Crusader of Centy

An action/adventure video game for the Sega Genesis published by Atlus. Also known as Soleil in PAL regions.

Gameplay and visuals are similar to those in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past or the Soul Blazer series, with a few exceptions. Instead of collecting items, you have animals join your party. Two animals may be equipped at a time. Certain animals may be equipped with certain other animals to produce a unique or upgraded effect.

The game starts with your character on the birthday where he receives his first sword and becomes a man. He inherits his father's, a great swordfighter and hero, old sword. After learning to throw it, you venture out into the world to fight monsters and have a good ol' time. Except that not all is as it seems...

Essentially, Crusader of Centy is a parable for environmentalist and expansionist issues as well as the morality of killing those who are different and strange.

Tropes used in Crusader of Centy include:

Ability Required to Proceed: If you want to get anywhere, you'll need to pick up certain abilities. While these usually come in the form of new animal companions, there are exceptions, such as learning how to throw your sword from an instructor at the Rafflesia Training Ground, or learning how to talk to animals from the Fortune Teller.
Amplifier Artifact: The Moa Bird. When you pair him up with another animal, his teammate's abilities will be more potent than usual: Flash the Cheetah makes you run even faster, Inferno the Lion and Chilly the Penguin give your sword stronger elemental damage, and so on and so forth.
Ancestral Weapon: Your father's rusty sword.
Androcles' Lion: Many of your recruited animals must be saved first.
Animal Talk: Animals speak their language, and understanding them requires you to forsake your knowledge of the human tongue. You get better, though.
Bee Afraid: Hitting certain switches will destroy trees containing bees that will instantly try to attack you. Interestingly, they aren't dangerous because they try to sting you - in fact, they actually don't do any direct damage. They will, however, push you and carry you around, potentially dragging you into damaging hazards or slam-dunking you into bottomless pits that hurt you instead.
BFS: While it's a normal-sized sword for her, Maldra's sword is longer than the main character is tall!
Big Bad: The Spirit Energy, apparently. Given that it's blocking off monsters from returning to the Underworld, it's indirectly responsible for all the suffering they experience.
Born In The Wrong Timeline: The imprisoned adventurer in the epilogue: Amon. Since monsters don't live among humans in the new timeline, this cantankerous Blood Knight is a public nuisance instead of a revered hero.
Bribing Your Way to Victory: To recruit Flash the Cheetah, you need to beat him in a race. The problem is that he's way faster than you, and you have no hope of beating him even if you drive perfectly. However, he's willing to slow down if you pay him 50 Malins, which is the intended way to beat him.
Broken Aesop: A two-fold example.
- Firstly, the game wants you to know that Humans Are Bastards, and monsters are innocent victims of discrimination. It really, really wants you to know that, to the point that the time traveling road trip during the second half of the game is kicked off by killing Maldra and thus tainting the Place of Peace with bloodshed. Of course, for this to work, you have to ignore the fact that at least 9 times out of 10, conflicts between monsters and humans are instigated by the monsters themselves, who are constantly shown attacking people unprovoked with the intent to maim, kidnap, and kill. Likewise, you killing Maldra is a textbook case of self-defense seeing as how she taunts you and immediately starts trying to cleave you in half with her gigantic sword. The only time you unambiguously murder an innocent monster is when you destroy the heart of the MotherMonster, and that's still exactly one case where you are the aggressor vs countless moments where you aren't.
- Secondly, the game itself implores you to find a peaceful solution to the conflict between humans and monsters so the two species can coexist peacefully. So naturally, the game ends with you promptly sending the monsters back to where they came from, creating a timeline where monsters and humans remain separate and have never mingled among one another. So much for coexisting peacefully, huh?
The Bully: Billy, a mean local kid who constantly makes fun of and insults you. He's more of an immature nuisance though, and the fact that you constantly catch him doing things he calls babyish means that he comes off as more pitiful than annoying. Especially when you get the Holy Sword, which causes him to fly into an all-caps tirade of him screaming about how much he hates you.
The Cameo: Sonic the Hedgehog. You can find him relaxing in Anemone Beach, and can even talk to him! Unfortunately, he immediately tells you to get lost.
Canine Companion: Mac, your loyal pet dog and the first animal who you recruit.
Circling Birdies: The Big Bad Wolf's attack consists of hitting himself on the head with a hammer, and then using the stars to damage you.
Cool Sword: The Holy Sword, a shiny golden blade that you get as a reward for getting all three medals at the nearby training grounds. Receiving one means that you're officially recognized as a hero of the kingdom of Soleil.
Convection, Schmonvection: A stage is set around and inside of an active, near erupting volcano. Falling into the lava only removes 1 apple (life point).
Crowning Music of Awesome: Battle 3/Leviathan
Disappeared Dad: Your father ain't around much. Don't despair. You have your best friend Johnny the dog and you get his sword.
- You get to see him again in Heaven. He doesn't have a name, but he's stereotypically dad-like and refills your health. It's couldn't be anyone else.
Eldritch Abomination: The Five Senses and the Spirit Energy. They don't feel like proper living monsters, but rather abstract concepts given life and enough of a weird physical form for you to slash and hack to pieces. The Sense of Taste is especially bizarre as it's a series of living mouths that you don't even attack directly, but rather kill by eating all the apples in their boss room.
Faceless Eye: The Sense of Sight is a gigantic eye without a face. While the Spirit Energy technically has a face, it's ultimately another living eyeball surrounded by a dense clump of cloud-looking things.
Floating Platforms: Many many many floating platforms. Half the floor in some stages is such. Standing on the floor too long will make it collapse into a never ending pit/lava/ice etc.
Fox Chicken Grain Puzzle: Featuring a chicken, a caterpillar and a flower.
Generic Doomsday Villain: The Spirit Energy. It doesn't speak or even appear to be sentient, and even the way it blocks off the monsters' path home feels more incidental than truly malicious.
Genius Loci: It turns out that the entirety of Dahlia Valley is a giant monster. When you first visit, you climb her body. When you visit during the endgame, you go inside of her.
Hello, Insert Name Here: You give your character his own name at the start of the game. Officially, it's supposed to be Corona.
Hero of Another Story: Amon, a traveling hero that you periodically bump into during your adventure. He's going on a journey that's very similar to yours, but he doesn't seem to go any further beyond Freesia.
Heroes Prefer Swords: Even though they act more like boomerangs and you spend most of your time throwing them at stuff.
Humans Are Bastards: Not that the monsters are much better, but there's plenty of instances of humans being cruel to each other and the monsters they coexist with. People like Amon and the castle guards attack monsters for no real reason, the people in the Camellia Desert's ancient past imprison and execute each other out of the mere suspicion that they could be monsters, friendly monsters are massacred in a church, and you even kill the gigantic MotherMonster simply because she was there.
Kill It with Fire: Inferno's ability will ignite your sword.
Knight of Cerebus: Maldra, whose boss fight coincides with the game's shift towards a darker tone that goes all-in with showing the injustices that monsters suffer at the hands of humanity. She's also a fairly vicious, humorless foe lacking the goofier aspects of the bosses that came before her.
Magikarp Power: Pieces the Caterpillar. He doesn't do anything when you first recruit him, but he'll eventually metamorphose into a butterfly (named Monarchy) that allows you to directly control the movement of a thrown sword later in the game.
Moon Logic Puzzle: One of the animals you get is Rio, an armadillo that can be used as a platform to jump on (previously only used to cross water). One puzzle requires you to throw him into a bottomless pit where he will float unsuspended in the air allowing you to use him as a stepping stone.
Noble Demon: Leviathan. While putting you through an unexpected Secret Test of Character that made you think that your mother was in danger wasn't exactly nice, you did attack him unprovoked in the first place. But for what it's worth, he's willing to spare you and even joins your party once he realizes that you aren't a bad guy.
Puzzle Boss: Many, starting with Shuffler, the third boss. Once you've beat him, the amount of bosses that can be beaten by simply stabbing/sword-throwing with no care for animal effects of out-of-the-box strategies are few and far between.
Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Even if you change the effects of time, you remain the same.
Set Right What Once Went Wrong: With TIME TRAVEL.
Shifting Sand Land: The Camellia Desert, which has quicksand pits that don't suck you in but do spin you around and throw you. Necessary to reach some areas by slingshot jumping. Some pits have spikes in the middle deeper into the desert, requiring you to try to carefully weave around them as you slide... or alternatively, tank the hits and keep going.
Shout-Out:
- Mac's dialogue before you can understand the animal language is "Bow wow wow yippy-yo, yippy-yay".
- The first boss is literally the Big Bad Wolf, and you catch him breaking into a little old lady's house and trying to eat her.
- One important NPC is an old woman named Dorothy, who talks about how she was caught up in a tornado as a little girl and sent to a different world. She also had a pair of magic shoes that ultimately sent her home. It turns out that she wasn't sent to a different world, but rather the distant past.
- Your goal for the first half of the game is to reach the Tower of Babel. Its completion also coincides with humanity losing the ability to speak and understand a unified language.
Silent Protagonist: In keeping with the Zelda aesthetic, your character (canonically named Corona) is completely silent. The same, amusingly enough, goes for Amon, the Hero of Another Story who is likewise silent for most of his appearances except for one. But that one instance where he can talk coincides with the Tower of Babel scrambling the human language and making it impossible to understand what he's saying.
Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Complete with killer snowmen. Melts into a water level.
Spikes of Doom: Averted, spikes only do minor damage.
That's No Moon: The first mountain range where you battle monsters? It's a single giant monster. At the end of the game, you talk to her at a time before she became so large.
Stock Video Game Puzzle: All over the damn show.
Throwing Your Sword Always Works: The first technique you learn with it. Handy for cutting down grass (Familiar, no?) and necessary to beat some enemies/every damn boss. Even works as a boomerang.
Turns Red: The Octopus literally turns red when he's low on health.
Under the Sea: Complete with lack of oxygen. Can be That One Level.
Upgrade Artifact: All the animals. Varies from fast running to an extra life to a rideable plesiosaur. Many for your sword too. You can make it bounce of walls, guide it manually in flight, light it on fire or coat it with ice.
Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma: The American version has some translation issues.
What Measure Is a Non-Human?: This game is all about the morality of killing monsters. Whether they deserve it, who starts the violence and how if effects their families.
Xanatos Gambit: The seer gives you the ability to talk to animals and creates a path to the past in an attempt to have you bring about world peace.
You Bastard: The game loves to guilt trip you over killing monsters, many of which attack you unprovoked.
Zero Effort Boss: While it may take some time to figure out how to hurt it, MotherMonster's heart never attacks you or even moves around, and dies with two Sword Throws enhanced by a combination of Chilly and Inferno's powers. Justified since it is a heart, after all.