Terranigma's hero Ark has even more moves at his disposal depending on the combination of attack, jump, and run you happen to be holding. Illusion of Gaia, as we'll speak more on in a moment, added different forms for your character to take which expanded their repertoire to include fireballs, sliding tackles, and a powerful leap attack. However, the first game was limited in this regard: you had the standard attack swing and a few spells to fall back on. While the lofty environmental, societal, and spiritual themes of these games have been their primary connective tissue, there's a certain other throughline that ably demonstrates the evolution this series has seen: the way it plays.Įach game in the Soul Blazer trilogy is loosely built on the structure of The Legend of Zelda with its real-time, top-down combination of action, combat and puzzle-solving. However, it's a much more narratively disjointed and contemplative tale compared to its peers, and far more ambitious to boot. Terranigma is the third of the thematically-linked Soul Blazer trilogy, after Soul Blazer ( reviewed here) and Illusion of Gaia (which is reviewed just below), and like those games concerns the resurrection of the planet and its many flora and fauna. While ActRaiser has been a long-time favorite and the Robotrek playthrough was more of a burning curiosity I felt I had to slake, Terranigma has been one of the most imposing white whales for the system and is, bar none, the game on my shortlist for this feature that I wanted to tackle the most. I've spoken a few times about my love for the overlooked Quintet, who developed half a dozen of the best SNES games ever made and then more or less vanished when the PlayStation era came around. This episode's kind of a special one for me, which is why I saved it for the penultimate entry. Episode XXIV: Quintet-sential The Candidate: Quintet's Terranigma The rules, list of games considered so far, and links to previous episodes can all be found at The SNES Classic Mk II Intro and Contents. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as those in the first SNES Classic, but have equally stood the test of time.

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience.

Illusion of gaia snes classic