For those of you who might be avid readers of my blog (basically 4 people according to my view reader), you may have noticed that I never finished the classic action RPG Terranigma. This may have caused some of you to assume that it shares the same fate of Final Fantasy and Secret of Mana, both games that I stopped playing due to intense boredom. Well no, Terranigma did not share their fate. The abrupt abandonment of Terranigma is just a product of bad timing. I was finished through I'd like to say 40% of the game and then RA training and school came around, essentially derailing me from the game. The question of why I haven't picked it back up is easy to answer. I've forgotten the gameplay system and so it would be an annoying learning curve to go back into playing the game, especially on my laptop. So I've just accepted that it's a game I'll try to do another time.
What I do remember about Terranigma is that it was shaping up to be an incredibly powerful game. The tone of the game was for the most part incredibly serious, lending to it an ominous feel. The game relied on one's natural inclination to bring balance to the world, since the world you're saving isn't a foreign land, but the actual decimated planet Earth. The game is very mindful on how it uses and portrays nature and it's heavily polluted Earth feels quite real to a 21st century gamer. I remember that some character plots were quite exciting and developed cultures for each type of organism. The love interest in the game was also very interesting and how she was going to connect later on is something I was curious to find out.
I can't give something my stamp of approval till I've legitimately finished it (on the contrary, I can give my stamp of disapproval to anything that displeases me in the first 20 minutes), but I can encourage you guys to try the game for yourself. It was a tad difficult at parts, but the game seems fairly paced and very fun to play through. Tell me how it turns out for you and if the reception is great enough (i.e. greater than 1 comment), then I will definitely revisit it.
I played the game through, and honestly it's one of the best games I've ever played. It's like Secret of Mana 2 (Seiken Densetsu III) but with real meaning to it's plot. Something about it just feels so connected to our world and real life morality, spirituality, etc (unlike FF games which I enjoy but always end up feeling too outlandish to really get into). On top of that, the soundtrack is excellent and it's a very novel concept. Plus the characters and their micro-stories are excellent.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I'd like to give you kudos for recognizing micro-narratives as being a very important part of some games. That's something I recognized a little while ago with some games that really stick out in my mind, but I was never sure what to call it.
ReplyDeleteThe game that really made me aware of this kind of device was Majora's Mask. In the game you have a 3-day timespan where you can follow characters and do quests for them (along with going to temples and saving the world of course). Over these 3 days you get a sense of who these characters are and what they're trying to do (so you might first run a fetch quest only to find out the deeper motivations behind the quest and get involved with those characters in another way). Many of the characters are incredibly interesting as you get insight into their "lives". Then you go back in time and do it again with other characters.