{"id":25355,"date":"2026-05-26T23:07:29","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T04:07:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/retromaggedon.com\/?page_id=25355"},"modified":"2026-05-26T23:07:30","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T04:07:30","slug":"ashguine-densetsu-no-seisenshi-msx2-review","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/retromaggedon.com\/index.php\/ashguine-densetsu-no-seisenshi-msx2-review\/","title":{"rendered":"AshGuine: Densetsu no Seisenshi (MSX2) Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
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AshGuine: Densetsu no Seisenshi (MSX2) Review<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
AshGuine Home Page<\/a><\/td>MSX2 Game Catalog<\/a><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s pronounced Ash-gwee-nee, like linguine.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

~by tankMage (May 2026)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Score: 65\/100 (Poor)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

AshGuine (or AshGuine: Densetsu no Seisenshi if you want to get fancy) is the very first MSX title I have played and it was a great experience. Discovering a totally new (for me) gaming system and playing this strange title was a blast. I won’t lie, this game is a total mess, which is why I gave it such a bad score. But hear me out: It has its own charm that some gamers may appreciate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what is AshGuine about you ask? Well, it’s kind of hard to read the scrolling text at the beginning, which is in italics, so I had some trouble piecing the story together. From what I gather, the planet Nepenthus was conquered by an evil overlord named Banutracus and his army of Gooligans. You read that right, the bad guy has an army of creatures called Gooligans.<\/p>\n\n\n

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This is fine.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Time passes and two of the natives of Nepenthus (I’m not even gonna try to spell their names) have a child who grows up to be a strong warrior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apparently, the two Nepenthians attempt to rebuild their world, which angers Banutracus who orders their deaths. This is where our hero, Lyle or Ryle OR Ashguine (whatever you wanna call him) finds his slain parents and swears revenge. The plot gets hazy after this, but it seems that Lyle is supposed to collect the relics of a legendary hero, who is also called Ashguine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You start the game in a really detailed and colorful temple that has a great sci-fi\/fantasy vibe. As promising as this sounds, the game quickly shows its flaws. Ashguine or Lyle or whatever his name is, jumps like he’s submerged in maple syrup. Enemies spawn constantly and all you have is a lame punch attack to defend yourself with. Eventually Ashguine’s punch turns into a tail swipe that’s arguably worse, because it becomes difficult to hit the bouncing enemies. Both attacks have small hit boxes and are slow to execute. Getting used to dealing with the constant stream of monsters becomes second nature after a while, but it’s a real headache at first thanks to the hero’s crappy attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n

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This is one of the more coherent bits of dialog.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The game expects players to figure where to go and what to do in the early phases while being pelted mercilessly with strange creatures. Luckily, the hero has a pretty big health pool and it takes a while to die. There are also NPCs who drop hints in nearly every area, but they are vague at best. That said, the vague instructions may be a byproduct of the translation I used, but we’ll get to that later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At any rate, I wandered around and died a lot before I figured out where to go even with the help of a walkthrough I found on a Japanese website. AshGuine feels a lot like Castlevania II at times, because the game requires players to do a lot of things that are unusual or even counterintuitive in order to progress. For example, talking to NPCs often opens up new paths, but there is no way of knowing where said paths are located, so you just have to wander around. I often wondered if the game manual provided hints, but couldn’t find a copy of it online, so I guess it’ll remain a mystery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AshGuine also has a few RPG elements….really strange RPG elements. Everyone will likely recognize the hero’s core stats (Life, Power, Defense, and Exp) but they do not work the way one would expect. Killing certain monsters grants the hero a point or three in a specific stat. If you defeat a bouncing eyeball, you’ll get a point of power, while smashing a walking mushroom nets you a whole life point. Stats don’t seem to have caps, so you could, in theory, get 9999 in every category, but most monsters stop yielding bonuses after a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stat system gets even more bizarre when you realize you need to hit certain requirements to get most of the items in the game. These requirements are astronomically high compared to what you get from monsters. The final item requires 1000 power and 2000 experience. While power wasn’t too difficult to farm, it took me forever to get 2000 Exp, since the only way to safely get it is to talk to the same NPC over and over again. It was brutal, trust me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As bad as this game may seem, it starts to become more fun in the second half and is pretty enjoyable by the end. You’ll find boots that make jumping not suck and a weapon that actually works. Exploration is still enigmatic, but the internet can do some of the lifting for you if you are not adverse to using guides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The colorful and exotic setting also comes to the rescue. AshGuine does a great job of making you feel like you are exploring an alien world that has been ravaged by war, which is amazing when you account for the fact that just about every screen is a flat plain filled with respawning monsters and intermittent NPCs. Excellent backgrounds and atmospheric music are to thank for AshGuine’s atmosphere. I gotta give Bit2 (the developers) points for originality. However (there’s always a catch with this game) everything is surrounded by an ugly border that was probably included to help ease the MSX2’s scrolling problems by making the action screen smaller. I’d hate to see what this game would have looked like under poor performance conditions, it was rough as it was.<\/p>\n\n\n

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That’s one weird lookin’ goomba.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

AshGuine also gets points for being a cartridge release. Anyone who has played old floppy disks can tell you all about painful load times and disk switching. While this game loads every time you change areas, it’s nowhere near as bad as MSX2 disk times, which were more frequent and longer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I just wish the controls weren’t so mushy. While the controls are laid out in an acceptable (howbeit archaic) manner, they do not respond very swiftly. I said the jumping was floaty earlier, well this also extends to attacking and even moving to some degree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will say I really enjoyed the control layout. Jumping, attacking, and walking are all performed using the bottom row of keys. The status window is bound to F1. Despite it feeling awkward at first, I found this layout really comfortable. A modern game would probably have players pushing WASD, Q, and E for hours, which gets uncomfortable for an old man like me. AshGuine’s layout let me take advantage of my keyboard’s hand rest. Nice!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, I should probably talk about Django’s translation which is what I used to play this game. Django is a prolific translator, but his (or her?) translations are very bare bones. Word on the street is Django uses one of the automated translation systems to convert in-game text from Japanese to English, so you can imagine how weird the dialog in AshGuine can get.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Django catches a lot of flak, but I appreciate their efforts. Most of the games they have covered have no English translation whatsoever, so Django’s work allows people who can’t speak a word of Japanese (like me) to play these games and at least sort of understand the text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In many ways, the translation for AshGuine felt very appropriate. A lot of the dialog in games from the 1980s was garbled (anyone remember “You are winner” and “I feel asleep”?) So AshGuine feels like something you would have popped in an NES, except on steroids. Expect to be treated to lines like “After father died you could only get a lost battle” if you use Django’s translation. At any rate, it’s better than nothing and I’m grateful to have it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note: I did some digging and found out that Django is a French guy who translates games from Japanese to both French and English. He seems to have been around since 2008, which is quite a long run for this kind of thing. It also makes what he does a bit more impressive since English is not his first language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Final Thoughts<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve been reviewing games for ten years now and I gotta say I haven’t encountered anything quite like AshGuine: Densetsu no Seisenshi. It’s weird, it’s unwieldy, it’s poorly cobbled together, yet it’s also magical in its own way. Bit2 was a new developer at the time, so it’s understandable that they made a lot of rookie mistakes. To Bit2’s credit, AshGuine dared to experiment and you can almost feel the enthusiasm that was poured into it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sure, it’s an objectively bad game, but it’s also fun if you can get past it’s many flaws. That said, I can only recommend AshGuine to the brave and the patient. In fact you’ll need to be very patient to get though this slog, but you may also find some joy in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thank you for checking out my AshGuine review!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RetroMaggedon.com \u00a92026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AshGuine: Densetsu no Seisenshi (MSX2) Review AshGuine Home Page MSX2 Game Catalog It\u2019s pronounced Ash-gwee-nee, like linguine. ~by tankMage (May 2026) Score: 65\/100 (Poor) AshGuine (or AshGuine: Densetsu no Seisenshi if you want to get fancy) is the very first MSX title I have played and it was a great experience. Discovering a totally new … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-25355","page","type-page","status-publish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/retromaggedon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/retromaggedon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/retromaggedon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/retromaggedon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/retromaggedon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25355"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/retromaggedon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25357,"href":"https:\/\/retromaggedon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25355\/revisions\/25357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/retromaggedon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}