Terranigma: What Lies Beneath

Terranigma has layers. You’d expect that from a game that starts deep inside the world, in a barren landscape of magma lakes and false skies. That’s just the initial stage for this ambitious action-RPG, the work of a talented developer trying to capture and perfect their ethos. It has a curious reputation among Super NES titles, a mystique that goes beyond the enjoyable surface.  That’s led Clear River Games to bring it back early next year, hyping the game as an unsung marvel and rolling out a deluxe box set. 

Why revive a game so elaborately? Terranigma offers not one, but three good reasons.

 

For starters, Terranigma is an exceptional game. It opens in a seemingly gentle village, albeit one where crystalline orbs float in the air, the elder has a forbidden door in his house, and there’s no apparent way to leave. Young troublemaker Ark opens that door and meets a strange creature named Yomi, revealing the truth: their sedate little town is the only scrap of life in a bleak, hollow earth. As heroes inevitably do, Ark leaves behind all he knows, including his devoted girlfriend Elle, and sets out on a quest. Yet he’s not rescuing anyone or defeating a villain. He’s resurrecting the entire planet.

 

A tall order that may be, but Ark’s journey remains an action-RPG in the Zelda mold. He explores dungeons and contends with monsters, and Quintet builds nicely on that base. Ark can dash, jump, and pull off half a dozen special attacks in the process, with an arsenal of magic spells to gradually purchase (and easily ignore). It’s a brisk game, one driven by combat, but Quintet’s also willing to slow things down for puzzles both routinely physical and fiendishly obscure. 

The true scope of Terranigma isn’t found in the dungeons and caves, however. It’s in the world Ark rebuilds, starting with animals and plants but progressing quickly. Hunter-gatherer societies soon grow into industrial cities and bellicose kingdoms, with a conspiracy curiously centered around a young woman who seems a duplicate of Elle. And so Ark guides the progress of humankind with occasional decisions and subquests, all without really questioning how or even why he’s doing this.

 

He finds out eventually, and the truth is of course a hard one. Quintet’s games stood apart by always digging a little deeper, threading existential matters through the plots and mechanics of fantasy action-RPGs. Illusion of Gaia sent players through the eerie ancient sites of a subtly twisted Earth. Actraiser let them shape the world from above. Soul Blazer offered homilies from rescued townsfolk, goats, and flowers. Masashi Hashimoto, co-founder of the company, described Terranigma as the “culmination of all our efforts,” an attempt to bring together everything that made their earlier Super NES titles important. 

It sounds like a sure case of overreaching, yet those ambitions made Terranigma soar. True, its overlying story dips into cliches, with turncloak warriors and spunky kids and corrupt rulers all limited in their development. Ark himself has a minimal personality, Yomi’s a typical caustic sidekick, and Elle’s incarnations are both passive and lack the arrogance (or the pet pig) of Illusion of Gaia’s Kara.

 

Yet the game is really about its atmosphere and its ideas, about the wonder of seeing the world come back to life all around you. So director Tomoyoshi Miyazaki (Quintet's other co-founder) never neglects a central theme of creation, destruction, and the price paid for them. It’s a tale of Manichean deities that steps beyond good and evil, examining instead the necessity of both. Hey, it’s right there in the Japanese title: Tenchi Souzou, the Creation of Heaven and Earth. 

And if Terranigma doesn’t have answers for everything, that’s the point. Quintet knew that it’s enough merely to ask the questions. 

That sense of wonder and vague melancholy comes through with rare clarity. Terranigma hails from the final years of the Super NES, when developers were adept at crafting detailed sprites, memorable soundtracks, and striking atmosphere with the hardware’s limitations. Miyoko Takaoka and Masanori Hikichi’s soundtrack follows Ark through a cratered underworld, a bleak surface, and the gradual spawning of life and civilization. It matches the weightier moments of Ark’s journey, so you’ll never feel completely good about what you've accomplished.

 

Not merely remarkable as a game, Terranigma is also Quintet’s farewell to their Super NES period, to that era of sprite-based artistry, and even to their own creative heights as a developer. The industry moved on to the PlayStation and Saturn, and Quintet stumbled as they followed up with the awkward strategy-sim Solo Crisis, the intriguing yet anti-commercial Planet Laika, and the swiftly forgotten racing game Code R. The closest they came to their earlier successes were Brightis and The Granstream Saga. These were both co-productions with Shade, a developer founded by frequent Quintet collaborator Koji Yokota, and they offer only vague glimmers of Quintet’s Super NES games. 

From there Quintet became a mystery, with a website infrequently updated until it effectively closed in 2008. Hashimoto and Miyazaki turned up in minor roles for a few games, and in the years that followed rumors took over and turned Miyazaki into one of the game industry’s more notorious disappearances. His Japanese Wikipedia entry mentions him working for a now-defunct company called Giga Factory, which was apparently tied to an online casino service known as Entget. This last venture apparently collapsed with a large chunk of investor funds lost, and Miyazaki has not surfaced again. Westone founder Ryuiichi Nishizawa even mentioned it a 2012 interview that he’d heard of Miyazaki getting arrested.

   

That, of course, only romanticizes Quintet’s games further. They’re often nebulous in their endings, where a hero’s reward might be only the vague promise of amnesiac reincarnation. It’s perhaps fitting that Miyazaki’s absence would stir the fascination of players, all hoping that he and the rest of Quintet will one day get another chance. 

At least Terranigma itself gets another chance. This brings up the third reason to make a fuss, at least among North American fans. When it arrived in 1995 as Tenchi Souzou, it was yet another impressive Super Famicom RPG unlikely to be localized, with fans left to gaze longingly at import coverage in magazines (and perhaps write plaintive letters to those magazines). Nintendo surprised them by translating the game and renaming it Terranigma…only to skip North America entirely. It saw a modest release in Europe and Australia, translated to English, French, German and other languages. Thus it was a point of envy twice over for Americans. Many of those interested in the game played it somehow, whether by importing a European copy and a PAL converter or just resorting to emulation. Perhaps it was only fair, considering all the RPGs translated for Americans but denied European releases. 

And in the decades since then, Terranigma’s acquired a sturdy cult reputation, one referenced in games like Sea of Stars and the upcoming Tako no Himitsu. Yet it went curiously without any reissues, leading some to wonder if the rights were lost alongside Quintet itself. 

Now Clear River Games has brought back Terranigma. Contrary to speculation about muddled rights to the game, the reissue apparently wasn’t held up by Miyazaki’s disappearance. Terranigma’s set for a release on modern platforms, complete with a lavish boxset for the truly devoted. The enhancements are notable mostly for adjusting the game’s balance (one boss is extremely brutal if you don’t exploit your magic arsenal). Elsewhere it seems the localization is much the same as it was in Nintendo’s original release.

That localization could be a problem. The font has annoyingly wide spacing, and the dialogue itself is very much a primitive mid-1990s translation, with awkward phrases and punctuation. Worst of all is the broken English spoken by Chinese characters, including Wong, a scheming financier and major antagonist. It's a patois that recalls how Asians were depicted in racist old cartoons (“He be very angry!”), and it's hard to imagine Clear River leaving that intact for Terranigma's new release.

Even with some problems at its edges, Terranigma remains a treasure. It’s the masterwork of a mysteriously vanished director. It’s the most egregious case of The One That Got Away for North American RPGs fans. And it’s an enjoyable action-RPG with an intriguing spirit and an elegiac tone. That’s always worth digging up.