Someone at Quintet Has Issues
Over the past few years I've been picking my way through Quintet's so-called Heaven and Earth trilogy of action RPGs on the SNES -- Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma. Soul Blazer was relatively straightforward and normal, putting aside the occasional.. eccentricity:
But Illusion of Gaia is where things started to get a little weird.
First, there's the game's infamous raft sequence, a scene in which the player and his token female friend stand around on a raft in the middle of the ocean for a long time. It's not a cutscene, because you still have control of your character, but you literally have nothing to do but walk back and forth on a square about a quarter the size of the screen, talk to the girl a couple times, and then wait for the next day to come so you can do it again. You have never seen a game stop so suddenly and dramatically in its tracks.
Later, you enter into a Russian Roulette game played with a glass of poison instead of a bullet. You and the champion take turns drinking from a selection of glasses until one glass is left, which must be the poisoned one. It's the champ's turn, so he must be the loser, except:
He insists on drinking it anyway, essentially committing suicide. (Despite how it may appear, this scene is not taking place on a raft.) You report back to his pregnant wife (!), only to find:
Kruks conveniently being the animals you need to ride to get across the desert to the next dungeon. How does she feel about this?
But the person you love just offed himself and left your only worthwhile possessions to the kids who blew into town this morning.
Still later into the game, your intrepid party gets captured by some starving tribesmen who intend to eat you. Just before they dig in, however, token female friend's pet pig comes running in and throws itself on a fire, cooking itself alive to feed the tribe and spare your lives. Also your dead mother's soul pops out.
Lastly, you deal with one of the game's villains by setting off a fire trap he's standing next to. In most games he'd just fall over, or perhaps flicker and disappear, but here he has to collapse into a flaming heap and crawl after you like the Terminator as his flesh continues to burn before finally expiring at your feet. He wasn't even a monster or something, he was just a regular man and then you set him on fire.
This is all ignoring the more subtle, less graphic weirdness to the game's story, such as the fact that all this magical crap is taking place on Earth somehow, as evidenced by visits to famous locations like Angkor Wat and the Great Wall of China.
The continuous bleakness of Illusion of Gaia lets up a bit in Terranigma. But the seemingly blase attitude towards death doesn't disappear entirely, as evidenced when you wake up in a cavern after barely surviving an avalanche.
Always a sign you drank too much.
The goat explains to you that she and her husband got stuck here in the avalanche too, and her husband didn't make it. As any grieving widow would, she then suggests you both eat him.
This isn't the first time he's been in my mouth, that's all I'm saying.
Iron-clad logic. But your prudish main character still isn't convinced, and says he can't eat.
That's a shame. I just.. I just really wanted you to help me devour my husband.
Later, you come to a kingdom with a princess who has been stricken mute. She was adopted by the king and queen from a village that was destroyed, and thus the boneheaded magical girl you're traveling with at the time suggests the way to snap her out of it would be to create the spectral illusion of her dead parents.
For some reason you go through with this plan. (Surely there were other options; I hear flowers work well.) I dunno about the princess, but the king sure finds it interesting:
I really should stop thinking out loud!
Yes, the resolution to this entire side plot is having the king casually mention that these two people look like some folks he had murdered. But it seems dead people don't fluster anyone around here:
Careful, it smells like something died out there. Because it did. It was the king. The king died. Out there.
But even without the occasional corpse, Terranigma is odd enough on its own. It expands on Illusion of Gaia's idea of a fantasy RPG taking place on the real-world Earth to a great degree, tasking your character with resurrecting what is essentially modern civilization. The world map is actually a simplified map of Earth, and you wander around locations like the Sahara and Arabia and Spain, whacking monsters with sticks to revive the world's plants and animals and people. Once you bring back people, you can start visiting towns, including a city in North America called... Freedom.
America, it would seem, is populated entirely by trollops, grizzled prospectors and black people. Seriously, you never see black people prior to this and then you go to Freedom and suddenly they're everywhere.
At least in Illusion of Gaia, signs of the real world were ancient artifacts like the Nazca Lines, which already feel otherworldly enough. But it feels weird walking around in a jRPG and stumbling across things like this:
This raises far more questions than it can answer. So Jesus existed in the world of Terranigma? Why didn't he fix all this crap then so I don't have to do it? Am.. am I Jesus?
To cap off all this oddity, Quintet put themselves in the game, in an office located (naturally) in Japan.
I imagine that's supposed to be a mustache, but instead it looks as if even the man on the sign is depressed. Inside, the developers are all represented by talking chickens sitting at computers. The office also contains a trash-strewn room where the team apparently sleeps when they're too busy to go home, which is suitably horrifying.
Later in the story, everyone in this building will die when a killer virus is released in Neotokio. I suppose they would want it that way.
I don't know what it says that Microsoft's conference today got me thinking more about Sony than about the 360.
