Mystic Defender - Sega Genesis review

Mystic Defender

review

by Fausto Chavez

I never played this game growing up. It is an early Genesis title with a fantasy medieval theme, like many games of that era, and as a fan of that genre, I was excited to have discovered this game.

Story: 4/5 Your basic 'save the princess from the evil one' story: Alexandra and Zareth, something about a castle in Japan. The game actually begins with a scrolling text of the story accompanied by great music. During the game, there is no presence of the story until the ending, with another scrolling text and an image of you and Alexandra again with some nifty music.

Gameplay: A side scrolling platforming game with not too much learning a curve, easy enough to control, and long jumps. The attacks are magic based in that you don't punch or kick. This is best part of the game. Destroying enemies and bosses with the magics is very fun. There is a magic/attack bar which when filled up, gives you full strength attack, which will be either a fire emitting from your hands, a flying electric charge, or multiple balls that fly all across the screen. It was great destroying the enemies and bosses with these attacks. The game is generous with its attack power in that you don't need to acquire power ups to have full attack power, it simply charges up by itself quickly and last a while. Later on you get a powerful lighting super-magic that can only be used a couple of times (save it for the bosses). There are some dead ends and some hard jumps that you have to master, but nothing overdone.

Graphics: 4/5 The graphics are good. The attack magics are generously present on-screen and fun to look at. The opening brief cut scene has a great color transition. Overall the graphics are colorful yet with a darkish theme. The characters are fairly large and some of the bosses are interesting, but our main character has no face, which after a while gave a strange feeling.

Difficulty: 5/5 I was able to reach the third stage without much trouble, but then it got hard, and would probably require much trial and error to beat, as there is not unlimited continues. I used a Game Genie 'extra lives' code to go deeper and beat the game. There are some dead ends and some hard jumps that you have to master, but not overdone. There is a difficulty setting in the options which is basically having more or less lives to play with. The last boss took a lot of damage to defeat and lasted so long that I thought the game had glitched and was stuck (it hadn't).

Sound: 3/5 The song that accompanied the opening story was GREAT, but none of the other songs were memorable. Unfortunately, the opening song was not included in the sound test!

Lasting Appeal: 3/5 This is a good game that I enjoyed, especially using the Game Genie extra lives code. However, there were limitations that made this just a good, but not very good or great game: the faceless character, the shortness of the game, and that you could not shoot diagonally or upwards with all the magics. Still it is a FUN game, definitely worth your time. I would like to play it again in the future.





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