That was a great read. Thanks a lot for that link!

This makes me want to play this game again...

I actually picked up a torrent the other day looking for the DKC games, and there were a bunch of other games labeled as 'Classic Games' in there too... I saw a folder called 'Soul Blazer Trilogy', so I added that to the download. I didn't know that Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma were part of a series...

And for some reason, I didn't even know that Soul Blazer existed. In any case, I've been playing through Soul Blazer since I picked it up yesterday, and I'm loving it. Once I'm done, I'll probably play through the other two games again, seeing as I never actually finished either one of them, I don't think.

It's a damned shame that it never came stateside, considering the fans of the old-school genre. In any case, who owns the rights to this now? SquareEnix? Given that we've seen just one title on the Wii's VC from SE, it's not out of the realms of possibility that they could port it to the VC. I'd gladly pay for it.

The Soul Blazer series is really underrated. I've always been a fan of Illusion of Gaia (or Illusion of Time to our friends across the pond), and Terranigma is a real gem indeed. Whether or not Quintet intended for all the games to work as an actual series is debatable, but there is a definite link in this chain. Check out the title screen for the North American beta version of IoG:

http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/848/sb2jj8.png

So Enix NA was originally going to call it "Soul Blazer: Illusion of Gaia", and use the original Japanese background image. Pretty neat, and it goes one step further to joining the games together.

That'd be my guess. I sure hope they decided to finally release Terranigma here, too. We got every other Quintet RPG (even Granstream Saga for PSone), it's just a crime not to include this one.

I loveds Terranigma to death - too bad I sold all my Super Nintendo stuff back then to get a Nintendo 64. The beginning was very slow, but what came afterwards was great. I found the graphics of the "awakening sequences" breathtaking at that time. Also a wonderful soundtrack. Having a look at a soundtrack rip, there are only a handful of tracks I find mediocre. Beruga has one of the most classic villain themes. Is there an orchestrated version available?

I remember a very tedious part that involved hiding from guys with flashlights, it took me ages to finish the part. Maybe I was just too clumsy back then. ^^

The translation to German was a little bit special, but not awful. The ending was a little unsatifsying - it´s okay to imagine what happens next, but I just wanted to KNOW, not just imagine.

it's a shame I never played the game when I lived in Germany. About 2 years ago I played the game on my PSP and it was great but the game would crash at a certain part of this cave and after that I upgraded the firmware so yea...

I reached pretty far I guess, I reached some part where I had to kill some queen in a castle, not sure. I gotta download the rom and play it again, or find one of those devices that I can play imported games on my SNES.

Is Granstream Saga really (and easily?) the best of the Quintet games like that article says? It seemed like the game wasn't held in high regard by anybody. I guess I'll have to try it at some point. For whatever reason I thought it was supposed to be one of those infamous games like Beyond the Beyond or Shadow Madness.

I honestly think the only thing it really had going for it were the animated cutscenes. Then again, I tried playing it last year sometime and that could be why I feel that way.

I know I *liked* it when it first came out but it really hasn't aged well. I can still play a game like Vagrant Story without any qualms, but every time I attempt to play Granstream Saga I facepalm and give up.

So it's frustrating or boring in some way now?

Boring is a good word. The game isn't hard, that's for sure, and the visuals are pretty terrible (I understand it's older than many PSOne games; but come on, the people don't even have faces.), the music is rather dull, and the gameplay was interesting when it was released, but there were other games that came out in the lifespan of the PSOne which did did the whole "real time combat" thing a lot better.

It's also pretty short and the plot was pretty cliche'd; though I did like the final plot twists and the ending was sort of sad/good. (It has 2 endings but the likely "canon" ending was the one I feel was a good ending.)

It'd be worth playing on a emulator maybe if you never played it, since you could soften the textures and increase the framerate a little so it didn't feel so sluggish. It's not a terrible game, it's just one that did not stand the tests of time. :(

I thought the only game that was a bigger waste of my money on the PSX over Granstream Saga was Beyond the Beyond.