Alundra, Alundra, a game after my own heart. As a dyed in the wool lover of classic Super NES adventure games like Illusion of Gaia, Secret of Mana, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (No duh) Alundra left a big impression on me when I first saw the ads for it in the Summer of 1997. Here was the pinnacle of the technologies that gave us those classic top-down adventure games, now popping up on the Playstation. And from the developers of Landstalker, to boot!The game follows the adventures of a young boy named Alundra, who is plagued by horrendous nightmares. These nightmares prophecy that young Alundra will be the chosen one destined to save the world from darkness. After a storm leaves him ship-wrecked in the small town of Inoa, Alundra's adventure begins when he must take up the battle against a group of forest monkeys to save the villagers that have adopted him as one of their own.
Simple, yes, but there's more in the telling than the tale. Much like the Dark World in Link to the Past, Alundra can sometimes enter the Nightmare World, the world within our dreams, to save friends while on his journey. These parallel dimension areas are excellently inter-woven into the narrative of the gameplay, giving the game a larger scope, and putting secondary characters in harm's way, sometimes leading to their deaths, a rarity in this genre.
The dungeons in this game are not only fantastic, but also extremely difficult. Much like the best puzzles in the Zelda series, each dungeon has a number of brain-teasers that'll make you scratch your head and really push yourself to think outside the box to move on. This is still sometimes considered one of the hardest games on the original Playstation.
Graphically, the game has very nicely detailed 2-D backgrounds and character sprites, looking like a richly textured SNES game. The whole game has a very earthy feel, with lots of natural tones and environments with lots of texture. Character animation can sometimes look more limited than the technology at the time could do, but it doesn't really matter in the scheme of things. It looks and plays enough like an SNES RPG that more fluid animation could've pulled the player out of the experience the game is trying to build.
The music, the MUSIC! The music in this game is phenomenal. Composer Kohei Tanaka's score quickly can go from a very melody-based sound for villages and fields, to a very atmospheric effect for dungeons and the nightmare world. The soundtrack actually reminded me a lot of Mitsuda's score for Chrono Trigger, it's that good.
So if this game is as amazing as it seems (completely honest here, it really is) why have so many people not heard of it? This really should be up there with the classic action RPG / adventure offerings on the SNES, as well as other Working Designs published titles like Lunar. So why isn't it?
Why Didn't it Catch on?:
Alundra was released at a peculiar time for the video game industry. More and more games on the next-generation systems at the time were being developed with 3D graphics, and two-dimensional games were seen as a dying breed of the past. Consider the fact that Sony actually published Alundra in Japan, but Sony Computer Entertainment of America refused to localize and publish it here, and you can see where the industry was going. Working Designs ultimately published it in the U.S. (with Psygnosis handling the game in Europe) and gave it a strong (for Working Designs) advertising campaign in the U.S. buying ad space in EGM, Game Informer and Gamepro for full-page ads.
The game was released in the winter of 1997 to fairly positive reviews. IGN gave it an 8.5 out of ten, Gamespot gave it an 8.8, and EGM gave it an 8.6.
As per the norm of Working Designs, only an initial print-run was made to keep demand up and to avoid discounted bargain copies at major retailers. It's somewhat rare, but isn't expensive like many classics of the Playstation era like Final Fantasy VII and Working Designs own Lunar:Silver Star Story and Eternal Blue.
Today, when I ask people about the game, I rarely will hear anybody has heard of it, let alone played it, I'm met with blank stares. In the last month of asking a ton of people if they've played Alundra, only one person has said they've played it, to which they enthusiastically followed up with "I can't believe somebody else has played it!"
Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that 2D games were a dying breed by late 1997, and gamers had already had their taste of Final Fantasy VII. Anything else would be a step-down to them, which is a shame, because if Alundra had been released for the SNES in 1995 or '96, it may have been considered a classic of the adventure genre. As it stands, it was a mild curiosity item to many in '97: an out of date dinosaur in a modern three-dimensional world. Don't write it off as many did, it just may be one of the best games nobody's played on the Playstation.
Note: There was a sequel released in February of 2000 in North America. This is a sequel in name only, as it's story has absolutely nothing to do with the original game. And it's in 3D.
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