Game Review: ゴッド・スレイヤー はるか天空のソナタ
2019-Jan-22, Tuesday 19:25![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
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.
And now that I understand the story, here it is. Spoilers for a thirty-year-old game.
In the year 199X, mankind grew proud and caused its own downfall, probably by playing gods through scientific pursuit rather than the war of the English localization. The surface of the earth and its creatures were all changed, creating a world of monsters and sorcery, where people huddled in small villages, afraid of the outside. Before they lost the last bit of their knowledge, the people built a tower in the sky and programmed it with a mission of preventing humanity's hearts from ever turning to evil again.
Meanwhile, a group of scientists set their own plan in motion. They built a robot called Azteca and programmed it to teach humanity and keep them from straying from the path of virtue, and as a failsafe, two of their number agreed to go into suspended animation with a pre-set trigger that would awaken them if the tower ever activated. The game begins when that trigger goes off a century later and Simea, the protagonist, awakens. He quickly meets the sages, disciples of Azteca, who tell him about the four elemental swords he will need and the cruel Empire of Dragonia which is attempting to conquer the world with its new weapons and armor, forged of an almost unbreakable alloy. What's worse, the empire seeks to control the tower so that it will be unstoppable.
Simea collects the four swords of Wind, Fire, Water, and Lightning and meets Mesia, the other sleeping scientist, who possesses the power to control the tower. Along the way, he learns that the emperor is actually the other side of Azteca, who has a split personality due to a flaw in his programming. It is Dragonia's world-conquering campaign, with Azteca/the emperor at its head, that has activated the tower and triggered Simea and Mesia's wake-up sequence. The tower is planning to destroy civilization again, and after Simea defeats the emperor, he travels to the tower where he is reunited with Mesia. She combines the four elemental swords into the God Slayer, a weapon with the power to control the tower's central computer, and Simea triggers the tower's self-destruct sequence. Now free from fear of the tower and the plots of their advanced ancestors, humanity can find its own path, and the game ends with Simea and Mesia on a cliff watching the tower fall out of the sky behind some distant mountains.
Mission accomplished.
Crystalis set so many of my preferences for fantasy, but it's only now that I'm older that I realize it's actually Studio Ghibli that set those preferences. You can see it in that plot summary. The boy and girl who work together to stop an evil organization from gaining control of a hyper-advanced floating fortress, where the girl has the power to control that fortress and so the organization is seeking her out, is the plot of Castle in the Sky. The world overrun by monsters, but actually being run by a plot designed by pre-disaster scientists who wanted to create a better world out of the disaster, is the plot of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The game straight-up steals huge parts of Nausicaä's setting as well--there's a poisonous forest filled with maddened insects, a hidden village of people who are immune to the poison in the center, and a boss that's literally just an Ōmu. The second person that Simea talks to tells him that the town he's in is called "The Village of the Valley of the Wind" (ここはかぜのたにのむら。). The game's ending, where Simea and Mesia reject the ancient plan of the tower and deactivate it before it can destroy humanity, mirrors the ending of Nausicaä.
I finally read Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind a decade ago and it was a real revelation to me about my tastes. Fungal forests, ancient technology still in use in a mostly-low-technology setting, idyllic city-states on the borders of a vast empire, ecological collapse, maddened insects. The genesis of all of it was there, filtered through an NES game I first played when I was seven.
"All the people training here are amateurs. I feel uneasy, but I guess I'll manage."
A lot of Crystalis's story is more comprehensive in Japanese too, because of character limits and localization choices. When I was a kid, I never understood that Azteca and the emperor were the same person. The English is ambiguous, though not to the point of being confusing, and I can also blame being seven for not picking up on how Azteca was both conveniently nearby and wounded after every time Simea fought the emperor. In the Japanese, though, it's crystal clear:
There's a lot of other changes later. Some of them are due to censorship, like the village in the poisonous forest (Japanese: まよいのもり, "The Lost Woods") having a villager who asks Simea if he believes in god, and then once Simea defeats the Ōmu and saves the village, that same villager says that he'll worship Simea as a god. Some of them are just minor phrasing, or giving names to places that didn't have them in Japanese--the first village is called "Leaf" in English, for example, and the Japanese Town of Travellers is named "Brynmaer." And there's my favorite, elaborated on in this post, that the Psycho Armor and Psycho Shield, the most powerful armor in the game, isn't named because it's maddening, or crazy powerful, or anything like that.
It's a transliteration from the Japanese 最高 (saikō, "The best").
A very Japanese name, and there's no way to convert it straight over to English without it sounding ridiculous. I think the localizers did an amazing job with that name, actually. I remember that "Psycho Armor" fired up my imagination a child. Then again, so did everything else in the game.
Bullet hell.
In terms of gameplay, Crystalis is an action RPG, with more RPG than The Legend of Zelda and less RPG than Final Fantasy I. While the only weapons available are the four elemental swords, there's a variety of armor, shields, and secondary accessories to find and use. Some of them are even part of optional sidequests. It's entirely possible to never find Deo's Pendant or the Rapid-Fire Ring (Eng: "Warrior's Ring"), since they both require using the Change spell and talking to specific people. It's even possible to miss the Blizzard Bracelet, the ultimate power-up for the Sword of Water, since it's just in a treasure chest somewhere and it's not necessary to beat the game. I know this because it happened to me the first time I played.
The main twist in terms of combat is that while it's possible to run into enemies and stab them, it's usually a suboptimal strategy. Each sword has the ability to charge up an attack to three levels. Level one fires a tiny projectile, level two fires a larger one, and level three fires an attack that hits a large part of the screen but also costs MP. The exception is the Sword of Thunder, where level one and two both fire a spread of projectiles and level three causes a storm that hits the whole screen. The best strategy is thus always to charge up the sword and fire at enemies rather than get close and risk being hit, and so Simea spends probably 90% of the game with the whirling orbs of a sword charge flying around him. It makes Crystalis almost more of a shooter, albeit one with a short charge time between shots. The Rapid-Fire Ring makes it even more of a shooter, as then simply pressing the attack button instantly fires off a level one charge shot.
There's also magic and magic points, which is taught to Simea by the sages, though just this playthrough I realized that it's psychic powers as magic. The powers are healing, flight, teleporting, telepathy, paralyzing enemies, disguising Simea as one of four other people, and creating a barrier that blocks attacks. There's no throwing fireballs, turning people into undead, summoning monsters, or anything like that. It's another element of Crystalis's science-fantasy premise.
"I've heard a rumor that the empire is on the brink of collapse, but is it really true?"
The one disadvantage of the leveling system is that there's a hard floor below which attacks do zero damage. This can work out to Simea's advantage, as going back to earlier areas late in the game means that enemy attacks just bounce off his Ceramic Armor, but it also means that it's possible to enter a boss fight and be completely unable to hurt it. The very first boss fight in the game absolutely requires level three to fight, and without level three all of Simea's attacks just bounce off. At that point, there's nothing to do other than die and then go off and grind, which is horrible game design. This is worst in Goa Fortress, where two bosses in the first half require level 13 but the two bosses in the second half require level 14. I ran into that and had to spend ten minutes killing monsters in the depths of the fortress. Not a long time in total--it's certainly no grinding outside the Marsh Cave in Final Fantasy--but to design a single contiguous dungeon like that definitely wouldn't fly today. And I don't see why they did it even then! Let people struggle through and kill bosses at low levels if they can. If someone is good enough to dodge all the projectiles that a boss fires, find time to charge their sword, get off the shots, and win through, they should be able to. Apparently the GBA version allows this, so amidst all their wrong-headed changes they made one good decision.
Less problematic and more flavorful is sword immunities. Certain monsters are immune to some elements, or can only be damaged by a certain element. This requires a lot of going back into inventory, equipping a different sword, equipping a different sword enhancer, and then going back out to fight again. This is annoying, but it's mostly a problem due to the NES inputs. If Crystalis were on the SNES and there were a single button to switch between swords, it'd be nothing but good, but as it is I lost quite some time hearing the "ting!" sound of an ineffective attack, switching swords to find the right weapon, and then attacking again.
The source of my love of fungal forests, giant insects, and poison.
That's about the only complaint I have, though. Everyone has those pieces of media that are pure nostalgia trips, where reading or watching or playing them is like taking a long, warm bath. Crystalis is like that for me, one of my favorite games of all time. It brings me back to summer days in my parents' family room, playing Nintendo games without a care in the world, trying to find out where the Sword of Fire is. The kind of carefree memory I'll treasure forever.
And it introduced me, even obliquely, to Studio Ghibli. I really can't credit Crystalis enough with making me a more cultured, fungal-forest-obsessed person.
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.
And now that I understand the story, here it is. Spoilers for a thirty-year-old game.
In the year 199X, mankind grew proud and caused its own downfall, probably by playing gods through scientific pursuit rather than the war of the English localization. The surface of the earth and its creatures were all changed, creating a world of monsters and sorcery, where people huddled in small villages, afraid of the outside. Before they lost the last bit of their knowledge, the people built a tower in the sky and programmed it with a mission of preventing humanity's hearts from ever turning to evil again.
Meanwhile, a group of scientists set their own plan in motion. They built a robot called Azteca and programmed it to teach humanity and keep them from straying from the path of virtue, and as a failsafe, two of their number agreed to go into suspended animation with a pre-set trigger that would awaken them if the tower ever activated. The game begins when that trigger goes off a century later and Simea, the protagonist, awakens. He quickly meets the sages, disciples of Azteca, who tell him about the four elemental swords he will need and the cruel Empire of Dragonia which is attempting to conquer the world with its new weapons and armor, forged of an almost unbreakable alloy. What's worse, the empire seeks to control the tower so that it will be unstoppable.
Simea collects the four swords of Wind, Fire, Water, and Lightning and meets Mesia, the other sleeping scientist, who possesses the power to control the tower. Along the way, he learns that the emperor is actually the other side of Azteca, who has a split personality due to a flaw in his programming. It is Dragonia's world-conquering campaign, with Azteca/the emperor at its head, that has activated the tower and triggered Simea and Mesia's wake-up sequence. The tower is planning to destroy civilization again, and after Simea defeats the emperor, he travels to the tower where he is reunited with Mesia. She combines the four elemental swords into the God Slayer, a weapon with the power to control the tower's central computer, and Simea triggers the tower's self-destruct sequence. Now free from fear of the tower and the plots of their advanced ancestors, humanity can find its own path, and the game ends with Simea and Mesia on a cliff watching the tower fall out of the sky behind some distant mountains.
Mission accomplished.
Crystalis set so many of my preferences for fantasy, but it's only now that I'm older that I realize it's actually Studio Ghibli that set those preferences. You can see it in that plot summary. The boy and girl who work together to stop an evil organization from gaining control of a hyper-advanced floating fortress, where the girl has the power to control that fortress and so the organization is seeking her out, is the plot of Castle in the Sky. The world overrun by monsters, but actually being run by a plot designed by pre-disaster scientists who wanted to create a better world out of the disaster, is the plot of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The game straight-up steals huge parts of Nausicaä's setting as well--there's a poisonous forest filled with maddened insects, a hidden village of people who are immune to the poison in the center, and a boss that's literally just an Ōmu. The second person that Simea talks to tells him that the town he's in is called "The Village of the Valley of the Wind" (ここはかぜのたにのむら。). The game's ending, where Simea and Mesia reject the ancient plan of the tower and deactivate it before it can destroy humanity, mirrors the ending of Nausicaä.
I finally read Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind a decade ago and it was a real revelation to me about my tastes. Fungal forests, ancient technology still in use in a mostly-low-technology setting, idyllic city-states on the borders of a vast empire, ecological collapse, maddened insects. The genesis of all of it was there, filtered through an NES game I first played when I was seven.
"All the people training here are amateurs. I feel uneasy, but I guess I'll manage."
A lot of Crystalis's story is more comprehensive in Japanese too, because of character limits and localization choices. When I was a kid, I never understood that Azteca and the emperor were the same person. The English is ambiguous, though not to the point of being confusing, and I can also blame being seven for not picking up on how Azteca was both conveniently nearby and wounded after every time Simea fought the emperor. In the Japanese, though, it's crystal clear:
それはやがてわたしのこころをむしばみからだをもしはいし。。。ついにドラゴニアというあくをうみだした。。。which reads
That [seed] took root and ate away at my heart, even controlling my body, and at last was born as the evil called 'Dragonia.'What's more, in the Japanese version Simea talks. He occasionally spoke in the English version, but it was almost always just an interjection to tell someone not to die right before they died. In the Japanese he has a couple conversations with Mesia, he apologizes to Deo for deceiving him, and he talks to Queen Amaryllis in Amazones village, leading to a hilarious joke where he forgets he's magically disguised as a woman and uses masculine Japanese before having to correct himself. It's not much, but it's far more than in the English.
There's a lot of other changes later. Some of them are due to censorship, like the village in the poisonous forest (Japanese: まよいのもり, "The Lost Woods") having a villager who asks Simea if he believes in god, and then once Simea defeats the Ōmu and saves the village, that same villager says that he'll worship Simea as a god. Some of them are just minor phrasing, or giving names to places that didn't have them in Japanese--the first village is called "Leaf" in English, for example, and the Japanese Town of Travellers is named "Brynmaer." And there's my favorite, elaborated on in this post, that the Psycho Armor and Psycho Shield, the most powerful armor in the game, isn't named because it's maddening, or crazy powerful, or anything like that.
It's a transliteration from the Japanese 最高 (saikō, "The best").
A very Japanese name, and there's no way to convert it straight over to English without it sounding ridiculous. I think the localizers did an amazing job with that name, actually. I remember that "Psycho Armor" fired up my imagination a child. Then again, so did everything else in the game.
Bullet hell.
In terms of gameplay, Crystalis is an action RPG, with more RPG than The Legend of Zelda and less RPG than Final Fantasy I. While the only weapons available are the four elemental swords, there's a variety of armor, shields, and secondary accessories to find and use. Some of them are even part of optional sidequests. It's entirely possible to never find Deo's Pendant or the Rapid-Fire Ring (Eng: "Warrior's Ring"), since they both require using the Change spell and talking to specific people. It's even possible to miss the Blizzard Bracelet, the ultimate power-up for the Sword of Water, since it's just in a treasure chest somewhere and it's not necessary to beat the game. I know this because it happened to me the first time I played.
The main twist in terms of combat is that while it's possible to run into enemies and stab them, it's usually a suboptimal strategy. Each sword has the ability to charge up an attack to three levels. Level one fires a tiny projectile, level two fires a larger one, and level three fires an attack that hits a large part of the screen but also costs MP. The exception is the Sword of Thunder, where level one and two both fire a spread of projectiles and level three causes a storm that hits the whole screen. The best strategy is thus always to charge up the sword and fire at enemies rather than get close and risk being hit, and so Simea spends probably 90% of the game with the whirling orbs of a sword charge flying around him. It makes Crystalis almost more of a shooter, albeit one with a short charge time between shots. The Rapid-Fire Ring makes it even more of a shooter, as then simply pressing the attack button instantly fires off a level one charge shot.
There's also magic and magic points, which is taught to Simea by the sages, though just this playthrough I realized that it's psychic powers as magic. The powers are healing, flight, teleporting, telepathy, paralyzing enemies, disguising Simea as one of four other people, and creating a barrier that blocks attacks. There's no throwing fireballs, turning people into undead, summoning monsters, or anything like that. It's another element of Crystalis's science-fantasy premise.
"I've heard a rumor that the empire is on the brink of collapse, but is it really true?"
The one disadvantage of the leveling system is that there's a hard floor below which attacks do zero damage. This can work out to Simea's advantage, as going back to earlier areas late in the game means that enemy attacks just bounce off his Ceramic Armor, but it also means that it's possible to enter a boss fight and be completely unable to hurt it. The very first boss fight in the game absolutely requires level three to fight, and without level three all of Simea's attacks just bounce off. At that point, there's nothing to do other than die and then go off and grind, which is horrible game design. This is worst in Goa Fortress, where two bosses in the first half require level 13 but the two bosses in the second half require level 14. I ran into that and had to spend ten minutes killing monsters in the depths of the fortress. Not a long time in total--it's certainly no grinding outside the Marsh Cave in Final Fantasy--but to design a single contiguous dungeon like that definitely wouldn't fly today. And I don't see why they did it even then! Let people struggle through and kill bosses at low levels if they can. If someone is good enough to dodge all the projectiles that a boss fires, find time to charge their sword, get off the shots, and win through, they should be able to. Apparently the GBA version allows this, so amidst all their wrong-headed changes they made one good decision.
Less problematic and more flavorful is sword immunities. Certain monsters are immune to some elements, or can only be damaged by a certain element. This requires a lot of going back into inventory, equipping a different sword, equipping a different sword enhancer, and then going back out to fight again. This is annoying, but it's mostly a problem due to the NES inputs. If Crystalis were on the SNES and there were a single button to switch between swords, it'd be nothing but good, but as it is I lost quite some time hearing the "ting!" sound of an ineffective attack, switching swords to find the right weapon, and then attacking again.
The source of my love of fungal forests, giant insects, and poison.
That's about the only complaint I have, though. Everyone has those pieces of media that are pure nostalgia trips, where reading or watching or playing them is like taking a long, warm bath. Crystalis is like that for me, one of my favorite games of all time. It brings me back to summer days in my parents' family room, playing Nintendo games without a care in the world, trying to find out where the Sword of Fire is. The kind of carefree memory I'll treasure forever.
And it introduced me, even obliquely, to Studio Ghibli. I really can't credit Crystalis enough with making me a more cultured, fungal-forest-obsessed person.
no subject
Date: 2019-Jan-27, Sunday 06:40 (UTC)"If someone is good enough to dodge all the projectiles that a boss fires, find time to charge their sword, get off the shots, and win through, they should be able to. Apparently the GBA version allows this, so amidst all their wrong-headed changes they made one good decision.
Less problematic and more flavorful is sword immunities...."
Ah, in two back-to-back paragraphs you just accidentally touched on why the GBA version removing sword immunities wasn't such a great decision after all.
Yeah, being able to damage the vampire at level 1 or 2 is neat. But what happens when you get more than one sword, they change the "you're hitting this boss with the wrong sword, doofus" immunity to a "well you still can I guess but it's Not Very Effective" sharp damage reduction, and as a direct result you no longer have the "ting" to tell you that you're using the wrong sword?
no subject
Date: 2019-Jan-28, Monday 03:42 (UTC)And the GBA even had L and R buttons, so they could have added a sword-switching shortcut and instead they did...that.