It’s the kind of thing you might expect from a book about Mario or Samus, but not so much from one about a semi-forgotten shirtless hero carrying, as foreword author Kurt Kalata calls it, “a gigantic spiked yo-yo.” And it’s fantastic. The book recently came out in a new extended edition with a poster, trading card, and stickers - and a deluxe version of the extended edition, which adds a wax pack of trading cards.
That’s The Legend of Argus: The Complete History of Rygar, a 154-page deep dive into Tecmo’s classic shield-swinging platformer series. Every now and then, you stumble onto something so narrow and obscure that there’s no financial reason for it to exist - just a writer who loves a subject so much they can’t help themselves. On the other, anything tied to a big franchise. On one side, you have comprehensive catalogs, typically broken down by console or publisher. We’re spoiled for great retro game books these days, yet those often fall into two groups.
