I've never regretted coming late to enjoy a game as much as this one, while I beaten many SNES games in my middle school emulation days, I could never get to this one, I was a goofy goober then, so all the themes flew through my head, I was impatient and dropped the game totally, it wasn't until now that I can finally experience Ark's journey to restore Earth, and while I still feel bad for missing it all those years, yesterday I could finally beat it, on that day I realized how timeless a game with lots of love can really be, follow me fellow reader, this journey will be long, but when we're done, we can go to sleep...
The youngest brother of a trilogy of unrelated-yet-related games, the first one being SoulBlazer and the next one being Illusion of Gaia, Quartet, a relatively obscure developer handed the publishing to Enix very late in the SNES era and only in Japan and Europe, that's right, for once USA got to miss this masterpiece, those factors leading to even today being barely mentioned, but believe me, the journey is worth every second, this game fixes a lot of SoulBlazer and IoG's flaws regarding battle systems, making it from miles away the most polished of the "Trilogy", while having a plot slightly confusing but still understandable, let's embark on the journey to finding how a minor mistake of a naughty boy led to one of the most tragic tales on the 16 bit era
HISTORY: The birth of a new world
Pictured: me after finishing the game and getting attached to the characters (fool's mistake)
The game already establish itself as far from Mario or Earthbound with its intro after the usual logos, for starters it begins narrating how millennia ago humanity was wiped by a war between two deities: Dark Gaia and Light Gaia, the war ended with zero winners and the earth being reduced to a scalding mess, split in two parts, the Light side and the Darkside, below the earth, Light brought advance while darkness bestower destruction,
The story starts proper in Crysta, a peaceful village where nothing goes wrong, the village may look idyllic, but it has a little troublemaker in a red haired hero, reader, meet Ark, beginning the plot as a force of chaos, throwing pumpkins, breaking pots as if they were rupees inside, being rude and as our first quest begins, tearing tapestries, after you explore the little village while wondering how to leave, you are called by the Elder, who orders you to apologize by the tearing of a seamstress’s work, after that he leaves his house, after which some guys goad you into opening a door that is forbidden to be opened, obviously obeying will make the game unwinnable so thanks to our pot throwing skills the door opens and inside we see a mysterious box, inside you see a mysterious being that dubs himself Yomi, after a brief tutorial on how the item’s menu work, huh… nothing seems wrong, I guess the Elder just wanted me to not meddle with his secret pet, let’s scram before the Elder gives me another nagging se…
WHAT THE HECK!
The opening of the box suddenly turned everybody into crystal statues, the elder surprisingly is calm while explaining what you did, you have opened the keys to five towers in the Underworld, and to be able to fix his mess he needs to “awaken” them, with a trusty pike and later your childhood friend Elle’s cape you go in a journey to fix your mess, a simple basic plot, ¿right?... NO!
As the plot advances you find lots of conspiracies and secrets, as soon as you put a foot on the Lightside A.K.A our world, everything gets greatly complex, beginning with the fact you will find that Darkside and Lightside has mirrored people, meaning you will find surface versions of Crysta’s inhabitants, the plot got so many plot twists and turns that I won’t spoil them, I will let you some key mysteries:
How the Elder didn’t become stone?
What’s the deal with Yomi?
What made the Underworld so minimalist to the point Crysta doesn’t even have an exit?
And most importantly…
If Underworld’s people have Lightside counterparts… WHERE IS YOURS?
Lots of question, lots of work, zero-time, time to being in the melancholic tale of a journey to fix a world where... You weren’t a part of
GAMEPLAY: The troublemaker turned into a warrior
My penance for poking in places i wasn't meant to be is poke people...huh
I’ll be real, SoulBlazer and IoG’s combat system was pretty basic Zelda based combat, you got spells but nothing too fancy, here Ark has lots of moves, jumping, running, shield, crawling and spells, unfortunately you don’t learn new moves, but the combat is simple enough that the ones you have are enough, combat is limited to some dungeons while the underworld is standard exploration, mercifully we have no random encounters, allowing for fast exploration
The magic of this game is fine… but the implementation is one of the few weak spots of the game, you see that in most ARPG you simply choose your spell and cast if as long as you have enough magic? Here they went TOO unique, for around the world(s) you will find small crown-like gems creatively called Magirocs, you need to get a set amount of them to buy a ring allowing you to use the spell, but not only you need to pay with rocks, you also need money, fortunately the spells are from situational to lifesaving, ph, the ring is single use, fortunately once you use it the cost on Magicrocs is returned, to use a ring you can choose it directly from your jewel box or equip said box and choose the ring in the fly
The dungeons have lots pf puzzles, nothing too fancy, still brain teasing,
Oh, the menu is diegetic, ¿What does that mean? It exists as a in-verse object, in this case Yomi letting you inside the box you opened, that thing is giant inside, letting you have separate menus for your armor, pikes and miscellaneous items, you can equip a potion or status healer for use later, stores oddly (And annoyingly) has no sell option so you have to use a hole in the item screens of the box to drop obsolete equipment, so if you are short on gold and are far from the dungeons, the only places where enemies appear, well, you are SOL
Oh, a pro tip, in the configuration section of the box this is the configuration I recommend:
X for item use
A for shield
Y for attack
B for Jump
R for Dash
The default configuration is fine if you grew with the game, but having played the Mana series, that is way more comfortable
EXPANSION MECHANIC: the boring but practical parts of world restoration
This part makes the game for me, ¿Notices all those mentions of the world being scarred by the war? With that they mean even when the towers restores and the continents recovered civilization is back to zero, eventually in your trips you “unlock” humans, and after that a ship, meaning exploration, you can talk to some townsfolk in certain towns to get a trinket or ask for a favor, nothing too hard, no “hey, kill 252453750347 blobs so we can create a hotel somehow” basic Mini quests, those Mini quests leads to the world becoming like ours, you invent (rediscover?) stuff like the camera, the plane, the phone and even the Big Ma…ahem, BigMick, sure you could just upgrade what you need to reach the next flag of the plot, but ¿Where would be the fun in that? All that contributes to making town bigger, you can also do small stuff that does absolutely nothing but contribute to making the game feel alive, like tasting different food in the towns’ food carts, I tried to use them while damaged to see if they acted as healing, but I never noted a difference
DIFFICULTY: Journeys were never easy after all
Quoting a conversation very late in the game:
Ark: You say it as if it was easy
Guys, this is an RPG in the SNES, so the game, while still fairer than most since the genre evolved from DQ 1, will still want to make you tear your hair
Combat wise enemies has patterns you can see from a mile, just bash them with your pike and reap the EXP, the Defense command is situational at best and while magic can be potent, it rarely see any use as you level up, especially since the bosses, the baddies you really want to use your spells against, block it for reasons
Experience fortunately is relatively easy to get, just kill everything on sight and your levels may escalate properly, unfortunately what the game has in EXP generosity it has in Money stinginess, not only you lack any sort of way to sell your outdated spoils, but enemies aren’t guaranteed to drop money, and you will really want to buy bulbs (the game’s potions) to keep the game over away, true story, while replaying the game I needed a light spear to damage ghosts, but the enemies barely gave money, I legit spend HALF HOUR to get the remaining 400 Gold to buy the damn spear
The leveling curve is a thing, ¿one level below the enemy? Pray for your safety, ¿One level above? Pray for the enemies’ wellbeing, the Darkside chapter gives you a weapon that while equipped slowly heals your health, but as soon as you have to leave, you are on your own, you better learn what the prologue taught you, by the way some enemies are immune to your basic attacks, so you have to either realize that spin attack is useful or scramble through your inventory to find a weapon that can hit them, bosses in particular suffer not only from the aforementioned magic block, but their hit windows are very precise, fortunately they are relatively fragile, but good luck getting a chance, especially the final boss that will spend 90% of the battle out of your reach and…UUUUUUUUUUUGH
Oh, and some of the stuff you need to do for puzzles are very obtuse, near the end of the game you need five McGuffins, four of them are relatively obvious as long as you bother to explore, but one of them is in *deep breath*
A DESERT IN A INREMARCABLE PLACE WHERE IF YOU WANDER TOO LONG YOU ARE BOOTED OUT…UUUUUGH X2
MUSIC: Hear to the wails of the earth singing for your comfort
Cut it out with the piano burning Super Nintendo, pianos are getting expensive!
The tunes aren’t exactly Final Fantasy in quality, but they sound really fitting the mood, they can be:
Ominous
Sad yet happy
Creepy as hell
Goves-coming-off pumper
Soothing in a “you are safe” way
And even amusing (give them a chance, it was the 90’s)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hNFYXhNFd8
The credits’ theme legit made me stay watching even after the THE END card appeared, stunned at how good every tune was
GRAHPICS: Watch the images painted by the great will of both sides of earth
See that curvature above the photo? not a glitch, that's the curve since you are supposed to be inside the planet, and it's just the tip of the iceberg
The game was made very late in the SNES’ life span, and oh boy it shows, a little caveat though is that detailed as the world map is, some landmarks would be useful, some are obvious such as caves, but more often than not I got lost figuring if that blot of pixels was just a lake or the town I needed to go to restock, that aside the overworld maps are really neat and detailed, the towns and dungeons are hardly slouches either, as you expand towns they will start to look like towns at the time of making, the characters are way more expressive than what you expect of some pixels, Ark himself moves and reacts properly, notable when eating either a item or some food of the stalls, the enemies look like you expect of a RPG of the console, but often it will remind you that you aren’t in a made up fantasy setting by showing actual settings, the Mode 7 gets squished for all its worth in cutscenes that pan on the world or when you eventually help reinvent the plane
CONCLUSION: All journeys have an end
A pretty fun game that… aside of some obtuse solutions and stinginess, it pushes the limits of what a tiny cart could do, at times I felt like playing a Open World game, the game costs of four chapters and of you are completionist it can give you 20 hours of fun (Mine is 19:26), that said it has some caveats, like magic being troublesome to use, the map being really non-indicative and the stinginess of the money drops, overall I had a blast, sadly the poor timing of its release as well as its... hot water topics ensued America got no chance to enjoy it
As mentioned in the intro I never finished the game while I was in my middle school days, those were my barely attention paying teen days, so no wonder I didn’t have the attention to comprehend the game, but now that it rained a lot since then, I can appreciate the deepness of the game, heck, I found the first chapter is Adam and Eve mixed with the Pandora’s Box myth mishmashes together, I usually play the games I review vanilla to get the unbiased picture, but this one it was for something more personal: atone for walking away in a classic, and playing it as intended was my penance, and my reward was a game that as I got older resonated even more
The little actions that lead to bigger consequences
Our purpose in the world
I am going to be remembered for ever or my memory will leave when those that shared it goes too?
Carpe Diem guys, every day is unique
Okay, I got way too melodramatic with that last paragraph, the game gets my Baku certified seal of
Now, if you excuse me, i have dreams to eat, so it's my time to become a soaring being *becomes a cloud after curling, in the Dreamscape he goes flying*
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Pros
- + Way complete for a SNES game
- + Combat is smooth
- + Every level does feel like you are gettign stronger
- + The town expansion is simple yet addictive
- + Challenging, but fair
Cons
- - Puzzles rarely but totally can get obtuse
- - Money is rare
- - Most weapons are just attack boosters
- - Map is confusing
- - Magic system... i take Mana systems any time of the day
9
Gameplay
Stumbles at times, but pretty solid
10
Graphics
Just... beautiful... if it weren't for Final Fantasy Vi the game would be the prettiest of the SNES ever
10
Story
Existencialism, religious parable, and historical edutainment in a single package
9
Sound
I could listen to the entire OST as Lo-fi fors studying or drawing all the time and never get bored
8
Replayability
No new Game Plus in sight, but you can try to repair the world at its fullest or collect al the Magirocks, the story alone makes a replay worth
9
out of 10
Overall
Flaws that are more products of its age aside, it's the best ARPG of the console and easly the best of Quintet's games
