u/AdUnfair558

What do you guys do when you’re playing a JRPG blind and find out partway through that it has multiple endings?

Do you just accept whatever ending you get on your first playthrough and then replay the game for the others? Or do you watch the other endings on YouTube afterward?

I’ve been thinking about starting Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen completely blind, but I’ve read that getting the best ending is apparently extremely difficult without a guide. I really don’t want to follow a walkthrough because figuring things out for myself is a big part of the fun for me, but at the same time I’d hate to put 40+ hours into it and later realize I accidentally locked myself into a bad ending.

For games like this, do you think the first blind playthrough is worth treating as your ending, even if it isn’t the best one?

This is a long one. Sorry I rambled a lot. There is a tl;dr at the end. Just want to start by saying thank you all for joining me in this journey. The next game I will play will be G.O.D Growth or Deevolution. I don’t think it has a subreddit so I will just be posting on the JRPGs subreddit.

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I finally finished Terranigma, and I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how I feel about it.

I definitely think it was worth playing, and there are parts of this game that I genuinely loved. At the same time, I’m not sure I’d personally call it the hidden masterpiece that it sometimes gets described as. For me, Terranigma is a game with some fantastic ideas that doesn’t always execute them particularly well.

The biggest thing is that I absolutely loved the beginning.

Everything from Crysta through resurrecting the continents, plants, birds, animals, etc. was excellent. The game felt focused, mysterious, and like it had a very clear sense of direction. Watching the world gradually come back to life was probably my favorite part of the entire experience. Honestly, if the whole game had maintained the quality and pacing of roughly that first 10 hours or so, I probably would have been looking at something around a 9/10.

For me, the game gradually started losing points once humans returned.

That’s where the story started feeling much more meandering. Instead of continuing to develop the overarching mystery, you spend a huge amount of time traveling around the world solving individual people’s problems and helping towns develop. I know a lot of people really love the civilization/town-building aspect of Terranigma, but it didn’t do much for me.

I think part of the problem is that I wanted more of the central story during this section. I wanted little pieces of information about what was really happening, Ark’s role in everything, Crysta, the nature of the world, etc. Instead, the larger plot feels like it disappears for hours at a time.

Then toward the end, the opposite happens.

Suddenly the story moves incredibly quickly and starts throwing much larger, almost cosmic concepts at you one after another. I actually like those kinds of ideas, so the concepts themselves weren’t the problem. I just wish they had been gradually introduced throughout the game. Instead of feeling like everything naturally built toward those revelations, I often found myself thinking, “Wait, what? Where did this suddenly come from?”

So the pacing was probably one of my biggest problems with Terranigma. The first part feels controlled and deliberate, the middle becomes extremely loose and meandering, and then the final part suddenly accelerates.

The world travel also made the middle and later portions much more tedious for me.

The boat is your main method of getting around for a long time, and it’s slow. Eventually you get access to planes, but they aren’t really equivalent to getting an airship in something like Final Fantasy VI. You can only travel between specific airports. You can’t just freely fly around the world and land wherever you want.

That makes all of the backtracking and town development much more tedious than I think it needed to be. I understand that exploring the world is part of Terranigma’s identity, but after a while I was spending too much time simply getting from one place to another.

The dungeon design was another mixed bag for me.

I think the actual dungeons are generally okay. Ark controls well, there’s decent variety, and I never felt like the layouts themselves were terrible.

But I swear almost every dungeon has at least one moment where I was thinking, “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

There are so many progression triggers or mechanics that the game barely communicates. A doorway can be almost completely hidden because of the camera angle. You suddenly have to figure out that you’re supposed to throw vases at candles even though the game hasn’t really trained you to think of vases as environmental tools. Earlier in the game there’s a point where clearing all the enemies in one room opens something several rooms away, and I had no idea why anything had changed.

Sometimes I figured these things out myself, but other times I eventually looked them up.

That leads into probably my biggest gameplay complaint. Terranigma has a habit of introducing mechanics or interactions without properly teaching or reinforcing them.

The final boss is a perfect example. You have a Guard mechanic for the entire game, but I basically never needed to use it. Then suddenly the final boss has an attack where guarding becomes extremely important.

There’s also an attack-reflection mechanic in the final fight that felt like something the game suddenly expected me to understand despite barely preparing me for it.

I don’t mind a final boss testing mechanics I’ve learned throughout the game. I actually like that. But the game needs to make those mechanics meaningful before the final hour.

It’s the same philosophy behind some of the puzzles: introduce something, barely use it, and then suddenly make it mandatory.

The Starstone quest near the end was probably where I completely stopped caring about playing without a guide.

I found two of the five myself, but some of the others felt ridiculously obscure. One requires finding a hidden place in the Sahara and inspecting a random pile of bones. Another involves remembering a flower seller mentioning, hours earlier, that perhaps a flower could be given to a girl who cannot speak “or even a penguin,” then later remembering that line when you find the penguin village.

Technically, yes, there are hints.

But some of these clues are so vague and separated from the actual solution by so much time that I stopped finding it satisfying.

Maybe when I was a kid and had one RPG that I was going to play for months, I would have enjoyed sailing around the world looking for secret entrances and experimenting with random objects. Today, I just don’t want to spend an hour of my free time walking over random desert tiles hoping I find the one location the developers had in mind.

I eventually just used a guide because I wanted to continue the story.

The bosses were also fairly disappointing to me.

Terranigma itself really isn’t a particularly difficult game. I felt overpowered for quite a lot of it, and most bosses could be brute-forced without learning particularly complicated patterns.

Then every once in a while, you get a boss where suddenly your level matters enormously.

The leveling/damage system feels strange to me. You can be doing terrible damage at one level, gain another level or two, and suddenly start destroying the same enemy. It makes some difficulty spikes feel less like “I need to learn this fight” and more like “I haven’t crossed the correct stat threshold yet.”

And despite finishing the game, I honestly struggle to think of many boss fights that I genuinely had fun fighting. They just weren’t very memorable to me.

That’s unfortunate because I actually think the basic combat system is good.

Ark feels great to control. He’s fast, responsive, has a nice range of spear attacks, can jump, dash, slide, block, etc. As an action RPG, the fundamentals are strong.

I just don’t think the game always creates encounters that take full advantage of those mechanics.

As for the music, this might be another unpopular opinion, but I thought the soundtrack was mostly average.

There are definitely individual tracks I really like, but it’s not a soundtrack I could listen to from beginning to end outside of the game.

For comparison, I can put on Secret of Mana or Chrono Trigger and happily listen to almost the entire soundtrack. Even Illusion of Gaia has a soundtrack I personally find more consistently enjoyable. Terranigma, for me, is more like Seiken Densetsu 3/Trials of Mana in that there are some tracks I love surrounded by a lot that I don’t feel particularly strongly about.

Overall, I think Terranigma is a very ambitious game.

And maybe that’s both its greatest strength and its biggest weakness.

It has some genuinely fascinating ideas about life, death, civilization, progress, humanity, and the nature of the world. Especially for a Super Famicom game, I admire that it was willing to attempt something this big.

But I don’t always think it successfully communicates those ideas.

The story feels disjointed to me. The game spends too much time away from its central mystery and then tries to make up for it by delivering a huge amount of important material near the end. The gameplay has a lot of mechanics but doesn’t consistently teach the player to use them. The world is enormous and interesting, but actually traveling around it can become tedious.

And yet there are parts of Terranigma that I’ll absolutely remember.

The beginning of the game and the resurrection of the world are fantastic. There’s a loneliness and atmosphere to Ark traveling across this empty planet that feels unlike almost anything else I’ve played from this era. The basic combat and movement feel great. And there are individual moments and ideas here that I think are genuinely special.

So I don’t think Terranigma is a bad game at all.

I think it’s a good, extremely ambitious, heavily flawed gamethat occasionally shows flashes of being an incredible one.

I’m glad I finally played it. I just came away feeling that it had all the ingredients to be something I absolutely loved, but for me it never quite brought them all together.

I’m curious how other people feel about this, especially the people who consider Terranigma one of the best RPGs on the SNES/Super Famicom. Was the civilization-building portion one of the highlights for you? And did the larger story work better for you than it did for me?

TL;DR: Terranigma has an excellent opening, great atmosphere, and some really ambitious ideas, but for me it gradually loses focus. The pacing becomes uneven, progression gets unnecessarily obscure, travel is tedious, bosses are forgettable, and the bigger story feels rushed and disjointed near the end. I’m glad I played it and think it’s a good game, but I don’t quite see it as the hidden masterpiece it’s often made out to be.

Is it a hidden gem? Yes.

Worth playing? Maybe. Depends if you played the FFs, Dragon Quests, Chrono Trigger and looking for something B tier to play.

This is a long one. Sorry I rambled a lot. There is a tl;dr at the end. Just want to start by saying thank you all for joining me in this journey. The next game I will play will be G.O.D Growth or Deevolution. I don’t think it has a subreddit so I will just be posting on the JRPGs subreddit.

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I finally finished Terranigma, and I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how I feel about it.

I definitely think it was worth playing, and there are parts of this game that I genuinely loved. At the same time, I’m not sure I’d personally call it the hidden masterpiece that it sometimes gets described as. For me, Terranigma is a game with some fantastic ideas that doesn’t always execute them particularly well.

The biggest thing is that I absolutely loved the beginning.

Everything from Crysta through resurrecting the continents, plants, birds, animals, etc. was excellent. The game felt focused, mysterious, and like it had a very clear sense of direction. Watching the world gradually come back to life was probably my favorite part of the entire experience. Honestly, if the whole game had maintained the quality and pacing of roughly that first 10 hours or so, I probably would have been looking at something around a 9/10.

For me, the game gradually started losing points once humans returned.

That’s where the story started feeling much more meandering. Instead of continuing to develop the overarching mystery, you spend a huge amount of time traveling around the world solving individual people’s problems and helping towns develop. I know a lot of people really love the civilization/town-building aspect of Terranigma, but it didn’t do much for me.

I think part of the problem is that I wanted more of the central story during this section. I wanted little pieces of information about what was really happening, Ark’s role in everything, Crysta, the nature of the world, etc. Instead, the larger plot feels like it disappears for hours at a time.

Then toward the end, the opposite happens.

Suddenly the story moves incredibly quickly and starts throwing much larger, almost cosmic concepts at you one after another. I actually like those kinds of ideas, so the concepts themselves weren’t the problem. I just wish they had been gradually introduced throughout the game. Instead of feeling like everything naturally built toward those revelations, I often found myself thinking, “Wait, what? Where did this suddenly come from?”

So the pacing was probably one of my biggest problems with Terranigma. The first part feels controlled and deliberate, the middle becomes extremely loose and meandering, and then the final part suddenly accelerates.

The world travel also made the middle and later portions much more tedious for me.

The boat is your main method of getting around for a long time, and it’s slow. Eventually you get access to planes, but they aren’t really equivalent to getting an airship in something like Final Fantasy VI. You can only travel between specific airports. You can’t just freely fly around the world and land wherever you want.

That makes all of the backtracking and town development much more tedious than I think it needed to be. I understand that exploring the world is part of Terranigma’s identity, but after a while I was spending too much time simply getting from one place to another.

The dungeon design was another mixed bag for me.

I think the actual dungeons are generally okay. Ark controls well, there’s decent variety, and I never felt like the layouts themselves were terrible.

But I swear almost every dungeon has at least one moment where I was thinking, “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

There are so many progression triggers or mechanics that the game barely communicates. A doorway can be almost completely hidden because of the camera angle. You suddenly have to figure out that you’re supposed to throw vases at candles even though the game hasn’t really trained you to think of vases as environmental tools. Earlier in the game there’s a point where clearing all the enemies in one room opens something several rooms away, and I had no idea why anything had changed.

Sometimes I figured these things out myself, but other times I eventually looked them up.

That leads into probably my biggest gameplay complaint. Terranigma has a habit of introducing mechanics or interactions without properly teaching or reinforcing them.

The final boss is a perfect example. You have a Guard mechanic for the entire game, but I basically never needed to use it. Then suddenly the final boss has an attack where guarding becomes extremely important.

There’s also an attack-reflection mechanic in the final fight that felt like something the game suddenly expected me to understand despite barely preparing me for it.

I don’t mind a final boss testing mechanics I’ve learned throughout the game. I actually like that. But the game needs to make those mechanics meaningful before the final hour.

It’s the same philosophy behind some of the puzzles: introduce something, barely use it, and then suddenly make it mandatory.

The Starstone quest near the end was probably where I completely stopped caring about playing without a guide.

I found two of the five myself, but some of the others felt ridiculously obscure. One requires finding a hidden place in the Sahara and inspecting a random pile of bones. Another involves remembering a flower seller mentioning, hours earlier, that perhaps a flower could be given to a girl who cannot speak “or even a penguin,” then later remembering that line when you find the penguin village.

Technically, yes, there are hints.

But some of these clues are so vague and separated from the actual solution by so much time that I stopped finding it satisfying.

Maybe when I was a kid and had one RPG that I was going to play for months, I would have enjoyed sailing around the world looking for secret entrances and experimenting with random objects. Today, I just don’t want to spend an hour of my free time walking over random desert tiles hoping I find the one location the developers had in mind.

I eventually just used a guide because I wanted to continue the story.

The bosses were also fairly disappointing to me.

Terranigma itself really isn’t a particularly difficult game. I felt overpowered for quite a lot of it, and most bosses could be brute-forced without learning particularly complicated patterns.

Then every once in a while, you get a boss where suddenly your level matters enormously.

The leveling/damage system feels strange to me. You can be doing terrible damage at one level, gain another level or two, and suddenly start destroying the same enemy. It makes some difficulty spikes feel less like “I need to learn this fight” and more like “I haven’t crossed the correct stat threshold yet.”

And despite finishing the game, I honestly struggle to think of many boss fights that I genuinely had fun fighting. They just weren’t very memorable to me.

That’s unfortunate because I actually think the basic combat system is good.

Ark feels great to control. He’s fast, responsive, has a nice range of spear attacks, can jump, dash, slide, block, etc. As an action RPG, the fundamentals are strong.

I just don’t think the game always creates encounters that take full advantage of those mechanics.

As for the music, this might be another unpopular opinion, but I thought the soundtrack was mostly average.

There are definitely individual tracks I really like, but it’s not a soundtrack I could listen to from beginning to end outside of the game.

For comparison, I can put on Secret of Mana or Chrono Trigger and happily listen to almost the entire soundtrack. Even Illusion of Gaia has a soundtrack I personally find more consistently enjoyable. Terranigma, for me, is more like Seiken Densetsu 3/Trials of Mana in that there are some tracks I love surrounded by a lot that I don’t feel particularly strongly about.

Overall, I think Terranigma is a very ambitious game.

And maybe that’s both its greatest strength and its biggest weakness.

It has some genuinely fascinating ideas about life, death, civilization, progress, humanity, and the nature of the world. Especially for a Super Famicom game, I admire that it was willing to attempt something this big.

But I don’t always think it successfully communicates those ideas.

The story feels disjointed to me. The game spends too much time away from its central mystery and then tries to make up for it by delivering a huge amount of important material near the end. The gameplay has a lot of mechanics but doesn’t consistently teach the player to use them. The world is enormous and interesting, but actually traveling around it can become tedious.

And yet there are parts of Terranigma that I’ll absolutely remember.

The beginning of the game and the resurrection of the world are fantastic. There’s a loneliness and atmosphere to Ark traveling across this empty planet that feels unlike almost anything else I’ve played from this era. The basic combat and movement feel great. And there are individual moments and ideas here that I think are genuinely special.

So I don’t think Terranigma is a bad game at all.

I think it’s a good, extremely ambitious, heavily flawed game that occasionally shows flashes of being an incredible one.

I’m glad I finally played it. I just came away feeling that it had all the ingredients to be something I absolutely loved, but for me it never quite brought them all together.

I’m curious how other people feel about this, especially the people who consider Terranigma one of the best RPGs on the SNES/Super Famicom. Was the civilization-building portion one of the highlights for you? And did the larger story work better for you than it did for me?

TL;DR: Terranigma has an excellent opening, great atmosphere, and some really ambitious ideas, but for me it gradually loses focus. The pacing becomes uneven, progression gets unnecessarily obscure, travel is tedious, bosses are forgettable, and the bigger story feels rushed and disjointed near the end. I’m glad I played it and think it’s a good game, but I don’t quite see it as the hidden masterpiece it’s often made out to be.

Is it a hidden gem? Yes.

Worth playing? Maybe. Depends if you played the FFs, Dragon Quests, Chrono Trigger and looking for something B tier to play.

I’ve been playing MOTHER 3 for about three hours now, and I’m still in Chapter 1. I’ve gotten past what I assume is one of the big moments of the chapter, where Flint finds out that his wife has died, so I figured this was a good point to write down some first impressions.

I’ll be honest: during my first 30 minutes or so, I really wasn’t vibing with the game.

A lot of the slapstick humor at the beginning just wasn’t doing much for me. You’ve got the guy running around with the horn pretending to be a siren, the whole thing with the doorknob getting ripped off and thrown away, and other stuff like that. I understood what kind of humor they were going for, but initially I was just sitting there thinking, “Okay…?”

I played quite a bit more today, though, and I’m starting to warm up to it.

One thing I really like is the battle system. I still don’t completely understand the rhythm mechanic, though. I know you can press the button in time with something and get multiple hits, and I’ve occasionally gotten double or triple attacks, but right now I’m basically just mashing A and trying to time it like Super Mario RPG. I know that’s probably not actually how it works, so any spoiler-free explanation of the battle rhythm system would be appreciated.

The battles themselves are fun, though, and I really like some of the music. The slower jazzy stuff in particular is great and actually reminds me a little of the Birdman theme from Pilotwings 64. I really like the battle music too.

On the other hand, that section during the fire where the music is playing while you can still hear the guy constantly ringing that stupid bell or horn in the background drove me insane.

Another thing that confused me at first was just understanding what kind of world MOTHER 3 takes place in.

At the beginning, the kids are casually playing with this enormous dragon/dinosaur-looking creature, and everybody treats it like that’s completely normal. So at first I was thinking, okay, I guess this is just a world where giant strange animals live peacefully around people and nobody thinks twice about it.

But then later I talked to an NPC who was freaking out about some weird flying rat-like creature, as if that was completely abnormal. That made me do a double take because suddenly I wasn’t sure what actually counts as normal in this world.

From what I understand so far, it seems like the animals are normally pretty peaceful and friendly, and something is happening that’s making them more aggressive or dangerous. So the enemies you’re fighting aren’t necessarily just normal wildlife that always acts this way. Something seems to be wrong with them.

Then you have those Pigmask guys doing something with the animals and apparently creating or modifying them into these weird chimera-like creatures. I don’t completely understand what they’re doing yet, but that part is actually pretty interesting to me. It gives the game this slightly unsettling feeling underneath all the goofy humor.

It also made the giant dragon/dinosaur creature from the beginning make a little more sense to me. At first I was confused that the kids were just playing with this enormous thing like it was a pet, but later when one becomes violent, it seems like the point is that this behavior is not normal for those creatures.

So now I’m actually curious about that whole part of the world: what these animals are normally like, what is changing them, where these strange enemies are coming from, and what exactly the Pigmask guys are doing.

Story-wise, I’m interested in seeing where everything goes, but I have mixed feelings about the emotional stuff so far.

The death of Flint’s wife is obviously supposed to be this huge emotional moment, but I don’t really know her yet. I barely know Flint or the kids either. So when the game suddenly asks me to feel this enormous sense of loss, I just… don’t really feel it yet.

I understand why Flint is devastated, obviously, but as the player I haven’t spent enough time with this family to have much attachment to them.

Because of that, the whole thing felt a little melodramatic or forced to me. Maybe my opinion on that will change later, but that’s how it hit me in the moment. It feels like the game is asking for a really strong emotional reaction before I’ve had enough time with these characters to naturally develop one.

I do like the characters themselves so far, though. There are tons of gags, weird names, little jokes, and strange bits of dialogue.

I’m playing completely blind with no guide, and I’m also playing the Japanese version and reading all of the dialogue, so I’m sure some of the humor is going over my head. There were two characters doing what seemed like a manzai routine, for example, and I understood what they were saying linguistically, but the actual joke just completely went over my head.

Some of the random dialogue does make me laugh, though. Things like a sign reminding you to use the bathroom and brush your teeth before bed, or being unable to walk somewhere because there are ants in the way. It has that strange MOTHER sense of humor where sometimes I laugh and sometimes I just think, “Huh. Okay. That’s certainly a signpost.”

My biggest issue so far is actually harder to explain.

At the moment, MOTHER 3 feels to me like it’s trying really hard to be MOTHER 2/EarthBound.

EarthBound’s weirdness felt natural to me. It felt like that game was weird because that was simply what the creators wanted to make. The strange dialogue, odd NPCs, bizarre enemies, signs, jokes, everything just felt like part of its identity.

Here, sometimes I get the feeling of, “People loved how quirky MOTHER 2 was, so we need weird NPC dialogue! We need strange signs! We need silly names! We need random gags!”

It feels more deliberate somehow. Almost like it’s consciously trying to recreate the feeling of EarthBound rather than simply being weird on its own terms.

Maybe that’s completely unfair after only three hours, and maybe the game eventually develops more of its own identity. I’m definitely willing to give it time.

My other little complaint is the running. I really wish there were just a normal run button or auto-run instead of having to hold the button, wait for the character to get into the running stance, and then take off. It’s a small thing, but it annoys me more than it probably should.

So overall, I’m mixed, but definitely interested.

I like the battles, I like a lot of the music, the characters seem interesting, and I’m curious about what’s happening to the animals, what the Pigmask guys are doing, and where the story is going.

At the same time, the early melodrama hasn’t really landed for me yet, some of the humor isn’t clicking, and right now the game feels a little too consciously like it’s trying to capture that quirky MOTHER 2/EarthBound vibe.

But I’m interested enough that I definitely want to keep playing and see whether my opinion changes.

And please, absolutely no spoilers beyond this point! I’m playing completely blind.

I just finished the Research Lab/Beruga section, and I’m honestly really happy that the game has gotten more interesting again.

For most of the 25 hours I’ve played so far, I feel like there hasn’t been that much overall plot. There have obviously been lots of individual stories involving different towns and characters, but I’ve always been more interested in the bigger story of what is actually going on with Ark, the world, Crysta, etc.

And now suddenly the game has taken this really interesting sci-fi turn.

I’m pretty confused about the timeline of everything, though. I’m assuming some of this will be explained later, and if it is, please just tell me “yes, it gets explained.” I definitely don’t want spoilers.

What I’m confused about is basically this:

Was there originally a normal world with humanity living in it, and then humanity disappeared because of the virus? Then Ark resurrected the continents and humanity basically came back?

And where does Crysta fit into all of this? Why was Ark’s village underground in the first place? Who exactly is Ark?

I’m assuming there is a reason for all of this, but right now I’m having trouble putting the timeline together. If the game eventually explains it, that’s honestly all I want to know.

I really liked the town before the Research Lab too. The way everyone talks about Beruga being in cold sleep and how everything will be wonderful once he wakes up was pretty creepy.

Then you actually meet him and get this whole “eternal life for the chosen people while everyone else is basically disposable” ideology. I really like that kind of sci-fi story. The idea that someone claims they’re creating a perfect future, but they’re also deciding who deserves to be part of that future, is always interesting.

The virus stuff caught me off guard too. Terranigma suddenly feels a lot more sci-fi than I expected it to.

Some elements of this section even reminded me a little of my favorite sci-fi visual novel/game. I won’t name it because honestly even making the comparison might be a spoiler for that game, but if you know, you probably know. lol

As far as side content goes, I was worried I might have locked myself out of a bunch of things by progressing this far. Apparently the main thing that disappears is the Quintet Building in NeoTokio, but I already did that, so I think I’m mostly okay.

I also haven’t really explored much with the boat yet, so there are still a few places I want to check out.

I’m at about 25 hours now, and from what I understand I probably have something like another 6–8 hours left depending on how much optional stuff I do.

Either way, I’m really curious where the story goes from here. This section definitely pulled me back in.