Guardian Heroes is a side scrolling fighter with RPG elements. The story revolves around a group of adventurers called the Guardian Heroes. They search for and find a legendary sword, that had supposedly saved the world. At their headquarters, a stranger named Serena jumps in and warns them of the Royal guard's attack. This is where the action begins.
In the story mode, you have the option to choose from four different characters: Han - a very strong and powerful character, but lacks speed, Randy - who is not strong but has a large variety of magic at his disposal, Ginjirou - a very fast character, who relies on a variety of moving attacks, and Nicole - who possesses weak attacks and random magic, but has healing magic. After you beat the game on the normal difficulty (or higher), you will be able to play with Serena, commander of the Royal Knights Red Team, who is a well-balanced character, with a wide variety of moves.
Guardian Heroes also has a versus mode, in which up to six different people can battle it out. A special feature of this mode is the ability to not only battle with each of the four main characters, but you can use any of the enemies that you have defeated.
On to the review. Guardian Heroes has some of the most amazing 2D graphics that I have ever laid my eyes on. It is extremely colorful and contains a large amount of parallax. The backgrounds are really amazing, and while the character animation is not as good as Night Warriors, the characters are still animated brilliantly. The music is also amazing, the best on the Saturn excluding Astal and Panzer Dragoon. And as great as the graphics and music are, the game's best quality is its amazing game play. The action is really intense, at times you will have over ten characters on screen battling it out with awesome attacks and magic with very little slowdown. Another huge positive is the RPG elements, which adds a lot to the replay value. At the finale of each stage you will have to make a choice which leads you to different events, which in turn, leads you to different endings. So far I've already seen four different endings, and I know there are more, and plan on seeing as many as possible. Overall, Guardian Heroes lives up to the hype, it is by far the best game ever in the action category, and right up there with Night Warriors and Virtua Fighter 2 as the best game available for the Saturn.
Here are some things to take notice of: If you're tired of reading the text and just want to get to the action, hold R and continue pressing C until the text is finished (it makes it much quicker.) The debug code for the Japanese version does not work with the US version (why???).