Before we begin, let's watch this. If there was ever a game besides NiGHTS that made me glad to have a Sega Saturn, this was it.
Oh, and here's the song you'll get if you play the game CD in a CD player and play track 2.
Alright, here is. First vid.
The game takes place on a planet known as Quartilia, where everything is made from gems by the goddess Antowas, including our hero Astal and his female human friend Leda. An evil being known as Jerado created his own human, Geist, to kidnap Leda. Astal freed Leda, but Astal was banished to the moon by Antowas - who was awoken from her slumber - after he broke the bottom of the sea to free Leda, and was chained to it for all eternity. Jerado may have been banished from the world and defeated by Antowas, but Geist is trying to bring Jerado back. When Geist kidnaps Leda again, Astal hears Leda's cries for help and breaks free. He makes his way back to Quartilia and hunts her down.
The Journey Begins
You can already tell this is a good looking game. The level environments are not only pre-rendered, they're seemingly hand-drawn!
Your main attack (B) is your grab. When you grab an enemy, you can hold them with the B button and toss them behind you whenever you let go.
You have three fruits which act as your health. You can have up to five if you find a specific power-up. A red fruit refills one unit while a green one refills the whole shebang.
Your blow attack (Up+B) stuns enemies and changes them into gems. From there, you can defeat them. You can also jump off the tops of their heads to stun them for a second if you need to.
Down+B lets you pound the ground with your fist. This lets you shake the ground and also stun enemies.
Pressing B in the air lets you smash things in mid-air. When you perform this attack, you'll stop falling as you perform it. This can be used to your advantage at times, as you'll see later in the game.
If you press B while running, you'll do a grab that has even longer range than if you're just standing.
To get rid of the trees blocking your path, just walk up to them and pick them up with B. With tree in hand, you can slowly amble forward and clear a whole line of foes.
The gem enemies that you see are pretty easy. Some of them leap out from both the foreground and background, but they're still not that hard.
Midway through the level, you'll come across a gold version of the enemies you've seen before as well as some of his gold henchmen. They've held a bird hostage in a cave. Get rid of the henchmen, then get rid of the captain (who just stands there and strikes every couple of seconds). When you finish these guys off, you'll free the bird...which follows you around, much to Astal's chagrin.
This is where the purple bar comes into play. The more you fill it up, the more you can get the bird to do things with the gems. The blue gems allows the bird to search for power-ups. (You may get a 1-up sometimes, so try it out in certain areas.) The red gem allows for the bird to attack around the screen. When this purple bar is glowing, it's completely filled. You can get energy from any enemy that has small, yellow flashing spheres of light surrounding it. (I shall refer to this purple energy meter as the "bird meter" to keep from confusing the heck out of everybody.)
If you have a friend and a second controller, you can play two-player simultaneous. The "1P" will change into a "2P" as soon as the other player presses Start. The bird can go in any direction and also strike at enemies with a variety of moves that is as wide as Astal's, too. Heck, the bird has dashing attacks and can also divebomb! The bird can also rest on Astal's shoulder and regain health from Astal. If the bird rests too long, the game reverts back to one-player mode, but the second player can still rejoin at anytime.
While you're in two-player mode, the bird has its own health meter. The health meters will act as a scale, and if they're not balanced, somebody has less health than the other. If the bird dies, you lose a life just like if Astal died, so be very careful.
There is a team attack that involves one of the bird's attack and Astal's breath, but it takes practice to time perfectly. If you pull it off right, the bird flies around furiously and takes out everything on screen.
Near the end, you'll meet archers. Avoid the arrows and make it to the end. You'll also meet the default flying enemies as well as the flying creature carrying a gem under it (which can leave power-ups sometimes).
Into The Darkness
The pig enemies slowly amble back and forth. They're pretty easy as well. They jump back a bit and rear back before attack, but you can see this a mile away. Some of them
Throughout the level, you'll see bats flying across the ceiling. They'll run across the screen like a crushing ceiling, so at some point you'll have to duck in a low area and let them pass and rise up before you can continue on.
There is one point in every level where you can pound the ground and cause a white sparkle to show up. Picking this up fills your bird meter completely.
Sometimes, as you make your way through a level, you'll get the yellow gem in the center to show up. When this happens, you can use it to perform a level-specific action, such as lighting a dark cave or attacking a boss. Here, you can use it temporarily clear all the bats from above your head. The bats do come back, though. It should be noted that the bats can take out other enemies.
There's a red fruit hidden behind the foreground. The sparkles from the fruit are a sort of clue.
The Evil Eye
We're now going to take on our first boss!
This one is a giant version of the bats that we saw in the last level. This one has a big yellow eye and wants us dead, sadly.
The boss health meter is in the upper-right corner, and it shows up in the form of a purple crystal. As you damage the boss, the crystal shrinks and changes color. When it starts flashing, he's nearly dead. Kill him to shatter the crystal.
Whenever you see the boss flying around, smash him. He'll fly around in the background before flying out into the battlefield. As you fight him, his bat minions will show up in the background, and after a while, they'll attack you. If you use the yellow gem here, the bird will help you take them out while you concentrate on the boss.
Stay on the move when the bats attack. You know this is about to happen when the background starts warping quite a bit. As long as you're running (double tap left or right on the Control Pad), you should be fine and their attempts to lock on to you will be useless.
If you send the bird to fetch an item here, you may get a 1-up, signified by a small glowing statuette of Astal that cycles through a color spectrum. It also refills your health, so go ahead and take satisfaction in that as well.
It takes three measly hits to take down the Evil Eye. After that, you'll take on his second form. He'll have no wings and he'll just bounce around the screen. Three more easy hits and it's done.
When you leave, Geist shows up behind you. He steals the life force of the boss you just beat and then teleports away. You'll then get a cutscene involving Astal being ticked off with the bird, then it's on to the next level.
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