Backlog Bingo 2025: Terranigma

Hoo boy.

Terranigma is 1995 action RPG for the SNES, made by Quintet. It's the middle game in what's informally called the Quintet Trilogy, between Illusion of Gaia (1993, also SNES) and The Granstream Saga (1997, on the PS1). Up until uh, when I started playing this game, I thought that the Quintet Trilogy was Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, Terranigma. So...that's neat. Apparently I've been wrong about that for years!

Terranigma, unlike the other three games mentioned above, never actually came out in the US, because Enix (this was pre-Squeenix, of course) had already shut down their branch here. But it did come out in Europe, meaning that it's had a perfectly accessible English translation basically since release. I didn't have to wait on a fan translation for this or anything, but I've started this game three or four times in the past fifteen or twenty years and have never even made it past chapter two, so it ended up on my card this year as a forcing function for me finishing it.

Terranigma is...kinda a mess, and not really in the way that I ended up loving, but it's so absolutely bananas that I can't not at least give it credit for absolutely sending its ideas as hard as it can.

Here is a canon plot point in this game: Christopher Columbus was tortured by Actual Satan for finding a cool spear and putting it into Pandora's Box for the protaganist to be given later by an alternate-dimension copy of his girlfriend.

Yeah.

The rough structure of this game: you are Ark, you wake up in the only town in the underworld, open Pandora's Box through a series of events, and then get assigned the task of climbing a bunch of towers to heal the earth. You climb some towers, each one brings back a (dead) continent (this is chapter one). You do that and then get sent to the overworld (i.e. Actual Earth, the world map is Literally Earth, not even turned upside down like in Drakengard, the cowards) to bring back humans, but to do that have to bring back animals, which basically means okay, do the plant dungeon, now do the bird dungeon, now do the mammal dungeon, now... (It just now occured to me that at no point does Ark bring back fish. Oops.) (this is chapter two). Then, bring back the humans. Go from town to town, doing little main quests and sidequests to rebuild towns and then help them grow. (This is chapter three.) At this point, the game becomes an absolute mess of "just go to GameFAQs already" fetch quests, even if you aren't trying to 100% the game, as the closing third chapter is a completely momentum-breaking set of five mandatory fetch quests: go to this corner of the Sahara for a magic rock, go buy a flower from a flower girl in the first town and give it to a penguin in Antarctica for a magic rock, go climb Air's Rock so someone can hand you a magic rock, etc.

Naturally, the section after this is learning that Actual Satan has ordered a mad scientist to destroy all of humanity with a virus named Asmodeus, and that you aren't just Ark, but Dark Ark, and that the elder of your town is Actual Satan in disguise, who, by the way, is also the final boss of Illusion of Gaia, who wanted you to revive the world so you could revive this mad scientist so the scientist could re-destroy the world because I DON'T KNOW OKAY it goes so far off the rails that at some point after the giant fetch quest, you, as Dark Ark, get killed by Light Ark, who shows up for just that scene, because Actual God needed Dark Ark to die so he could be reincarnated as a baby back into the underworld to fight Actual Satan, and my only response was "yeah, sure, I guess this is happening, this is a video game".

The purely-vibes plot gets bad enough that the Wikipedia summary says this about a key moment in the final chapter:

He fails, as Darkside Elle sacrifices herself to kill Yomi and save Ark's life. Yomi is conveniently replaced by a "Light Version".

It's absolute "somehow, Palpatine has returned" energy. It's a fucking mess.

There is, fortunately, a fairly competent-if-dated ARPG in here. If you like similar games of the time (Illusion of Gaia itself, of course, but Soul Blazer or Secret of Mana/Evermore or maybe even Link to the Past), you'll probably like the mechanics. The damage formulas are borderline broken, though: I reached the final boss at level 30, and would have needed ~500 hits to kill him, dealing 1-2 with the occasional crit for 6. Grinding to level 31, though, brought my base damage from 1-2 to 35-50, with crits in the low hundreds. This is...weird balance, but it ends up being good, because the final boss is also an RNG nightmare that has two layers of deciding when he can be attacked, and who also has a 100% unavoidable attack, so you're on a timer. That timer happens to be completely random, and if the boss decides that you can't win, you can't, as nothing stops it from just doing the unavoidable screen-filling attack that you can't hit it during a thousand times in a row other than that that would be the world's most egregiously awful RNG.

I...did not really enjoy this. But some positive things: the soundtrack is excellent, a lot of the dungeons are good, and the art direction is really striking for the time. The whole package, though, is just a bit of a mess, with really questionable bosses and writing that is Utterly Vibes. Not really one I'll recommend too often, but I'm glad I finished up Quintet's catalog from around then. (I still really like Soul Blazer, honestly!) 2/5.