Genre: Brawler
Developer: Treasure Co. Ltd
Publisher: Sega

Treasure did their best to make Guardian Heroes look like a comic book in action, and they did a good job. The characters are very colorful, caricature-like, and well animated. The backgrounds are a little more gritty but still feature some bright, high-contrast artwork. Sprite scaling is used to convey depth as the characters more towards and away from the foreground.

Unlike a lot of Saturn games, Guardian Heroes uses a full red-book audio orchestrated soundtrack, and it is fantastic! Roaring saxophone riffs come together with fast percussion and some outstanding keyboard work and composition to form a memorable selection. Sound effects are very well done as well, with some intermittent voice tidbits adding a little life to the dialogue.

Take Streets of Rage, move it to a fantasy mid-evil time period, add in a dash Street Fighter fireball-rolls and combos, then finally throw in a pinch of RPG, and you get Guardian Heroes. To allow the player to use Street Fighter style controls (you can even block!), Treasure introduced a "plane" system, where the shift buttons let you leap between three 2-dimensional regions.

Along with combos, two-in-ones, 2-player coop, a series of 30 boards (which branch depending on your actions, ala Metal Slug), your player levels up and you can allocate your experience points to a plethora of attributes after each stage. There is also a fun team-based Vs. mode, which reminds me a little of Super Smash Bros., except with a good gameplay engine to back it up. Saturn owners should not be without this game.