Crystalis

Crystalis

NES - USA - 1st edition.

Developer SNK, Nintendo Software Technology Corporation Publisher SNK, Nintendo Published 1990-04-13 Platforms Game Boy Color, NES Genres Action RPG, Metroidvania Themes Fantasy, Science Fiction Distribution Commercial

Crystalis is an action RPG developed and published by SNK for the NES on 1990-04-13, and later ported to the Game Boy Color on 2000-06-26.

The game takes place in a world where technology brought humanity to the brink of extinction in a great war, so the few survivors outlawed technology. In the rebuilt society, people turned to magic as a replacement. However, one magician discovered the ancient secret of technology and used it to create a powerful flying fortress with which he plans to conquer the world. Desperate for to stop him before it's too late, the magicians looked through their ancient writings and learned of the existence of a powerful being from the ancient war who was put into a cryogenic sleep long ago. Hoping he could save them, the magicians woke him from his sleep only to discover he was a mere boy. You play as the boy who must defeat the evil magician before he conquers the world.

Personal

Own?	No.
Won?	Yes. NES - USA.
Finished	2024-06-04.

None of my friends had this game growing up, so I didn't see it when it was popular. I remember coming across it around 2000 when I was first playing with NES emulators. I thought the intro looked nice, but, once I discovered it was an action RPG, I abandoned it as I wasn't interested in sinking a bunch of hours into it. In the early 2000s, while living with several gamer friends of mine, I briefly watched one of them playing it on original hardware, and, though it looked interesting, and he had nothing but praise for it, I still didn't bother with it. A few years later another friend of mine talked about how great the game was, and all of this praise kept the game on my radar. In my 40s while looking for a new game to play, I finally decided to try it out. It took me a couple weeks of off-and-on play, but I finally beat it.

Review

4	6	5	4	3

Best Version: NES

Good

• I like the charging mechanic where staying still allows you to increase the power of your attack power. This is a nice system where you have to make yourself vulnerable in order to become more powerful.
• The player's character moves quickly, and is responsive to input.
• The theme of the story, a cryogenically frozen scientist is thawed out to prevent a villain from using technology to conquer the world, is enjoyable. I know this wasn't original at the time, but it was one of the first of it's genre to see acclaim in the USA.
• The game opens shortcuts in the maps as you progress through the game to cut down travel time, then gives you a teleport spell which helps even more.
• The start and ending cutscenes look great.
• The game thankfully uses a save battery instead of a password.
• The manual is pretty detailed.

Bad

• Because both the player and the monsters move quite quickly, it's difficult to hit an enemy with an uncharged sword attack without also getting hit yourself. This means you almost always have to delay your attacks throughout the entire game.
• The controller's buttons are implemented in a rather odd manner. A attacks and B uses the equipped item or spell, except some items are activated with A, not B, though you still swing your sword when you try to use them. Also, you can equip both a spell and item at the same time in your inventory, but, if a spell is equipped, the item can't be used, so why allow it to be equipped? Start opens your status, unless you're in your inventory, then it opens the save menu. Select opens your inventory, but, if you press it while talking, it repeats the last dialog box. Navigating the items menu is a bit clunky too, so more work should have been put into the system to tighten it up.
• Most of the caves are long winding corridors which all use the same repeating graphics, and, aside from the same repeating enemies, they're mostly empty. You will occasionally find a chest, but half of the time it will be a cheap item. This makes most of the game pretty bland.
• There are several status ailments like poison, paralyze, petrify, etc., and none of them wear off, each must be cured with a specific item, and you only have a few inventory slots to hold such items. Until late in the game when you get armor that intrinsically protects you, your only other way to cure these is by casting an MP-expensive spell. This can create annoying problems. For example, if you're poisoned far away from a town, and you don't have an antidote or the MP for the spell, you'll probably die before you can get back, even if you had full health when you were poisoned. This is makes the game harder than it needs to be.
• Your level is capped at 16, which you're quite likely to reach before you reach the ending. Upon reaching the cap, killing enemies only rewards you gold, but, by then, you'll also most likely already have the best equipment you can buy, so, every enemy you fight is meaningless.
• I didn't like having to activate an item in my inventory then use it in order to give it to an NPC. For such a fast-paced game, it would make more sense to just have the NPC accept the necessary item if it's in your inventory.
• You get a few bow and arrows in your inventory, but you can't use them in combat; they're just lock-and-key items for bosses which is very anticlimactic.
• While the plot is nice, the story is tissue thin. Most of the dialogue is your typical unimportant 8-bit RPG fare. Every so often a character says something related to the story, but it's usually so terse it loses any emotion it was meant to convey. Several NPCs die in the game, and the dialogue implies the player is supposed to be sad about their deaths, but there is almost no character development, and I never even recognized any of the characters anyway, so I never felt anything for them.
• Through the course of my play through I got stuck in the walls twice due to buggy wall collision.
• Most of the screenshots in the manual are from very late in the game, including a picture of the final boss. This is kind of a spoiler.

Ugly

• Overall, I just didn't like this game very much. I found the play too repetitive, the world too homogeneous, and there are too many problems which hindered my progress. I probably would have been more impressed by it had I played it in my youth, but I also know I never would have even come close to beating it due to the puzzles with vague solutions. The game is often rated quite well on lists, so I can only conclude that the game just didn't age well. The late portions of the game, in particular, were aggravating.
• Having to constantly switch between the various swords and their power-ups so frequently throughout the game is very annoying. I don't know how the play-testers didn't complain enough to get this fixed.
• I found a lot of the game's "puzzles" to have a pretty vague solution, and I had to consult a walkthrough multiple times to find the answer. I list a few examples below, but there were more:
  • You're given a flute and told it attracts deadly insects, but playing it where the insects live accomplishes nothing, and the game won't progress until you solve the puzzle. There isn't any indication for what to do, but you're expected to play the flute in an area of the woods that looks different than the rest of the woods to summon a boss.
  • An injured dolphin asks for herbs so he can heal himself. I initially assumed he wanted the plant I found in the same cave system, but that didn't help. I tried all my other plot items, but they didn't help either, so I wandered for some time and still couldn't find the item he needed. I ended up consulting a guide, and, to my consternation, it turned out I just needed to select a normal medical herb, the kind you buy from a shop and use as a healing item. However, instead of using the herb, you give the herb by pressing the opposite button. This is a very unusual way of handling a fetch quest.
  • At one point you're given eye glasses as a reward, and told simply that they "will help you." You can keep them equipped, but nothing happens. What you're supposed to do is use them in an empty shed inside a town which will reveal a secret door. There is no indication they have this ability, and the only hint is that there is an otherwise inaccessible area outside the town.
• Most of the bosses in the game cannot be damaged unless you've reached a specific level, and there is no indication what the minimum level is to hurt them. If you encounter them when you're under-leveled, you'll just fail to damage them until they eventually kill you, which makes them seem invincible, so you wonder if there is some special trick you need to figure out in order to injure them. Neither the game nor the manual says anything about this, the player is just expect to know they need to grind more and try again later. No doubt this came up in play testing, but they chose not to address it.
• Near the end of the game there are is a narrow ledge between a moving platform. On the ledge is a powerful monster that takes many hits to kill, as well as a moth that flies about erratically. If either hits you, you will probably fall off the ledge to the map below and have to work your way back up and try again. Once you make it past the ledge, there is another, and then a third. This part was quite infuriating and drained nearly all of my health, and is naturally followed up by one of the game's hardest bosses (I later discovered I could have just flown over the whole thing without much effort, which made me even more angry!).
• The floating tower is an obnoxious gauntlet. You face dozens of bullet sponge robots which damage you severely if you take a hit. You can very slowly regenerate your HP and MP if you have the right items, but it requires being in a safe place, and the only one that exists on the tower is the room where you start. But, if you do re-enter it, all the enemy robots respawn and you have to kill them all over again. The trick is to very slowly and methodically hit the robots while they're just off screen in order to stun lock them. And, just in case you wanted a fallback, nope, saving is disabled!

Media

Box Art

• 

  Famicom - Japan.

• 

  NES - USA.

• 

  NES - USA - Clean cover art.

• 

  Game Boy Color - USA.

Documentation

• 

  Manual - Famicom - Japan.

• 

  Manual - NES - USA.

• 

  Manual - Game Boy Color - USA.

• 

  Advertisement - Japan.

• 

  Advertisement - Japan.

• 

  Advertisement - USA.

Videos

Review - Hungry Goriya.

Longplay - Famicom.

Longplay - NES.

Longplay - Game Boy Color.

Play Online

Famicom, Game Boy Color, NES, NES (Beta)

Representation

Strong female character?	Fail	There are several female NPCs, but none are important.
Bechdel test?	Fail	No women ever talk to each other.
Strong person of color character?	Fail	Race isn't mentioned. A few of the wise men are drawn as thought they're Asian, but they aren't really that important.
Queer character?	Fail	There are no queer characters.

Titles

Language	Native	Transliteration	Translation
English	Crystalis
Japanese	ゴッド・スレイヤー ~はるか天空のソナタ~	Goddo Sureiya: Haruka Tenku no Sonata	God Slayer: Sonata of the Far Away Sky

Links