As I've said quite a lot, Treasure is one of my favorite game developers of all time, but Light Crusader was always my least favorite game from them. I remember trying it when it popped up on NSO and quickly bouncing off of it. Treasure's bread and butter has always been wacky, cartoony action platformers with creative and surreal imagery, hardware-pushing visual effects, and complex, diverse, ever-changing gameplay. So to see them put out what seemed like a drab, realistic-looking isometric action adventure game felt like such a weird step away from what makes Treasure so special. But I decided to revisit the game recently to give it another shot after finding out that it's actually quite well-respected, and little did I know that it actually does manage to have a lot of that Treasure magic, just hidden a bit deeper under the surface.
Light Crusader's unskippable opening is as unassuming as it gets. You play as a knight named Sir David who arrives at a town only to discover that the townsfolk have been disappearing, and you are tasked to investigate. It seems like your standard fantasy fare, maybe even a bit too cliché for the brilliant minds at Treasure. But once the intro ends and the game actually gives you control, I was immediately surprised by how... smooth movement felt? It manages to dodge the common mistake that many isometric games make where pressing up moves you up-right, essentially skewing the directional inputs to match the perspective. It's a control style I could never get used to, so I'm glad Light Crusader keeps things simple. Up makes you go north, just as it should be. Your movement speed is fast and your jumps are floaty, so I found it really easy to make precise movements with confidence, quite the impressive feat for a game with this perspective. Talking to NPCs will also reveal that dialogue boxes display in real-time in this game, meaning you can start a conversation and then just continue walking around. This combined with the fast movement speed means that once you take control of David, Light Crusader really never stops moving, keeping up a brisk, frenetic pace throughout its entire playtime.
Another thing you'll notice right away is the absolutely wacky NPC interactions. Walk up to the several other characters around the castle you're in and you'll discover that you can just kinda push them around, even down the stairs. As a matter of fact, Light Crusader actually has an entire physics engine built for it, and many in-game objects from enemies to items to chests can all be physically pushed around. And this is a pivotal part of the game, more than even being an adventure or action game, Light Crusader is a physics-based puzzle game. The first task the game has you do is go to the graveyard, find the interactable grave, and push it to the side to unveil the entrance to a large dungeon underneath the town, which shows you that looking for context clues is important and that you should try to push around everything you see. This is the first area where the sheer Treasure-ness of Light Crusader really becomes apparent. Designing a full, working physics engine for a Sega Genesis game and allowing you to use it on pretty much everything in the game is just the kind of goofy ambitiousness that always seemed to define Treasure.
Once you enter the dungeon, the true gameplay loop of Light Crusader reveals itself. This is a dungeon crawler through and through, and you have to work your way through six varied dungeon floors to find the evil dude responsible for all the disappearances. I actually really like games that take place entirely within a dungeon, like Ys Origin or Swordcraft Story, it's like I can get the fun puzzle-solving action-exploration of a Zelda dungeon but stretched out across an entire game. And as far as the core exploration goes, Light Crusader is pretty damn great. Right from the get-go, the dungeon sprawls into a number of different rooms and directions, and you have a simple map to help you keep track of which doors you haven't checked out yet. There's a solid amount of collectibles from health upgrades to equipment, and there's even a few secret areas the map doesn't tell you about that tend to hide easter eggs and optional, powerful items like a fast travel sextant and a dedicated cat room. This is honestly a perfect balance for exploration in an adventure game like this. While by no means trivial, I was able to beat the game with max health and equipment relatively guideless, but I also probably missed a lot of those hidden rooms. This can also really increase replay value since players will be likely to notice things on a second or third playthrough they haven't the first time around.
As I said earlier, the bread and butter of Light Crusader are the physics puzzles. Many rooms will have you pushing a variety of objects to accomplish certain tasks. There's standard blocks, statues that shoot out lasers, explosive bombs and barrels you can use to blow open doors, and boulders that you can roll around. The game gets an impressive amount of mileage out of all of these objects and puzzles will have you utilizing switches, elevators, wind, or even other physics objects to get them to where they need to go. Later floors will even have you start juggling multiple different types of physics objects and trying to figure out which does what. But with all that said, is the physics engine even... good? I mean, it is still a Genesis game and to be fair, yeah, it is a bit janky. Pushing certain objects around can even be a bit overly sensitive making it frustratingly easy to accidentally push something into a corner and force a reset. However, I still found it not only impressive but fun to mess around with. Most of the puzzles are still quite well-crafted around the engine's limitations, and for the ones that aren't, reseting is as easy as leaving the room and trying again. On top of that, the freeform nature of physics in general meant that I honestly feel like I was able to solve a few rooms with completely unintentional methods which did genuinely make me feel pretty clever.
Of course, there's also a fair amount of enemies to fight, and this is probably where Light Crusader is at its weakest. Combat is as basic as going up to an enemy and swinging your sword. You can attack in mid-air to do a dive attack but that's pretty much it, and between your stubby sword and the depth perception, it's pretty easy to whiff your attacks. On top of that, this game doesn't give you gold for fighting enemies. Instead, you can either get gold as a rare pick-up, find it in a few hidden chests, or grind for it in a few random spots across the game. This means that I often found myself unable to buy anything in the game's shops. And yet, on the other hand, despite all these combat issues, Light Crusader is actually kind of a cakewalk. This game absolutely showers you with health restoring items, pretty much every enemy drops one and you have a massive inventory. On top of that, there's an auto heal function so you don't even need to think about healing yourself, meaning that most enemies and bosses can be easily taken out by standing right in front of them and spamming attack. I'll be honest and say that I'd rather a game be broken but easy than broken but annoyingly hard, but the item drop rate doesn't fix the fact that combat isn't especially fun, it's just a bandaid on the greater issue.
That being said, there are a few combat-related aspects of Light Crusader that I did genuinely really like, and of course, they're the most Treasure-esque parts of the whole system. The magic system seems pretty standard in that you have a number of spell types based on elements like fire and earth, but you'll quickly realize that you can actually combine the element types to create different kinds of spells, almost like Threads Of Fate's similarly fantastic magic system. With four elements, there's a total of 15 spells you can use, which adds a ton of fun experimentation. Not every spell is especially useless, but if you take the time to mess around with the system, you'll probably find a few favorites. This is a very Treasure take on a tried-and-true system, imbuing it with a lot more player freedom. The boss fights are also generally really fun, as you'd expect from Treasure. They're all big, varied, visually-impressive, and at times very creative. I especially love the floating armor fight as you'll need to hit the shadow of the person manipulating the armor to take it down. On a smaller note, I also love how you can deflect certain projectiles with a well-timed sword press, such a cool little feature that didn't need to be there.
As I said, the dungeon spans six floors, and each one is different from the last in terms of structure. Floor 1 is a fairly simple introduction to Light Crusader's gameplay loop. Floor 2 is probably the one you'll need a notepad for the most, as you need to find codes you can use to unseal four orbs scattered on the far reaches of the map. From a puzzle standpoint, this was definitely one of the high points of the game for me. Floor 3 has a huge orc village in the center, which you can infiltrate using an orc disguise (which can also help you skip a few combat encounters). Floor 4 is more platforming-focused as it has a ton of icy floors to deal with. And Floor 6, being the final floor, has the most devious puzzles in the game along with the vast majority of the disappeared townsfolk you need to rescue. This variety helps keep the game fresh despite taking place almost entirely within a dungeon, and really helps keep the pacing up throughout. But if you've played Light Crusader, though, you probably already know that Floor 5 is the highlight. You'll stumble upon eight teleporters each taking you to a small mini-dungeon you need to complete to recruit one of the eight wizards. These mini-dungeons take place pretty much all over the world, from a western town, to an active warzore, to the far future, and more. You'll be fighting a giant tank, fast-moving ninjas, and even the elements themselves, it's so much fun. And in what's otherwise a fairly standard fantasy setting, this sudden shift to a random genre roulette feels so wonderfully Treasure.
As for the presentation, Light Crusader does genuinely look pretty impressive. Not only are the characters and isometric environments quite detailed, but Treasure manages to squeeze a lot of cool effects into this thing. Floating platforms along with the player have dropshadows which helps to make platforming a cinch, the dialogue boxes are formed seamlessly with wireframes, many of the bosses utilize multiple sprites like in many of Treasure's action games, and doors, effects, and several in-game objects are fully 3D rendered. And the game manages to do pretty much all of these with zero performance issues, it all runs super smoothly. That being said, I can't deny that the artstyle itself can feel a bit generic by Treasure standards. The color scheme is fairly drab and Koichi Kimura's distinct visual style that defined games like Dynamite Headdy and Silhouette Mirage feels entirely absent here. Similarly, the soundtrack is more ambient and baroque-inspired than you'd expect from Treasure, but honestly, it's not too bad overall. The boss themes feel a bit twangy, but most of the floor themes are quite catchy, with the more energetic ones sounding like they came right out of a Castlevania game.
Overall, Light Crusader was honestly a pleasant surprise. It's by no means a perfect game, the combat system is not especially great, some of the physics puzzles can be pretty finicky, and the game probably could've gone a bit weirder in spots. However, it's honestly a really pleasant and enjoyable dungeon crawler with fun movement that dodges pretty much all of the pitfalls that come with isometric gameplay, engaging exploration, brisk pacing, an impressive physics engine that's fun to mess around with, and a lot of charming, little quirks that only a company like Treasure could've thought up. As far as top-down Genesis adventure games go, it easily surpasses stuff like Landstalker and Beyond Oasis for the sheer fluidity of play alone. I don't think this is Treasure's worst game anymore, it's not even their worst Genesis game. I'd easily play this again over their McDonalds game, that's for sure. It might seem unassuming under the surface but if you give Light Crusader time to show its true colors, you'll find a unique, fresh, and well-thought out adventure game.
3.5/5 Stars
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