Does it get any better?

[EverPhoenix]

there actually is a storyline to do with louran, and you have to go to the inn to find it. 'cause lets face it. its an rpg. first thing you do in a town... find the inn.

in there you find a guy who says that apparently Louran is a lost town. Plus the inn-kepers tell you to go look around. since you were sent to the place to find Meilin, you then proceed to go look for her.

once you find her, she tells you to bugger off.

so now that youve 'explored' the town, back to the inn you go. and BOOM, zombies everywhere. and that fat guy who tells you its a lost town keeps talking.

so now you have to go find meilin, to save her from this place. as far as i can see, that is a storyline

im not meaning to insult/offend you at all, gcx, but it just seems that you spoke to one npc too few. or maybe its that ive finished this game multiple times and know the story fairly well.

ill admit that upon finishing louran, there isnt much story that dictates where you go (im not sure if the elder has said something about the 'babe to the sea' yet). but its fairly linear from there, until you reach the next place that is.

[Rark]

Oh hey I'm just new, and I decided to step in for a bit when I saw this person unjustly blowing up some minor issues with the game and quitting it before it has even fully kicked in..

Sure, Terranigma's gameplay sometimes progresses by an unconventional sort of logic that may seem a bit off if you start demanding that everything you have to do has to be told to you in advance like in most games. Notice for instance the large portion of the game where Ark seems to travel about the world freely without holding onto some little checklist specifying what must be done next in order to accomplish this or that.. At first I deemed this lack of guidance a bit of a flaw myself too, albeit not one big enough to even remotely consider quitting the game. At the same time though, the freedom also changes Ark's adventure into a more personal experience, almost as if he, like the gamer, is eager to explore the world and try out new things even if initially these undertakings have not been announced to trigger greater events. In fact, it's probably one of Terranigma's strongest points that in these subtle ways it causes the player to empathize with Ark (and eventually punishes you for it.. ahah), i.e. by letting you fill in some of his motivations. In fact, this could also very well be the idea behind the many times you're presented with multiple answers for Ark to give where it doesn't really affect the story, most notably during the scene in Dragoon castle that lets you literary pick Ark's reason for having gone there.

I kind of based this thought on how 8 years ago (when I didn't even notice the lack of logical pointers in the game), everything Ark had to do to progress in the story was exactly what I naturally felt to be the right thing to do myself. And most of you here will know that doing the right thing in Terranigma won't avert you from some terrible events later in the game. It was pretty devastating to see that decisions that had felt like my own had actually been anticipated by the story and had come to lead to the tragic climaxes of the last two chapters. It definitely forged a strong sense of synchronization with Ark who practically goes through the same realization process.

It might not be the case for everyone though, that the non-linearity makes the emotional bits more griping. It's also true that from the beginning I was fond of Ark, so it's not just the gameplay itself that contributed to the powerful experience. Regardless of what the relation between the lack of traditional videogame logic and story impact may be though, there's never a point in the game where there's absolutely no clue available on what to do, even if the underlying logic sometimes leaves room for interpretations such as that Ark may want to enjoy his free stay at the inn and give Meilin a break to come to her senses. In all it seems a little, inane to me to give up on Terranigma for just this one 'flaw'.

As for the bashing of the level design, I can only plain disagree. The dungeons are everything except long and tedious, and all of them are broken up into segments by interesting skits. Plus Ark can actually slide-stab enemies to hell so quickly he doesn't have to hang around most rooms for more than a minute in order to clear them. Now if only some of the long-stretched Secret of Mana dungeons would allow for such speedy run-throughs, I might actually be more motivated to play that game again sometime.