r/terranigma

I still can't believe it.

I was so lucky as a kid. I saw Terranigma and Lufia 2 advertised in a Kmart or Target brochure on special for $20 a piece. This was in Australia. I wasn't certain they were jrpgs because info was hard to come by but I took a chance and got the 2 best SNES jrpgs. RRP was $120 per game back then too.

I posted this in Soul Blazer subreddit, but seems it is kinda quiet there, If it's not appropriate to post about other games in the trilogy here, I'll delete the post. I'll take this opportunity to extend the question to Terranigma as well, not just Soul Blazer.

Recent replayed Soul Blazer and really think it would be great if Square Enix releases a remake. There are many things that a remake could improve, like dialogues and gramatical mistakes, game mechanics, graphics etc. I'm really curious if people would prefer a modernized game, or an extremely faithful remake that mainly updates the graphics like it was with Super Mario RPG remake on Switch. Feel free to comment what would you change or improve in a Soul Blazer and Terranigma remake.

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 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.

I think Dragoon Castle is easily the worst dungeon I’ve encountered in Terranigma so far, which sucks because this feels like it’s supposed to be a pretty important story dungeon. (Hate you Meiling!)

First you have the stealth sections, which I already hate in RPGs. The entire game has trained me to fight everything I come across, and suddenly I’m supposed to sneak around guards. Even worse, getting caught can send you all the way back instead of just resetting the room.

But what really got me was figuring out where to go afterward. I got the hint about the statues not facing each other and checking the wall, so I spent forever wandering around looking for the room it was referring to.

Turns out I first needed to go back to a completely different room, pick up the blue pots, throw them at all six candles to extinguish them, and then a hidden passage appears.

How was I supposed to figure that out?! Is there even a hint about it in the game? Also those super fast boots were kinda useless. I thought they were going to play a bigger part in the dungeon as well since there was a hint about finding them. What a stupid part this has been.

Maybe I missed some clue somewhere, but I don’t remember the game ever establishing that extinguishing candles with pots is something I’m supposed to be looking for. The statue hint doesn’t even help you until you’ve already figured out this completely separate hidden passage! To quote AVGN, “What were they thinking!?”

I’ve been trying to play Terranigma without a guide because I wanted to figure things out myself, but sections like this are really wearing me down. There’s a difference between making me stop and think and just making me wander around aimlessly until I happen to interact with the right thing.

I’ve had some issues with the dungeon design before, but Dragoon Castle is by far the worst one I’ve encountered. It’s a shame because story-wise this should be one of the more interesting parts of the game.