Okay I took a while to finally review this, but here we go!

I haven’t played Gotta Protectors on 3DS, but this isn’t my first tango with this series. My first time was playing a free NES rom some years ago called Amazon’s Running Diet, an infinite runner kind of game where the Amazon character needs to run to lose weight, but also avoid cake while running. Limited Run Games released a cartridge version of it, which they censored because they’re losers.

So anyways, I picked this up on launch, having previously no idea it existed and not listing it in the April release post. Let’s talk about it now that I took over a month to finish it!

Developer: Ancient
Publisher: 8-4
Release date:April 14th, 2022
Platforms: Switch
Genre: Tower Defense? Or something?

Review

You play as the Gotta Protectors. They’re a group that Gotta Protect the princess. So anyways, the Princess installed train wheels on the castle so it can move and attack enemy castles, to fight the Black Knight or whatever. The story isn’t very important, though it does end with a nice mushy feel good message about why video games are great. It’s a bit lame. The writing is all self-aware cringe and tired references to old games. It’s rarely funny, just a few moments that got a genuine giggle from me.

The presentation is very nice outside of the story, with extremely nice-looking, detailed 2D sprites. They emulate something you may see on an NES… and considering the Amazon sprite used here is the same as the one used in Amazon’s Running Diet, which is an NES game capable of running on actual NES hardware, the fact that they’re super-detailed sprites doesn’t preclude them from looking like something on the NES. The graphics are colorful and just pleasant to look at. As far as gameplay, the sprites are smaller and less detailed, but still very nice. It does look like a mess if you look at screenshots (seriously look at this), but after a few levels, you’ll get used to the chaos going on on-screen most of the time, since you’ll know what to focus on. And, outside of graphics, the music is great because it’s made by Yuzo Koshiro… Yeah.

So gameplay… It’s something of a tower defense game. You control one character who gets an attack and 3 skills. The character can also block, and tag out. You start every level by choosing 3 characters for your team, choosing their colors (this doesn’t matter) and selecting which skill set you want them to use. There’s a few preset skill sets, and one you can customize from skills that are in any skill set you unlocked. So this is a top-down game. Each level has train rails, and an enemy castle at the end. You can push (or carry, if you have the skill) the princess to place her onto the castle, at which point the castle will move forward on the track. Each stage in a level ends when your castle rams the enemy castle enough that it gets destroyed. You lose if the enemies kill the princess.

There’s some icons on the track where the castle must stop, and to be able to move again, you need to kill every enemy. Enemies spawn from these statue things (a few aren’t statues, but enemy units that move around), with each color of statue spawning different versions of the monsters (different color from the basic version of the enemy means being stronger). You can destroy the spawners either by killing all the enemies that come out of it (as each spawner has a limited amount of monsters that will come out of it)… or by going and destroying the spawner itself, which takes 2-3 hits. You can stop enemies in 2 ways: killing them before they get to the princess (heck, there’s a few levels that have areas that actually make the princess fully safe), or placing walls and turrets in the path towards the princess, which enemies HAVE to destroy if they want to move forward. You do have the amazing ability of healing barricades… by hitting them. Even a fully-destroyed wall can be fully recovered, as its remain stay on the floor for a little bit. Turrets can either shoot projectiles to damage/kill enemies, or have melee attacks meaning they’ll only hit enemies that are touching them. As the castle progresses, more enemies may spawn, some blocks may be cleared so you can move around more or find things (like keys and money), some barricades/turrets may spawn to help you out, and as you get keys you can clear up blocks of that color.

Your character is important of course. Some characters have the ability to build barricades (which means extra defense since just using the barricades that the game spawns is generally not enough), build turrets, attack from a distance, set up damage over time (like the mage’s fire spell), hit in a large area (like the mage’s ice spell), provide healing for you and the princess (and the princess also provides healing to you if you’re very close to her), carrying the princess (which is meaningful because the camera locks on the princess, so if you’re carrying her you can move more freely) and probably some things I’m missing. The characters’ basic attacks are all different, so you’ll probably find some you prefer (I like the prince because it does plenty of movement). Oh and when you tag out, it brings you back to the princess’ location, so if you’re far away, switching characters is a good way to get back to direct princess protection duties.

Each level has 4 stages. In-between stages, you can spend money (which you get from killing enemies, spawners and opening chests) to power up. You can power up your stats, skills, barricades and the princess. The game isn’t super clear about what this does, but I like to focus on stats and barricades, I found that to be pretty effective. This money you’re using means you’re more likely to win since you get stronger, but it’s also money you’re not bringing back to base after the level. Also those upgrades aren’t permanent, they only last for the current level. Once the level is done, the upgrades are gone. Outside of levels, you can spend money on 3 things: Skillsets (which essentially unlock new skills to use in the Custom skillset), the Castle (I assume this increases the castle’s HP, which isn’t super useful but might as well do it) and alms, which is a bar that goes down as you play levels. The more alms, the more likely you are to get the support of fairies in battle. The fairies might attack enemies or provide some healing, AFAIK. Doing certain secret objectives in stages spawns shiny chests, which will give you an NES cartridge. Those can be equipped on the characters for various kinds of stat boosts, and using them enough unlocks a second stat boost on that cartridge.

And that’s kind of about it. There’s 24 levels, each lasting 10-20 minutes depending on your strategy, and each level has 4 difficulties (you unlock difficulties above Easy and Normal by finishing the story). So if content is what you want, there’s a whole fucking lot of content here.

Overall

While the graphics are great and the core gameplay is mostly fine (and I have not too many problems with the presentation, though the “comedic” writing is kinda shit a lot of the time), I feel this game is a bit lacking in some areas, namely the leveling up aspect. Basically you’ll try all the characters, but very quickly you’ll find the 3 characters that work for you (for me it was Warrior, Mage and Prince), and once you unlocked all the skills you want for a character, there’s nothing really to waste money on other than alms to get help from fairies, or your castle, which has a pretty unclear effect. The NES carts you can find can be powered up, but there’s a pretty limited amount of effects so eventually you’ll just keep the one that does whatever you want (probably attack and defense increases).

Also, I feel it gets kinda boring by the end, because you start getting into the groove and every level ends up feeling like the exact same thing, even when it isn’t. That said, it has a pretty huge amount of content, with each of the 25 levels in the game having 4 difficulty levels, and with each level being kinda long, this has a lot of stuff to do. This is kinda why it took me so long to finish this, I’d play two levels, get tired of it (maybe play a third one), then not touch it for several days.

I have to only give this one a very mild recommendation. If you’re really bored, it’s probably fun for a bit. If you end up enjoying the core gameplay more than me, it might be very worthwhile since there is so much content (and there’s DLC with even more levels (and new skills for some characters, and new sound chips to emulate so you can make the music sound like it’s out of an SNES rather than an NES)). In the end this game didn’t do much for me. Not because it’s bad, it isn’t, but because I felt like I was done with it when I wasn’t even halfway through.

At least there’s some pretty nice Yuzo Koshiro music.