Crystalis (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
1,835A playthrough of SNK's 1990 action/adventure game for the NES, Crystalis.
For my full write-up on Crystalis, be sure to check out http://www.nintendocomplete.com/crystalis/
1997, October 1,
The END DAY
I can distinctly remember the first time I played Crystalis because of this line. I don't recall any other game - at least not one in 1990 - beginning with a predicted date for the apocalypse, only to then immediately follow it up with a vivid depiction of how it would happen.
It might come across as simplistic now, but damn. At the time, it was one helluva way to make a lasting impression, and a super-effective way of retelling the tired "save our earth" tale in a new way. No oil spills, no factories, no consumerism. They went with full nuclear holocaust.
And in a funny coincidence, the prediction it gives is strikingly close to the August 29, 1997 date given in T2: Judgment Day, released about a year later.
Crystalis was SNK's second game developed specifically for a console (the first being Baseball Stars), and it was a huge hit with fans. It wasn't a massive best-seller, but everyone that played it, including critics, loved it.
It's an action-RPG that, like Final Fantasy Adventure or The Guardian Legend, takes the basic structure of The Legend of Zelda and fleshes it out with a proper narrative, experience-based growth system, and an array of upgradable weapons each with specific uses. And it arguably does all of this better than any other NES game (and many SNES games too, for that matter).
There were so many things that made Crystalis memorable - the soundtrack is one of the best on the NES, the cutscenes, the mechanics - and who can forget turning yourself into a woman to progress the plot at one point? And if you ever played the Japanese version, you know already what a surprise lay in store at the title screen. It wasn't originally called Crystalis. It's name translates to "God Slayer: A Distant Sky's Sonata." On the NES. Yeah, ikr?
Crystalis was, in my opinion, a seminal NES work that still deserves to be played today. Just avoid the Game Boy Color update. It's a badly compromised experience that really doesn't do the NES game justice.
Even now, 21 years after the world forgot to blow up and mutate, I'm still waiting for a sequel.
And am I the only one with some weird attachment to Deo? I felt so bad for him :( Or Athena and Kensou, for that matter?
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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