A couple of months ago, I was reminiscing, as I often do, about the good ol' days of gaming. And, of course, the good ol' days will vary from one gamer to the next, but for me, it was the heyday of the Super NES.
One game that held a special nuanced memory for me was Actraiser. It was one of the earliest SNES games and like all good early titles sought to show off the capabilities of the new hardware. To this day I think the phenominal orchestrated soundtrack, tight controls, and gorgeous colorful graphics make it a great demo piece for the SNES.
Like many good things, however, there wasn't nearly enough of it to quench my thirst. Just when the game started to hit it's stride, and I started to really get into the "zone", excited about what I'd be doing next, it was over. When the credits rolled, my heart sank. I rushed out and picked up a copy of ActRaiser 2 (I didn't play the first game until well after it came out, so the sequel was readily available). ActRaiser 2 disappointed me in that it departed from the original in too many ways to recapture its essence. I never finished it.
So a couple of months ago I remembered ActRaiser and happened across its Wikipedia entry. As is often the case, after reading the article, I started tumbling down the Wikipedia rabbit hole and ended up learning all about the developer that made ActRaiser, Quintet, and about another game as famous for its obscurity as for its quality - Terranigma.
I learned that Quintet went on to make another SNES game called "Soul Blazer" with a theme similar to ActRaiser. I also learned that it was unofficially the start of a series of games fans had dubbed "Heaven and Earth".
Amazed that I had never heard of this before, I immediately scoured the local used game shops for a copy of Soul Blazer. I found one and played through the game in a couple of days. The game told the story of a greedy king that sold the souls of his kingdom to the devil for money. He didn't see the foolishness of dealing with the devil until the devil came for his soul. The English adaptation didn't call him the devil, just as it didn't call your benefactor God, but that's what those characters were meant to represent. The game consists of defeating the demonized souls of the citizens that the king sold and restoring the world to its state before the devil took over. Although it was almost completely different from what I remembered of ActRaiser, it managed to capture some of the addictive gameplay and kept me hooked until the very end.
The next game in the series was "The Illusion of Gaia". I had actually bought the game years ago and never played it. I was on an RPG kick and bought pretty much anything I could find with the intention of playing it later on. It worked out remarkably well in this case. So the Illusion of Gaia was quite a bit heavier on story than I remember many SNES games at the time. The production values seemed a bit higher than Sould Blazer - better graphics, more action. But it played like a cheap knockoff of Seiken Densetsu II (The Secret of Mana). The difficulty of the boss fights seemed disproportionate to the stuff leading up to them, so I only really died on boss fights - some of which took upwards of 30 minutes to figure out. Kinda reminded me of Mega Man's pattern-based boss fights. Still the characters were compelling and the story, while still very Japanese in its unliklihood, was compelling. The rest of this paragraph is a spoiler. The game world is filled with references to actual places on Earth, but the references aren't exact. Instead of a continent, Euro is a large town. The Nazca lines of Peru are actually where India is located etc... There is a large comet careening towards Earth (Final Fantasy fans will find this very familiar) and its light is causing creatures on the planet to evolve into monsters. After defeating the monsters and collecting several mystical statues, you gain the power to confront the evil soul of the "Dark Gaia" - the horrific intelligence behind the comet. When the dust clears the comet changes course, but it expelled enough evolutionary light to re-order the continents and suddenly you've gone from a 50 B.C. like world to the world of 1994.
After that we have what some consider the end of the series, "Terranigma". This is a game with an odd history. Its primary quirk is that although it was officially released in the English language, it was never released in the United States. This makes it a much sought-after title for collectors. This is a trend reversal of sorts because generally Europe and Australia get screwed out of quality game releases. I never realized that half of the challenge of the game would be getting past the technical hurdles just to actually play the thing.
A couple of years ago I heard about Terranigma and tried to buy it. I even bought a Super Honey Bee adapter so it could be played on my U.S. Super NES system. But I was outbid on the Ebay auction for the game itself, so I was stuck with an adapter and nothing to adapt with it. Well, once I learned that the game was made by Quintet, and further that it was part of the "Heaven and Earth" series, I redoubled my efforts to get a copy. After winning my auction I spent a couple of hours digging through dozens of boxes and several closets filled with gaming crap to locate the stupid adapter. When the game arrived, however, I received a shock. The adapter that I had had for the last two years for this one purpose, didn't work. It did what it advertised it would do - it bypassed the lockout chip on the Super NES, but apparently the engineers at Nintendo had devised an additional way to stop people from playing out-of-territory games by the time that Terranigma came out. Terranigma was only released in English in Australia and Europe. Both countries use a different television standard than the U.S. and Japan. Long story short, the screens refresh at a different rate in Europe than they do in the U.S. The game checks this refresh rate and if it finds the system running at the U.S. refresh rate, all you get is a screen telling you that you can't play the game because you're out-of-territory. Of course, my SNES runs at the U.S. refresh rate of 60Hz - otherwise the TV wouldn't display it properly. So I started furiously digging on the Internet for answers - a game this popular, this has to be a known issue and there has to be a solution to it that doesn't involve emulation.
After searching and searching, I was surprised to find how little information there is out there about playing Terranigma on a U.S. SNES. In general a lack of information about something like this either means that it can't be done, or it's so easy, no one thought anyone would need specific instructions. After a couple of hours of searching, however I discovered two options, one was to buy a Pro Action Replay for the SNES as they are the only adapter cartridge that are known to work with that game, but it would have to be a specific version of the adapter, and they usually went for over $100 on Ebay. The other was to spend $5 on bits from Radio Shack and wire in a 50/60Hz switch on the console. Such a switch is usually installed to allow European and Australian gamers to play U.S. and Japanese games, but since the consoles are effectively identical, it works both ways. Since I have 5 Super NES's, including one that's already marked up by some joker who etched his name and social security number into it, I opted to go the cheap route and mod the console. There are plenty of sites that will show you how to add a 50/60Hz switch, just not many that will explain that that's what's needed for Terranigma.
So the mod worked and I can play Terranigma on a proper Super NES now. After playing through the first few hours of the game, I can say that this is, in fact, one of the most polished SNES Action RPG's I've ever played. The graphics, sound, combat engine, options, weapon and armor system, and in-game help are all on par with the best the SNES has to offer. While it's no where near "the best game on the system" as a lot of hype-monger fanboys would have everyone believe, it is a significant leap in complexity and depth over Quintet's other offerings. It's quite a bit better than several titles that did make it to the U.S. so I have to wonder why it was never brought here. My only guess so far is that Nintendo didn't like the sloppy job Enix did with the English translation. Normally when a game is localized from Japanese to English, a new "half-width" character set is added to the game's memory to take advantage of the fact that English letters don't need as much space on screen as Japanese letters. This is particularly evident in the text of games like "Secret of Mana". Terranigma is a perfect example of why localizers normally do this. All of the English text uses the same width as the Japanese characters so it looks like there's a space after every letter and two spaces between words. It's not a horrible thing to adapt to, but it does make it difficult to read the dialogue.
Finally I learned, that although Quintet dissolved for all practical purposes after the 16-bit era, they did re-form under a new name and spit out one last game that is arguably an unofficial sequel to Terranigma: Granstream Saga on the Playstation. That's another game that I picked up some time ago but never played. I won't know if it's any good until I finish Terranigma, but once again it pays to be a pack rat.
