Rygar: The Legendary Adventure says, “Camera first, character second. Have fun with some ham-fisted Greco himbo action but we’re more interested in the cinematic framing of ham-fisted Greco himbo action than the ham-fisted Greco himbo action itself.”
Unfortunately taking pics of the CRT with my phone blows out some detail, there are some floating rocks in the extreme distance that make this save point a nice little composition (more floating rocks to come, I’m a sucker for floating rocks and this was the first visually stunning area after the first stage)
I swear this area looked prerendered at times
There’s this invisible diskarmor node you can use to pull yourself up onto a platform that takes you waaaaay up high over the level…for no apparent reason? Easy to miss and it remains the subject of an unanswered question on gamefaqs. I believe the correct answer is, “The devs made this whole ass section out of a big ass lion statue and they want you to see it”
Sick scrolling goooooze
Speaking of scrolling textures, I’m assuming this serpentine smoke is a static lumpy mesh with a scrolling transparent texture moving over it, some effective Raiders of the Lost Ark ending shit
And finally a sick velociraptor dragon skull to jump into for the final boss
Remains from Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire were used as a reference to help design the world. At the start of production, in-house staff members traveled to Greece to look at subject matter. Photographs were taken to help create textures.
The care that went into the often dramatic framing of your character using these colossal spaces was apparent from the get-go but now I can also imagine the devs getting a holiday out of it too which is nice.
3ds Max was used to develop the stages and character models. The character models were then converted into Tecmo’s original format and imported into Softimage 3D to animate them. Model textures were edited in Photoshop. The opening movie began production before the game sections.[1]
That’s a quote from Japanese Game Graphics: Behind the Scenes of Your Favorite Games and it’s not a terribly revelatory addition to the wiki page but the fact that it’s included/exists at all a) makes me want to check out the book especially if there’s more context given and b) makes sense because the craft and intention behind the environments gets top billing. Like yeah, you’re gonna see a lot of the same brown rock texture repeated throughout, but the level geometry filling every fixed camera angle is almost always unique and carefully composed. No (or very few) copy and pasted rooms. Maybe this is why the game is on the short side?
In fact, the only overtly copy and pasted part of the game is an entirely optional combat gauntlet that also highlights the nicely struck balance between combat and environmental navigation. They don’t feel bothered to stuff the game with slug fests (and there are slugs to slug) and that single gauntlet shows just how boring that would get. The handful of combos and three unique diskarmors with their levelled capacity for augmentation are most interesting in situations where crowd control is key against varied enemies (all dumb but resistant/aggressive in different ways that reward changing attacktics on the fly). One-on-one fights are not nuanced affairs which is why most of the bosses lean towards some arena-based spatial dance or pattern recognition “puzzle” pummeling. They’re very wise not to push the crude verbage too far and so Rygar: The Legendary Adventure never drags.
Even the non-combat functions of your diskarmor (like swinging from node to node) are kept to a minimum, they really could have ratcheted up the complexity in a very Nintendo gamey way but that’s not the point, and when you are presented with these challenges, punishment rarely follows (fall down a pit and respawn without losing health nearby, or just fall down to a place you can climb out of, no sweat).
The lack of depth, or the lack of required delving into mechanics (not too far) below the surface did lull me into a bit of complacency so that when I reached the second to last boss I was shocked at the difficulty spike. I had neglected the option to use heal/magick items from the pause screen + summoning mythological beasts for a long while. Once I remembered to do so, piece of cake. Maybe some of the research holiday vibes rubbed off on this game, it does feel like fantastical tourism at times…
And about the story. I don’t know about the story cuz I wasn’t interested. A lotta liberties taken with Greek mythology. It’s mostly unobtrusive (really coulda placed a few cutscenes before pre-boss save points but whatever) and very cheesy. Fetatextual (just saving myself a visit to Brain Garbage there). Superunnatrual line delivery in a fun way though (Rygar says “Mother…” at a pivotal point of supposed high drama like someone coming out of a 20 year coma trying to remember the relationship between words and mouths). This all original song rides in about 3/4 of the way through and returns over the end credits:
By Izzy Cooper (I think they shoulda given her more time to recover from falling down the stairs before taking that photo)
From a time when they still made instruction booklets in full colour and hearty of card stock!
So some real A+ B-game stuff. The influences are apparent (ICO, Devil May Cry, NOT God of War which came out almost 3 years later (I knew this at the time but somehow over the years convinced myself that Rygar was a AA response to that “AAA” game’ success + an excuse to trot out an old IP but shame on me, Rygar is better!)
Also, shoutout to this thread, I like these kinds of games. I miss these kinds of games. I might play The Bouncer next.
EDIT: oh and of course, once you beat the game, you can activate ‘Pizz Armor’ mode which turns your diskarmor into a 
pie
