Terranigma and the Philosophy of History

Terranigma is unmatched in terms of the sheer scale of its thematic ambitions. Though sixteen years have passed since its original Japanese release, no other game has saddled you with such a herculean task as resurrecting the earth and directing the evolution of every living thing on it.

Terranigma attempts to track the entire course of history as it unfolds at the hands of a teenage boy who has been cast out of his subterranean village. That’s pretty ambitious stuff for a 16-bit cartridge and only the Japanese would have the stones, or the inclination, to try it!

Lazy woman!

While no other game has attempted to track the entire development of life on earth, it has been a theme of philosophy and other sciences for quite some time. G.W.F. Hegel was one of the first intellectuals to examine universal themes of the history of life; previously historians had focused on individual or short chains of events, were more nationally than globally oriented and focused more on hard facts than themes of human nature. So you might say that Hegel was the Terranigma of the 19^th century.

Why all this talk of old school German philosophers? Well, like many young boys at the time a lot of Terranigma’s grander themes went over my head in 1995. However looking back I can now appreciate the full meaning of that epic adventure and there’s a lot of Hegel in there.

Terranigma begins fairly slowly. After the initial scenes beneath the earth’s surface (an idyllic village surrounded by fire and ice) Ark is sent above ground to resurrect plants, animals and eventually humans. These early stages are fairly low on narrative; while Ark can communicate with plants and animals they don’t possess very sophisticated motivations.

This allows Terranigma’s fast-paced, almost arcade style combat to move to the fore. Terranigma arrived late in the SNES’ lifecycle and as a result it benefits from some truly excellent 2d artwork and high octane fighting. While it may be low on typical RPG excesses such as vast inventories and highly customizable characters, those features are included and sometimes can play an interesting role.

Terranigma brought zombie action to consoles a whole year before Resident Evil!

Things get a lot more interesting once human beings have been resurrected. Terranigma’s world map is a reasonably faithful rendition of the real world, though unlike most Western maps Japan lies at the centre with Europe to the West and America to the East (as a European I find this unspeakably offensive).

This means that Ark travels real-world locations, filled with charmingly racist real-world stereotypes, overseeing such important inventions as democracy, electricity, the airplane, wine, etc. Ark inspires these all-important inventions through the game’s neat item trading system in which for example a sheet of tin found in the USA can be given to a sailor in Spain thus leading to the invention of canned goods.

Chillin on the runway

As Ark leads the development of technology towns become bigger and cooler but many characters lament the loss of simpler times. This is an overriding theme of Terranigma; the final chapter involves the resurrection of ‘the genius’. The genius in question turns out to be a megalomaniac bent on creating eternal life for his cultish elite. Beruga’s (the genius’) eternal life is a horrific zombie-like state in which people can no longer feel.

Beruga also wipes NeoTokio off the map with chemical weapons; this is most likely a reference to the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo and the terrorist attacks they carried out in Japan using Sarin nerve gas while Terranigma was in production. It’s fitting then that Terranigma’s final act deals explicitly with contemporary Japanese concerns about where civilization was heading.

Hegel understood evolution as a continuous process of ever increasing consciousness. So for example human beings are more conscious than trees; whatever life is it strives after greater self awareness as its ultimate goal. Ark is horrified to find that as man reaches the highest possible state of awareness, he overcomes death and thus his life becomes meaningless.

As it says in the opening titles an endless cycle of creation and destruction are the stuff that life is made of; an end to this cycle is just what the game’s ultimate villain is after. Once he has disposed of Beruga, Ark returns to his village only to find that his friends and family were never anything more than deathly puppets and that the elder originally sent him on his journey so that ‘light’ and ‘dark’ could merge and history could end. Ark defeats the elder so that life can go on in spite of the pain that endless creation and destruction entail. All throughout the game life is depicted as an extremely painful process but one worth fighting for.

You're welcome!

It seems the game’s ultimate preoccupation is the meaninglessness of a life made easy or indeed perfect by human intelligence. Perhaps this is not surprising given that at the time the Super Nintendo was at the cutting edge of entertainment technology and kept kids hypnotized for years on end. However it is surprising that a children’s product would deal with its own ambiguous nature in such an explicit way.

Only in Japan is this kind of serious material considered appropriate for children; as a child I loved it and I’ve remained a bit of a Japanophile ever since. Even to this day I’m grateful that I got to play a videogame that had cannibalism, cults, terrorism, German philosophy, Keynesian economics and even the odd whore house thrown in to stimulate my young mind. And most importantly I was left with the idea that life should be a great journey of increasing self awareness and wisdom, thanks Quintet!