What’s On The Shelf | Games, Music & Culture

There are a handful of games that I could play with my eyes closed and still hit every secret and sprint through every level. Dark Souls, Mario 3, and, surprisingly enough, Gauntlet Dark Legacy.

I pumped so very many hours into this game that I can still hear the sound of secret walls opening in my sleep. While my original copy may have been lost to the great pile of GameStop reselling somewhere along the way, I am now an adult with poor decision-making skills and disposable income.

$94 and five days later, I had a copy back in my grubby mitts.

Gauntlet Dark Legacy is essentially a massive expansion and follow-up to Gauntlet Legends, taking what already worked and throwing substantially more shit on top of it. It’s a similar game at its core, but Dark Legacy nearly doubled the amount of content between the N64-era Legends and what eventually landed on the GameCube.

More levels. More secrets. More characters. Smoother gameplay. More ways to kill enemies.

Just more game.

Way more game.

You choose your hero from a massive pool of options: Warrior, Valkyrie, Wizard, Archer, Dwarf, Jester, Knight, and Sorceress. You can further customize your character by selecting different colors, with each color giving you a different skin.

Every character has their own strengths. The Warrior has higher strength, the Valkyrie has better armor, the Archer has higher speed, and the Wizard excels at magic.

Makes sense.

There are also several hidden characters unlocked by discovering doorways to bonus levels. Once inside, you’ll need to collect a certain number of coins within a time limit. Complete the challenge and you unlock a new character with slightly boosted stats, although they largely share the same moveset as their regular counterpart.

Booting up the game and deeply inhaling that nostalgia blast emanating from my GameCube, you’re thrown into the story of Dark Legacy.

Known stupid-ass wizard guy Garm decides bringing back the giant demonic monster Skorn is probably a good idea. Skorn responds to his newfound freedom by immediately wrecking Garm’s shit with a massive claw swipe.

Great job, everybody.

With evil once again roaming the land, Skorn’s assortment of minions and goons have taken over the surrounding worlds. Your job is straightforward: kill everything, restore order, and eventually banish Skorn back to whatever horrible pit he crawled out of.

Your central hub is overseen by Sumner, a wizard who serves as the primary source of plot explanation and general instruction. He tells you what you’re doing, vaguely explains how you should accomplish it, and then sends you on your way.

Progression revolves around collecting colored crystals scattered throughout the levels. Gather enough of a particular color and you can unlock the next area associated with them. Each zone contains four to five main levels and a boss, with its environments, enemies, and general aesthetic built around a specific theme.

The bosses are also guarding pieces of a shattered window located in the hub world. Collecting those pieces eventually opens the path to Skorn.

And these bosses are monsters in both the literal and metaphorical sense.

Some of them are absolutely brutal on your first attempt. Luckily, defeating every boss immediately isn’t required to continue progressing through the game. As long as you’ve collected enough crystals, you can move forward and come back later when you’re stronger.

Dark Legacy also throws you another bone with Legendary Items.

Each zone contains one Legendary Item associated with a particular boss. Finding it provides a significant advantage during that fight. Maybe it temporarily freezes the boss in place. Maybe it prevents them from attacking in a certain direction. Whatever the effect, these things can turn an enormous pain-in-the-ass encounter into something substantially more manageable.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s go back to the first level.

You materialize into the world, weapon in hand, and enemies immediately begin pouring out of every possible opening to tear you to shreds.

You have a basic attack, a stronger but slower attack, and a meter allowing you to unleash massive screen-clearing abilities. Magic potions can wipe out larger groups of enemies, while keys are used to unlock gates and treasure chests scattered throughout each stage.

Your enemies come in all the classic varieties.

Small guys.

Slightly bigger guys.

Even slightly bigger guys.

Little rats and other assorted freaks. Archers shooting you from a distance. Guys hucking goddamned bombs across the screen.

And Death.

Like, literally Death.

The Grim Reaper occasionally appears from an opened chest or destroyed object and starts sucking away your health or experience. There’s even a power-up that lets you turn the tables and drain HIS health instead, which remains one of the game’s more satisfying little reversals.

Larger monsters also appear throughout the campaign, including griffins, manticores, and other giant nightmare creatures. Killing them rewards you with things like golden feathers, talons, and fangs, which can be used to unlock even deeper areas of the hub world.

The real bread and butter of Dark Legacy, though, is the absurd number of power-ups lying around everywhere.

The game completely embraces its arcade DNA here. It constantly keeps you moving while handing you increasingly ridiculous ways to annihilate whatever poor bastards happen to be standing in front of you.

One power-up lets you breathe fire. Another allows you to shoot three projectiles simultaneously. Others increase your attack speed, strengthen your weapons, or surround you with destructive magical effects.

There are enough of these things scattered around that you’re constantly burning through one power-up while looking for the next.

And when you have several effects working together, you briefly stop feeling like a guy wandering around a dungeon and start feeling like an unstoppable god spewing lightning and fire across the entire screen.

Your basic objective in each level is simple: reach the teleporter at the end with your life intact.

Actually accomplishing that becomes a constant juggling act.

You’re watching your health. Counting keys. Saving potions. Managing items. Building your special meter. Smashing generators before another thirty goblins climb out of them. Your eyes start zipping around the screen like a fly on speed as you attempt to process the absolute mountain of shit happening at once.

And through all of this, you still need to keep those peepers peeled for secrets.

Dark Legacy absolutely loves hiding things behind walls.

If you happen to strike a secret wall, it briefly flashes white. Give it a few more whacks and the entire thing disappears with an incredibly satisfying little shimmer.

Maybe there’s some gold behind it.

Maybe a useful item.

Maybe a switch.

Maybe that switch opens another secret somewhere else in the level, leading you into an increasingly elaborate series of secret revelations.

That’s ultimately where Gauntlet Dark Legacy shines.

It tries to cram as much as humanly possible into every inch of every level in every zone.

There’s always another hallway. Another hidden switch. Another character to unlock. Another boss item you missed. Another pile of crystals to find. Another weird little corner of a level that you somehow walked past despite playing the game fifty times.

Dark Legacy was absolutely designed around stuffing a full complement of friends onto one shitty couch and having everybody scream at each other while goblins flood the screen. Multiplayer remains probably the ideal way to experience Gauntlet.

But I was surprised by just how much fun I still had playing it solo.

There’s something almost relaxing about falling back into a game you know this well. Twenty-plus years later, my brain still remembered where certain walls were hiding secrets before I consciously remembered why I was walking toward them.

And despite all the hours I poured into Dark Legacy growing up, revisiting it reminded me just how enormous the damn thing actually is.

I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface here.

Gauntlet Dark Legacy is clunky. It’s repetitive. It looks exactly like a video game that escaped from an arcade more than two decades ago.

And somehow, none of that really matters.

It has aged with all the grace of a greasy slimeball, and I love it anyway.

For $94, I better.

This thing will be spinning in my GameCube for many more days.