PlayStation Basement #27 - Lightning Legend: Daigo no Daibouken

This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on March 2nd, 2019. It has been edited slightly for formatting.

Spring will be here soon in the United States, and yesterday was National Pig Day. I intended to review a pig-related game today called Butage de Iin Janai?. Unfortunately, this Monster Rancher-style simulation game proved beyond me in terms of navigating menus of Japanese text without a guide. Still, PlayStation Basement carries on. As with every Saturday, I’ll be reviewing an odd or obscure game for the original PlayStation. My reviews are intended to de-emphasize the standard point system you see in a lot of video game reviews, so I use a nine-point scale where 9-7 is Good, 6-4 is Neutral, and 3-1 is Bad. The emphasis is on the word used, not so much the number.

This week, I present to you Lightning Legend: Daigo no Daibouken or Lightning Legend: Daigo’s Great Adventure. This is a 3D fighting game with anime/manga-style visuals. The game was developed by KCET and published by Konami. KCET is a subsidiary of Konami and worked on many other games including the PlayStation and Saturn ports of Snatcher, Poy Poy, Silent Hill 4: The Room, Suikoden III, and the port of Silent Scope for PS2 to name just a few. Lightning Legend: Daigo no Daibouken was released to Japanese PlayStations on December 20^th, 1996.

The cover art to the game is okay. I like the hand-drawn look and the colors used. I don’t like that it is just a group shot on an abstract explosion of yellow and green. I actually find the background kind of jarring, especially considering the lack of yellow and green in much of the rest of the image.

In-game, the graphics of Lightning Legend: Daigo no Daibouken are also hit-or-miss. Fights have some dramatic camera angles and engaging KO replays. The character designs are creative and are well-rendered in 3D and well-drawn in the larger, 2D images. However, the animation is not very smooth. The characters move stiffly at times, and some segments of certain maneuvers seem to have a rushed animation. Special effects like beams and ice magic are flat and okay overall, and there are some interesting lighting effects in certain stages. The backgrounds for the actual fights are of a lower caliber than the similar Tekken or Rival Schools overall, but a few, like Mokomoko’s dark, icy woods, look great. I’m also not a huge fan of the little story sequences, created with chibi sprites that resemble something from a cheap Super Famicom game, that occur between fights, however, I think that I would think a bit more positively if I could read these better.

Listening to the sounds of Lightning Legend is better. The sound effects and voices are pretty good, and the music is pretty good overall too. There are some excellent music tracks, my favorites being the opening theme and the songs played during the story segments. The latter really helps to set the mood in an otherwise limited experience. Unfortunately, the sound designers seemed like they used lower quality files than they could have, creating a thin sound, and there are also some really mediocre songs that utilize odd, bouncy, circus horns and stuff. These sound really out of place and make these stages awkward for high-action fighting.

Of course, Lightning Legend is not the most high-action game that there is either. Fights take place on infinite 3D planes like in the aforementioned Tekken or Rival Schools. Lightning Legend: Daigo no Daibouken is not really in the same league as those games, however. The controls are simplified a bit in a way that I don’t love - three attack buttons corresponding to light, medium, and heavy attacks and a taunt button. You can sidestep, grab, and power up by hitting certain buttons together, and blocking is done by holding the direction away from the opponent. You can dash forward and backward by double-tapping. Most of this is fine, but I’d rather have four attacks (two kicks and two punches for example). The main things that hurt the game are the delayed controls and odd hitboxes, compounded by the odd character designs. Some of the combos and special moves are fun to pull off, but the game feels too unpredictable to really enjoy.

Now there are quite a few things to do despite the stunted capability to do them. Other than the Story Mode that pits your character against others in a personal story that eventually leads to an encounter with the demon Dragless, there is Versus Mode along with a hidden Time Attack Mode and Collection Mode. While the others are self-explanatory, Collection Mode, which I never unlocked, pits the player against various challenging objectives that can unlock special items. Collecting certain items unlocks hidden costumes, characters, and stages. This is an oft-mentioned feature of this game, but you unlock it randomly by finishing the Story Mode multiple times. How unpredictable!

The characters you can pick to unpredictably do battle against others are pretty weird. The developers must have felt that these designs were one of the strongest parts of Lightning Legend, including some cool cards for each fighter inside the CD case. We have standard characters like the young hero Daigo Raioh, the tomboyish Mayu Uzaka, cool guy Terrific Forelock (what a name!), and the kind Yuki Shirogane. There are also the elf-like Misa and Risa, the half-human Rankerk Hatred (another amazing name!), the fluffy monster Mokomoko, a tiny sorcerer named Naughty, and Adolf the superhero among a few others. Adolf, though a hero of justice and all that comes off kind of weird for two reasons. One is that he looks like a cross between Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star and the title character from Kinnikuman (M.U.S.C.L.E. in the US). The other thing is that his name, his black and red attire, and his lightning symbolism give off a pseudo-Nazi vibe. It doesn’t seem like Adolf is intended to be an Aryan superman or anything like that, but it seems, at best, a short-sighted design of a pseudo-Char Aznable (Mobile Suit Gundam), and, at worst, a Nazi-chic aesthetic. Unfortunately, this wasn’t exactly uncommon in Japan; going back to Kinnikuman, there was even a heroic Nazi character, Brocken Jr., a character that seemingly had given up the ways of his actual Nazi father but continued to wear the uniform. Even if these characters are not intended as believers in the ways of Hitler and the like, it isn’t particularly great to utilize this kind of imagery. That said, I like mysterious, idiosyncratic masked men (Captain Falcon comes to mind), so I did play as Adolf. I felt kind of weird about it too. With this in mind, it’s not surprising to me that this early, rough-playing fighting game with heavy anime influences would not come out in America before Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, and Pokémon had gathered enough traction here in the states.

Honestly, I don’t think you are missing much if you have not played Lightning Legend: Daigo no Daibouken. This game has some neat elements – the 80’s and 90’s anime OVA style, storylines for each of the fighters that go beyond just a beginning and ending cinematic/text, impressive details on each character, and the Collection Mode. However, the awkward gameplay, mediocre animation, out-of-place tracks, and the goofiness of these weird characters bring the game down. There’s quite a bit to do if you want to collect all 208 items. Though I did it in Pokémon Blue, I don’t know if I am that concerned with catching them all in Lightning Legend.

Lightning Legend: Daigo no Daibouken receives a Neutral (6).

Follow EfreetEater on Facebook