Mallow marred: A Boy and His Blob & Crystalis | Metroidvania Works 22
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- čas přidán 8. 08. 2023
- The U.S. didn't produce a lot of works in the metroidvania vein prior to the indie game era, and David Crane seems to have been the one American designer who dared fly close to that particular sun. A Boy and His Blob follows on the heels of Pitfall! and Pitfall II, but arrives after half a decade of Japanese designers exploring the exploratory platformer space. Crane ultimately went a different direction with this creation, focusing more on the puzzle-solving aspect than on pure exploration or character-building-a valid approach, but imperfectly realized in this case.
More satisfying is SNK's rare sally into the action-RPG format with Crystalis, a game that moves even further into the RPG side of things than Willow did. Heck, it even introduces Final Fantasy-like elemental affinities into the mix. With its focus on character skill development and elemental weapon upgrades, Crystalis pushes its genre in a more complex direction and introduces ideas that would eventually find their way into exploratory platformers, too.
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NES footage captured from Analogue Nt Mini. Video upscaled to 720 with xRGB Mini Framemeister. - Hry
The Wii Boy & His Blob improves over the original in a big way by giving you the ability to hug the Blob on command.
That was the main gist of my review for the game back in the day, yeah. More games need a dedicated Hug button.
Hug button aside, the Wii game is so much less ambitious than the NES game. It's a fine level-based platformer, but the original really puts everything out there. Some of it fails miserably, but I can't help but think it's better because it at least tried.
I hugged that little guy so hard, I got back to blobalonia and gave it a break after realising theres a ton more levels. Had the original back in the day, with a game genie of course cuz it's legitimately nails!
😄
Worth noting: Crystalis also has a banger OST
It’s criminal that we never got a Crystalis sequel.
I never understood that, either
Agreed. SNK should do a sequel to Crystalis and Kouldeka
Crystalis 2: The Adventure, a solid side scrolling platformer 😅
A wonderful double feature. Crystalis meant so much to me back then, it felt so enormous and serious when I was 12.
What's remarkable to me about Crystalis is how it sticks out among SNK's library of almost exclusively arcade-style action games. They basically only made one true adventure/RPG, ever, and somehow it was one of the best of its era. It's strange that they made it, strange that it was so good (even if they were cribbing from Falcom), and strange that they never really followed it up.
I love Crystals. It always felt like an expansive mystical world.
Some notes, save. It is possible to walk into a boss room and be trapped until you defeat them but be too under-leveled to hurt them- you will be dying and reloading if that happens. Also, avoid saving in the poison march before you get the gas mask. It is possible to save with so little health that you cannot get out, ever- you will be restarting if that happens.
Crystalis is still one of my favorite NES games of all time.
The fact that SNK never made a sequel to Crystalis for the Neo Geo still blows my mind.
Crystalis 2 showed up on "upcoming release" schedules for Neo Geo for ages, though I wonder how they could have made a game that felt true to the original yet still worked with the Neo Geo's arcade aspect.
@@JeremyParishwow I had no idea! Maybe something like Cadash?
Cadash is getting an Arcade Archives release on PS4 and Switch in a few weeks!
From Crystalis in 1990 to Tears of the Kingdom in 2023, Japan’s love for legally distinct Nausicaa forests will never die lol
Being an English kid in the 90's, that monkey wrench puzzle in Monkey Island was truly baffling
Really threw a spanner in the works for you, eh?
Another fine episode of Jeremy Parish's Metroidvania and its Works.
Crystalis was a fun take on action RPGs. It's lived on in my imagination throughout the years: thinking what a sequel on SNES or PS could've been. Jeremy focused on the Swords' powers; but how the hero uses his psychic abilities added nice flavor, too. Paralyzing NPCs to get past them, disguising yourself to access new dialogue and objectives, reaching out telepathically to get advice from (or to annoy) your allies. And let's not forget collecting items that set events in motion...or call a dolphin you can ride.
Crystalis was a big favourite of mine, in spite of the mandatory grinding and clumsy menuing. I love the way its areas interconnect, and the various puzzles that make use of items and spells. In addition to the classic Zelda/Metroid-style dungeon puzzles (break wall, build bridge, find key, etc.) you have lots of more organic adventure game style puzzles. For example, the way you have to paralyze a guard in order to sneak into the Queen's secret room in Portoa, or the way you use the change spell to disguise yourself as a rabbit's dead owner.
Crystalis is one of my all time favorite games.
Thank you for discussing Crystalis. It's my favorite NES game. I beat it in 1991 when I was just 9 years old and it has stuck with me ever since. I play through it about once a year just to keep it fresh in my mind. Thankfully, more and more people are discovering Crystalis for the first time. It's one of the best games on the system.
Despite its flaws CRYSTALIS is my favorite NES game. I go back to it often. Holds up well.
Crystalis was probably the best action RPG on the NES. It felt fleshed out and huge.
Also awesome noting the Naussica forest. I knew about that back then when it was localized as Warriors of the Wind.
Two wonderful games! Crystalis has a lot to offer, and Boy and His Blob is charming if nothing else.
Ah, you've gotten to Crystalis. My favorite game of all time. I grinded for months in that game as a kid. I never devoted so much to a game back then as I did to Crystalis. I still replay it every few years. Nice job.
Crystalis is a game that I beat with the assistance of safe states. Swapping swords is a bit annoying but I got used to it. The story in it is somewhat interesting, the music is definitely great in it. The cameo of the two Psycho Soldier characters as two of the sages that help you was pretty nice.
I had the GB boy and his blob game and it kept me busy for a while. Some of those puzzles were too much for my lil kid mind. Loved crystalis...1997 was such an apocalyptic year!
1997 gave us that awkward CG Jabba the Hutt, which some scientists view as the branching point between the Good Timeline and the Evil Timeline we're trapped in today
Couldn't put my finger on the familiarity of the physics and movement in A Boy and his Blob, until I saw that it's a David Crane game.
I think Boy & His Blob is great. It's like a sequel to Pitfall 2 combined with Kings Quest.
I discovered it with my kids, and we had a blast figuring out the puzzles.
It might be a short game compared to Metroid or Zelda but we couldn't beat it.
As a kid, I had no idea who David Crane was. But it does make a ton of sense as "Pitfall III." As a hyperadvanced Pitfall, it seems way cooler than as a weirdly regressive NES game.
@@guaposneeze As a kid I was vaguely aware of Pitfall but never played it, didn't know author's name, and never knew Pitfall II existed, but I loved A Boy and His Blob. I think it may have been on this channel that I first saw footage of Pitfall II and suddenly "WAIT A SECOND!" discovered the connections.
I absolutely love this series
My favorite CZcamsr! You can tell you actually spend your time to play every game you cover and talk about them intellectually, not just based off of others opinions.
I guess A Boy and His Blob's greatest achievement is searing the music into my brain for all time. That and I always thought the background of the city was really charming
I'm happy you got to cover Crystalis in a proper Jeremy Parish critical overview, damn good game I find it funny that SNK pretty much never did Action RPGs aside from Crystalis.
I've never played Crystalis, but I've watched a fair bit of its gameplay in videso like these, and the one problem I've always had with it is that, as far as I've seen, the sword magic combat system changes the game from a top-down hack-and-slash adventure to a top-down shooter where your gun has a long charge-up time between each shot. As soon as they have sword magic, everyone stops even attempting to melee enemies, because the relative movement speeds between the player and the enemies always seems to make it too hard to close in to melee range without getting hit.
Yeah, the majority of combat is firing off charged shots. There are times when spamming melee is a good idea, like when you’ve pinned an enemy against the wall. But between contact damage, status effects, an enemy movement speed, melee is definitely a niche use case.
For what it’s worth, there’s a satisfying rhythm to the charge, as you need to find a safe spot (only charges while standing still) then line up a shot. But definitely not as melee-focused as the emphasis on swords might suggest.
I wish SNK would bring back Crystalis. Although they kept Asina and Kensu in the game, aka Athena and Kensou in King of Fighters.
The Crystalis characters were themselves a reference to Athena and Kensou from Psycho Soldier. SNK has never been above a bit of navel-gazing.
A Boy and His Blob & Crystalis are work of art 🎨. 😀👍🎮
This is the sweet spot of gaming for me. Crystalis was a long term rental i ended up buying. A Boy and his Blob was the first game I ever traded for, traded Karnov.
I remember reading the Nintendo Power article about A Boy and His Blob a lot because it sounded so wild and having recently played it...whew I'm pretty glad I never got it myself back then! Crystalis though...oooh, I found that on sale for 20 bucks at Babbages at the mall and was hyped to find a game with an interesting box selling for so cheap...and it turned out to be AMAZING! Might be one of my top 10 for the NES, it and Final Fantasy were definitely the two rpgs I beat the most as a kid
"Legally distinct forest from Nausicaa"
I feel weird for never mentally making that link between the Poison Forest and that anime decades ago, and now that you've said it, it's impossible to divorce the two. You know, in spite of being legally distinct.
Had the Crystalis IP been allowed to continue on, I imagine it being very similar to the modern Ys games now
A Boy and his Blob was a game I loved. Next to Super Mario 3 and Ufouria, it was one title I would play over and over. It really got the imagination going and it is a game I truly loved. I finished it countless times but never had I ever thought of using the Hummingbird form to transport the blob to to the boy as shown here.
Crystalis is still amazing. I've almost bought the SNK Anniversary bundle several times now just for that game. What a stone cold classic. Also, I guess I've been pronouncing it wrong my whole life? Oh man. Lagoon rules, too.
I think you can pronounce it however you want! It's a made-up word, anything goes
Between the music, the animation, and the graphics, A Boy and His Blob feels so much like Pitfall III, it's amazing. I wonder if Crane had a design team with him or if he was doing much of the work himself.
The team’s names appear as graffiti on the subway walls!
Hey Jeremy! I just wanted to let you know that I just bought SNES Works and Virtual Boy Works from Limited Run. I know own all your stuff, even Good Nintentions. Anyways thank you so much for making sure they were restocked. I missed then on the first round, and I was super bummed. Have a great weekend! Thanks for all your hard work 😁
Nice, thanks for your support!
I"m not surprised that you ended up comparing Crystalis to Secret of Mana. I myself remember noting the many similarities and differences between the games after I got the latter, especially the way that the latter improved some mechanics but downgraded others. For instance, in Crystalis, you have to be still to charge your weapon (or at least, mostly still - you do get as slight amount of charge after you start moving as determined by speedrunners) but once it's charged, you move at full speed. In Secret of Mana you can charge your weapon while moving, but your movement slows and that slow lasts after you finish charging your weapon until you discharge it. In Secret of Mana you get the weapon upgrades from bosses and then have to pay for reforging, while in Crystalis (usually) the items don't drop from bosses and there's no economic cost for them. In Crystalis you can unequip the max level bracelet so you don't charge up to where you spend magic on the attack and stop at level 2 instead; in Secret of Mana, while higher level attacks don't cost mana, they have different attack patterns, and if your weapon is higher level than the attack pattern you want, you have to assign that weapon to a computer-controlled ally and tell them only to charge to a specific level - you can't stop charging at a certain level on player-controlled characters. In Crystalis you could mash the uncharged attack for full damage, while in Secret of Mana you had to wait a few seconds to get full damage after any attack. That one I really felt hampered the game, and I was glad that it mostly disappeared in what is now called Trials of Mana (that I played as Seiken Densetsu 3 on emulator in the early 2000s).
Considering how easy it was to stunlock bosses with magic in "Secret of Mana", I never bothered to charge up my weapons.
I should replay Crystalis, as I only have some experience with the GBC version.
My poor, sweet summer child. That cropped, zoomed-in version is so much harder to play than the NES game.
@@JeremyParish Better intro music, possibly, though.
Paired with an honestly risible intro cutscene. The hell was that?
@@JeremyParish They should have quit while they were ahead. They ending shares those regretful qualities, as well.
I have never heard of Crystalis before but it sounds really fun!
Good afternoon, and thank you for flying Metroidvania works; where every flight is an adventure though places you never knew about, captaining the airship Zebes is your Pilot, Jeremy Parish. Remember, when the seatbelt light comes on, immediately return to your seats. Even those of you in the pool lounge.
I was so happy when I finally beat A Boy and His Blob after 30 years.
One of the reasons this trial-and-error approach to problem solving was more successful and forgivable on home computers, was that those games typically allowed you to save and load your game at will. So if your experimentation ended in failure, you would only end up losing a few minutes of gameplay at most. Certainly, the adventure games from Infocom and Sierra, that inform a lot of the puzzle design in a Boy and His Blob, were absolutely designed with quick save/loading and mulitple save slots in mind. On the other hand, on consoles, where the ability to permanently save your progress hadn't become quite mainstream yet, you could often end up needing to restart the entire game, and redo sections you already know the solutions to over and over again, in a Groundhog Day-esque loop. For instance, the SG-1000 port of The Castle is much harder than the original computer version, and easier to get permanently stuck in, due to having the ability to save and load completely removed.
I like crystalis. I'm surprised it did not get reprints. Before NSO I think it was buried in a set once.
Crystalis is included in the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection.
You got one of those voices that should be doing narration.
I am doing narration here! It all works out!
Crystalis is somehow at par or even surpasses some SNES action-adventure/action-RPGs
Haha!I'm hoping the Hunt for Red October might be a nod to Callsheet from Casey Liss releasing? Or perhaps just an interesting coincidence :D
It’s just a film that was big during the time of these games’ release, as always
Considering ABAHB can be finished in a few minutes if you know what you're doing, the trial and error aspect is a feature.
It seems like A Boy and his Blob is crying out for a spiritual successor.
Perils and *Pitfalls*!
good morning jeremy
A boy and his blob was an interesting game, but David did miss the mark in design that he succeeded with the Pitfall games specifically Pitfall 2. Should have stuck with the score based system solely as the driver for skill, gave the player unlimited jelly beans much like Pitfall 2 had unlimited lives but using them the most effectively would ensure the highest score.
A Boy And His Blob is a good game that is very misunderstood.
What's the joke/pun with strawberry = bridge?
drawbridge, maybe? like, straw-bridge
That’s better than anything I could come up with. Let’s go with it.
Eloquent as always.
wait, so secret of mana is gonna make it into metroidvania works, but seiken densetsu 1 isn't?
In the words of The Mighty Thor, cool thy tits
Is a ABAHB a dead end though, or part of the lineage of puzzle-focused metroidvanias like La Mulana 1+2? Those exist and were popular enough for a kickstarter!
La Mulana is directly inspired by Maze of Galious, which was covered previously. I see those as a different strain of game, since ABAHB is really about using a limited set of tools that's provided almost entirely at the outset to solve a few puzzles, while La Mulana requires the use of tools and abilities you acquire along the way and results in more of a two-prong challenge.
Metroidvania works? Uh, Yeah, I sure Hope it does!
As ridiculous as a boy and his blob is it kind of has a bit of charm to it, it does get old pretty fast though
don't have much to say on a boy and his blob I never figured it out... too busy turning him into a brick wall, haha. on pitfall 2 he got rid of the lives mechanic? guess nobody told Nintendo or Konami that lives don't really work in a metroidvania. 10:03 I was not a fan of this mechanic, rendering some bosses unbeatable unless you're high enough level. but I think that's my lone complaint on Crystalis which was a pretty good take on the zelda formula. (well okay that and the weapon/item juggling can be tedious) Just a shame SNK abandoned plans for a sequel in favor of ripping off Street Fighter...
More suffering in puzzle games?
I don't know... I overall found Blob to be more enjoyable than Crystalis. Sure, the latter is more ambitious, but the aforementioned grinding, as well as all the dungeons being extremely feature-free and one note made it a less than great experience for me. It was still fine, and had some really nice mechanics, but overall I was a bit let down.
Have I been saying this game wrong for decades? I thought it was crystal-is not crys-tal-is.
It’s a fake word, say it however you like
@@JeremyParishjust like Metroidvania
Yes, Real Ones actually pronounce it "met-ro-id-van-ee-uh"
if you really wanna get specific, the japanese version is called "god slayer"