It's new to me: Crusader of Centy

Published by Sega in Japan and Europe and Atlus in North America, this "Zelda clone" has plenty of its own personality and ideas.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

“Zelda clone” is a term that used to be thrown around quite a bit in reviews, especially in the late-80s and early-to-mid-90s. It was sometimes used as shorthand, sometimes as a bit of a pejorative, and in either case, the term has never really sat well with me.

It’s just too dismissive, in too many cases. Hudson’s Neutopia series is considered a “Zelda clone,” and given what the term is meant to convey, sure, that’s true. It took the topdown adventuring style of NES-exclusive The Legend of Zelda, with dungeon crawling and puzzles and an inventory of fantasy-based items to help you traverse it all, and put it on the Turbografx-16 so that people who enjoyed Zelda on the NES would consider buying the more powerful system that had its own Zelda-type game. There weren’t a whole lot of this style of game at the time, so Neutopia became a “Zelda clone” for the same reason every first-person shooter of a certain era was a “DOOM clone,” or every single exploratory action-adventure platformer with backtracking became — well, becomes, it still happens — a Metroidvania.

What bugs me is that Neutopia gets knocked a bit for being a Zelda clone, instead of just being enjoyed as a pretty good take on the genre of game that Zelda was a major influence on, if not the launching pad of. Adventure is the real progenitor of it all — released in 1980, the Atari, well, adventure, literally changed the game, but it would take the post-crash popularity of the Famicom/NES and the introduction of Zelda to ensure this was a genre that would grow and grow and be endlessly riffed on by other developers and publishers. Zelda is an adventure game, but because it ended up so popular, and because other developers and publishers and console manufacturers wanted their own Zelda, we didn’t get more “adventure” games. We got Zelda clones.

Sonic the Hedgehog didn’t get much time to rest in the era of the Genesis, so he decided to vacation in a limited release no one was playing.

It’s a problem with language. Platform games were already well established by the time of Super Mario Bros., so every platformer that released afterward was not known as a “Mario clone,” not that you didn’t ever hear that sort of thing. Every genre has its starting point: platform games were often referred to, in their early days, as being in the style of 1981 arcade hit Donkey Kong. As that genre kept on churning out new games, new advancements, and so on, it eventually was widely accepted that they were platformers. “Zelda clones” would similarly start to just be called adventure or action-adventure games, but there was a good period of at least a decade where if it looked or played even a little bit like Zelda, it was a clone, with the implication being, fairly or unfairly, that it was inferior to the real thing.

If you read “Zelda clone” like that, then you probably missed out on the Neutopia games — which, funnily enough, influenced Nintendo’s A Link to the Past just like the original Zelda had influenced Neutopia in the first place, and despite some issues it has, also managed to improve on parts of Zelda’s gameplay, too. And you probably missed out on the mid-90s Sega Genesis action-adventure game, Crusader of Centy, as well. This Nextech-developed game was published by Sega in both Japan and Europe, but it took Atlus to get it to North America. Of course, Sega now owns Atlus, presumably not so that they could have the full international rights to Crusader of Centy, but hey, they got them, anyway.

Crusader of Centy looks a little like Zelda, sounds a lot like Sonic the Hedgehog, and plays like neither. It’s an overhead action-adventure game with some RPG elements, sure, but this, much more so than with Neutopia, had to really stretch to justify the use of the term “Zelda clone” in reviews. The Zelda comps are superficial, at best, with most of them being visual: there is an ice dungeon that, on the outside, looks a bit like the ice dungeon from Link to the Past, but the interior, and the way you go about solving it, have nothing in common with that potential inspiration.

The reason the “Zelda clone” comp falls apart, and one of the reasons I don’t like how the term was tossed around back in the day, is that Crusader of Centy doesn’t play anything like Zelda. You would think that kind of thing would matter, but alas. There is an overworld map, and you head from area to area on it like you were playing Super Mario World. The vast majority of the areas you enter on the map are outdoor spaces: caves, forests, beaches, and the like, not dungeons or temples or your Zelda standards like that, nor does the game have the same kind of openness or exploration, as it’s a pretty linear adventure both narratively and in gameplay. The central mechanics of the game revolve around utilizing your recruited animal friends for their special powers, be they for puzzle-solving, enhanced offense or defense, increased speed, or more. There are 16 of these animals, and you can equip two of them at a time, which really helps you tailor the gameplay to how you want to play.

Defense-first? Elemental sword? Faster attacks? You’ve got plenty of mixing-and-matching to do, and you’ll want to experiment both in and out of battle to see what you’re capable of when you recruit new animal pals, as they help you both open up previously inaccessible areas, and better defeat some of the game’s tougher enemies and bosses. You also can and will have to throw your sword in Crusader of Centy, which makes battling significantly different than it is in Zelda, even outside of the whole animals-as-tools-and-weapons thing. And yet, you’ve got reviewers who described it as a “mirror image” of Zelda. Like I said, it was a problem of language that hadn’t yet evolved to the point it has today.

Anyway, if you’re familiar with pre-Sega Atlus, then you would recognize this as exactly the kind of “familiar, but make it weird” title that they used to be drawn to in publishing. And they made it a little weirder, too: as Apollo Chungus pointed out at Hardcore Gaming 101, the American localization is a little more tongue-in-cheek than the more serious European one (where the game is known as Soleil), as evidenced pretty well by these two screenshots:

“I can sing of peace and love here and no one calls me a geek!”

I shall continue to sing forever, even in Saint Heaven.

I found myself enjoying the oddness that Atlus injected into the game, but apparently, the European version of the game is a bit easier to follow in terms of what’s expected of you next. I figured it out without that help, though, and got to chuckle at plenty of interactions with NPCs, so it’s not like the game is impossible without the extra European guideposts, plus you get to laugh more often.

As for the narrative itself, you play as Corona, a 14-year-old who is given a sword and told to train in service of the kingdom, as every kid his age is expected to do, during the time of crisis the existence of monsters has brought on. Corona, though, ends up getting involved in a whole lot more than the standard quest to become a soldier of his kingdom. Instead, he finds himself no longer able to converse with humans, but he can speak with animals, which is how he ends up recruiting them to his side. He also, outside of his hometown, is able to speak with and assist the animals in their villages around the world. He’ll eventually be able to speak to his fellow humans once again, but you spend quite a bit of the game not being able to follow a word they’re saying. It certainly gives you an excuse to go back to areas you’ve previously been to where humans were potentially in need of help you couldn’t, at the time, provide.

That’s the first half of the game: in the second half, with Corona able to speak to his fellow humans again, things start to get a different kind of weird. Your task is now to get to the bottom of the conflict between monsters and mankind, and to do so, you must travel through time. The monsters in Corona’s world don’t actually want to be there: they’re as trapped in that world as the humans are with the monsters. Monsters, historically, have been hunted down and killed when found in the world of the humans, but what if there was another way? Finding an answer is your task in the game’s second half.

The game’s art is nice and bright with plenty of colors, and the sound and songs were definitely put together by folks who knew how to make the Genesis’ weirdo audio capabilities sing. Things are a bit linear, but that’s not really an issue unless you despise linear experiences. You go from Point A to Point B to Point C to back to A for a little bit and so on and so forth pretty regularly, but at least the story opens up from a story of training to “hey why can’t I speak to humans anymore” to “hell yeah baby gonna travel back in time and set humans and monsters free before high school starts in the fall.” It’s a good thing Corona doesn’t change ages when time traveling, or else Nextech might have been accused of pre-cloning Ocarina of Time.

I didn’t miss out on Crusader of Centy because it was labeled a Zelda clone, but because it released in 1995 when I was nine years old, and as a game with a fairly limited physical release at the end of the console’s lifespan, it was just never on my radar. My Genesis games were either hand-me-downs (as was my Genesis itself) or something I found at a secondhand shop: I was likely beginning my obsession with the Phantasy Star series around Centy’s release. Times have changed, however: all these years later, you can find Crusader of Centy on best-of lists for the Genesis library, and finding the game itself is as easy as [redacted]. Hey, it’s that or… well that’s it, really. It’s like $900 on Ebay for a copy of this game, and it’s not like Sega or Atlus will see a cent of that. Maybe I should have put this under the Re-Release This banner, yeesh.

Anyway, Crusader of Centy might have been labeled a simple clone of an extremely popular and influential franchise, but it has plenty of its own ideas, and its designation as a clone has much more to do with the limitations of genre description of 1995 than anything else. Get yourself a copy of the game — no, not from Ebay, Moneybags — and see for yourself.

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