![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Terranigma (SNES, Replayed on SNES9X LME on PSP)
Ark is a simple boy living in a tiny village called Crysta. No one leaves, nothing changes, and Crystal Blue floats pleasantly through the sky. Until one day, Ark opens a mysterious box and everything changes.
One of the last games produced by Enix for the SNES, never released in the US, and arguably the best game created by the Quintet team. This is a semi-sequel to Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia, part of the “Creation of Heaven and Earth” series of games. This was apparently the first time I played through this since 2004, according to my notes and all the save files I could find. Which kind blew my mind, because I feel like I must have played it since then. It felt very fresh in my mind despite that.
They were definitely trying hard with the pretty visual and cutscenes—a lot of the graphic design is the culmination of the SNES era. The opening village has floating semitransparent bubbles of “crystal blue” that float through the air, and the first world map has a “wrapping” effect because it’s on the inside of the Earth. They punctuate each major event with 16-bit cutscenes. When you reach the outside world, they go to great lengths to show off the Mode 7 effects, especially when flying.
I have a particularly fondness for this over Illusion of Gaia because it leans more heavily into being a jrpg. You gain standard levels and monsters respawn, which allows you to grind past problems. (And the skewing of the stat system means this is sometimes necessary. The Bloody Mary boss is a notorious sticking point, but a few levels makes all the difference between it being impossible and easy.) You have a standard inventory and (most of the time) stores are available to restock your healing items. There’s a magic system that involves collecting Magirock and having it made into one-use rings (effectively spell charges), but it’s a lousy system and I never use it.
I suspect the fact that Bloody Mary is notorious is also because she comes at the end of Sylvain Castle, a particularly complicated dungeon with multiple puzzles and collectables, which also presents you with a new weapon that’s ostensibly stronger than the one you can buy in town, but that does less damage to every enemy in the castle due to its elemental properties. I had to whittle down Bloody Mary’s 350 HP 3-5 damage at a time; with the IcePick I was doing 1. (This was at level 21; I decided to try not grinding and just barely made it.) And one of the most interesting parts of the game, where you go back and forth to various towns so they can solve each other’s economic logjams, starts very soon after you leave.
The translation is a product of its time; I kinda wish there was a high-quality fan translation that captured more nuance with the dialogue…but at the same time I kinda don’t? There’s a nebulous mystery that comes with the weak translation. There are gaping plot holes in the game if you think about it too much or ask too many questions, but for the most part they’re probably better off not trying to answer them. A remake of this (which I can reasonably assume would never happen) would likely make the Elder and Yomi really talkative…but everything they say means another question Ark was too dumb to ask, or another lie he has to fall for. (On the other hand, it would be nice to remove the “ching chong” speak the people of Yongkou use.)
Some random observations: There are far fewer missables in this game than you’d think, because you can revisit 90% of the areas from Chapter 2 onward up through Chapter 4. The mystery play at Astartica makes much more sense when you've played the game once and realize that, despite the bad translation, they're foreshadowing the endgame revelations. I’m always annoyed that, in the last scene, Ark acts as if there was only one Yomi, rather than the lightside one who joined him only before the final dungeon.
The in-game clock out my final time at 10 hours and change, which was clearly wrong as I could play for an hour and have it only increment thirty minutes. I'm guessing my real playtime, including lost saves from battery issues, was more like 16 hours. I’m not sure how much of that was emulator slowdown issues and how much was the game not counting time on the subscreen, etc.
Overall: This was as solid an action-rpg as anything produced for the SNES; not without its quirks and with a dodgy translation, but definitely fun.
One of the last games produced by Enix for the SNES, never released in the US, and arguably the best game created by the Quintet team. This is a semi-sequel to Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia, part of the “Creation of Heaven and Earth” series of games. This was apparently the first time I played through this since 2004, according to my notes and all the save files I could find. Which kind blew my mind, because I feel like I must have played it since then. It felt very fresh in my mind despite that.
They were definitely trying hard with the pretty visual and cutscenes—a lot of the graphic design is the culmination of the SNES era. The opening village has floating semitransparent bubbles of “crystal blue” that float through the air, and the first world map has a “wrapping” effect because it’s on the inside of the Earth. They punctuate each major event with 16-bit cutscenes. When you reach the outside world, they go to great lengths to show off the Mode 7 effects, especially when flying.
I have a particularly fondness for this over Illusion of Gaia because it leans more heavily into being a jrpg. You gain standard levels and monsters respawn, which allows you to grind past problems. (And the skewing of the stat system means this is sometimes necessary. The Bloody Mary boss is a notorious sticking point, but a few levels makes all the difference between it being impossible and easy.) You have a standard inventory and (most of the time) stores are available to restock your healing items. There’s a magic system that involves collecting Magirock and having it made into one-use rings (effectively spell charges), but it’s a lousy system and I never use it.
I suspect the fact that Bloody Mary is notorious is also because she comes at the end of Sylvain Castle, a particularly complicated dungeon with multiple puzzles and collectables, which also presents you with a new weapon that’s ostensibly stronger than the one you can buy in town, but that does less damage to every enemy in the castle due to its elemental properties. I had to whittle down Bloody Mary’s 350 HP 3-5 damage at a time; with the IcePick I was doing 1. (This was at level 21; I decided to try not grinding and just barely made it.) And one of the most interesting parts of the game, where you go back and forth to various towns so they can solve each other’s economic logjams, starts very soon after you leave.
The translation is a product of its time; I kinda wish there was a high-quality fan translation that captured more nuance with the dialogue…but at the same time I kinda don’t? There’s a nebulous mystery that comes with the weak translation. There are gaping plot holes in the game if you think about it too much or ask too many questions, but for the most part they’re probably better off not trying to answer them. A remake of this (which I can reasonably assume would never happen) would likely make the Elder and Yomi really talkative…but everything they say means another question Ark was too dumb to ask, or another lie he has to fall for. (On the other hand, it would be nice to remove the “ching chong” speak the people of Yongkou use.)
Some random observations: There are far fewer missables in this game than you’d think, because you can revisit 90% of the areas from Chapter 2 onward up through Chapter 4. The mystery play at Astartica makes much more sense when you've played the game once and realize that, despite the bad translation, they're foreshadowing the endgame revelations. I’m always annoyed that, in the last scene, Ark acts as if there was only one Yomi, rather than the lightside one who joined him only before the final dungeon.
The in-game clock out my final time at 10 hours and change, which was clearly wrong as I could play for an hour and have it only increment thirty minutes. I'm guessing my real playtime, including lost saves from battery issues, was more like 16 hours. I’m not sure how much of that was emulator slowdown issues and how much was the game not counting time on the subscreen, etc.
Overall: This was as solid an action-rpg as anything produced for the SNES; not without its quirks and with a dodgy translation, but definitely fun.