I could dust off the NES and bust it out again (or d/l a rom) but I would rather play a VC port. This is one of the most criminally underrated games of al time. Some may not realize it, but it was also pretty influential. If Im not mistaken, wasn’t it one of the first narrative driven RPGs, and one one of the first to display changes in the character’s costumes? Correct me if I’m wrong.
The character’s costume only changed between having armor and no armor on. I think Kid Icarus managed to change Pit’s appearance once you got to the end of the game. Then of course there’s that terrible Athena game from SNK that had several different outfits for the main character to parade around in (and I’m pretty sure it predated Crystalis by a good couple of years).
That said considering that it just barely made it onto the NES thanks to the massive technical requirements and that Final Fantasy managed to squeeze in three games before that I don’t think that Crystalis was the first story driven RPG (in fact I’ve heard somewhere that FF2 even beat Crystalis in cribbing elements from Nausicaa’s story, but then again, I could be mistaken).
That would be neat. I’ve never properly finishing Crystalis.
I bought the GBC port awhile back, and never got anywhere because of the AWFUL music. Seriously, the original Crystalis had an awesome soundtrack for a NES game. I could understand some alterations that might be needed to make it work on the GBC but they re-composed all of the music in the game. It all sounded like this God-awful trash rock stuff horribly squeezed through the GBC’s sound processor. It was like music LJN would have made for some of their NES games. It was completely terrible.
Suffice to say, I couldn’t get far in the GBC Crystalis before shutting it off for good. I still have the cart though, hell I can see it from here. Taunting me.
My brother and I have our copy at home, one of our best purchases. Is it bad that we used the warp trick too many times before we sat down and played it for reals?
Speaking of the warp trick, we broke our game once and had to start over. In the Forest Maze we had called the Giant Beetle with the Insect Flute, and when things got too difficult we warped out of there, went to the Inn, saved, and decided to try again. Too bad for us there was only one Insect Flute.
That wasn’t the only thing they fucked up in that remake. They also completely ruined the story by making the main character into some random kid raised in a hyperbolic time chamber in preparation to face down some generic foreshadowed evil villain. So now the evil emperor is now the true big bad instead of the other enemy that shall remain nameless since the original game is still worth spoiler tagging.
The GBC version of Crystalis is almost as bad of a remake as Sword of Mana was.
Geez, I never even got far enough to realize that because the music was simply so bad that it drove me off of it.
I’d love to see Crystalis VC’d, but isn’t SNK shut down now? Who knows it, if anyone?