Partridge Senpai's 2023 Beaten Games:Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023* indicates a repeat
1. Terranigma (SFC)
Closing out the Quintet trilogy of action/adventure games on the Super Famicom that I started last year, I finished Terranigma just at the start of the new year~. Now, unlike Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia (two games I really loved), Terranigma is a game I knew almost nothing about but have heard great things about for years and years. As long as I can remember, this has been held up as one of the best games on the Super Famicom, as well as one of the best games that never made it to North America. Finally getting a good excuse to play this game in particular was one of the biggest reasons I started playing through the Quintet trilogy in the first place, really. Regardless of any other feelings I may've had on this game, it was very interesting to finally get a taste of the game that people have been praising for all these years. It took me about 17.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states.
Terranigma, or as it's known in Japanese, "Tenchi Souzou" (lit. Creation of Heaven), is the story of Ark. A young man living in the secluded forest village of Crystalholm, his whole life changes one day when he breaks down a forbidden door and finds Pandora's Box (and its resident scrimblo, Yomi) inside it. This sets off a chain of events that sees the elder of Crystalholm sending him on a grand adventure through the underworld. First, a mission to restore the continents of the overworld, and then a quest to guide the newly restored world to life again by saving its residents' souls. It's a story that, in its broader strokes, is very similar to the other two games in this trilogy, and in many ways it honestly feels like a strange midpoint between Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia. However, that comparison is good as much as it is bad. Actually, scratch that, it's actually much more bad than it is good ^^;
Terranigma isn't written by the same person who did Illusion of Gaia (weirdly enough, Illusion of Gaia seems to be the only game that person has ever written, actually). It was written by the same writer as Soul Blazer along with a co-writer. Now however well their writing may've worked for a relatively smaller game like Soul Blazer, it really does not work nearly as well for a much larger game like Terranigma. The narrative pacing of this game is absolutely dreadful, with massive swaths of the middle of the game (I'd say from like the 20% mark to the 70% or 80% mark) having little to nothing to do with the overall themes or premise beyond "it's something else for Ark to do to restore the world or just progress through the map".
That in and of itself isn't usually a bad thing, mind you, as not every game needs to be this grand epic that tells a meaningful story. Terranigma, however, IS trying to be this grand epic that tells a meaningful story, and just how many characters and thematic beats it tries to cram into its last leg comes off very poorly with just how little time we've had to get used to these characters and what they believe in. Even Ark himself, present through the entirety of the game, comes off as a really weirdly written character because he just so infrequently actually gets lines to give his character any sort of meaningful depth over the course of the narrative. There's a kinda sweet love story in here somewhere, and I think there's even something about the nature of good & evil and the cyclical nature of history and the universe, but it gets so confused and hurried at the end that I honestly had a lot of trouble trying to figure out what this game was even going for. Part of that is due to the game's own clumsy writing, sure, but part of it is also that a LOT of this game just feels like a far more poorly done rendition of Illusion of Gaia's story. That game actually had a well paced narrative with characters slowly and thoroughly developed throughout it, and the lack of that narrative writing ability really hurts Terranigma's overall story (not to mention makes it look very poor by sheer comparison in the first place).
Terranigma also has some pretty bad issues with casual racism (particularly towards African Americans and First Nations Peoples) as well. This is something Illusion of Gaia kinda struggles with, but it's WAY worse here. It's hardly the worst instance in the world, granted, and it's certainly not the biggest issue the writing has, but it was so distracting that I couldn't leave it unmentioned here. At the end of the day, though, Terranigma just isn't a very well told story. The bones of the narrative are largely just a poorer replay of Illusion of Gaia's story, sure, but that didn't need to be its death knell. It could've been a perfectly fine story just living here as a vacuum separate from its predecessor, but even divorced from its lack of originality (within its own series), the lack of care and attention in how the story itself is executed causes a lot more harm than any amount of copying Illusion of Gaia's homework ever could.
On a gameplay level, we're kinda stuck between good and bad here as well (though more so leaning towards bad in a lot of ways that matter). In a vacuum, this is (seemingly) easily the best playing of the trilogy. The ways Ark can jump around, dash through enemies, use his run button (which we finally have) to zip from place to place, it all amounts to a game that feels very nice to play around in compared to the previous two games in the series, both of which felt like you were in some way locked to a grid. You also have a neat magic system where you find blue crystals (Magirocks in English), and they act as a sort of total mana. You buy magic rings at vendors (you have a money system now!), and how many Magirocks you have dictate how many total rings you can carry around. One ring is one use of that spell, and once it's spent, you get thost Magirocks back to "spend" again, not unlike spell slots in something like Dungeons & Dragons. We have lots of big, impressive bosses to fight, and there are tons of different weapons and armors to collect to give yourself different elemental damage & status effect resistances and strengths.
However, despite just how far this laundry list of mechanical advancements may make it seem like we've come since Illusion of Gaia, these successes start to fall apart under closer scrutiny. A lot of areas are quite close quarters, so your nimble character doesn't feel like his speed in combat is particularly useful compared to how fast his enemies are. Boss design in particular is quite bad, frankly, and I cannot begin to count how many bosses (including the very first one) not only did MASSIVE amounts of damage compared to enemies in their area but also had quite unclear methods on how to even damage them in the first place. Dodging attacks, getting nuked down in seconds, and waiting very annoyingly long times between opportunities to be able to hit the boss at all are something that plague the fights in this game terribly, and that goes especially for the dreadful final boss. The bosses in this game aren't so much "not fun because they're so difficult" so much as they are "not fun because they're often just as boring as they are frustrating", and that's not something I can even begin to say for the other two games in this series (at least in their Japanese versions).
None of this is helped, of course, by other bad choices or clumsy implementations of other mechanics. The jumping is a "neat" new mechanic, sure, but that doesn't really solve how the platforming in this game just overall kinda sucks. Walking on (or god forbid walking onto) ropes is an overly fiddly experience at the best of times, and most of the jumping that *is* here is either barely necessary or far more frustrating than it needs to be. The painstaking put together magic system is also just basically useless as well. Rings don't cost *that* much, but they cost more than enough that they'll add up very quick with how limited their uses are. They're generally also very ineffective compared to just pummeling things to death, and they're often not too useful for bosses either.
On top of all that, unlike the previous two games, enemies respawn as soon as you leave and re-enter a room now, so using a big magic spell to forever-kill a difficult enemy isn't a consideration anymore either. Factor in as well that the level design and signposting are awful, so you're going to spend a LOT of time being lost and re-wandering around areas over and over. I reckon I spent about 4-ish hours in total lost over several points before I just looked up a guide for it, and I recommend following a guide for this game in general, frankly. To top it all off, the game even has a DREADFUL stealth section full of guards who use have random patrol patterns in areas almost always clearly not actually designed for stealthing (as they're often reused from other castle areas in whole or in part), and it's no small miracle that I managed to get through that section as quick as I did without using save states. On the whole, I found Terranigma's gameplay thoroughly mediocre. It's hardly the worst on the system, sure, but it's a huge pile of bad-to-just-okay implemented systems that do a lot more harm than good compared to the more simple but polished experiences offered by its predecessors.
Aesthetically, at least, this game is very very nice. It's a Super Famicom game from 1995, and damn does it look like it. From environments to NPCs to enemies to bosses, this game looks absolutely incredible, and for all the other bad things I can say about it, the graphics are outstanding. The music is also quite good, but it leans more towards atmospheric tracks than the previous two games. It's not a bad soundtrack, but it's my least favorite of the three, at the very least.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I wish I could only chalk up how hard this game is to recommend on sheer disappointment. I had heard a lot of great things about this game over the years, and with how much I enjoyed the previous two games, I was excited for a grand crescendo to a great trilogy. But with how bad stuff like the boss fights, signposting, and stealth section are, there are much larger caveats to recommending this game than simply "well it's not as well executed or written as the previous ones". Terranigma is a very pretty game, but it's just not a very good one. While it may not be an outright bad game, you'll honestly be better served playing one of the many other better games in this genre on this platform than trying to have a Just OK time trudging through this game's missteps.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
