Guardian's Crusade is a traditional RPG fused with quirky "Tamagotchi"-style elements.   While in the traditional sense, the game uses all the tried-and-true RPG stat building, exploration, weapons and items buying, and talking, its novel focus comes into play during raising of the supporting character, Baby.

The player takes control of a young knight who stumbles upon a bizarre pink elephant/pig creature which was accidentally dropped by a stork who was making a delivery to its mother. Predictably, Baby sees the Knight as its mother and follows him around everywhere. The player's job is to take Baby to the other side of the world and reunite Baby with its mother. The way is long and fraught with danger as the knight uncovers an intricate plot of evil that once again threatens the existence of his world and is intimately involved with the identity and purpose of Baby.

A large portion of the game is spent raising Baby into a useful and powerful companion.  Treated correctly, Baby can be a great asset to your quest. Treated poorly, Baby will attack you and refuse your commands, making your task much more difficult. Baby goes up in statistics like the Knight through battle experience points. Periodically, the player must feed Baby snacks which consist of items found during the quest. Also, to feel useful, Baby must be sent on fetching missions where he may or may not bring you something you can use later in the game. Praising or scolding Baby during these missions, as well as feeding good or bad items to him, determines his growth and relationship to the Knight character. 

During battles the player can also issue commands to Baby which may or may not be followed according to how Baby feels about the Knight at the time. Regardless of these options, the single-most important task appears to be keeping Baby from dying during battle. This is a difficult task at first because, at the beginning of the game, Baby is very weak and gets killed all the time by the enemies. Healing is a big necessity to keep the relationship from turning sour. An added bonus is Baby's ability to absorb transformations and attacks from defeated enemies, which he'll use to deliver bigger damage. During battles, Baby attacks, heals, or defends randomly with very limited control by the player.  This is why basically this game consists of one playable character, the Knight. Baby ultimately becomes an accessory character that the player must take care of but not control.

Gameplay, excluding the Baby interactions, is very standard RPG menu driven combat.  The Knight can buy stronger weapons and armor for more damaging attacks, but effect-wise all the weapons appear mostly the same. Magic is not present in the usual sense but is handled through the use of 'living toys'. These toys are collected from treasure boxes or found in the environment and they act in a supporting capacity. During each combat turn, the Knight can call up the aid of any of the toys he has collected to either attack the enemy, heal the party, provide supporting stats, or to put on a useless show such as cheering or doing play-by-play announcements. Toys can either stay during the entire battle or for only one turn. The Knight can call up multiple toys to aid him in any battle.

While many players will find this toy concept very entertaining, I found it annoying at times  since it's basically not much different from regular magic. Most of the toys are pretty useless  because either they possess extremely weak attacks or just because they really don't do anything to help the battle. Another problem is that by the time the player calls up most of the toys they think will be useful in combat against a boss, the boss is killed by Baby attacking and the Knight never even gets a chance to attack.  While the living toys idea is an interesting concept in the end it really does little to improve on the basic RPG idea.

One plus is that all enemies are visible on the field and can be avoided. The enemies appear as either pink ghosts, which chase you, or white ghosts, which run away from you.  As the character gains levels, pink ghosts will become white and run away.  This is useful in determining if you are strong enough to leave the area and whether or not you have been to a particular location before.   The rest of the gameplay involves running around towns and the countryside talking to people and going on lots of mini-quests. This is a very task oriented RPG. Going from town to town solving everybody's problems is a very outdated concept and one which, unfortunately, this game overuses rather than trying to emphasize a really good story and character development present in today's top RPGs.

Graphics are the weakest part of Guardian's Crusade. The environments, while 3D and fully rotatable, are very bland, using simple color schemes that belong on 16-bit generation consoles. Sometimes, it seems that the entire game is a trek across an everlasting brown dirt road surrounded by green fields and pointy trees. Characters and enemies are fully polygonal but all with low detail. Sound and music involve typical repeating tracks which only rarely add to the personality of characters or battle ambiences.

Overall, Guardian's Crusade comes across as a mixed RPG. While the "Tamagotchi"-style relationship with Baby is refreshing, the rest of the game does not inspire accolades for originality. Hardcore RPGers will find it satisfying, but I advise casual RPG players to stay away and save your money on bigger and better offerings.