Tenchi Souzou / Terranigma (1995, Quintet)
Soul Blader writer Tomoyoshi Miyazaki, having once retrospectively expressed slight dissatisfaction with the game's structure of separate, delineated miniature setpieces, desired to revisit its general premise on a grander scale. Blader indeed owed partially its tight design to its relatively compact world, though its successor Gaia Gensouki would prove that a bigger world in the hands of Quintet wouldn't necessarily mean the design spiraling out of control, even accounting for its development being concurrent with ActRaiser 2; quite the opposite, in fact, as the mechanics only got more refined and accommodating to its setting. Having now just cut their teeth on a game large yet very linear and traditional in story progression, and now unfettered by other game development obligations, the time had come for Tomoyoshi Miyazaki and Masaya Hashimoto to turn the experience gleaned by the creation of these two titles into an expansion of the world resurrection concept, an expansion into the highest form allowable by the Super Famicom hardware.
Tenchi Souzou wastes no time in impressing you with its intro cinematic, depicting a ticking clock panning slowly over photorealistic scenes of a cave painting, a ship sailing on the sea, then an airplane flying in the sky, before it fades into the earth that you will be exploring, after which it zooms into the screen, revealing the title. Shortly after beginning the game you walk outside of your house to see reflective multicolored blobs floating in the sky, and after some place setting town exploration and dialog you're tasked with clearing out five towers scattered around the underworld quite unlike your idyllic hometown. Immediately upon entering the underworld map you're slapped in the face with the most insane looking mode 7-style effect you've likely ever seen, with what seems like an entire other plane of existence wrapped around the sky, scrolling as you travel on the ground. Taking on this first set of objectives it's almost as if the game wants to trick you into believing that this will be another stratified, cleanly structured adventure akin to Soul Blader, however it's anything but. It doesn't defy structure entirely, it's more like there are within it several mini-structures. After clearing the five towers and making your way to the overworld, which represents our Earth, you'll complete all sorts of world resurrection-related objectives, none of which follow any particular blueprint. Sometimes you're resurrecting a dungeon-sized area, sometimes a city, sometimes an entire continent. It's only a theme that unites your activities. Cutscenes accompany the successful completion of many of these objectives, which is where Tenchi Souzou really wows you. Great looking translucency, scaling and other such effects are overlayed onto prerendered CG landscapes, comprising some of the best eye candy the Super Famicom has to offer. Story-wise it contains a unified theme of death and resurrection in several forms, and retains a lot of the darkness of Gaia, and the events of the story get straight up trippy sometimes, especially near the end. As an aside, in the EU-only localization there are a lot of interestingly overt references to religion, God, death, and other things you wouldn't expect to see if it were brought to the US as well.
This is by far the grandest adventure in the spiritual trilogy it caps off, with its story spanning years over an entire planet that changes drastically over time. It's a wonder they fit all of this on a cartridge in 1995. Though on this journey it's only you versus the world; there's no group of friends to hang out with this time around unlike Gaia, which evokes a sense of loneliness as the only time-tripping odd man out on this entire planet. The theme of world building is more overtly on the main path early on, though as the game progresses it's relegated more to sidequest status as you ping pong between the already developed towns on several continents. The world map indeed becomes more freely traversable as the game goes on, and here unlike the game's 2 predecessors it's an actual manually walkable world map, though there aren't any random encounters or anything so it's effectively an incredibly fancy area select. Which is fine, really; the extra mobility is enough to hit the right note of exploration, and the map opens up to an almost intimidating degree as it goes on. It might have been of my own doing but there were a couple of points in the second half of the game that felt like extended "hang out" periods where I was going from place to place just to see what was there, which is something that Blader and Gaia, necessarily with their minimal structures, were missing out on. There was more than one point in time that I was in awe of how big the game was; I had suspected early on when I entered the overworld the kind of scale it was going for but I didn't really expect it to pull it off. What the game really drives home is the feeling that your journey is of your own doing. You'll wander into a city or dungeon on the map wondering if you're really supposed to be there yet, and the game goes on. Strictly speaking it's about as linear as either of the other games in the trilogy but the world is so massive and your objectives so mysterious that it never feels like it. Compare: a large modern game world with a main quest waypoint versus a large game world that only vaguely hints at what you're supposed to do next. The latter inspires exploration of places you'd otherwise skip entirely for the fact that you have to wander around a bit to figure out what to do, whereas the former needs to make other mechanical preparations for the player to deviate from what is obviously the next objective. Not to say waypoints are bad, as sometimes you do want to leave it internally to the character that they know where to go and relegate the necessity of sidequesting to some other motivator, but in these primitive days this was about as good as it got.
The sheer joy of wandering aimlessly around a gigantic world does have its limits, however, and the game does lean toward the frustratingly obscure in terms of later objectives. Something I was eventually dismayed to discover is that the game very seldom holds your hand, and that you want to make copious notes on places in the world you've visited and how to get to them, especially if the area seems weirdly empty or purposeless. But the main pitfall of expanding the world to this degree is that you run the risk of spreading the content too thin, which I feel like this game does just a bit. Each plot point doesn't hit quite as hard, spread out as they are, as in Gaia Gensouki's tight story (the Metal Gear Solid V problem), and the areas, friendly or hostile, feel less significant than the ones in Soul Blader's tight world. Which leads me to Tenchi Souzou's biggest problem: the dungeons have taken a severe step back in quality from the dungeons in Gaia, and really even the dungeons in Blader. They're all big ol' annoying mazes that you scour forever for the next progress trigger, featuring none of the elegance of Gaia's puzzles or Blader's compactness and simplicity, and aesthetically they're frequently uninteresting. Lots of caves and castles. They're all squared off and corridor-like, with little of the openness featured before in this series. This game being as huge as it is there are accordingly lots and lots of dungeons, and most of them just aren't that fun to crawl after a while.
Anyway, run is a button now! And you can jump and pick stuff up! The main character gets a variety of spear weapons to use throughout the game, which combined with running and jumping provides a simple yet substantial and addictive physical moveset. Dashing and launching yourself through enemies never gets old. The enemy patterns have gotten more sophisticated and quite a bit tougher since Gaia, and restores some of the subtle tactics that were lost in the transition from the first to the second game here in the third. Also restored here are numerical levels, experience and stats, the latter consisting in strength, defense, HP and luck (which presumably controls crit chance). Unlike its two predecessors, Tenchi Souzou is a full-on RPG not only with levels and stats, but money and shops too. Enemies rarely any longer have progression through a given dungeon tied to them and take their place as fodder for the gain of money and experience, and will even respawn as soon as you exit and re-enter any given room. This makes grinding possible, though likely never necessary if you're doing the requisite aimless wandering you'll need to do if you're playing without a guide. Lots of time is spent figuring out where you're supposed to go in dungeons, so smacking down popcorn enemies is a common and addictive enough activity that it doesn't feel like intentional grinding. A big change from previous games is that you can now purchase healing items from shops and keep a stock of up to 9 of each type, which dulls considerably the otherwise sizeable threat of enemies and bosses. Magic is also purchased in shops in the form of rings of different element types that contain a finite amount of uses each, which is a bit cumbersome, but more importantly, and in the game's second major misstep, it's also completely unnecessary. I used magic rings once near the beginning of the game just to test them out and went on to clear the remainder of it using only physical attacks. No puzzles or enemies whatsoever, at least in the course of my playthrough that didn't cover every sidequest, required the use of magic at all, and no undue grinding was necessary to compensate for its absence. I objected to Soul Blader's extraneous number of different spells, but here the entire system may as well be nonexistent.
For the first time in this spiritual trilogy the world has reached beyond the mechanics' grasp. With the focus squarely on epic scope and visual flair, both of which are accomplished flawlessly, looseness in area design and combat mechanics have crept in. Both of its major flaws go hand-in-hand; think about Gaia's usage of its techniques, gradually bestowed upon the player as a more rigid but better employed replacement for a magic system, in not only its combat but also its dungeons' puzzles, and then it becomes clear the lack of marriage between Tenchi Souzou's magic system and its dungeons harms both causally, leaving magic a completely altogther superfluous system and its dungeons mostly inoffensive yet still bland monster-grinding labyrinths. It's a disappointing backslide. Nevertheless the grand scale of the adventure and its daring aesthetic ambition hold up the experience well enough. I mean it's a mid-90s action RPG that's 20 hours long on a basic playthrough, that's worth something ain't it? In any case, despite the nature of their relation being spiritual and not narrative, still play Soul Blader and Gaia Gensouki first if you haven't, and then if you're down for a journey that fulfills the grandiose thematic aspirations of its forebears with dauntless extravagance and have a tolerance for less-than-excellent dungeon crawling, play on.
Final rating: 4/5 (Good)