Next on my chronological list of SMT games to play was the first Persona game, but I didn't have it yet, so while I waited for it to come in the mail, I settled on playing something else relatively short and non-RPG-ish until then. The only thing I could think of out of the games I had recently picked up in another bundle of very cheap games from the resale mall was Alundra. I'd heard good things about it, but it was something I picked up on a whim more than anything. I barely even had much idea what sort of game it was, beyond some sort of action title. And so I bravely stumbled forth into this 2D Zelda-like game published in '97 by Sony (and made by a newly minted dev team staffed partially by Landstalker veterans). It took me about 30 hours to finish the (quite different) Japanese version of the game.
Alundra tells the story of the titular young man Alundra. Sent by a beckoning figure in recurring dreams, the story begins on a voyage to a far off village, and since this is a fantasy adventure from the 90's, the ship he's on inevitably gets sundered into pieces by a mysterious massive storm. Washed up on shore and saved by the village's blacksmith, he finds himself in a village of mysteries. A village robbed of its ability to create, villagers plagued by never ending nightmares, and a strange church on the hilltop that a few (looked down upon) villagers pray to for salvation. It's not the most original setup by any means, but it ends up going places I certainly didn't expect it to.
Alundra's story is a surprisingly serious and often quite dark one, and it repeatedly caught me off guard in just how large the body count gets by the end of the game. There isn't a lot of levity in the text itself, but that levity is sorta provided second-hand by the nature of it being an action-adventure game. The main theme of the story is not around how faith itself is bad, but how those who would seek to exploit people abuse their faith to manipulate them. It's a remarkably topical story for a Zelda-like game, and while it does have some trouble with setup and payoff at times (particularly around the blacksmith's story), I found it to be a quite story I really enjoyed.
The gameplay of Alundra is something I can best sum up with "Did you ever think that Link to the Past would be improved with more difficult puzzles, the addition of (often very hard) platforming, and a generally harder combat difficulty as well?" XD. It's a 2D Zelda-like game with tons of dungeons to explore, bosses to fight, sub-weapons to wield and even a few main weapons to experiment with. Dungeons and puzzles are all well designed, but as I explained before, it's just all pretty damn hard. There are some really brain bending mental puzzles, some absolutely fiendish platforming puzzles among the generally quite difficult ones, and bosses that while well designed take an awful long time to kill. This is mitigated by mid-dungeon save/heal points (though only one per dungeon, and sometimes not that well placed), the ability to get quite a lot of healing items to bring into dungeons, and a generally quite low price for failing any of the platforming puzzles.
But there are more problems than just an overall difficulty. Mind you, that difficulty is probably the #1 thing that will drive anyone away from Alundra. If you aren't very comfortable with 2D action games in the Zelda style, you're likely going to have a very hard time with Alundra, as it's easily one of the hardest games in the genre I've played. I actually managed to do the entire game without looking up any puzzle solutions (which I was kinda proud of myself for), but there were some that took me a heck of a lot longer to do than I thought they would. And the platforming may be already tricky, with tons of jumps right from the start requiring you to edge-jump if you want a chance of making it, but the camera perspective doesn't help things.
Alundra is a 2D game, and while some of you may've recoiled in horror at the word "Landstalker" in the start of this review, you can rest safely that this game doesn't have an isometric perspective like that. Unfortunately, what it does have is a more Zelda-like top-down view with LOTS of platforming toward and away from the camera (on the vertical axis). It's difficult to judge where you're going to land when jumping like this, and even though Alundra's foot hitbox is pretty big and you do have a very reliable shadow to guide you, you're still gonna have quite a time dealing with the jumping puzzles even if you're a veteran to retro platformers like myself. It's by no means a deal breaker, especially with how small the penalty for failure often is (almost always just a short walk back to where the start of the jumping puzzle is), but it can definitely get frustrating and is something very worth keeping in mind.
The presentation of the game is VERY pretty. Beautifully animated 2D art and animations (they've gotta be some of the nicest looking on the PS1, at least for '97) make for a beautiful adventure with a more earthy color palette than most other games in the genre tend to have. The music is also excellent, having both fun upbeat tunes as well as more somber affecting tracks for emotional beats. It isn't always perfect with the timing of when to use these (happy village music playing over emotional scenes doesn't happen every time, but it happens often enough to be weird), but when it uses them well it works damn good. There are 2D animated cutscenes as well, but it's more like just one cutscene, and it plays at the very end of the game to serve as a sort of flashback on how you got here as well as an epilogue. It's very weird to just suddenly have it there, especially with the main character going from his usual yellow to suddenly red hair, and it reads like something that was commissioned much earlier in development and ended up being far too different to the end product to actually use anywhere else ^^;. The game has a very 90's art style for its characters, and they look nice in those animated cutscenes, but I found them pretty darn ugly in the in-game portraits.
The last thing worth commenting on is the changes between the Japanese and English versions of the game, as if you're going to play the English version (which I think it's a safe bet virtually everyone reading this review would be), you should go in knowing that it was localized and worsened by none other than Working Designs. In their usual fashion, they made the game significantly harder (giving the already overly tanky bosses FAR more HP) and the writing significantly worse (I guess they were trying to add some levity, but it just does not work with the original tone at all, at least from what I've seen of the English version). Alundra still seems overall fine in English, but from what I have seen it is quite easily an inferior product to the writing and balancing in the original Japanese version.
Verdict: Recommended. Alundra would be a highly recommended game if it didn't have the camera perspective or difficulty issues, but it's still a damn fine game. I enjoyed the hell out of it, and managed to put 30 hours into this thing in only three days I was having so much fun. I'd hesitate to call it a hidden gem on the PS1, but it's definitely one worth checking out if you're into 2D Zelda-like games and aren't afraid of something a bit harder than you're likely used to from Nintendo's offerings in the genre~.
Alundra tells the story of the titular young man Alundra. Sent by a beckoning figure in recurring dreams, the story begins on a voyage to a far off village, and since this is a fantasy adventure from the 90's, the ship he's on inevitably gets sundered into pieces by a mysterious massive storm. Washed up on shore and saved by the village's blacksmith, he finds himself in a village of mysteries. A village robbed of its ability to create, villagers plagued by never ending nightmares, and a strange church on the hilltop that a few (looked down upon) villagers pray to for salvation. It's not the most original setup by any means, but it ends up going places I certainly didn't expect it to.
Alundra's story is a surprisingly serious and often quite dark one, and it repeatedly caught me off guard in just how large the body count gets by the end of the game. There isn't a lot of levity in the text itself, but that levity is sorta provided second-hand by the nature of it being an action-adventure game. The main theme of the story is not around how faith itself is bad, but how those who would seek to exploit people abuse their faith to manipulate them. It's a remarkably topical story for a Zelda-like game, and while it does have some trouble with setup and payoff at times (particularly around the blacksmith's story), I found it to be a quite story I really enjoyed.
The gameplay of Alundra is something I can best sum up with "Did you ever think that Link to the Past would be improved with more difficult puzzles, the addition of (often very hard) platforming, and a generally harder combat difficulty as well?" XD. It's a 2D Zelda-like game with tons of dungeons to explore, bosses to fight, sub-weapons to wield and even a few main weapons to experiment with. Dungeons and puzzles are all well designed, but as I explained before, it's just all pretty damn hard. There are some really brain bending mental puzzles, some absolutely fiendish platforming puzzles among the generally quite difficult ones, and bosses that while well designed take an awful long time to kill. This is mitigated by mid-dungeon save/heal points (though only one per dungeon, and sometimes not that well placed), the ability to get quite a lot of healing items to bring into dungeons, and a generally quite low price for failing any of the platforming puzzles.
But there are more problems than just an overall difficulty. Mind you, that difficulty is probably the #1 thing that will drive anyone away from Alundra. If you aren't very comfortable with 2D action games in the Zelda style, you're likely going to have a very hard time with Alundra, as it's easily one of the hardest games in the genre I've played. I actually managed to do the entire game without looking up any puzzle solutions (which I was kinda proud of myself for), but there were some that took me a heck of a lot longer to do than I thought they would. And the platforming may be already tricky, with tons of jumps right from the start requiring you to edge-jump if you want a chance of making it, but the camera perspective doesn't help things.
Alundra is a 2D game, and while some of you may've recoiled in horror at the word "Landstalker" in the start of this review, you can rest safely that this game doesn't have an isometric perspective like that. Unfortunately, what it does have is a more Zelda-like top-down view with LOTS of platforming toward and away from the camera (on the vertical axis). It's difficult to judge where you're going to land when jumping like this, and even though Alundra's foot hitbox is pretty big and you do have a very reliable shadow to guide you, you're still gonna have quite a time dealing with the jumping puzzles even if you're a veteran to retro platformers like myself. It's by no means a deal breaker, especially with how small the penalty for failure often is (almost always just a short walk back to where the start of the jumping puzzle is), but it can definitely get frustrating and is something very worth keeping in mind.
The presentation of the game is VERY pretty. Beautifully animated 2D art and animations (they've gotta be some of the nicest looking on the PS1, at least for '97) make for a beautiful adventure with a more earthy color palette than most other games in the genre tend to have. The music is also excellent, having both fun upbeat tunes as well as more somber affecting tracks for emotional beats. It isn't always perfect with the timing of when to use these (happy village music playing over emotional scenes doesn't happen every time, but it happens often enough to be weird), but when it uses them well it works damn good. There are 2D animated cutscenes as well, but it's more like just one cutscene, and it plays at the very end of the game to serve as a sort of flashback on how you got here as well as an epilogue. It's very weird to just suddenly have it there, especially with the main character going from his usual yellow to suddenly red hair, and it reads like something that was commissioned much earlier in development and ended up being far too different to the end product to actually use anywhere else ^^;. The game has a very 90's art style for its characters, and they look nice in those animated cutscenes, but I found them pretty darn ugly in the in-game portraits.
The last thing worth commenting on is the changes between the Japanese and English versions of the game, as if you're going to play the English version (which I think it's a safe bet virtually everyone reading this review would be), you should go in knowing that it was localized and worsened by none other than Working Designs. In their usual fashion, they made the game significantly harder (giving the already overly tanky bosses FAR more HP) and the writing significantly worse (I guess they were trying to add some levity, but it just does not work with the original tone at all, at least from what I've seen of the English version). Alundra still seems overall fine in English, but from what I have seen it is quite easily an inferior product to the writing and balancing in the original Japanese version.
Verdict: Recommended. Alundra would be a highly recommended game if it didn't have the camera perspective or difficulty issues, but it's still a damn fine game. I enjoyed the hell out of it, and managed to put 30 hours into this thing in only three days I was having so much fun. I'd hesitate to call it a hidden gem on the PS1, but it's definitely one worth checking out if you're into 2D Zelda-like games and aren't afraid of something a bit harder than you're likely used to from Nintendo's offerings in the genre~.