Mallow marred: A Boy and His Blob & Crystalis | Metroidvania Works 22
1,088The U.S. didn't produce a lot of works in the metroidvania vein prior to the indie game era, and David Crane seems to have been the one American designer who dared fly close to that particular sun. A Boy and His Blob follows on the heels of Pitfall! and Pitfall II, but arrives after half a decade of Japanese designers exploring the exploratory platformer space. Crane ultimately went a different direction with this creation, focusing more on the puzzle-solving aspect than on pure exploration or character-building—a valid approach, but imperfectly realized in this case.
More satisfying is SNK's rare sally into the action-RPG format with Crystalis, a game that moves even further into the RPG side of things than Willow did. Heck, it even introduces Final Fantasy-like elemental affinities into the mix. With its focus on character skill development and elemental weapon upgrades, Crystalis pushes its genre in a more complex direction and introduces ideas that would eventually find their way into exploratory platformers, too.
Production notes:
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NES footage captured from Analogue Nt Mini. Video upscaled to 720 with xRGB Mini Framemeister.