Video Game / Gauntlet: Dark Legacy

1 Following

Essentially an expansion of Gauntlet Legends, it added more classes and feature twice as many levels, and adding an additional world with a new final boss. It retains the story where Sumner’s evil brother Garm gathered the Rune Stones in an attempt at controlling Skorne after unleashing him on the realms, but because he became impatient and could not find the 13th Rune Stone, Skorne broke free from the control of Garm and fatally crushed him with his palm before trapping his spirit in the Underground World, unleashing monsters on the eight realms and casting the Rune Stones to the farthest corners of the eight realms to prevent them from suppressing his evil.

Sumner returns to his tower and repels Skorne, who retreated into a temple, shattered the glass portal and sent its eight shards to several monsters to guard so no one can dare access the temple that has been desecrated, leaving it up to Sumner to summon eight heroes to recover the shards, reclaim the Rune Stones, and destroy Skorne for good. Produced during a transition in hardware generations, the console ports this time were released for the PlayStation 2, GameCube and Xbox. A portable version was also released for the Game Boy Advance, featuring an isometric perspective similar to Gauntlet III.

Tropes:

• Big Boo's Haunt: The entirety of the Forsaken Province. The levels are all in a dark forest where a decrepit town and its surrounding areas have all been invaded by hordes of undead, led by The Lich. Much later in the Dream World, the Haunted Grounds share the dark and evil forest and is followed directly by a literal Haunted House full of ghosts. The boss of this realm is fittingly the Shadow Wraith, a giant dark phantom and Skorne's most powerful guardian.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: The latter is the boss of the Ice Domain.
• Boss-Only Level: Exaggerated in Dark Legacy; every boss except the two fights with Skorne has its own level.
• Button Mashing: The point of the game. On the GC and PS2 ports, you can switch it to Robotron: 2084 style strafing controls in addition to just holding the button to fire. Both of them really help your thumbs.
• Circus of Fear: Enter the Carnival of the Lost, the first level of the Dream World and a circus full of monsters and demons
• Company Cross-References: The Lich in Dark Legacy is an undead who taunts you "COME HERE!". Midway Games was involved with both franchises.
• Deadly Rotary Fan: The propeller blades in the docks of the Sky Domain. A Nightmare Realm level has several huge fans blocking your way. You can hit the "slow down" switch to make it past them.
• Demonic Possession: The near-death Garm absorbs Skorne's essence after the latter's destruction in the Underworld, prompting Garm to take over as the True Final Boss in Dark Legacy.
• Disc-One Final Dungeon: The Desecrated Temple is the area accessed by beating all of the world bosses, features enemies from all four realms and has Skorne as the boss. Of course the appearance of a 13th rune stone on the UI around the game along with the final gate (which, in the Dreamcast version, has a massive bust of Skorne over it) means that a player likely won't be too fooled. Dark Legacy turns the Underworld into this although, again, players can find the teleporters for the final set of levels regardless.
• Distaff Counterpart: For the most part, each character type (Strength, Armor, Speed, and Magic) in Dark Legacy has a character of each gender. The only man's club is the Strength type, with the male Warrior and Dwarf.
• Bears Are Bad News: The Ice Domain in Dark Legacy is notable for having polar bears as the realm's golems. These bears' mouths have a more zombified look to it.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: As in Legends, Garm learns at a poor time that the powerful and demonic prince Skorne is not a force he can command easily. In this version of the story, Garm gets impatient and does not gather the thirteenth rune stone before summoning, and cannot control him without it. This gets Garm killed and his soul Dragged Off to Hell for his troubles.
• Exploding Barrels: Red barrels were straight up explosives in Dark Legacy, while in the Jester's levels, boxes of fireworks were the same way.
• Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat: In Dark Legacy there were green drumsticks with crossbones in them and a bite taken out of them. These were poisoned meat that could take away 100 Health, and unless you were a Wizard or a Sorceress of at least Level 50 you had to avoid them (if you were that Wizard / Sorceress of at least Level 50, though, you could use a potion to turn it into a healthy drumstick for 100 Health).
• Infinity +1 Sword: Sumner in Dark Legacy. He has the same moves as the wizard but all of his stats are maxed out making him the strongest character in the game. You can't unlock until the final realm however so there isn't a lot of areas where he's worth using.
• Level Drain: Black-robed Death in Dark Legacy (arcade and consoles) steals Character Levels. If you're armed with the halo, the tide is reversed, which is actually one of the best ways to rack up easy level-ups.
• Level Grinding: In some versions of Dark Legacy, the Spider Queen gives tons of experience, even more than the bosses that come after her for some reason. Once a character is strong enough to be able to beat her without much trouble, she becomes a great source of experience and gold.
• Levitating Lotus Position: The Wizard class has this as an Idle Animation.
• Life Drain: Red-robed Death does the life-stealing here. If you have the Anti-Death Halo, you steal Health from Death.
• Mana Meter: The Turbo Meter in Dark Legacy. It gives you a close area attack good when surrounded by enemies when yellow, and a deadly forward wave / straight shot attack when red. Otherwise it merely powers up your regular attack (such as the Archer firing a stronger arrow, or the Jester dropping a crate of chickens).
• Ms. Fanservice: The Sorceress exudes Hot Witch by strutting like a supermodel and leans forward whenever she shoots magic bolts.
• Not His Sled: In Gauntlet Legends, Skorne is the Big Bad for the entire game, from start to finish. Here, however, Garm turns out to be Not Quite Dead and absorbs Skorne's power after his defeat in the underworld, ursuping Skorne as the villain of the game's final realm.
• Novelization: The game has one, Paths Of Evil. It ends on a Sequel Hook. And a sequel was written, Paths of Fear. Unfortunately, the publisher went bankrupt, and no one else has picked it up.
• Pivotal Boss: Nine of the 11 bosses are like this.
• Point of No Return: The game has several levels that are effectively split into sublevels; miss something before you step onto the transporter/go through the gate and hopefully you didn't need it. The game will (usually) warn you first, though.
• Sarcasm Mode: The Jester goes: "I'm so happy for you" if in multiplayer you steal an item HE was trying to get.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: One of the nasty surprises from the chest where death was sealed in was what looked like a barrel head with yellow lensed glasses and a crown of TNT in Dark Legacy: If you opened a chest and HE came out, RUN! You only had a few seconds before he exploded and took out the area around him.
• Secret Character:
  • For the unlockables you had to get all the coins under a time limit in certain levels, and if you did the unlockable characters had at least 50 points more in their main stats than their "normal versions."
  • There are special codes you can put in as your name in the PS2 and GameCube versions to play as alternate characters. Among them were a waitress Sorceress (complete with throwing plates!), a football hurling quarterback Knight, and an alien Wizard. In the end you've got a total of 25 playable secret characters, outside of the normal secret characters.
• Squishy Wizard: The Sorceress also counts as this, being even frailer than the Wizard but is slightly faster.
• Stealth Pun: Dark Legacy changes Death's mechanics to include two variants, but only elaborates where barely needed; one that drains your health, and one that drains experience points. The one that takes health is wearing a red cloak, and the one that takes experience has a black cloak.
• True Final Boss: Garm. The very same mage trounced by Skorne in the intro of Legends.
• Überwald: The Forsaken Province and its hero, the Sorceress.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: The Lich is this, especially for people expecting something like the Dragon. As one of two bosses that moves around, the Lich is tough, he has a leaping slam that lets him close the distance quick, and has some surprisingly powerful attacks with wide ranges that'll cut unseasoned heroes down to size like greased lightning.
• Your Head A-Splode: The victory cutscene upon beating the game shows all the monsters across the realms perishing. Some crumble to dust, others burn away, and the zombies have their heads explode.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Skorne's done for, now we can re— "Skorne is dead... Steal his power..." Goddamn it, Garm!

---