This was my problem with the game and why I couldn’t progress very far. The combination of the diagonal perspective with 3D platforming over pits without adequate indication of your relative location in 3D space just made it very frustrating.
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I tried the game in my MiSTer and found that running at 50Hz the timer in the opening sequence would take 60 seconds to count up 60 seconds. I also timed walking the length of one of the corridors and it took about 4.2 seconds. On my retroid running at 60Hz, the timer goes up 60 seconds in 50 real world seconds, which is what you’d expect with it running too fast, and walking the same corridor took about 3.5 seconds. So although the counter is running fast, my movement speed is equally sped up meaning in theory I’m not disadvantaged. Except that so much time is taken up fiddling around changing direction, and the timer being sped up just means I’m losing time there. I suspect that the timer speed has been adjusted for PAL but the movement speed has not, meaning Garian moves slow relative to the timer in the PAL game compared to NTSC, which might explain why some of what I’ve seen online says you have to reach the capain’s cabin in four minutes for the second parallel but I found I had four and a half minutes - they added some leeway for the slower movement.
Anyways, the second parallel: there’s a bit more retreading stuff I’ve already gone through in the first parallel than I’d like, but at the same time it’s wildly divergent. Right at the start, you kill the final boss of the first parallel, who turns out to be possessing the brother who was only briefly mentioned in the first pass. Seemingly significant characters like Lance and Doc appear briefly and die, areas from the first time reappear but have different gates open or new hazards. It’s pretty cool.
I thought my problem with save states freezing up might have something to do with the music, so I’ve been playing with sound turned off in the emulator. But in fact I haven’t needed to load save states in the second parallel. Despite it looking more difficult, with more enemies and tougher environments, I’ve been making progress without much trouble. Maybe I’m getting better at the game? Or maybe turning off the sound has improved the performance of the emulator and that’s making things easier? Dunno. I got through the three fights in a row sequence that gave me so much trouble in the first parallel without any difficulty this time (though I also had better equipment this time), and I’ve only had one game over (to environmental hazards that I hadn’t figured out yet). Until:
I’m sure anyone who’s played the game will know seeing this image that I am currently suffering. For anyone else, you roll along these tracks and have to jump over the gaps. This section, unlike the rest of the game, has a dynamic camera that often gives you little warning of the gaps, and sometimes no clear view of them at all. And it goes on and on. I cleared the first few screens after many attempts and then had a couple with no jumps. I thought I was done, but then holes start appearing again. I do not recommend this part of the game without save states. Unfortunately, it turns out turning off the sound has not stabilised my save states, so I’m still struggling to get through.
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This might have been the most difficult challenge in the game - you gotta jump off this little block, change direction in mid-air, and land on the other one. In theory not that hard but I failed it so many times, and it sends you back so far. Thank goodness for save states. This whole room is nuts - it’s huge, it’s full of curving geometry (remember you can only move in four diagonal directions), mess up anywhere and you fall offscreen and have to start it over, and there are large sections of it where you can’t see your character or the path at all because of walls in the foreground. I really wonder if some of those are supposed to go invisible but my emulator isn’t doing it, because surely they can’t have intended it to be like that?
Anyway, I got through it and have finished the second parallel, which seems like a fairly neat and happy ending to the story, except that you wake up again and it was all another dream seemingly. Though the dream the characters describe is the first parallel again. I did enjoy the second parallel and the way it builds on the first. In particular I liked that one of the dungeons is repeated in full but a secondary character goes through ahead of you so all the puzzles are already solved and you just stroll through. Could have done without some of the absurd platforming, but save states made that more tolerable.
Now for the third parallel. I’m still not sure I’m going to be able to pull off the run through the ship at the start fast enough to reach it. Maybe I should switch from my handheld to PC and use an emulator that will run my PAL copy at its intended speed.
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I made it into parallel 3 with a couple of seconds to spare after many attempts. My reward: an even worse minecart section.
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I’ve finished parallels 1-4 now, so I’m considering the game finished. The fifth parallel is just a series of fights, which is not what’s interesting to me about the game. Gameplay-wise the fourth parallel is kind of interesting. You retread a lot of the game, but with an hour long timer and no option to save. It starts with a retread of the silver castle - the one I described as “absurd” earlier in the thread. It remains absurd but having been through it once I was a lot quicker this time plus I’m using save states. After that you wind up covering a lot of territory backwards. I dunno if this is intended to capitalise on your having been through most areas at least twice during the first three parallels and assumes you know your way around but I found it challenging. The stages were designed around a basically fixed camera that can be moved through a 90 degree arc only. Moving through the game backwards doesn’t give you much view of where you’re going, so a few times I thought I’d reached a dead end only to eventually find a path sitting just out of my field of view - the zoom out feature that I kept forgetting about is a big help.
Anyway, while I did enjoy the platforming in this game more than my posts in this thread have probably suggested, the fourth parallel is where the story finally cracks open and you get some idea what’s going on.
At the start of each of the first three parallels there’s a guy who won’t let you go any further unless you drink a bottle of jalapeño juice, which of course seems very likely to be a more family friendly substitution for booze made in the localisation (I looked up a longplay of the Japanese version and used a translation app on the text, which seems to confirm it - also in Japanese he’s hiccuping because he’s drunk which finally made him going “HOWEE” mid sentence in English make sense to me: he’s supposed to be reacting to the jalapeños). Shortly afterwards, Garian gets woozy and starts acting aggressively - he’s drunk, or I guess hallucinating from the chili in English. At this point a child approaches, angry with bounty hunters for capturing his father and having him locked away. Garian threatens him and the player faces this confronting scene:
Is the game going to have me murder a child? As it turns out, no. Garian hallucinates some roses and backs off. The first time through I found this scene shocking, at least until it relented, then on the second and third passes it became comical. At the end of the third parallel though Garian encounters himself, carbon frozen. This freezing is the method of execution in the prison, and it’s been suggested in other parallels that people frozen in carbon experience unending nightmares. Then you get this scene:
So the overall plot is Garian shows up on the island, gets drunk, murders a child, is executed by freezing, and the game you play is his nightmares. Parallel four then positions you as an alternate reality Garian who didn’t kill the kid and has you chasing down the one who did in order to merge the parallel realities and escape the nightmare, and it ends with you and your friends escaping the island as it is destroyed by the colliding realities. And then you wake up on the ship again, still trapped in nightmares. It’s pretty grim.
I don’t know that I have much to add beyond my summary of the plot, but I will say it seems bizarre to lose the alcohol (in a way that really undermines the plot) but keep the child murder.
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