Illusion of Gaia: What is Life, What is Evolution, and Why Does Being Swallowed by a Leviathan Turn You Into a Leviathan?

If there was a Venn diagram of my interests, I'm guessing Illusion of Gaia would pop in somewhere near the middle. As an avid Indiana Jones fan, I'm all about globe-spanning archaeological action adventures. If they're all connected to some massive revelation that could cause the rescue/doom of the Earth, all the better (But don't just say, "Aliens!" as the cause, please). On the other end, there's the spiritual side with the anime Haibane-Renmei, where angel-like people wander a town in the afterlife with no memory of how they got there and less idea of how to make their next step. Somewhere in-between is Illusion of Gaia, a Super Nintendo action RPG from 1993 that is weirdly meditative on the nature of evolution and existence, even if the only adequate translation knocks the high-mindedness down a few notches.

Published by Nintendo in the States, the game was a creation of the famous Enix development team Quintet. Even though many of them came from the Falcom company having created the more workmanlike Ys games, they were no strangers to making action RPGs with a higher mindset. They'd already done Actraiser where you're God slowly trying to heal a world taken over by Satan (And don't let Nintendo of America's 90's censorship tell you otherwise). Around wonderfully scenic action sequences, it mildly dipped its toes into exploring how people interacted with a deity they knew was exceptionally real and could do fantastic or terrible things to them. IoG was even a follow-up to Soulblazer in an unofficial trilogy.

While Soulblazer was a bit mechanical in its approach, it still had an addictive quality to rebuilding the world piece by piece and moments of thoughtfulness. However, Illusion of Gaia was something special, even against its significantly more ambitious follow-up Terranigma. Terranigma did occasionally lose itself, like when you traverse through a haunted castle to rescue Christopher Columbus with the help of a black kid on a skateboard while being pursued by a, "ME CHINESE. ME MAKE JOKE," of a caricature villain. All of this is true. I would say they weren't particularly sensitive to other races and cultures, but Quintet studios and a Japanese city are actually in Terranigma and they stereotype themselves, so....

Anyway, for answers as to why Illusion of Gaia felt like a richer experience, it didn't take a whole lot of research. Below the title screen is a list of names normally I wouldn't pay attention to. Along with composer Yasuhiro Kawasaki (Who we'll get to eventually), there's Moto Hagio, manga pioneer and creator of such works as They Were Eleven, doing the character designs. While not unheard for manga artists to work on games (Enix in fact had another successful series that did the same thing. Dragon Warrior Quest or something...), it was still unusual. The other name is novelist Mariko Ohara, the first female, Japanese sci-fi author to get published in the United States. For kicks, I read her one novel that got traction on this side of the Pacific. It's about a shape-shifting military weapon that escapes the lab it was held in, finds its way into the abusive household of a woman author who made an exact AI copy of her daughter she killed through starvation and neglect, and the weapon is chased by a military where they have a Being referred to in capital letters reserved for God that sends soldiers through time including Its mother who HASN'T GIVEN BIRTH TO IT YET. The book sticks out is what I'm saying.

Added to the world building done by Quintet's Yuko Miyazaki, the more literary origins provide an extra layer to the experience. While there is certainly a good bit bit of characterization and plot that feels missing if it were to be in a, say, book (Hi, Seth), there is a level to the game that truly gives serious thought about what it is about. There are themes and motifs that are implemented way more than I'd seen in a game up to that point except maybe Phantasy Star II (Another RPG with a scenario by a woman), but with less dry, grindy spots and fewer over-designed mazes (Mu is way too big, but other than that...). Illusion of Gaia was also a title that dared put more than a dash of ennui and melancholy into the whole experience instead of simply applied dramatics, which is out of the ordinary for a mid-era Super Nintendo game, especially one so built on action.

But before all that, we must get our bearings for the audience unfamiliar with the work. Illusion of Gaia is an action RPG in the style of Zelda. However, instead of a fictional fantasy world, this is a fictional version of the real world circa 1600 or so. Humanity has gotten to the point where exploration is widespread and everyone is trying to piece together the mysteries of the many lost civilizations. Instead of finding answers, most explorers discover torment and death with ruins full of monsters and traps.

In this world where real-life and mythical wonders are geographically shuffled about at random, we come to our main character Will, the apparent sole survivor of a lost expedition to find the Tower of Babel, of which the crew included his mother and father. With no memory of what happened, he is mysteriously returned to his home village South Cape with telekenesis and psychic abilities, while at the same time, access to a portal of closed space where he speaks to the giant face of Gaia, the spirit of the earth. Despite all of this, Will lives a somewhat normal life with his grandparents and hangs out with a boys club which includes the mature Lance, spoiled and portly Erik, and shy, nerdy Seth. Gaia warns Will of an incoming calamity that threatens all life on the planet at the same time the king of the land sends a representative to demand Will's family surrender a family heirloom. With no idea where it could be, Will is imprisoned on suspicion of intentionally keeping it from the king, but is helped out first by the princess Kara who is running away from home to rebel against her horrible parents, and second by Lilly, who comes from an invisible village of flower sprites of which Will is a descendant. I realize this all seems like I just filled out a mad-lib, but I promise you most of it comes together in a reasonable manner.

What all this setup amounts to is Will and his friends along with Kara and Lilly must travel the ruins of the world to find six mystic statues (Dolls in the Japanese version. Not "epic" enough for us, I imagine....). From The Great Wall to the Pyramids, there is a secret connection between all of them that also involves a comet that has passed by every 800 years for the past 3,200 years, destroying every existing civilization when it does. To help combat the many challenges the ruins present, Will can transform into Freedan, an adult knight who yields more powerful attacks and a different skillset, or the inhuman bio-weapon Shadow. Along the way, Will and his companions grow up and learn much about themselves and the world around them. According to Ohara, Stand By Me was a popular movie in Japan at the time, and it and the Stephen King short story it's based on were influences for the game's more coming-of-age sections.

Now would probably be a good time to talk about my general feelings before getting into the mix of weird and academic. Normally, you would get even-handed critic voice from me, but I love this game. It's so good in ways that are both easily appreciated and under appreciated. The graphics are big and bright, and while the animation is limited to 3 or 4 frames most times to prevent the infamous SNES slowdown, they are detailed enough to get the gist of every character from looking at them. The controls are responsive and let you do cool things like jumping off of roofs, beating the crap out of monsters with a flute, and sliding into vampires for significant damage like you're an out-of-control baseball player. There's not much variety in the combat, but it does its job. Yasuhiro Kawasaki's music starts with an amazing theme that is worthy of "Raiders March" comparisons, and while it doesn't reach the consistent highs of your Secret of Manas or Chrono Triggers, it is extremely solid soundtrack and doesn't lack for standout tracks. It is astonishing something this well put together is Kawasaki's only major work and he just sort of vanishes off the face of the Earth; Well, in Western media, anyway. Any person not given a laser focus or god status on this side of the Pacific can get lost in the indifference, especially with the drive needed to translate pieces about them in the print-driven 90s.  There is a Sound Cloud with his name and a version of the Great Wall theme, but I can't verify it's him. Cool tunes, though.

And the adventuring! Flying gardens, an undersea palace, and the Tower of Babel! Going to all the ruins of the world and discovering their secrets is invigorating, even if it's a sorta' fakey fantasy version of them where there's a mountain of mushrooms somewhere in-between. The mode 7 map traveling gives the right amount of living an Indiana Jones film joy. Each ruin has a different experience to keep the game fresh, and even if Mu's gets tedious with an unfair boss challenge to top it off, it still has rad moments like the mysterious figures in the shrines that lower the water. It's so exciting to actually go places that just aren't color-swapped tilesets of the previous area with genuine mystery, aura, and wonder.

The overall story could've been told better and the translation is simplistic with many noted mistakes. Enix made and/or published games over here that had a rash of awkwardly-localized scripts (They released a game re-titled Paladin's Quest that was about two main characters who were magic users and neither could be described as lawfully good knights), and since there was a beta you can find on the internet that showed it existed in English before Nintendo took over publishing, it's safe to assume Nintendo just took their wonky translation and only changed names and other choice bits. However, there is this method to the entire project that lets the player draw out their own conclusions and feelings I've rarely experienced in any form of media. Answers to many of the questions are there, and some are better buried than others. What I discovered in my most recent play is the heavy hints that the Incan spirits you release from a ship trapped in a cave is that these were possibly a failed attempt to stop the comet and Will and Kara may be reincarnations of the heroes. There's enough material to give solid footing, but there's also enough left to interpretation to have fun with it, and I love work like that. The only problems arise when they simply drop plot threads unceremoniously, especially when they're going somewhere.

The characters aren't particularly deep. They have a certain universal quality and rarely step beyond it. Will is made to appeal to the average teenage boy, Lance is the older kid who has to keep everyone in line, Kara is the spoiled princess who has to learn to be more mature, and so on. There isn't much done to differentiate them from what you'd normally experience. Ohara did say she was proud with what she could do with Lilly and Kara in the midst of the mostly male-oriented world of gaming to where two women covering the story and world building had to make everything as appealing to boys as they could. There is the slight inversion of expectations where tomboy Lilly is the character who has to stop journeying to be with the person she loves, and princess Kara in mostly pink gets to be the Knight of Light who combines with Will's Knight of Shadow to become the Phoenix that fights the final boss. Still, most of what the characters do is what is generally expected. And then there's the curious case of Seth.

I suppose now is when we get to the heavy duty analysis, and it will be spoiler territory from here on out. At the beginning, you have the option of visiting the houses of each of the boys. The one that leaves the biggest impact is Seth's, where you open the door just before a chair is thrown out of it. Seth's parents are in the middle of a hated fight, and these happen often according to Will's narration. Seth is the nerd of the party who isn't given much to do besides be the smart one. He's mainly shoved in the back for what little time he has. While you would think Seth has some sort of arc where he faces the damage that his potentially abusive have done to him, I cannot begin to tell you about how that's not what they did....

After releasing an Incan ship from its centuries-old prison as a result of finishing the first major dungeon, the ship is almost immediately attacked by a sea beast known as the Leviathan (Improperly translated as Riverson in the American release). Seth is thrown off the ship with the rest of the kids, but unlike the rest of them, he is eaten by Leviathan, which turns him into a Leviathan. You meet him later traveling through an underwater tunnel when he contacts you by banging on the walls using Morse code. Then after explaining his situation, he vanishes from the game except for a short appearance near the end where he's with the characters who died and became immortal spirits; Except it's never established that Seth dies. It is by far the most baffling part of the game.

Reading Ohara's novel Hybrid Child provides a few answers. Even though it's a pathetically small sample size, there are heavy themes in both works about existing as a human and inhuman simultaneously. In escaping the military, the protagonist military weapon attains sentience and has to assume various forms in violent and freakish fashion to be free (It's like Short Circuit if Johnny 5 ate and became Ally Sheedy in the first ten minutes of the movie), and then runs around experiencing vignettes of humanity in the way distant future. In the novel, survival is paramount, and there are no qualms about turning into a winged fairy that can fly into space. However, the only ones who are seriously against its existence are the rigid hierarchy of the military as well as some characters who are ashamed of their own limitations (One robot attempts suicide because it wants to see heaven.). A thread between the book and the game is sometimes existence is an exceptionally painful experience that will transform you into something you don't recognize, and sometimes, it just stops for no rhyme or reason.One of the first characters to have a point-of-view is the first to die.

In one of the few interviews to be translated into English Ohara did about Illusion of Gaia, she says the themes were of boys discovery of self, conflicts with their parents, and becoming adults. Some of this is more explored than others, with Will and Kara's journey to adulthood feeling like it has an arc, and Kara standing up against her parents' tyranny registering as thin to the point of nearly being forgotten until a sudden showdown with a proxy assassin. Granted, you get to see someone burned alive in a SNES game published by the normally reserved Nintendo of America, but it doesn't properly build up to feel like it's earned that payoff. John Friscia argues the Jackal is far more of a vital piece to the puzzle than I do, so you can head on over to his nice article to hear that side of it.

However, there is a more fascinating theme about the nature of evolution and survival. In the limited time Seth shows up as Leviathan, the party debates about whether it's a terrible outcome, or whether they merely think so because it's not the norm in the eyes of humans. I do wonder how much material had to be dropped for the sake of the story to be streamlined into game form because this seemed to be going somewhere. With Ohara's other work considered, it also might just be a note that sometimes what you have to do to survive is horrifying and alien to what you used to be, and the nature of evolution is every step forward means leaving something behind. Don't think Darwin had that in his notes.

From the start, Illusion of Gaia has a series of encounters that wrestle with the different types of living brought about by either the comet that's altered the evolution of humanity, or simply the melancholy of everyday living. The most standard is Freejia, a city that has a beautiful front with flowers and posh inns supported by a literal backstreet of slave trading. Pretty basic indictment of the machinations that led to our modern world and reflected on Will in laborers that are exactly the same age as him and have lived a far worse life. As you push farther, you cross paths with the family of an explorer you found dead in an Incan trap still hopeful that he's coming home where you're given no option to tell them what happened, leaving them permanently oblivious to his fate. Eventually, you get to experience the other end of this tragedy, where you see the explorers begin their journey with so much confidence only to discover their skeletons when they run afoul of cannibals and the mysterious Angkor Wat. For as many stories as we get of the people who made their incredible journeys and came back, IoG emphasizes the many more who were swallowed by the unknown.

Illusion of Gaia's more tantalizing details are how it uses science fiction to ask more questions of our existence and evolution. There is an undercurrent of how massive suffering can cause abrupt and brazen evolution in people, not all for the better. The survivors of Mu after the comet destroyed it had to spend what must've been decades building an undersea tunnel to land. When they were done with their journey, they were changed to a different species of humans the game calls Angels. They look and occasionally act human, but their human emotions have eroded away, and they cannot be in sunlight long before "their spirit leaves them." They spend their time dancing and trying to remember what it was to feel human. There is an artist who can give them an emotional essence in their painting, but their subject turns into the painting and is lost. Even with the iffy translation, one gets the feeling they were aware of the side effects of this artist's works and still allowed him to continue, and it's not until Will has to rescue Kara from becoming a painting that it stops.

If I may run the risk of reading way too much into this, the suggestion here is that the evolution through mass suffering causes a deep rift in our humanity.  Long wars, plagues, and famine can create people who we don't recognize as people and can't exist the same way again. Some arguments say the strife causes great art, such as Picasso's "Guernica," depicting the aftermath of Nazi bombing practice on a Basque village during the Spanish Civil War. But the art replaces the people who would've been alive had it never occurred. As a person living through horrific and often dehumanizing times right now and my empathic side being constantly overloaded, am I going to be like the Angels who can only listen to the music that used to bring me joy and mimic what it was like when I was happy?

 While the Angel Village tells the story of the survivors of these catastrophes, the Moon Tribe appears to represent the people who cause the suffering. While some experimented with the comet as a way to make life better, the comet's nature is a massive weapon of destruction created in an ancient war between advanced civilizations. The people who are exposed to the light who aren't obliterated become spirits who live forever. They lose almost all general experience of life and simply exist. They are not-so-secretly one of the villains (Especially if you've played Soulblazer where their sprites are literally demons that attack you), and they have an ultimate goal of complete obliteration with a certain disdain for humans. Will eventually meets his cousin Neil, an inventor who is the heir to an incredibly wealthy shipping company Rolek. When Will makes it to Euro, Rolek's headquarters, he uncovers a slavery ring that eventually leads to Neil's parents, who were murdered and replaced by members of the Moon Tribe.

Since I'm going out on all the limbs here, the Moon Tribe are the people who believe destruction and suffering are key to evolution. War causes us to invent so many items that are useful, after all. Slavery and subjugation are vital to building a world with comfort, such types would say. Even though they do create beings like the camel with the comet's light, the massive loss of life and culture from the destruction of these civilizations loom large over the world. That these beings seek ultimate annihilation would suggest this isn't the proper path. In fact, this path literally perverts the evolution of the world in Illusion of Gaia, causing a population that is far less advanced. Destroying the comet and stopping this cycle causes the world return to its "normal" evolution, which is modern times.

So what is the path? Reincarnation is a big theme in this trilogy, which suggests it's not easy and fraught with failure. What keeps you moving in the game is general human empathy and self-sacrifice to ease suffering. Setting the Inca free, Kara's pig Hamlet choosing to die and be food for the cannibal villagers who only did what they did out of necessity (Yeah, it's a WEIRD scene), and Lance going to the Great Wall of China to find a cure for his father's illness are all things that propel the plot forward. What ultimately solves everything is, of course, love (Cue 1930's silent film crescendo). Will's mother and father turn into spirits similar to the Moon Tribe, but maintain their humanity due to their love of their son. Will and Kara are descendants of Dark and Light knights respectively who used to war against each other combined into one force for the survival of humanity. That is the force that ultimately wins.

I'll stop because this is mainly my experience with the game, and I'd like you to have yours and share your own one day. What I hope is this little bit of my interpretation shows the wonder of Illusion of Gaia, even 25 years after I first played it. I keep discovering more and more each time I return, even as it's something I probably put more of myself and my thoughts into than the people who made it. Those are the best works though, right?