Like a lot of people, I’ve been on a nostalgia trip lately. The accelerating societal collapse seems to be the catalyst for this phenomenon, so it makes sense that much of today’s nostalgia revolves around the High 90s–when most entertainment media sang their swan songs prior to hitting cultural ground zero.
For me, a defining component of the High 90s experience will always be sixteen-bit JRPGs. Back then, the Super Nintendo was the main venue where legendary game studios delivered masterpiece after masterpiece to gamers who didn’t see that the tracks ran out just around the corner. It was a time that’s now romanticized by the fact it was doomed to end–more so by how it ended.
This sentiment was really driven home to me recently when a friend lent me a rare copy of Terranigma. Most readers can be forgiven for not having heard of it. Part of a loose trilogy with Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia, Terranigma was developed by plucky Japanese studio Quintet and published by JRPG powerhouse Enix.
A joint by those two outfits is an automatic buy in most Gen Y gamers’ books, and they would have been right to snatch it up on launch day. Unfortunately for American gamers, Terranigma never saw an official US release.
The fact that I’d never gotten the chance to play the game before made my first playthrough of Terranigma a nearly transcendent experience. Like watching a TV show rerun that’s “new to me”, slotting the game pak in my SNES, firing up the old CRT I reserve for such purposes, and digging into a long lost JRPG transported me to another place and era. It’s the closest I’ll come to having a time machine.
It wasn’t just being immersed in classic 2D JRPG graphics, game play, and sound–though Terranigma’s soundtrack is an instant classic, and you should put it on while you’re reading this.
What nailed the sense of, “It’s the summer of 1996, and I’m just firing up the new Enix game I saved up for,” was the key ingredient that’s universally lacking from current AAA games but defined the 16-bit era. Each and every element of the game presented the familiar genre and aesthetic staples players loved while markedly improving on all of them as we once expected.
My default state while playing Terranigma was, I’m playing a Quintet RPG. This is fun! But often, I’d marvel, Whoa, look at that water effect! or, These battle controls are really smooth! or catch myself humming the OST.
Prior to Terranigma, no game had given me such a revelatory experience since Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger.
It made me grateful, in however narrow a sense, to have been born when I was and sorrowful that younger generations never knew and will never know a time when things continually get better; when ascending excellence is taken for granted.
To at least make a show of giving an objective review, Terranigma does have a few warts worth pointing out. The plot involves the Manichean dualism precipitating a fight against a nihilistic supreme evil that’s been overdone to the point of cliché in JRPGs and anime. Paeans to Fukuyama style Liberalism as final evolution of human thought pervade the game’s second half. John Maynard Keynes even plays a recurring role as a traveling economist who encourages the protagonist to impose global free trade.
But unlike a Current Year game that would hammer on these points in a smug, lecturing tone, Terranigma presents its Liberalism and globalism as quaint artifacts of a more innocent time. In those days, Japan was still Japanese, Europe was still European, and America was still American–if only for a little while longer. The game gives no indication that its makers foresaw globalism wiping out those identities; quite the contrary, in fact.
As powerful counterpoints to its liberalizing tendencies, Terranigma depicts at least two images of Jesus Christ, and the Church is cast in a positive light. Such charity was audacious, even for the time.
The ultimate indictment of our current age’s entertainers is that it’s deeply refreshing to play a game whose makers clearly didn’t hate their audience. If you can find it, I highly recommend playing Terranigma.
It’s a great way to not give money to people who hate you.
