Rygar (1987) gave you one of the great NES weapons: the Diskarmor, a spiked shield on a chain you fling ahead of you and, later, use to grapple across gaps. You're a legendary warrior fighting to free the land of Argool from the tyrant Ligar.

Like Strider, the NES version is not the arcade game. Tecmo's 1986 coin-op is a straight-ahead side-scrolling brawl that ends when it ends. The cartridge kept the hero and the weapon and rebuilt everything else as an exploration game with an overworld, and it's much the better for it.

The shape of it is unusual. Side-scrolling stages connect to top-down overworld areas, and you move between the two constantly, which gives the world a real geography rather than a level select. Tone and Last are your two stat bars, rising as you kill things, and the items you find are mostly traversal tools: the Grappling Hook to cross chasms, the Pulley to ride ropes, the Crossbow, the Wind Pulley, a set of Mind powers you cast from a menu. Every one of them opens somewhere you walked past an hour ago.

That places it in the action-RPG and Metroidvania space before either of those had a name. It also means the game is quietly generous: there's almost always somewhere new to try, and the difficulty is in navigation rather than in twitch.

The atmosphere is the reason it stuck. Argool is green and overgrown and empty in a way that suggests something happened here, the music is mournful where it should be triumphant, and the Diskarmor whirling out on its chain is one of the best-animated things on the console.

A deeper game than its arcade roots suggested, and one people still discover with surprise.