Game Review: ゴッド・スレイヤー はるか天空のソナタ

Crystalis was one of my favorite NES game as a child. I played it through probably a dozen times, searching through every nook and cranny, to the point where I knew all the maps and the story, confusing as it was, by heart. It's the only game I ever wrote a letter to Nintendo Power over, asking the counselors where I could find the Sword of Fire, though as far as I know it was never published and I found the Sword of Fire a few days after I sent the letter anyway. It's the only piece of media I've ever written fanfiction of, when I was nine, for a school assignment to write an original story. It's probably the game I've most wanted a remake or remaster of, and while there's the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection for Switch that has Crystalis as one of the games on it, it's an emulated version of the original, not a real new version. There was a remake for the GBA, but the cramped screen size, inferior music, and massive changes to the story gives it such a bad reputation that I've never tried it.

But I thought...why not play the Japanese version? If I'm confused about the story, and if I think that localization limitations are what made it so confusing, why not go back to the original? I know enough Japanese to understand it now. I can beat the game in a few hours. I'll get even more Japanese practice, and it'll be useful because the whole game is in hiragana and so I'll need to derive meaning from context, exactly as though I were listening to conversational Japanese. So over the long weekend, that's what I did.

The Japanese title means "God Slayer: Sonata of the Far Away Sky," which is an amazing name for a game.

A peaceful village, for now.

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