13:00. Let's play Terranigma!

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Let's Play Terrangima. I am your skeletal host, Beat.



Terranigma is a 1995 Action RPG that was never released stateside. It's one of the few RPGs I genuinely love, and the only game I ever played to completion on an emulator. And now I'm gonna do it again. For you.

Before we start, you should really watch The introduction. It's not exactly something that can be conveyed in screenshots, and I've honestly never seen a more impressive introduction in any 16 bit game. Feel free to exit that video after the title card shows up.



Our Character's default name is Ark, which is sort of symbolic, given his role in the world of the game. That said, I'm not in the business of letting games tell me what to name characters. No. That's #talkingtime's job.



Bastards.



The game is split into 4 chapters, each one covering a relatively distinct portion of the plot. They aren't anywhere close to the same size. Chapter 1 can be beaten very quickly, while chapter 3 takes an eternity.



Music: Crysta

Anyways, the game opens much like all RPGs from that era, with the main character sleeping in, and someone important to him waking him up. Pretty typical, really. In this case Kark is woken up by Elle, who takes a moment to comment on his dream not described at any point, and then tells him to get his lazy ass out of bed, because some crazy blue stuff is in the air and he should totally check it out.



Unlike most RPG heroes, Kark lives in some sort of crazy communal housing project. The first of these guys rags on Kark for having a hot girlfriend that wakes him up, while the second one just sort of idly wonders about the Crystal Blue that Elle was all excited about. Moving on to the next room, we meet a woman who asks us to fetch a vase for her.



Fuck that noise.

This little exchange actually helps establish Kark's character. For all his crazy RPG hair and funky pants, Kark is kind of an asshole. While you can pick up the vase, there's no way to hand it to the hardworking chef. Pushing the button again causes Kark to toss it across the room, causing her to get pissed. There is no doubt in my mind that many, many players have dutifully picked up the vase and walked back to the chef, expecting the next push of A to kindly hand it to her, only for Kark to toss it into the wall. You can almost feel him laughing at you, shouting “As if I was really gonna let you do it!”

Turns out Kark just loves screwing with the people in his idyllic little RPG homeworld. In another room of the compound, a bunch of guys at the table explain that Kark's antics have cheesed off the town elder and he wants a word with me. Trying to stay in character I chose to make a feeble excuse because it's more hilarious.

For those of you who watched the introduction video I posted, you may have noticed that the little sequence that plays out after the title card disappears is exactly what's being described here. It's not much but it's a nice little touch.



The elder, being a crotchety old man, tells Kark to stop being such a punk and apologize to those he's wronged, so we head out of the communal housing, and into the Idyllic hometown.

Crysta's pretty standard as far as Idyllic hometowns go. We have Groups of villagers milling about, Children at play, and of course, horrifying sentient pumpkins. The floating blobs you see in most of these shots is the Crystal Blue everybody's so excited about. It become significant to the plot, as I'm sure you all guessed, but not for a very long time.



Inside some of the more interesting buildings in Crysta. First is the fortune teller hut, where a witch who decorates her walls with a star of David informs us that we should take care. Then there's the Mill where the man on the lower level explains that A.) the mill is awesome, and B.) he has no idea how it works. Being an asshole, Kark runs upstairs and presses the black box in the wall, shutting the machine down and ruining the miller's day.

Our dark work done, we go over the weavers (and apparently Elle's workplace) to make our begrudging apologies. Kark's obligation fulfilled, we exit the building the only way we know, by running up to the top floor and jumping off the roof!



Going back to the commune, we find out that the elder is gone on some sort of errand, and that Kark's pals have decided to take this opportunity to open the one door the one authority figure in the entire town decided to lock. Kark, seeing nothing wrong with this idea, pelts it with vases until it quite literally cracks in half. A very neat lighting effect and a very cryptic voice shows up once the door is adequately smashed, and everybody decides that they suddenly have somewhere else to be. Well fine! More magical evil doorway for me!



Music: Sad

The other side of the doorway is very different from everything we've seen so far. We go down two featureless levels before ending up in a long blue hallway, where the ominous voice begs Kark for help. Going down the hallway reveals a spinning box, that very badly wants us to touch it. Upon doing so, the room is flooded with light and...

Music: Yomi

...This little bastard is unleashed upon the world. Meet Yomi, your companion for the duration the game, and pretty much the only character that's more of an ass than Kark. His significance in the larger plot won't be clear for some time, but for all intents and purposes he's basically just the cursor for our inventory/options/status screens.



And what a status screen it is! Yomi gives us the guided tour, then tells us to check out the weapon room. Once we get there, a sparkle on one of tables talks to for a little bit before giving us our first weapon, the Cyspear!



With our first weapon safely in our inventory, we leave the box to discover that Elle has followed us down into the basement. She expresses disgust at Yomi, then fear of some unknown event, then freezes solid before our very eyes. Yomi in classic asshole fashion, explains that the entire town is like this because we released him. He tells us to explore the world around our quaint little village and vanishes back into the box.

Going back upstairs, we see that Yomi was telling the truth and everybody was frozen solid. Well, almost everybody. At the front of the house the ever crotchety elder has gotten back from his errands, and is pissed as hell that we turned the entire town into statues. He tells Kark to go outside the village and visit five towers. Kark reacts with surprise. Apparently he's been in this tiny little village his entire life, and it never even occurred to him that anything could exist outside of it.



Before we take our trembling first steps into the outside world, I run back to the elder's room and raid his stuff. These two chests contain a small bulb (restores hp) and 50 gems (game currency). They might come in handy in the next update We then run back to Kark's room where I save so I don't have to repeat this prologue stuff in case I accidentally destroy my savestate (As I have done so many times in the past). Then finally it's outside, where a gate has magically appeared! Kark expresses the appropriate amount of wonder at his newfound freedom, and declares That he'll go anywhere.

And then it's out! Out into a beautiful green overworld! Right? Right?



Wrong.

I neglected to mention this earlier: Kark's little idyllic RPG starting village is a tiny patch of livable land in the bowels of hell. Which isn't to say it's not interesting to look at. The mode7 has a neat bending effect to make it look as though you're walking on the inside of a sphere, and the blue mass overhead actually reflects the ground you're walking on: approximating another sphere suspended in the middle of the one you're trapped in.

In my first playthrough of Terranigma back when I was 16 or so, this was the moment that grabbed me and dragged me into the game's world. It set itself up to mirror the introduction of every other RPG I've ever played, I set foot outside of the town expecting the same overworld I've seen in countless other games, and instead I got this. The game presents us with a completely standard prologue, then changes everything on you.

And that concludes the introduction! This is the first entry of my first LP, so any criticism you have would be much appreciated! See you all next week!

This is totally the best of the Soul Blazer-derived games.

Hopefully we'll get it on VC someday.

It's not Soul Blazer-derived, per se, but it is the final chapter in that particular trilogy (Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma), and all three of those games are loosely linked to the ActRaiser games (although mostly thematically).

Really, all three of the games in the trilogy owe a lot more to both Actraiser games than to Soul Blazer for thematic and gameplay elements.

I now realize that I was a letter off when I named my character.

Now Loki will hate me!

I'm just happy to be included.

Also, I think I like Kark better than Karc. It sounds a little dirty or that our hero could captain a starship.

Ah, good ol' Tenchi Souzou (Creation of Heaven and Earth; you can see why they retitled it Terranigma for the non-Japanese releases). I remember how impressed I was by the odd world map the first time I got out of Crystalberg (or Crysta, if you prefer). Not exactly every day you see a world map where the whole thing curves like you're on the inside of a hollow sphere!

Illusion of Gaia will fight you over this. Although Terranigma is awesome.

"Terranigma" is a pretty good title cause I've definitely never been able to figure out what's going on.

I've always wanted to play this, but just never found the time to fire up an emulator and play it.

But honestly, the one thing that probably has prevented me from ever starting this is the font/lettering. Sorry, but the text has always looked butt-ugly - the letters are way too spaced out! It looks like some beta that was never polished for final release. Am I the only one bothered by this?

Actually, there's a reason why they didn't adjust the font: that would have required a massive amount of work due to the fancy way that location titles fly in. See, Quintet (the company responsible for this game's development) was not the cleanest when it came to their code. They tied the font system in the game intricately to that text-fly-in feature, and even just making the font a shorter fixed-width version would have required some serious work to get the fly-in letters to not look awful.

To put it into perspective: work on making this game's font not look so ugly has been attempted several times over the last decade by several different groups, but nobody has been able to pull it off. Meanwhile, the almost-as-messy text systems in the SNES Dragon Quest games have all been cracked and made fully variable-width in the same timespan.

This game is great. I also don't have a great track record with beatings games on an emulator, even if they were ones I loved on their native hardware, but Terranigma was also an exception for me.

This game has great music!

Agreed. Not as funky fresh as Soul Blazer's, though.

I tried playing Terranigma once. Loved that overworld design and music, but lost interest out of frustration or something when trying to do the five towers.

I'll definitely be watching this LP. I'm interested in what's past those five towers, and I might even end up giving this game another chance.

~everything~

I love this game's atmosphere. there's nothing else quite like it.

well, there's Illusion of Gaia, I guess, but still!

I don't like this game.

I'll read this LP anyway.

The master is reading my LP? My amateurish, ham-handed first steps into the world of LPs after I haven't written anything decent in months?

Pressure's on now!

These guys just have more bad luck with their mills, don't they?

Another reference to an earlier Quintet game (in my mind, at least): these weavers remind me of the ones from Illusion of Gaia. These women haven't been conscripted into slave labor, though, so that's a plus. But I still can't look at them without feeling just a little uncomfortable.

I remember being bothered by it the first time I fired this game up on an emulator. But Sky Render's explanation for its continued existence makes it easier to accept.

And Beat, I would be remiss to tell you how to run your Let's Play, but you can't show us the underworld without the music. That beginning is absolutely sublime. It really helps make the moment where the game pulls you in with its over/underworld.

This LP is making me want to start up my Soul Blazer thread again - not that I haven't been wanting to all this time; life's just been getting in the way. I think I have to now, though, for synchronicity. Dare I dream that Illusion of Gaia comes back to complete the trifecta?

Wait. I didn't see a link to the best music in the game.

The Underworld

That's better!

Edit: Seth beat me to it. That's what I get for eating dinner and not reloading the board when I get back.

I was gonna link to that in the next update, since I stopped at the end of the prologue nonsense this time.

Speaking of which, I'm driving up to my friend's wedding on Wednesday and will be there until Monday, so the next update may very well be tomorrow night. I think I learned a lot with my first try here, so the next one might be better? I hope?

Time will tell.

It's okay. You obviously have impeccable taste.

Eeuhhh... Oops?

Nahhh, we cool. It's far from a spoiler and it really is a damn fine song.

Welcome back to let's play Terranigma! I'm your host Beat, and I'm really sorry I'm running so late!

Now where were we?



Oh right. Hell.

Music: Underworld

Terranigma's version of the underworld is a pretty neat idea that screenshots really don't convey all that well. I would love to see the underworld made with current generation 3D Graphics. Just the idea of being trapped inside of a sphere, an artificial sky that reflects the ground, the barren stone earth and the snowbanks contrasted against the rivers of magma is, you know, cool.



The first tower is super-easy to find. You can barely take 20 paces from Crysta before you run right into it.



That's an awfully pretty per-rendered background. Terranigma came out pretty late in the life of the SNES. I don't know jack shit about programming or the specific things you could do with the system, But the difference between this and your typical scene in soul blazer is the difference between night and day.



Anyways right. Cutscenes. Ark is unimpressed by the tower, so the tower freaks him out. I told the tower I was here to do hero stuff, but it really doesn't matter which I pick. The tower tells me that yeah, I can totally take on his trials to rescue the villagers, as well as drops a certain line about controlling the world. I'm sure that's nothing important though.



Music: Tower

Inside the tower, we meet our first “enemies”. These little pillbug things are equal parts weak and useless, and are pretty much the easiest things in the world to kill. Killing them all opens up the door, so that I might find more things to murder. Truly, life is good.

As I've mentioned loads of times, Terranigma is an Action-RPG. While many members of this very board absolutely adore RPGs, I'm not exactly among them.

Yeah exactly. I probably wouldn't like Terranigma at all if It didn't have halfway decent action. Fortunately for me, it does! Mostly, anyways.

Kark has an attack for pretty much every way he can move. Just pressing A will result in a standard stab, seein in the first picture. The move I'll be using most, running, Jumping and pressing A causes ark to nosedive into the ground spear first and then skid for a few feet. Jumping normally results in Kark doing a flip slice, but it's over so quick I'm having trouble getting a screenshot of it. Finally, just dashing and attacking works exactly how you would expect it to.



Going up the stairs takes us to the first "real" room of this dungeon. The rules here are pretty simple. One enemy in this room has the souls of a bunch of villagers in him, and killing that one opens the door. There's no indication of which enemy it is, but my instinct is to just kill everything, so that's hardly an issue.



Off to the side in the same room we find our first Magirock. Magirocks are the basis of the game's magic system, which makes no goddamn sense at all. I'll explain it later.



Up on the next level we meet these bastards. They have a decent amount of HP and hit pretty hard. Fortunately they also give out a decent amount of exp, meaning Kark earns his first level up!



I managed to miss the screenshot, but the next line the soul on this level says is that strengths is not just in fighting, but in observation. Essentially it's telling us to explore the room, since there's no obvious way further up. Sure enough, looking around nets us another Magirock, a treasure chest, and a window that isn't quite like the others...

Which takes us out of the tower completely, giving us a way to climb to the next floor...



...Which is full of giant monsters that totally wreck my shit.

Did I mention that standing still in the early levels of the game causes HP to regenerate? No? My bad. Every few seconds Kark's HP goes up by one, meaning that if the Iron Knuckle wannabe gets me near-death, I can just chill out of his reach and be back to full health in short order. Cheaper than wasting a healing item, but not exactly exciting



Remember way back in the introduction where I exited a building by jumping off the roof? Turns out there's a lot of flinging yourself off ledges in this game. In fact, it's the only way to get around this room. With a little bit of effort, we clear out the remaining enemies, and head for the next floor.



Music: Boss

The final floor of the tower is sort of a makeshift boss fight. The guardian shows up, tells us that we're doing just swell, and sics a bunch of annoying critters on us. Their attack patterns are the exact same as the blue ones Kark has crushed in so many earlier rooms, but they have a lot more HP. Not that it helps them.

Once the little bastards have been soundly defeated, the guardian dude bellows some stuff at us about how the earth wants to wake up and suggests that we go through the not-ominous-at-all door. Also, the little red dudes were enough to push me up to Level 3! Ark poses with joy!


Going to the door causes things to get very weird very quickly. How weird? Well...