I sympathized with Nadia’s post last week about the pants wetting nature of Terranigma’s “Desert” theme. That eerie swath of SNES atmospherics by Miyoko Kobayashi and Masanori Hikichi is still fresh in my memory, and not just from following the link in Madame Oxford’s piece. Three weeks ago, after some ten years of hunting, I finally sat down and played Terranigma in one day-long marathon session. This was both the realization of a long-standing desire to play Quintet’s final Super Nintendo entry in their Heaven and Earth saga and also part of a grand gaming journey I’ve undertaken here in 2009. The quest, as it were, is to track down three games from the past two decades that represent significant gaps in my experience: The One That Got Away, The Second Chance, and The White Whale. My goal is to finally see, after building up each game that fits these descriptions for me in my brain, how they live up long after their respective primes.
Given my inexplicable aversion to emulation, the English version of Terranigma has always been my white whale, the cartridge I’ve hunted for and that I’ve constantly sought for an actual way to play. An Australian copy of the game isn’t terribly rare, but it tends to fetch a high price, and then there’s the hurdle of getting it to run on a non-PAL Super Nintendo. That hurdle’s especially high since Terranigma, being one of the last Super Nintendo games, is fitted with a particularly finicky region-lockout chip. Even a Fami-clone that can play PAL carts like the Retro Duo won’t boot Terranigma. There are only two options for intrepid (and legitimately insane) gamers like myself. First, you can mod your SNES with 50/60 Hz region lockout switches. Fearing that I’d end up soldering my hand to the console, I opted out of this. The only other option is to find an incredibly rare version of the Pro Action Replay cheat device. Only three models will work, Mk2.P, 2.T, and 3, all of which only released in Europe in limited quantities. After trolling the net since last summer, I finally found one at the beginning of January. So, in spite of these barriers, in spite of my psychoses, I finally played and finished my white whale.
Was it worth the wait? Did Terranigma live up to a decade of expectation?
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