Have you played… Gotta Protectors: Cart of Darkness?

The legend of Gotta Protectors is truly a fable for the ages. Indulge an old man a while, and allow me to tell you this tale — because, frankly, the upshot of it is that Gotta Protectors is a frickin’ brilliant game, and you should play it.

Ahem.

Once upon a time, there was a magical kingdom of undiscovered treasures (and festering piles of cack, but we don’t talk about those). That kingdom was known as the Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace, or XBLIG, and it played host to a very special game known as Protect Me Knight — or, more accurately, まもって騎士, since despite the game being fully playable in English, it maintained its Japanese title on its store page, thereby dooming it to being completely ignored by all but the most insufferable of weebs. And, uh, Japanese people, but we all know none of them owned an Xbox 360.

Well, my children, I was one of those insufferable weebs, intrigued by the prospect of a Japanese indie game on a console not known for being particularly supportive to Japanese games in general (apart from shoot ’em ups, inexplicably) and thus more than willing to cross the great Microsoft’s palm with digital silver for the privilege of discovering exactly what this pixelated bundle of intrigue might be.

Protect Me Knight, it transpired, was an absolutely brilliant little retro-style game that was one of the earliest examples I can recall seeing of “modern retro”: games that adopt an authentic retro-style aesthetic, but which pull off feats that the original hardware on which the aesthetic is based would never have been capable of.

Not only that, it was a game by Ancient, a company run by legendary video game musician Yuzo Koshiro — and one that had previously worked on some real bangers, such as the excellent 8-bit version of Sonic the Hedgehog, Streets of Rage 2 and the The Story of Thor series of RPGs. But I digress.

In Protect Me Knight’s case, its “retro bit” was derived from how it looked like a Famicom game, and its “modern” bit came in the form of the sheer number of enemies on screen at once. The game was a relatively simple affair in which you and up to three other players were tasked with protecting a princess from incoming hordes of enemies — and I mean hordes. There were hundreds of the buggers on screen at once, in a sight that would have made the poor Famicom spontaneously combust.

Your aim was simple: beat the shit out of all the enemies before they got to the princess. In order to better achieve this, several different character classes were available, each of which had their own strengths and weaknesses as well as their own unique lineup of skills. They were also able to construct and repair barricades around the battlefield, making the game as a whole something of a frantic combination of beat ’em up, hack-and-slash action RPG and real-time strategy game.

Protect Me Knight remains a favourite of mine that still sits proudly on my Xbox 360’s hard drive, despite the XBLIG marketplace being long gone. And when I heard that a sequel named Gotta Protectors was coming to Nintendo 3DS in 2016, I was enormously excited — that is, until I discovered that it wasn’t coming to Europe. And the 3DS, of course, was the first handheld console Nintendo had produced that actually implemented region locking. Curses!

I was tempted to pick up a North American 3DS just to play the game but ultimately determined that it probably wasn’t worth the hassle of trying to set up international eShop accounts. And so, I resigned myself to a life without Gotta Protectors.

Just a little colour drained from my world that day; I knew that things would never quite be the same… until it was announced that Gotta Protectors was getting a Switch follow-up, of course, and that it would be getting a physical release via Limited Run Games, featuring not only the full game, but also all of the DLC.

This week, that Nintendo Switch cartridge finally plopped through my letterbox, and the colour has returned to my world. Gotta Protectors: Cart of Darkness is here, and it is a thing of beauty and wonder.

The basic concept of Gotta Protectors (as we shall refer to it hereafter for simplicity’s sake) is similar to that of Protect Me Knight in that you’re attempting to protect Princess Lola from hordes of enemies. The difference this time around is that Lola has a job of her own besides simply standing around being useless and screaming.

Spend the opening moment of each level ensuring that she is safely ensconced in her moving castle, and she’ll proceed along a series of tracks towards an enemy fortress, at which point she will proceed to batter the shit out of it with the castle until it collapses.

When this is accomplished, a stage is clear and you have the option to level up your character, the princess and your defences — though these upgrades are only temporary. Clear a series of stages and you complete a mission, at which point you return to town and are able to purchase various permanent upgrades, including new skills for your characters and upgrades to the castle’s basic abilities.

Like Protect Me Knight, there are a series of playable characters available. When playing solo, you can take up to three into battle and switch between them at will; this is handy, because each character can only have three skills equipped at once, so by taking multiple along you can cover multiple bases. For example, you can take one character whose skills are focused on dealing damage and clearing out enemies, and another that is good at building up and repairing defences.

As the game progresses, additional elements are introduced to the mix, including coloured walls that need keys to remove, holes that you need to stand in so that the castle can roll over the top of you, teleporters that obfuscate pathways to useful items and branching paths in the tracks that the castle rolls along.

These new features — and new enemy types — are introduced at a gradual pace, meaning that you’re never left just doing the same thing for too long, but neither are you suddenly overwhelmed with a huge amount of new things to worry about all at once.

Between stages, the game features some genuinely amusing cutscenes that poke fun at the conventions of ’80s games, video games in general, popular media tropes and all manner of other things, including Ancient’s past games. The whole game is very much a parody experience rather than something to be taken remotely seriously — but it backs this concept up with incredibly strong, enjoyable gameplay and plenty of replay value.

Not only that, but the game as a whole is a love letter to retro gaming in general, not just its Famicom-style aesthetic. Collectible game cartridges pay homage to classics of the ’80s gaming scene, and a customisable soundtrack allows you to change the music to sound as if the game is being played on a PC-88, Mega Drive, Game Boy, Wonderswan or Super NES.

It’s always been abundantly clear that Koshiro and company at Ancient genuinely love video games — and Gotta Protectors: Cart of Darkness is one of the best examples of this to date, because while it most certainly takes the piss out of a lot of things, it does so with affection and fondness rather than spite and snark.

It’s a refreshingly light-hearted experience, but one with plenty of depth to enjoy over the long term — particularly if you can either bring some friends along to play it in local multiplayer, or can recruit some buddies to play online. It absolutely deserves to be in everyone’s Switch library — so if you’re yet to enjoy it for yourself, pick it up this weekend and have a chaotic fun time defending the righteous princess from the totally bodacious dudes who seek to cause havoc in the kingdom.

Gotta Protectors: Cart of Darkness is available digitally via the Nintendo eShop. You are, unfortunately, a full year late to pre-order the physical version from Limited Run — but you might get lucky on eBay if you look!

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