Monday, January 28, 2013

Games I Grew Up On: Crystalis

One of the very earliest action RPGs I ever played was Crystalis.  The music was top notch, the gameplay was a good balance of intense (usually for boss fights) and pleasant (wandering around killing monsters for money/experience), and the setting is amazing (100 years after a nuclear war where magic has been rediscovered and is combined with science).

The player wakes up in a strange tower with no memory, but is guided by four different sages through the story to ultimately combine four different elemental swords into the Crystalis sword and defeat Emperor Draygon who is conquering the world.  As cliche as that sounds now, it certainly wasn't when I was a little kid.  Although I'm not sure how well this game stands up if you didn't grow up on it, it's definitely a game I go back to play every once in awhile.

Essentially, combat is like Secret of Mana.  You run around in a mostly top-down view, stab at enemies with B, can cast some spells, can charge up your sword attacks to various levels by standing still (the character, not the player) and holding B (the player, not the character), use gold to buy upgraded armor and shields or useful items, talk to lots of people to figure out what to do next (eventually you get a Telepathy spell that lets you read people's minds, which is an interesting way to get information), and vanquish evil.  I really want to go back and play this game again now just thinking about it...

2 comments:

  1. One of my favoritest games of all time. I still play the theme on the piano. And apparently I'm still mixing magic and science in post-apocalyptic worlds (I didn't remember that aspect of Crystalis's world-building).

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    1. While looking stuff up about this game, I found out they made a Gameboy Color version of it and for some reason they changed the music. Why would they change the music? This is one of my top 10 games for music.

      If I remember right, it was just the bad guys that used technology. Most of the normal people abandoned it, though.

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