The History of Guardian Heroes

Development started in June 1994. Designer Tetsuhiko Kikuchi names the main inspirations on the record: Fill-in-Cafe's Mad Stalker: Full Metal Force and Capcom's Alien vs. Predator arcade game. Asked why Treasure made a sprite game while the industry chased 3D, a Treasure representative answered that the studio had built up tremendous 2D sprite knowledge and wished to keep using the asset, adding that the real risk was trying to make a new game at all, and that 2D and 3D could exist alongside each other.

The music is part of the experiment: composed by Katsuhiko Suzuki and Norio Hanzawa, with synthesizer credited to Hideki Matsutake, formerly of Yellow Magic Orchestra.

The Xbox 360 remaster (October 12, 2011) nearly failed on archaeology: all the Saturn source code was stored on DAT cassettes, Treasure owned no reader, and equipment had to be borrowed from divisions inside Sega to recover it. The remaster added remix graphics and gameplay modes, online versus for up to 12 players, and an endless Arcade mode.

The team called it a fighting RPG. The brawling happens on three planes (foreground, middle, background) that players hop between to dodge and reposition. Between stages, experience points go into six attributes, from Strength to Luck. The story branches after every stage, leading to different bosses and multiple endings, and a Karma meter tracks choices including killing civilians. A versus mode lets up to six players fight using unlocked characters, bosses, monsters, and even civilians. And at the center stands the Undead Hero, a resurrected swordsman the party cannot control directly, only command: attack, defend, follow, hold, or berserk.