 Last month I took a look at an NES top-down adventure game in StarTropics, so let's stick with that genre and check out Crystallis, or is that Crystallis? Seriously, how do you pronounce this title? Well, let's check the commercial. Well, there you go, I guess that's as definitive as you can get. It would have been a lot more convenient if they just stuck with the Japanese title God Slayer Sonata of the Faraway Skies, but something tells me that it wouldn't have gone over well with mainstream Western audiences at the time. Anyway, Crystallis is a science fiction story-driven adventure game taking place in the wild and crazy futuristic times of 1997. War has destroyed all of civilization, and as a result, creatures across the planet have mutated into hideous monsters. The humans that survived built a floating tower in the sky that I guess will somehow oppress evil forever? Okay. We fast-forward 100 years with our main character waking from a cryogenic sleep and you learn about the current state of the world through NPC dialogue. It's cool, it beats unskippable cutscenes, at least this way you can control the pace of the game yourself to a certain extent. So yeah, you find out there's a power struggle to control the floating tower between the Dragonia Empire and the good guys, I guess, along with your character, who's the only one who can obtain the four elemental swords to create the ultimate weapon, Crystallis, and defeat evil forever. What's really cool about the story in Crystallis is how it's told. You don't really know the full scope of what's going on or even who you are, and that's how the game hooks you. You just want to find out more about what's really going on, and of course the only way how is to keep exploring, keep meeting people, and keep fighting monsters. That's just good game structuring, especially for the time, and it's aged well. The game starts out very linear, as you'd expect, but surprisingly it does open up quite a bit, and you can revisit previous areas up until you get to the final dungeon. As for the gameplay, this may look like a Zelda clone, but it's actually an action RPG, complete with an experience and leveling system. In addition to the usual hack and slash gameplay here, you can charge your sword for a special attack, and you can level that up as well, to a certain extent. There's attack magic and healing magic, there's shops where you can buy and sell equipment, there's towns you can visit. Really, this game is actually pretty advanced, despite it being an NES title from 1990. It's not exactly Chrono Trigger, but all the RPG elements that you've come to expect in a game like this are all represented well. This game does show its age in certain ways, though, like the need to constantly switch between the four elemental swords. And of course to do that, you have to bring up the menu screen over and over, so that gets annoying. And of course, I'm obligated to mention that since this is an NES game, that Crystalis is really, really hard. I'm not sure if it's as hard as Star Tropics, but it's certainly on the same level. Part of that is the frustrating hit detection. Sometimes you'll be asking how the hell something just hit you, while other times you'll be wondering how you're not hitting certain enemies. It gets old. I think what adds to that, as well, is how fast your character moves. You move so quickly that it almost feels like you're playing an Ease game at times, so it's easy to take damage, even if you're being careful. Conversely, though, your character speed does help move the game along quickly, so that's nice. Anyway, yeah, Crystalis is definitely worth playing today. In fact, I'd say it's one of the best NES games I've looked at in one of these videos so far. That's mostly due to the story and the way it's told by keeping the player somewhat in the dark to fend for his or herself to find out what's going on on their own. Interestingly, Crystalis also got a remake on the Game Boy Color back in 2000, and they kind of sort of rearranged the story and the music is a little different, but otherwise, the action is more or less the same. But yeah, the RPG stuff here is well done, the music is fine, the game visually looks good, and man, I wish this game got a sequel on the Super Nintendo. Oh well, you'll just have to settle for just the NES game, and that's more than okay.