Of late I've found myself kind of obsesed with the idea of top down 8-bit RPGs, and nothing really scratched that urge for me in quite the same way as Crystalis for the NES.
The experience of the game was at times straining but I found myself captivated. The music is a notch above what you usually hear from even the best 8-bit soundtracks, the writing is strong and the gameplay has its weak points but it also flourishes when it works.
The things that age Crystalis the most is the lack of checkpointing and its sometimes indecipherable logic. More than once was I sent to a guide to find the path to progression, only to find that I needed to equip the glasses item to look at an inconspicuous wall to find a secret entrance, or I needed to use a lamp on a broken statue and place that statue in a shrine in order to remove the whirlpools blocking me in the sea. I also found myself grinding more than I would have liked to. While grinding isn't strictly necessary, you risk putting yourself at such a severe disadvantage in some sections that it'd almost be silly not to.
Still, the ending of the game is what made it all worth it.
There are few NES games I would classify as having particularly strong stories, it's something inherent to the era, coming from the arcades and without much space to store text in a still developing medium, NES games just weren't as narratively capable for the most part.
Crystalis shattered that conception for me in its entirety.
The story is that good.
I have some experience with the Gameboy Color port but I'd say that despite its improvements, the noticeable screen crunch will make mazelike dungeons even harder to navigate and triple the difficulty of the combat.
Crystalis can be a hard sell, it can be a weird game and it can be obtuse but it can be an intensely rewarding game. It earns my recommendation.
