Every day I’m Crystalin’
I planned on playing a bunch of video games while I was home on vacation, but what I mainly ended up playing was SNK’s sort of Zelda-like Crystalis. If you haven’t played it, it’s definitely worth checking out. If nothing else, the setting is unique: it’s post-apocalyptic but cartoony and cute, with an interesting backstory and a good variety of sub-quests that have you winning over a tribe of xenophobic dwarves, unmasking a queen who moonlights as a fortune teller, bothering a surly wise man until he teaches you shapeshifting magic, and so forth.
It’s got the standard litany of NES-era problems, not the least of which is the many landmark-free mazes you have to navigate to progress (made worse by the fact that they’re scored with the game’s drearier tunes), but it’s still fun. I might recommend that you suck it up and check out the maps if you’re not 11 and full of patience and memory, like I was when I first played the game. I lost those qualities at some point and now I demand an automap when I play a game.
Here’s something about Crystalis’ story that I feel like we rarely see these days: the character you play has a central role in the conflict with the Evil Empire that’s threatening to whatever, but throughout the game you meet a group of four “wise men” (even though one of them is a woman) who seem to be the ones driving the resistance. They know what’s going on in the world, whereas you’ve just woken from cryogenic sleep. The first parts of the game feel like you’re just getting your bearings and preparing yourself for your critical role in the conflict.
In contrast, I’ve been playing Gears of War 2 and even though that game takes great pains to show that you’re fighting in one squad out of a huge army, you still feel like you’re personally driving the progress of the war you’re fighting. Hell, you pretty much feel like you are the war. But Marcus Fenix’s only remarkable quality is that he’s a “war hero”, i.e. he’s alive even though he’s been shot at a lot, probably because if he stays behind cover for a few seconds all his wounds heal.
It’s such a cliche to play the Chosen Hero in a video game that they’ve stopped bothering to justify the “chosen” part. In that light, it’s nice that Crystalis gives you a humble introduction (your first task is literally to wake a dude up) and gradually fills you in on what’s going on, why you should care, and what you can do — even if that exposition is a bit threadbare at times.
