The Beat’em Up Genre Tribute: Legend (1993, SNES)
|
Legend is one of the “Underdogs” represented in the Game-Art-HQ Beat’em up Tribute. It was quite surprising when we saw it being claimed as one of the first 15 games. Legend is a 2D beat’em up developed for the Super Nintendo by a small french team by the name Arcade Zone Ltd. abd published by Sony Imagesoft in Europe, the game publishing division by Sony before they developed their own console known as the Sony Playstation. Like the Golden Axe series years before, Legend plays in a fantasy land which seems to be inspired by the Conan the Barbarian movies. While there are magical attacks too, the gameplay itself is more similar to the Final Fight games Outstanding in Legend were the colorful graphics the big and detailed sprites and its great soundtrack as well, which made a use of the Super Nintendo’s chipset as good as possible. The sound effects of the swords, axes and other weapons the characters use are outstanding and very fitting in Legend as well. It has 1-2 player options and there are no issues with flackering characters like in a few other SNES beat’em ups. The only downfalls of Legend are the few short stages really and that the main characters lack charisma. – You can enlarge most of the images here by clicking on them – |
Official Box Art of Legend for the Super Nintendo (European Version) |
 |
Legend is a nice game which showed the strenghts of the Super Nintendo but is played through very fast and lacks the “wanting to go back” factor you had in Final Fight or Golden Axe.
It added nothing really new to the beat’em up genre but is a solid example of a traditional game of its kind. Interesting enough, the developers released a mix of a sequel and remake of Legend years later in 1998 for the Playstation. Legend was never ported to a newer console though, a real pity Legend was never made a real serious, today in the time where indie developers have more ways to distribute their games a new Legend game could be quite successful since there are not many new beat’em ups getting made.
|
About our illustration of Legend and the artist behind it
“This is my ‘claim’ for an awesome SNES Beat’em up (well u don’t really hack nor slash, more like crack/clang your blades on the hordes of enemies) going back to 1994.
One of these hidden jewels that for lack of proper advertisement never really shone on our shelves.
It has a great soundtrack (very Conan-ish), Great sound FX, Great design (Levels, characters, Bosses, etc..), Great gameplay
(If anything, u gotta try the co-op mode) for a Cult game which deserved remembrance.
I tried to render the horizontal scrolling (of the in-game display with info hub, lifebar, magic, etc…) with bigger size characters (than in the game, to try to get a better dynamic vision, or maybe a similar one to the one I had as a kid back then) while keeping with similar color patterns and designs.”
Cilab from Canada is one of the Game-Art-HQ Contributors, beside in the beat’em up tribute you can see works of him made for the Mortal Kombat tribute as well, he draws a lot of different things including fan art but also own character designs which you can see on deviantART!
Screenshot Gallery of Legend
|
First Boss |
Stage 3 |
Boss 4 |
The Ending |
The other Beat’em Up Genre Tribute articles:
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
