Terranigma

Originally posted on Facebook on 25 July 2021

Terranigma.

I just finished playing it, and in general, I ended up liking it quite a lot. However, it has some problems that make the game less interesting than it has the potential to be.

Let's start with the positives.

I really enjoyed the unique setting and progression of the game. The basic gist of the story is that the young hero Ark must resurrect the dead planet, piece by piece. The story is very mysterious and doesn't always explain what's going on, or even how the world works. Sometimes things just "happen", and you're left to wonder the significance behind all of it. And even when the game does provide explanations, the meaning is still left to interpretation. 

The overall feeling of the journey is very unique and strange.

I enjoy the environments in the game. Some parts of the game feel really sweet and cozy, while other parts give a feeling of vast, empty loneliness. The music in this game is great, and really helps with conveying the emotions of each area of the game. 

The gameplay is fairly typical action-RPG fare with dungeons, monsters, treasure chests and bosses. I like the dungeon design for the most part. The layouts are fun to figure out, and the moment-to-moment exploration and monster-slaying is all good stuff.

The combat in Terranigma is good. It's not like the confusing combat in Secret of Mana where you have to keep charging your attacks and can randomly miss out of nowhere. 

Instead, in Terranigma, when your weapon touches the enemy, they take damage. I like it simple like this. In fact, this kind of simple combat was exactly the kind of thing I was expecting Secret of Mana to be, before I found out firsthand what it was really like. It felt like such a relief to go from that confusing mess to this more straightforward style.

That's the positives. I really enjoy the game on an artistic level, and the majority of my time spent playing it was very engaging. But I do have some specific problems with the game design. So now the complaining begins.

The game is divided into four distinct chapters that do indeed feel very different from one another. Chapter 1 and 2 are mostly non-stop dungeon exploration, while chapter 3 introduces a ton of sidequests and NPC missions. And chapter 4 consists of just the last dungeon and final boss.

This structure makes the game feel rather lopsided. By the time I had finished chapter 2, I was getting rather burnt-out from all the dungeoneering, and I had to put the game down for a while. And in chapter 3, I had several play sessions where I basically did nothing but run around the world completing sidequests, barely engaging in any combat at all.

This lopsidedness does make a lot of sense within the narrative however. The hero is in the process of resurrecting the world, so all the sidequest areas from chapter 3 don't even exist yet during chapter 2. 

I feel like the game could certainly have benefitted from having a few additional sidequests using areas that do exist in chapter 2. It would have given the game some much needed downtime during this section.

Unlike a lot of contemporary RPGs, the dungeons in this game actually do have in-game maps you can bring up, but I find them difficult to interpret. The map shows you a bunch of rooms in a row, and it's not very clear which room in the map corresponds to which room I remember exploring. So I generally don't bother to use the in-game map, and instead rely on keeping track of the layouts in my head, like I have to do with all the other old RPGs.

In this game, You have five different attacks - a stab, a rapid-jab, a dashing thrust, an aerial spin, and a dashing aerial slide. 

But unfortunately the combat does not really change throughout the adventure. These five moves are all you get, and nothing about your attacks changes or upgrades during the game, aside from a standard EXP and leveling-up system.

There are different weapons that give you more damage versus certain foes, or extra chance to crit or whatever, so there is a bit of strategising with which equipment to use. But for the majority of the game, you can just hit most enemies with a couple of aerial dash slide attacks, and it works fine. 

The game also contains magic spells, which you steadily gain access to more and more throughout the adventure.

Unfortunately, the spell system in this game is rather annoying and cumbersome to use, and it is often so much easier to just hit enemies normally than to bother with the spells.

To use a spell in this game, you need to have your spell box equipped, and then when you press the "use currently equipped item" button, a selection appears for you to scroll through your spells. Then, you select the spell you want, press the button again, and it will cast.

This is annoying to do every time, especially if the spell is a single, small projectile such as the Ice spell. Because if you wanted to throw more than just a single ice shot at the opponent, you need to repeat this process for every single cast.

You can only have one item equipped at a time. Which means that if you are in an area where you need to have a different item equipped, then casting a spell becomes extra problematic, since you need to pause, equip the spell box, unpause, find spell, cast spell, pause, go back to the other item, unpause, continue. It's just not worth doing.

There is also a way to cast spells from within the pause menu without having to equip the spell box first - you just go to the spell inventory section of the pause menu, and you can select the spell from there. ....however, whenever you return from the pause menu, the unpausing animation causes your hero to face south. Which means that, even if you paused facing left or up or right, if you cast a spell from within your pause menu, it can only be fired southwards. ...yeah. Not very well thought-out.

It's bad that there isn't a dedicated button for spells. They're just not worth the fuss most of the time.

This is unfortunate because the main reward given to the player upon completing quests and finding hidden areas is Magirock, an item that increases your spell capacity. There are 96 Magirocks in the entire game, making it a rather common prize, and it's used as the main collectible seen throughout the entire adventure. This means that the majority of sidequests don't really give you a meaningful reward, since getting more Magirock isn't too useful.

Also there are apparently 97 Magirocks in the Japanese version. They removed one for the translated edition. ... who knows why game developers do the things they do.

The other really unfortunate aspect about the spells is that the use of magic is restricted in most boss fights. If you try, you simply get a "Cannot use magic here!" message.

 I find this particularly annoying, because the bosses are the ONE area of the game where I would have gladly gone through the extra effort to actually use my spells. Yet the game simply doesn't let me. 

There does exist one boss halfway through the game that lets you use magic, but this boss is specifically made to be too difficult to hit with your weapon, so I guess using magic instead is the main point of this fight.

The bosses in general are okay, but for the most part I find them less interesting than they could have been. The inability to use magic forces you to just whack em over and over again in order to win, and a lot of the time, you have to wait around for their attacks to finish, or for them to make themselves vulnerable. Dodging their attacks is also very difficult, and it looks to me like the game expects you to just bring a bunch of healing items with you to counteract all the cheap shots. ...

All of the bosses could have been made so much more interesting and strategic if they just simply let you use your spells.

Regarding the sidequests... I did really enjoy all the sidequests in chapter 3. They felt rather satisfying to finish since they make real changes happen within the world. However I am rather concerned that some major sidequests can be rendered unfinishable if you make the incorrect choices during certain important events. I think there are three or so specific dialogue windows in the game that can make or break your ability to finish all the quests. Thankfully, I chose correctly in all three cases, but it does feel like an unnecessarily harsh thing to put in the game without warning.

 There are a few other missable things in the game as well, and I did in fact miss a few of them... but thankfully it was only a bonus weapon and a Magirock that I missed out on, and nothing more meaningful than that. 

Overall, I think Terranigma is a great game. It's unique and bizarre and it's great at creating atmosphere and emotion. But as an RPG, I take issue with some of the decisions they made.

I do recommend this game though! It's really unique and interesting.