Silver Falls: Guardians and Metal Exterminators (3DS)

Also available on Switch

Silver Falls: Guardians and Metal Exterminators had a troubled history on the eShop.  Due to a clerical error in the eShop filing (it was listed as working on all models of 3DS whereas it actually only works on New 3DS), it got pulled from the eShop very shortly after launch and took a couple months to get restored.  Despite that difficulty, though, it was worth the wait because this is a truly excellent 3DS game.  I was fortunate enough to snag it before it was initially delisted, so while the version I've spent the most time playing has some glitches and bugs that were fixed in the updated version that was re-listed on the eShop, I still had an absolute blast with the game.  All screenshots are courtesy of Sungrand.

Guardians and Metal Exterminators is a bit of an odd duck in that the "main" game modes only make up like 5% of the content in the game.  Game A and Game B are designed to emulate the old Tiger Electronics handheld LCD games.  They're simple score chasers with shallow but addicting gameplay.  Unless you're a serious score chaser, they're unlikely to hold your interest for more than five or ten minutes here or there.  That said, that's part of the purpose of Guardians and Metal Exterminators; it's meant to be a game you can pick up and play for a few minutes when you have down time without needing to invest a lot of time in a long story mode or keep up with a lengthy narrative.

That said, Frontier Guardians, the game's ostensibly-extra content, is actually where the vast majority of the gameplay is.  It's a mission-based RPG mode where you start off with two playable characters, Oxa and Gold, and play through set missions.  Don't let the mission objectives fool you; the way you earn moose tokens to buy items and xp to upgrade your character is through killing enemies, not completing objectives.  Completing the objective just gets you 100% of your earned rewards instead of the 50% you get from failing the mission; if you manage to complete the mission's optional objective, you get 125% of the earned rewards.  The missions involve your chosen character running around in an overhead view, killing enemies, and completing your objectives.  As you progress through the game, you'll unlock a couple other characters, and there are even more characters you can unlock by using the Code Linker functions and connecting with other Silver Falls titles.  You can also play as the Metal Exterminators, too, but whereas every Guardian character has at least a few story scenes, none of the enemy characters do.  Bummer.  The way you see these story scenes is by upgrading your character, and you can see the story completion % on the character select menu, so you'll easily be able to tell what characters are complete and who still has unviewed story scenes.

For me, Frontier Guardians and the story scenes were the draw.  I get bored of old LCD games quickly, so that didn't really grasp me as anything more than a novelty, but Frontier Guardians is a lot of fun and provides a lot of Silver Falls lore if you go through the story scenes with every character.  The missions don't take long - on average five to ten minutes - and I've completed some in under a minute.  The objectives are randomly generated each time, so if you get a super hard one, no worries; you can either switch to a better character or just fail the mission, and the game will roll you a new mission.  It's a ton of fun and a great way to kill some time or unwind.  I definitely recommend this one highly.

My Rating - A