A Truly Worthy Mobile Successor to Zelda - Guardian Tales Review
If you caught my post last week about The Legend of Zelda’s 35th birthday, you already have some idea what I’m about to tell you. For those who haven’t, I spent the last couple of weeks trying out a bunch of different mobile takes on the Zelda formula, and I walked away impressed with many of them. But there was one that stood far above the rest of the pack, a game I’ve continued obsessively playing every night since I first downloaded it, a game I expect I will be returning to for months and maybe even years to come. That game is Guardian Tales.
This is far from a hidden gem, so I’m sure many readers aren’t going to be shocked by this revelation. Originally launched in 2020, Guardian Tales has racked up over five million downloads on the Google Play store alone. But if you happen to be like me, someone who somehow missed this title, or perhaps saw the ads over the last couple years but assumed that like so many mobile game ads, they must have been misleading about the actual contents, then I’m here to spread the good news. And that news is: Guardian Tales is real, and it truly captures the feeling of playing a great 2D Zelda game, but with plenty of its own personality as well.
In true Zelda fashion, Guardian Tales opens with the introduction of its mute main character, the Knight. Players are able to name the Knight and choose their gender, and then the castle where you’re finishing up knight training is suddenly attacked by a barrage of fireballs. Before you know it, you’re on the run alongside the Queen and Princess. And from there, the insanity only grows as you’re given the task of tracking down and bringing together a series of legendary heroes who are spread across space and time, and who are the only hope against the great evil threatening the kingdom.
If all of that sounds like by-the-books fantasy stuff, I’d caution you not to be fooled. While Guardian Tales’s first world or so plays it safe with a generic forest setting and goblin enemies, things get much less predictable from there. The game has a lot of strengths, but one of them is its commitment to embracing a seemingly limitless supply of imagination in its stories and locations. The Hyrule-looking forest shifts to an endless array of much wilder locales: a city being invaded by aliens; a magical school overrun by evil spirits (think Harry Potter meets Ghostbusters); a modern city street that is caught on an endless loop of the same Halloween evening for some sinister reason; a desert that is home to a cult of goblins who dress like Mad Max rejects want nothing more than to recruit you into their Scientology-esque cult.
Where the majority of mobile gacha games seem totally content sticking with cliché fantasy or sci-fi setups, Guardian Tales bursts at the seams with creativity that surpasses even many paid RPG experiences. I was constantly blown away by just how consistently things got shaken up or pushed in totally different directions than I expected. Even the hard-mode versions of levels that you unlock as you progress have their own unique storylines, showcasing how areas and characters you’ve left behind have changed in your absence and putting you up against new challenges.
The glue holding together all of these ingenious scenarios is the clever (and occasionally even laugh-out-loud funny) writing. Santa Monica-based developer Kong Studios has filled Guardian Tales full of surprising, engaging, and humorous plotting on a level that I’m just not used to seeing in mobile RPGs—or RPGs in general!
Even the sidequests, which often consist of just fighting a series of enemies, have an entertaining wrapper. For example, one early sidequest sees the Knight and their party overhearing rumors of a “popular slime cream” while venturing through the forest. The special stage to complete this quest has you desperately trying to take down various slimes before the tons of other hunters who have come in search of the skin-softening slime cream for themselves. And your reward when you finally manage to get your hands on some of that sweet, sweet slime cream? You get turned into a slime yourself!
Guardian Tales also brings a lot of variety to the gameplay itself, even if it sticks relatively close to the Zelda formula. The game is played from a top-down view, and the levels you explore are basically little mazes, where some rooms have combat encounters, some have puzzles, and some have NPCs who progress the story. Combat is fast-paced, flashy, and slick, and it includes a nice dodge feature that provides some mobility. There are a wide variety of weapon types, from the traditional sword and shield to magic staffs to, uh, alien blasters and AK-47s. While that variety necessarily gives the game a slightly different feel than the traditional Zelda titles it’s clearly inspired by, the core combat feels just about as solidly designed and satisfying as Nintendo’s best.
Where Guardian Tales really shines, though, is its puzzle design. Whether you’re using a tool like the grappling hook or the drill, or just pushing blocks around, or trying to avoid wind ghosts that blow you across the stage, the game is always introducing smart twists on its mechanics and pushing you to think about things from a new angle. Capturing the feel of Zelda’s combat or its world design is one thing; capturing Nintendo’s ability to introduce and expand on mechanics at a near-perfect pace that makes solving puzzles feel both natural and intensely gratifying—that’s truly rare and difficult to pull off, but this game accomplishes it.
While the overall gameplay of Guardian Tales is Zelda-inspired, the structure is more akin to a Mario game, with the adventure split into thirteen themed worlds, that are themselves divided into a bunch of shorter levels. Don’t think that splitting things up like this means that each level is quick and easy, however. A sidequest level might only take a few minutes to blast through, but most of the main story levels are quite lengthy and complex, full of puzzles to solve, enemies to battle, secret paths to uncover, and collectibles to gather. Trying to 100% main story levels often took me half an hour to an hour of focused play, and some even require returning to the level later when you have a new tool, or have progressed the story to a certain point.
And, of course, story progression is really just scratching the surface of the total amount of content in Guardian Tales. As with most live-service gacha games, there are a bevy of other modes to check out, all of which will become more of a focus as you move into the end game. If you’d expect it from a mobile game, Guardian Tales has it: PvP arenas, guilds with their own challenges, live events and collaborations, resource grinding bonus levels, and even a wave-based co-op mode. On top of all of that, there’s also a long-term base-building metagame, where you slowly build up a flying castle in the sky, adding in food, drink, and entertainment options to keep the population happy.
It’s not just enough to have all of this stuff to do, though. What Guardian Tales gets right with its content—and what so many mobile games often miss spectacularly on—is that everything that you do feeds back into the same small handful of systems that power up your playable characters. While there are a lot of different ways to improve your characters stats, from equipping better gear to spending “awakening stones” on a special grid of power-ups, it doesn’t fall into the same level of resource type overload as many competitors. I never felt confused as to what steps were best to improve my characters, and the game also includes a long string of “beginner missions”—seriously long, like over three hundred missions—that introduced me to everything I needed to know.
With all of that praise heaped upon Guardian Tales, I guess it’s time to address the elephant in the room that I’ve mentioned just a couple of times throughout this review: Yes, it’s a gacha game. I know that’s anathema for some readers, and I get it! I have one simple argument for why it’s worth getting over your aversion to gacha games for this one. As I’ve made clear, there’s a frankly absurd amount of content in Guardian Tales, and you can enjoy probably eighty to ninety percent of that content without spending any money.
The game provides a good number of playable characters as you work through the story mode, plus you earn tons of diamonds (the premium currency) and a solid base of gacha tickets for playing through the story as well. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that you could spend upwards of a hundred hours playing and enjoying Guardian Tales before you hit a point where you need to have a more optimized team put together. And frankly, if you hit that point and are still disgusted with the idea of spending money for gacha, it’s totally ok to just quit, uninstall, and maybe check it out again the next time they add a new main story update.
But I promise, no matter how much you hate gacha games or free-to-play microtransactions or whatever else, if you enjoy the exploration and puzzle-solving of Zelda games, or if you have been looking for an action-RPG that isn’t afraid to try strange new things with its storytelling and setting, you owe it to yourself to give Guardian Tales a try. I sat out this game for two years, and I regret that, but discovering it now has been absolutely delightful. In recent years, my attention has mostly been focused on discovering great games that got missed. But sometimes, just every once in a while, there’s a game that got millions upon millions of downloads that is absolutely worth the hype. Guardian Tales is one of those games.
SCORE: 5 STARS OUT OF 5
PLAY IF YOU LIKE:
• Zelda games. Come on. Did you even read the review?
• Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent. If you’ve read my review of the recently-released Octopath Traveler mobile spin-off, you’ll know that that’s another mobile gacha game that I was very impressed by, particularly with its writing. While Octopath Traveler tends more toward the dramatic than the humorous, Guardian Tales is right alongside it in terms of being one of those rare mobile RPGs with truly excellent writing.
💬 Have you played Guardian Tales? Am I crazy for having missed it for this long? Or are you still missing out yourself? And if so, what’s keeping you from giving it a chance? Leave a comment below, and I’ll be sure to reply!
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