Crystalis: Better Than the Legend of Zelda

Crystalis basically draws on the traditions that had been brewing in Japanese PC action RPGs for some years by that point(e.g. Ys, Hydlide). If you had been playing a lot of PC-88 games this would be one more like those, just on Famicom.

Zelda is doing something different from these games in a macro sense since it combines both an open world and gradual unlocking, rather than either treating each new area as effectively "level 1, level 2, etc." or letting the player go anywhere but gating with power progression(i.e. the enemies instantly kill you). And it engages a little more with puzzles and item reuse than most of these games, though I would not say it's far beyond other examples in that respect.

Zelda 2 is particularly interesting in this light because it's so clearly following with the trend to tack on a grind for power progression and to use side view to expand the combat's moment-to-moment with more physics behaviors. IIRC Miyamoto said something about this game to the effect of "everything went exactly as planned so nothing interesting was discovered."

IDK about "better".

It had a better combat, more colorful graphics and fantastic stereo music. The plot was better (ie it existed) but also kinda nonsensically lifted from Laputa for a non-sequitor ending.

But mostly, they're just different games. Fundamentally, Zelda plays as a puzzle and exploration game. Crystalis didn't quite do that. Instead of maps and puzzles, you had mazes of passages, and a few town puzzles. Instead of exploring for heart containers, you grind levels by wandering around the wasteland killing anything that moves.

Crystalis was my first brush with the aRPG genre as a kid; in fact, when I first played Diablo II, I thought "Wow, this game is like Crystalis, but with better graphics and more choices! In college, when I would tell people about the "hidden gem" that was Crystalis, I always thought it was one of those "peak platform" games where people had finally really gotten comfortable with a platform and managed to crank out games that took advantage of everything possible.

The art looked great AND the movement/animations were smooth, too. A lot of the third-tier sword effects blew me away.

Incidentally, I knew the author in college. He's a tremendous fan of NES/SNES-era games (especially platformers) and was most recently a judge on the Make a Good Mega Man Level 3 (http://magmmlcontest.com/wiki/index.php/Make_a_Good_Mega_Man...). I've always admired his self-taught game design/user experience sense because I've seen it grow over the years and was a part of playtesting some of his level designs! He's a tremendously kind and thoughtful guy.

I believe a level he designed actually made it into an official Mega Man collection from Capcom, but I can't remember which one...

Ah, I loved this game! Replayed it about 10 years ago too.

Another hidden gem of that time was 'Faxanadu'. The controls were a bit clunky but the music, narrative and exploration were really fun.

I managed to beat that game in one irresponsibly long sitting when I was 12...

Hey, I thought I was the only one who'd ever played Crystalis, whaddya know.

Seriously, though, it's a pretty good game, even if it gets a bit grindy at certain points (though actually not that grindy for it's day).

And for an early NES game, it's got some fantastic music that is, in my opinion, vastly unrecognized and underappreciated by the video-game music community

Two things always stuck out in my mind about Crystalis.

1. The character moves very fast. It makes the entire game feel better. 2. There's a part where you have to beat a guy in a competition by hammering the a button as quickly as you can. Turns out that's a lie, consistent timing is more important than speed. I found this out when I attempted to use a 3rd party controller with turbo functionality and still lost.

I still maintain that game did a lot right that many games even today don't.

I recall it had a well-publicised cheat that let you warp to late stages of the game, but it wasn't resilient-- you could easily get the saved game into a state where you needed to defeat a boss to get an item or advance the plot, but the boss didn't appear because you were now out of order.

I hadn’t come across this game before but saw it was an option on Nintendo Switch Online.

Thanks for positing, I’ve just finished and I really enjoyed it.

Crystalis is a good linear ARPG, but it's not a good zelda game.

Crystalis was the first game that got me hooked on RPGs.