
Terranigma (1996)
Review, 17/11/12
INTRO
Who doesn’t love the Super Nintendo Entertainment System? Its excellent library of games cannot even be counted on all fingers and toes: that ever-present plumber alone crops up with Super Mario World, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, Super Mario Kart and Super Mario All-Stars. Other top notch SNES showings include The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, and Rareware’s Donkey Kong Country trilogy. RPGs your thing? Take a look then at Chrono Trigger, EarthBound, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy 4 and 6 (and a fan-translated 5), even Mario shows up again in Super Mario RPG. And all of this is even before we get onto the Capcom and Konami showings.
Those games are must-haves of the SNES, with many of them made by development powerhouses (in this case Nintendo, Rareware, Squaresoft, Capcom and Konami). Of course, with almost 800 official SNES releases in PAL regions and the US, there was bound to be a few lesser known games, even by the well-known developers. You might have played Capcom’s Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting and Mega Man X, but have you played U.N. Squadron? Probably Konami’s best known SNES outings are Super Castlevania IV and Contra III: The Alien Wars (Super Probotector: Alien Rebels in EU), but have you ever given underrated platformer Sparkster a shot? There are probably dozens of games on this beast of a console just waiting for you and I to fall in love with, so far-reaching is the console’s appeal and the genres of games created for it.
Who are Quintet? They are a heavily obscure Japanese video game developer who were active in making games during the 1990s. Or should I say “were” a video game developer? For even that bastion of knowledge Wikipedia states “the current status of Quintet is unclear”. This sounds like a pity, as Quintet were responsible for the development of four heavily underrated and loosely connected games for the SNES: ActRaiser, Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia (Illusion of Time in EU) and Terranigma, all later published by Enix (now part of Square Enix). The latter three of these games have the strongest connection with each other, and are sometimes called the Blazer or Gaia Trilogy, but ActRaiser itself created some Quintet trademarks and signature darker themes that were further established in the latter three games. Now brace yourself for this history, it’s difficult to keep it all brief.
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