centy

released on Jun 17, 1994

Millions of years ago, heinous creatures that lurked in the shadows and darkness that blanketed the planet inhabited the Earth. When light finally broke through, only a few beasts were able to survive by burrowing into deep caverns. Over time, they multiplied, evolved, and patiently waited for the right time to emerge and rule the Earth once again. You are Corona, and you've just celebrated your 14th birthday. By law of the king, you must now go seek out these creatures of the dark and destroy them. As you travel in search of your destiny, you'll make animal allies that will prove invaluable on your quest. Each level will offer mind-bending puzzles and challenges that will help you get one step closer to completing your mission.


Released on

Genres

RPG


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This review contains spoilers

Crusader of Centy is… a fascinating experience. It throws a lot at the wall, and not all of it sticks. But it has a goal, and at the very least it succeeds in making you consider what it has to say.
The game follows a young boy who wants to become a hero. You exist in a fantasy world filled with monsters that have been biding their time underground for countless eons. Your character comes of age into a tumultuous time, so you take your sword and venture out to discover the cause. So far, so standard. The game throws a major curveball at you pretty early, however, when a fortune teller suddenly gives you the ability to talk to animals… at the cost of your ability to talk to humans. At that moment I was hooked- I figured the rest of the game would be about flipping the classic RPG town on its head, like a Zelda game where you can only talk to the Cuccos. The game does deliver on this, but unfortunately it’s really only for the first town. After this, you come across as many animal villages as human ones, which kind of ruins the whole idea for me.
As for the gameplay, it’s pretty average. You run around, swing a sword, jump, and the combat focuses on this boomerang sword throw you can do. You also find many animal buddies throughout the adventure that give you abilities. I really enjoyed the flying squirrel, which makes the sword fly incredibly far with your camera following it. Honestly all the powers were fun to use, though some, like the dodo, get shafted by appearing at the very end of the game, going completely underutilized.
The main adventure areas were kind of a slog, even using the speed-boosting cheetah buddy most of the time. Some puzzles were somewhat obtuse (or perhaps it was just me… probably) and the objectives sometimes unclear. The bosses, however, were nearly all very enjoyable, taking advantage of the animal buddies in ways the main levels just don’t.
Getting back to the story, it quickly swaps to being about monsters rather than animals. There’s a great segment where you get body-swapped with a slime who desperately wants to be human. You get ambushed in the woods by this hero fellow that you’ve been following in the footsteps of for most of the game. He bursts out of the bushes and makes a mad dash for you, which was both hilarious and terrifying. Great stuff. It really makes you feel bad for the slimes, but I really don’t think it makes an effective point because you haven’t seen or fought any other slimes up to this point. But the game will come back around to the humanization of monsters shortly.
I do want to take a moment to talk about the music, which was a major highlight of my playthrough. The soundtrack is filled with absolutely JAMMIN’ tracks stuffed to the brim with that classic crusty Genesis bass. There are at least 5-6 tracks that are going to stick with me for years.
Once you regain the ability to talk to humans, the game’s finale ends with you retracing your steps across the world, traveling back in time in each location, learning about the history of humans and monsters. You travel further and further back, fighting boss after boss and systematically dismantling the evil influences on the present. You learn that monsters are just people who want to be treated fairly. Eventually, you travel back to a time of darkness before humans and send all monsters back to where they came from, preventing all the conflict in the first place. To be honest, I’m really not sure how I feel about this as an ending. It says a lot that the only way humans can live without hatred is to not even have contact with monsters in the first place. On the other hand, seeing your home town in peace is quite impactful, especially when you realize you have a father now, one who didn’t go off to become a soldier.
Overall, I can’t say that Crusader of Centy achieved what it set out to. It did, however, give me a lot to chew on that I’ll probably still be thinking about for quite a while. I’ll have to revisit it sometime in the future to see if my thoughts here still hold up. And to find whatever that raccoon buddy was. If any of this sounded intriguing, give this game a shot.

A very nice Zelda-like action adventure that looks like a RPG but it really isn't. It felt a mix of FF Mystic Quest, ALTTP and Secret of Mana.

This is a game I've heard quite positively talked about for a good while, and it being a Zelda-like game, it's absolutely in one of my favorite retro genres, so it was always one I've planned to get around to. I was excited ages ago when I heard it was coming to Switch Online, and then I promptly forgot about it as I always do X3. Then yesterday I accidentally rediscovered that it'd been added to the service! I launched it up and started playing, and before I knew it I'd just wound up finishing the game outright I'd been having so much fun x3. It took me about 6.5 hours to finish the game in English via the Switch Online Genesis service, and I never actually needed to save or anything (managed to not die a single time ^w^), so I never actually ended up using save states or rewinds or anything.

Crusader of Centy follows a young boy (whose canon name is amusingly enough, Corona) who is given a sword and shield on his 14th birthday as is the custom in the kingdom of Soliel. He sets out on an adventure to save the kingdom from the resurgent monster threat! It's an interesting enough premise, and while it does have some major twists in the narrative, I don't think it succeeds exceptionally hard in what it's going for. It falls into the pitfalls that a lot of pro-tolerance/pro-peace games do where the anti-violence message/goal is still, nonetheless, achieved through the power of bravery and violence (not to mention the bigger takeaway messaging of what actually happens in the conclusion is truly quite ghastly if you try and apply it to real world analogues in any way ^^;). The story really isn't the big reason to play the game, granted, but it made me do a "wait a minute, what the fuck???" double take hard enough that I couldn't omit mentioning it here x3

The real meat and potatoes of this game is the gameplay, and as mentioned before, it's a top-down action adventure game very much in the mold of The Legend of Zelda. The big gimmick here is your sword. While the sword itself may have kinda abysmal hit detection, that's not so much of a problem at the end of the day (and not just because the actual combat difficulty isn't terribly high). You very quickly gain the ability to throw your sword like a boomerang, and slingshotting your sword around towards and back through enemies makes for a quite satisfying combat experience despite the bad hit detection. Additionally, while this game doesn't have sub weapons or proper items, it has animal companions you can befriend along the way. You can equip up to two at a time, and while some of them have active effects, most of them just augment your movement speed or sword abilities in some way. Some animals even give special effects when the two of them are equipped at the same time~. They're both neat systems that make for a fun and satisfying adventure that's also just different enough from stuff like Zelda to help set it apart.

The overall dungeon and combat design is, as mentioned before, not terribly difficult. It's not an especially easy game, mind you, but if you're a veteran of the genre, you'll likely end up dying only once or twice if ever. The biggest places you'll likely die at are the jumping puzzles, however. Most of the bosses aren't terribly difficult, but the true place the game will shave away health is with all of the bottomless pits. The dungeon and gameplay design overall has a quite heavy puzzle focus compared to most Zelda games (which gave it an almost Alundra-like feel at times), and while the puzzles were challenging but solvable enough that I enjoyed them while never having to look anything up, platforming is still unfortunately a meaningful part of these puzzles. Now mercifully, the platforming isn't nearly as unforgiving or dire as a game like Beyond Oasis's is, but there are still more than a handful of really mean pixel-perfect jumps that I was really not a fan of. The dungeon and boss design is overall quite good, but those bad platforming bits really take away from some of it. Like with the bad hit detection on the sword, this is another small but important misstep that takes what could've been a great game feel only just good enough instead.

The presentation is by and large very good. Coming out in 1994 and published by Sega, they clearly had the resources to make a game that looked and sounded very pretty, and they did it. The graphics are very nice and colorful, and while there are perhaps a bit too many luxury animations here and there on things like your turning circle, it never felt like it was getting in the way of the gameplay at least. The music is also very good, and it has a very Sonic-y feel to it (and not just because Sonic has a cameo in the game x3). Honestly it feels like Sega gave them a lot of sound samples that the Sonic games use, because there were even quite a few sound effects that even a relative Sonic non-fan like myself could recognize from the Genesis Sonic games x3. Again, not a complaint, really, but something fun to point out.

The only real presentation criticism I have is for Atlus's localization. It's honestly a pretty solid localization for the time, but there are some very sloppy mistakes here and there like text boxes that cut words in half or words that are just outright misspelled to begin with. It thankfully never makes any puzzles unsolvable or confuses the narrative or anything, but it's still a bummer to see such glaring localization mistakes in a product at least in part from Sega themselves. At the very least they're quite funny mistakes when they happen, which is a bonus of sorts~ x3

Verdict: Recommended. While the weird hit detection and difficulty of the platforming will definitely turn off some, if you're a fan of 2D Zelda games or just 2D action adventure games in general, I think you'll probably really enjoy your time with Crusader of Centy. It's not perfect, but it's got a good difficulty balance and just hard enough to be challenging but not frustrating puzzle design in a way that'll add a good adventure to your weekend or afternoon~.

“What if we made the sword the boomerang?” is a good instinct for a zeldalike

Growing up with the SNES I got to play some Sega genesis games when I went to my uncles, but very few. I always felt like they were more difficult then SNES games. Anyways, now I am glad I can check out their library and play through the games I missed. I did not know about this game until recently. It is a pretty fun and intricate Zelda clone for its time with its animal companions mechanic. Some of the music was really good, and sometimes it would get a little bit on my nerves mainly because I felt like every time I would make some progress I would completely get lost again soon after. Some people like myself may definitely need to use a guide. I do like how close to the end they have a tornado show up on the map that basically lets you know, "hey! go here!". Bosses were pretty fun to fight and exploring dungeons was cool and adding platforming was a fun addition compared to most other Zeldas. I have played a good bit of Genesis titles at this time and this definitely has been one of the best on the console so far!

An okay Zelda-like with some real unique gimmicks with the partners you collect over the course of the game. Held back mostly by bland dungeon design and a sloppy localization/translation that mares a lot of the story (granted, many of the story beats tend to get dropped very quickly).

That said, it's beatable in an afternoon, has wonderful music, and makes for a fun time as a one-and-done.