Illusion of Gaia (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
1,427A playthrough of Nintendo's 1994 action-RPG for the Super Nintendo, Illusion of Gaia.
Illusion of Gaia was Quintet's direct follow-up to their 1992 cult-favorite Soul Blazer, and it is the fourth game in the loosely connected, heavily spiritual line of 16-bit adventure titles that began with ActRaiser in 1991.
On the surface, Illusion of Gaia appears to diverge a fair bit from the heavy-handed, largely philosophical tone of Soul Blazer and the ActRaisers. By not casting you as God's proxy, the tone feels far more personal and intimate, but the story it presents focuses on themes and tropes that'll be immediately familiar to fans of the earlier games.
Instead of playing as an animated statue, Illusion of Gaia places you in the role of Will, an average teenage boy from the sleepy village of South Cape. He goes to school, hangs out with his friends, and occasionally gets yelled at for his mischief-making - he's everything you'd expect out of a young, wholesome protagonist from the 19th century.
Without going into the specifics, I will say that Illusion of Gaia's plot is great. By putting you in the role of a person that has lived his life in this world, Gaia steers wide of the detached, voyeuristic perspective of the earlier games. The "human" perspective that this story is driven by creates empathy for these characters rather than sympathy. You're no longer an angel of mercy delivered by the creator, but rather, you're a person who is given agency in the fate of the people you care about, and by extension, the world that created you. It's a huge narrative shift that makes Illusion of Gaia a very distinct, very memorable game, and it's what makes this is my favorite of Quintet's god games.
The game frames its story through relationships, and it's not afraid to break standard game conventions to define them. Of all the "moments" the game has, I think the one that stands out to me the most over the years is the scene where Will and Kara find themselves stranded at sea on a piece of driftwood. What would be a short cutscene in most games is here turned into a 10 minute setpiece that focuses solely on two people trying to understand each other once all sense of pretense is stripped away. It temporarily grinds the game's pace to a halt, but the game's refreshing focus on character development really pays off.
That's not to say all is rosy, though. The tone is usually good - the writing doesn't try for awkwardly elevated "Ye Olde Fancy Talk," and it maintains a pretty light, humorous feel throughout. There are some glaring translation errors, though, and occasionally a character says something that is either so off-color or so on-the-nose that it'll leave you wondering, "Wtf just happened?" Those issues don't ruin the experience, but they do make for an uncharacteristically poor localization effort by Nintendo - one that is even further compounded by the censorship. It's a testament to the strength of the original plot that the intent still comes through as well as it does.
The gameplay, in my opinion, is a huge step-up from Soul Blazer's. It's still a 2.5D action-adventure with RPG trappings, but the dungeons are far more puzzle-oriented. Each dungeon has a theme that introduces its own specific wrinkle to the gameplay (I loved flipping between the sides of the Sky Garden!), and Will levels up by collecting emblems that appear once he has cleared all of the enemies in an area - a huge improvement over Soul Blazers' grindy-feeling enemy generator system.
Perhaps the coolest addition, though, is Will's ability to visit "Dark Space" where channeling different representations of his psyche through his physical form allows him to transform into the dark knight Freedan, and eventually the shape-shifting Shadow. They each have their own unique moves, and you'll have to regularly switch between forms to clear dungeon puzzles. Speaking of which, the puzzles are excellent throughout. They're often fairly clever, and their difficulty scales nicely over the course of the game. There's nothing here that's painfully hard or frustrating, but it certainly has its devilish moments.
The game looks great with its big, well-animated sprites, distinct locations, and its fancy Mode 7 map screens, and there's a good bit of attention to detail. Just check out how Will's hair blows around when he's standing in the wind.
And the music is fantastic. There's a huge variety in the tracks, ranging from big symphonic pieces to eerie, woodwind-based atmospheric ones, but my favorite easily has to be the dark space theme that plays near the end of the game. So nostalgic!
I know that popular opinion says that Terranigma is the best of the Quintet games, but I disagree. It's good, but Gaia has always resonated far better with me.
ActRaiser: https://youtu.be/iJTnHa9aWiA
Soul Blazer: https://youtu.be/clPT-KSffOw
ActRaiser 2: https://youtu.be/FiwG5roS3-c
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.