Crystalis (Game Boy Color) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
162A playthrough of Nintendo's 2000 action-RPG for the Game Boy Color, Crystalis.
When it was first released for the NES in 1990, SNK's Crystalis was well regarded. It wasn't a smash hit but it reviewed and sold reasonably well, and it was often highlighted in Nintendo Power's monthly charts and tips columns. Oddly enough, it is also a game that seems to be more popular today than it ever was in its heyday.
You can find my playthrough of the NES game here: https://youtu.be/KTfTvrVvkZ8
The Game Boy Color version is a remake produced exclusively for the American market by Nintendo's US-based first-party development team, Nintendo Software Technology
I remember being excited for this one and bought it pretty soon after it came out. I loved the original, and it had been several years since I'd last played it.
But Crystalis on the GBC wasn't really what I was expecting, nor was it at all what I was hoping for. Going by its reviews, I wasn't the only one who felt that way. The core game is mostly intact but a lot has been changed in order to "update" the experience, and these changes end up undermining a lot of the original's appeal.
The story has been rewritten and the intro and ending cutscenes have been replaced with slideshow sequences that are filled with poorly drawn, badly compressed art that's stylistically at odds with the rest of the game.
The graphics elsewhere look great - they're true the NES game - but that's also their biggest issue. The GBC runs at a substantially lower resolution than the NES did and nothing has been scaled to compensate for the difference. The sprites look fantastic, but the screen crunch hobbles the gameplay. You can't see enemies until they're right on top of you, and the maze-like dungeons are frustrating to tackle when you can't see the landmarks that you would've used to navigate on the NES.
If you've ever played Super Mario Bros. Deluxe (https://youtu.be/V3FAsFHYQ2c ), you know exactly what I'm talking about here.
And what is up with that horrible greenish-blue color they used for the textboxes and status bar? Was there something wrong with the (much easier on the eyes) dark blue of the original game?
The sound is perhaps the worst offender, though. The NES game's classic, memorable tunes were binned in favor of a brand new soundtrack. So much of it comes across as blippy, atonal noise, and it lacks all of the melodic punch of the original music. It's not *terrible*, but it's hard to imagine anyone familiar with the NES game actually enjoying the new music.
There's also some crunchy sounding digitized speech thrown in for no apparent reason. The bad guy laughs during the intro, and whenever you get a new sword, a disembodied voice calls out its name.
Finally, the gameplay has been tweaked a bit. An extra dungeon was thrown in, the endgame has been slightly rearranged, and you can now kill any enemy with any weapon regardless of its elemental affinity. There's also a ton of slowdown when you're charging a weapon or when there's more than a single enemy on-screen at once.
It's a crying shame that Nintendo felt the need to cock its leg on so many aspects of the original NES version of Crystalis. Every change made here was to the game's detriment, and while it's not a bad game - even with the alterations - I can't think of a single reason why someone would choose to play it over the NES game.
*Recorded using a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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