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« on: June 21, 2020, 11:21:59 AM »
Finished the game yesterday. It still amazes me what developers were able to accomplish in later-NES era games despite the limitations of the system. My first introduction to NES games as a kid was through Animal Crossing on the GameCube. These were mostly launch window black box games like Excitebike, Balloon Fight, and Ice Climber. Sure, they could be fun, but I basically wrote off NES games as a 30 minute diversion at best. So when Virtual Console came around, it didn’t seem prudent to spend $5 on an NES game when there were far superior SNES experiences available for just $3 more. Since then I’ve played many more games in the NES library, but the NES online games on Switch have been great for getting me to play NES games that I otherwise never would have given a chance.
Crystalis is one of those, and I’m glad I played it. You can tell it’s a 30 year old game, and I definitely took advantage of the rewind feature, but the combat is pretty engaging. I love how fast your character moves around the world. The music is somewhat hit or miss, there were some songs that I though were really good and others not so much. Nothing as bad as the Legend of Zelda’s grating dungeon theme though. I thought the visuals were great. The lightning bolt effects when you do the fully-charged attack with the lightning sword look cool even today. One thing that got annoying was constantly having to open up the menu to swap swords and equipable items, but that’s just a limitation of the NES having so few buttons. I’m not sure what the status of the IP is after the Game Boy Color port, but maybe we’re due for a remake...?