The History of Crystalis

The world ended in 1997. The hero slept through it, on purpose.

Crystalis reached the Famicom on April 13, 1990, and the NES that July, developed and published by SNK. In Japan it carried a bolder name: God Slayer: Haruka Tenku no Sonata, Sonata of the Far Away Sky. It opens with a date, October 1, 1997, the END DAY, when global thermonuclear war ended the old world, and with a young magician waking from cryogenic sleep a century later to stop the next one.

THE MAKING

SNK steps out of the arcade

SNK built the game under director and producer Kazuto Kohno, with music by Yoko Osaka. The credits are short and the staff wore several hats, as NES credits of the era usually did. The world they built is the game's boldest asset: not a medieval kingdom but a post apocalyptic one, where survivors abandoned science, took up magic, and built a floating Tower whose weapons could govern the world, precisely so that no one would ever use them. The villain Draygon, who revived the forbidden science and mixed it with magic, is marching on the Tower.

Two of the four sages who guide the hero are quiet in jokes. Kensu and Asina are modeled on Sie Kensou and Athena Asamiya from SNK's arcade game Psycho Soldier, complete with Kensu's devotion to Asina, years before The King of Fighters made the pair famous.

THE DESIGN

Four swords, four elements, and gates that check your level

Crystalis plays in real time from overhead, in the vein of The Legend of Zelda, with levels, equipment, and spells layered on top. Its system is the four elemental swords, wind, fire, water, and thunder, scattered across the world. Each sword slashes and, charged, fires an elemental projectile; each breaks particular barriers, and the Sword of Water lays a bridge of ice over shallow rivers. Enemies are immune to some elements and weak to their opposites, and in the NES original some enemies simply cannot be harmed until the hero's level is high enough, a hard gate that makes the game's RPG half non negotiable.

The endgame combines the four swords into the fifth, Crystalis itself, and the final enemy waiting in the Tower is not Draygon but DYNA, the machine that runs it. Critics of the era remarked that the story and art seemed to draw heavily on Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind; that resemblance is a critical observation, Tier 2, and no statement from SNK confirming it as intent is on the record this page could verify.

THE EDITIONS

The versions, documented

Japan · 1990

Famicom, April 13, 1990, as God Slayer: Haruka Tenku no Sonata.

America · 1990

NES, July 1990, retitled Crystalis. The Japanese box art, discussed on the gallery page, did not survive the crossing: the American hero's hair, armor, and sword all changed.

Game Boy Color · 2000

A substantially different game, developed by Nintendo Software Technology. New opening, a rewritten story in which the Tower is the antagonist's weapon, an almost entirely new soundtrack, a reordered finale that cut a major character's death scene, and a smaller field of view that let enemies attack from off screen.

SNK 40th Anniversary Collection · 2018

The NES original returned on Switch in November 2018, then PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Steam in 2019, its first official availability off a Nintendo console.

THE RECEPTION

Scores, sales, and the dissent

EGM · 7, 8, 7, 8

The Electronic Gaming Monthly panel's scores for the NES version: warm, with reservations.

Famitsu · 28 / 40

The Famicom panel scored it 6, 8, 8, 6, notably cooler than its American counterparts.

GameSpot · On the GBC port

"Crystalis' sheer depth, and the quality of its presentation, was without peer, and it is still regarded as a milestone title in the action RPG genre."

Dissent · Repetition and collision

The standing criticisms are repetitive play, many enemies fall to rapid presses of one button, and flawed collision detection, noted by RPGFan among others. Famicom Hisshoubon scored the original 2.5 of 5.

IGN ranked the NES game forty second on its Top 100 NES Games list, Nintendo Power placed it 115th in its 200 best games on a Nintendo system, and Kotaku's retrospective verdict sums up the balance: "Crystalis has flaws, but makes up for it with bold strides in its narrative and gameplay."

THE LEGACY

What it left behind

1UP called Crystalis a hidden gem and one of the better games inspired by Zelda on the NES, contrasting it with Willow on this same shelf. The Game Boy Color version's fate is the cautionary half of the legacy: a port remembered mostly for what it changed. The NES original, untouched, is the one that kept being re-released, and its soundtrack is now regularly cited among the best of the NES era.