With the Super Nintendo now over 36 years old (holy cow!), it’d be nice to say that all of its best games are widely playable on one modern platform or another. Unfortunately, that’s not really the case. Certainly the games are all available on PC for those who enjoy emulation, but those don’t or are just console-bound have kinda been at the mercy of Nintendo Switch Online until now. Fortunately, one of the SNES’s best, Terranigma, is finally receiving a modern port. Now we just gotta wait for all the others.
One little fun fact about Terranigma is that it never made it to North America back in the day. It did have an English release, but only in Europe. So, in order to play this mysterious JRPG, not only would you have to somehow know about it but also would need the means to import both it and a European SNES capable of playing it. In otherwords, it’s been a pretty darn elusive game for a very long time now.
As for what Terranigma is about, it’s about what most JRPGs at the time were: defeating evil and saving the world. The story follows Ark, a boy who lives on the inner portion of a hollow world, One day, he discovers a strange door and, being a curious boy, opens it and sets in motion an incredible chain of events that will alter his world irrevocably.
Terranigma sports pixel artwork and annimation that rivals Chrono Trigger, features its own fantastic musical score capable of competing with any of its peers of the era, and has its own combat system, one that tosses aside turn-based tradition in favor of something more action-oriented. It’s really too bad hardly any of us had a proper chance at it until now, eh?
Clear River Games mentions bringing a bunch of “tweaks, upgrades and bonus features” to the game in its official press release, but has not yet described what that means exactly. Hopefully there’s more to it than the standard graphical bump and rewind features, since, well, most people don’t really know all that much about Terranigma. Getting some extra behind-the-scenes features or world info would make for some great extra content, I think. Regardless, though, it’s just fantastic that Terranigma is finally seeing daylight again.
Have you eve had the opportunity to play Terranigma? What’s you favorite SNES RPG?
Image from the Steam page