Granstream Saga
Apr. 10th, 2010 01:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroBack in the 90s, there was a developer called Quintet that did a lot of development work for Enix, including ActRaiser, Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, Robotrek and Terranigma. Enix had money problems as the 90s waned and closed Enix of America, so this game (officially made by "Shade" but with most of the same Quintet people) was localized by THQ. Now, Enix was never the greatest in terms of translations, but THQ delivered one of the worst I've seen in a very long time.
Granted, if you loved Quintet games, you're better off remembering Terranigma as the last of them. It's wonderfully done, perhaps tied with Link to the Past for best 3/4-view adventure game of the 16-bit era. (Don't remember it? That's because it wasn't released in the US. You need to emulate it.) Which isn't to say this game is terrible, and besides the switch to isometric 3-D and the over-abundance of cutscenes, it's not that far off from their previous style. It's fairly standard action/adventure, searching through dungeons for treasures and missing macguffins.
They added a new combat system that takes some getting used to. You see all of the enemies on the main screen, and if you touch one, the screen zooms in and you enter a one-on-one duel with them. There's a lot of blocking and dodging, and battles tend to last a while. Both you and the enemy have both HP and Life Points, and when you run out of HP, you get knocked down, which restores all of your HP at the cost of one LP. When the monster runs out of LP, you win. Run out of your LP, and it's game over (which is possible in pretty much any random battle).
You gain levels and LP at set points in the game and by picking up special items; you don't gain any sort of XP from fighting, so it actually ends up in your best interest to avoid most battles unless you're trying to win dropped items from enemies. (Which is a marked departure--Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia required you to kill every monster in an area to level up, and Terranigma had a standard XP system.) The rpg elements feel kinda tacked-on.
The game is also really difficult, though if you're like me, you can semi-cheat by getting the best weapon (the Onimaru) before you do the first real dungeon, which means you only have to land 2-4 hits on any enemy, and it sometimes insta-kills. Which doesn't mean the game is a breeze, mind you, as you still need a decent amount of skill with the system to land those 2-4 hits.
The graphics are excellent for the era, with full anime cutscenes and some clever effects. Though the fact that characters in system (as opposed to in cutscenes or close-ups) don't have faces is...off-putting. (I kinda understand why they did it, but that doesn't make it less weird in many scenes.)
And the plot is engrossing. It actually moves a lot faster and is a lot fuller than you'd expect. There are a lot of events, and you move from place to place very quickly. If you removed the cutscenes, the pacing would be about on par with Soul Blazer or Terranigma. And the main character's magic bracelet (translated as a scepter for reasons I never really followed) has a clever power that the storyline does a good job of exploring, even though it means he's particularly stupid at times. The dialogue is often painful, though, and the ending comes off as a bit out of nowhere and confusing. In both cases, I blame the translators.
Not great, not horrible, but fun. And one of many games that makes me wish I could read Japanese to get the real story. Perhaps in another decade, when emulation has advanced again, there will be an improved translation patch for this game.
Granted, if you loved Quintet games, you're better off remembering Terranigma as the last of them. It's wonderfully done, perhaps tied with Link to the Past for best 3/4-view adventure game of the 16-bit era. (Don't remember it? That's because it wasn't released in the US. You need to emulate it.) Which isn't to say this game is terrible, and besides the switch to isometric 3-D and the over-abundance of cutscenes, it's not that far off from their previous style. It's fairly standard action/adventure, searching through dungeons for treasures and missing macguffins.
They added a new combat system that takes some getting used to. You see all of the enemies on the main screen, and if you touch one, the screen zooms in and you enter a one-on-one duel with them. There's a lot of blocking and dodging, and battles tend to last a while. Both you and the enemy have both HP and Life Points, and when you run out of HP, you get knocked down, which restores all of your HP at the cost of one LP. When the monster runs out of LP, you win. Run out of your LP, and it's game over (which is possible in pretty much any random battle).
You gain levels and LP at set points in the game and by picking up special items; you don't gain any sort of XP from fighting, so it actually ends up in your best interest to avoid most battles unless you're trying to win dropped items from enemies. (Which is a marked departure--Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia required you to kill every monster in an area to level up, and Terranigma had a standard XP system.) The rpg elements feel kinda tacked-on.
The game is also really difficult, though if you're like me, you can semi-cheat by getting the best weapon (the Onimaru) before you do the first real dungeon, which means you only have to land 2-4 hits on any enemy, and it sometimes insta-kills. Which doesn't mean the game is a breeze, mind you, as you still need a decent amount of skill with the system to land those 2-4 hits.
The graphics are excellent for the era, with full anime cutscenes and some clever effects. Though the fact that characters in system (as opposed to in cutscenes or close-ups) don't have faces is...off-putting. (I kinda understand why they did it, but that doesn't make it less weird in many scenes.)
And the plot is engrossing. It actually moves a lot faster and is a lot fuller than you'd expect. There are a lot of events, and you move from place to place very quickly. If you removed the cutscenes, the pacing would be about on par with Soul Blazer or Terranigma. And the main character's magic bracelet (translated as a scepter for reasons I never really followed) has a clever power that the storyline does a good job of exploring, even though it means he's particularly stupid at times. The dialogue is often painful, though, and the ending comes off as a bit out of nowhere and confusing. In both cases, I blame the translators.
Not great, not horrible, but fun. And one of many games that makes me wish I could read Japanese to get the real story. Perhaps in another decade, when emulation has advanced again, there will be an improved translation patch for this game.
