Crusader of Centy

Crusader of Centy was published by Sega in 1994 for the Mega Drive, and it is the best answer that console ever gave to Zelda. You play a boy named Corona who receives his father's sword on his fourteenth birthday and walks out of town into an overhead world of screen-sized areas, sword fights and puzzles solved by movement and timing.

Its own idea is the animals. You meet sixteen of them over the course of the game and each lends you an ability: a dog pins enemies down, a penguin strengthens ice attacks, others open routes you could never reach alone. You can carry two at a time, which makes the combinations both a combat system and a logic system — every obstacle starts with the question of which pair to bring. Add a sword you can throw forward and catch on the return, and simple hacking turns into a game of distance.

The strongest part, though, is the story and one turn in the middle of it. Corona loses the ability to speak with people and begins to understand animals; when human speech finally comes back, a journey through time leads him to ask why humans and monsters are at war at all. A game that starts as an adventure about a good lad and his sword spends its second half asking who the monster really is. That was not a common move in 1994.

Two complaints stand. The controls can be unhelpful, particularly when aiming and when jumping between tiles, and the game invites the Zelda comparison so openly that many players at the time wrote it off as a copy. Give it a few hours and it turns out to have a mind of its own — and it ranks among the best the Mega Drive offered in this genre.

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