Nobody made games like Quintet: slow, pensive games that created a place for us to feel- to learn- to grow.

It's interesting how Quintet's storytelling somewhat reflects the company's story...

Based on your telling of the games it's ironic how the plot mirrors what happened to the devs. Giving hope and light in an era of gaming where there was both Harmony and discord in game design with tittle all over the quality spectrum. Then giving the ideas if better and more complex storytelling with a different philosophy to stay in the minds of children. And after all that they vanish when their work is done

I am a kid from the SNES days and I have no idea what Quintet made... *google* OH! Nearly all of my favourite SNES games. I have not been paying enough attention.

TODAY, IN GAMES YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE TRIED

Not going to lie, my first thought on seeing the title of "Eulogy for " was "Oh no, what company did EA just murder this time?"

To quote Robert Blaze from "Will save the Galaxy for food" by Yahtzee croshaw: "The goal of a hero is not to slay all the dragons, save the princesses or save the land. That may be part of it, but in the end, a hero's only job is to make himself unnessecery"

Games you might not have tried: Quintet edition

I played all the games once back to back. I Had to emulate Terrangma because it wasnt release in the US at the time. I have never, in my life, balled so hard at games ending as I did with Terrangma. I remember my mom came in, asking what was wrong. She thought something serious had happened. I spent an hour with her, telling her everything that happened. Thanks to Quintet, my mom and I have had a wonderful time with games. See, she grew curious about what I was playing, and so for the next week Her and I played them again, together, with me teaching her how. The second play threw, she was crying at the story. But I was crying out of happiness. Because she finally understood the amazing power behind gives to deliver emotion, and story. Thank you Quintet!

I love Terranigma, it has so many amazing moments and this feeling of melancholy isn't just present in the ending... it's almost at every step on the way. Like when you bring back humans and loose the ability to talk to animals (iirc) or when you are trapped in that ice cave with a blizzard outside and the animal staying with you starts eating its partner who just died because it's the only way she will survive. Or when you enter the lab of one of the bad guys and see sick humans who are kept alive but are suffering. My memories are hazy on it, it has been such a long time. I hope I can find the time to replay it soon.

You should make a "10 tragic games you might not have played" video! I love tragedies, and I really have a soft spot for Japanese Melancholy (like that found in most Hayao Miyazaki filmsk).

My favorite SNES-era developer gets a whole EC episode! Yay!

Some of you hardcore Quintet fans may have noticed that their most well known title, Illusion of Gaia, is entirely left off this list. This is intentional. Illusion of Gaia was created in conjunction with Enix and it's great but I've always felt that you can feel the hand of Enix reining it in and moderating the "Quintetness" a bit, so when I look at their games even though narratively you can put Illusion of Gaia in with the rest, the ethos is a little different so it doesn't feel quite as much like it's part of the (possibly subconscious) grand project of Quintet. -JP

"...games that saw all the flaw in us and loved us anyway." I appreciate the thematic moods and resonance for any story, but I think this kind of story without a doubt is my personal favorite flavor. I tend to really like it when things hang just _barely_ on the cynical side of the sliding scale of Optimism vs. Cynicism--cynical enough to never let us forget that the world and its inhabitants have awful flaws, but not quite cynical enough to make us think that's all there is to it. Bittersweet endings are a favorite, at least when executed well. The feeling that the characters had to make a decision between two things _really_ important to them and be saddened by the lost opportunity but be confident that their decision is ultimately the better one... ugh, there's so much depth there that it hurts to think about. It hurts _so good._ Sometimes the toughest choices aren't the lesser of two strongly unwanted evils, but rather the greater of two strongly-desired goods--knowing that choosing one completely excludes the other. Obviously, it works better when the "goods" have their downsides if _not_ picked other than just "you don't get the other good thing"... like, in ActRaiser: do you want to continue to be worshipped like you've been going for this whole time? Or do you want the people to be safe? You _want_ both, but you can't _have_ both... yet both sacrifice the other, and the story essentially exists to point out that kind of truth. Of course, in ActRaiser, you don't necessarily make the choice--it's already made once you win, whether you knew it or not. But that's where the _reflection_ part of bittersweetness comes in: even if you _did_ know your decisions had some kind of negative effect, would you have done anything differently? Is this the outcome you wanted? Is it really for the best? In most story cases, it probably _is,_ but just pointing out the trade-off for us to reflect on does a lot.

I have only played Terranigma from that list. And it was a bittersweet game. I still remember it fondly. My biggest gut punch was not the end though. [Spoiler] It was when I lost the ability to speak to the animals. There they were. My friends and I couldn't talk to them anymore :(

Terranigma is one of my favourite games of all time.. there are no words for how much I love this game.

ActRaiser 2 looks fucking godly. That dive through clouds looks amazing.

Terraniiiiiigmmaaaa *cries quietly* Definitely one of a kind, I agree that there really hasn't been any modern games like it. I have to stress that there are plenty of modern tragedies, but melancholy as the driving emotion, wistfulness, nostalgia and sadness all mixed together, is a lot rarer.

Terranigma is the best SNES game. I played it so many times already and it's so filled with atmosphere, adventure, amazing parallels to the real world. I love it. Played all sorts of awesome SNES games but this one's my absolute fav one. X3

Bless you for this retrospective. I'm so glad I got to play these when they came out. (also Filmore stage 1 is still one of the most badass pieces of videogame music ever)

Everytime I watch Extra Credits History, for some reason I can't help but think of Act Raiser

TERRAGNIMA, the only game who really made me cry tears when i finished playing it. I REALLY ENJOY IT

Thank you! Terranigma was one of my favorite games of all time! That was such a wonderful game, and ended in a way that literally left me in tears when I first played it. I did wonder what happened to them... Tho I would note that a few other developers did try similar storytelling practices, but I think overalls sales hurt them. And really, only Quintet did get it right. That said... Quintet? but only 4 games (unless you count SoM, of course)? Also, as noted elsewhere, it is interesting how their own company's arc reflects the sort of storytelling they were doing as well. When the story needed to end, it ended. No fanfare, no hurrah, just silence.

Wow. I remember playing Act Razer years ago on a snes emulator. A shame I wasn't old enough to appreciate the melancholy. Illusion of Gaia was great as well. Now there I did feel the melancholy, the way you fought to stay ahead and what this meant for the defeated it was a sad thing to win in that game...

is NieR : Automata a modern example of Quintet game? I feel so damn melancholic after playing it, Tragedies every fucking way

I looked the company up after watching the video, and it's weird. Apparently, it still exists but doesn't put out games of its own anymore. It just helps with games made by other companies now. It isn't dead but not really alive. It's an undead company.

The first time I played Terranigma I was blown away within the first 5 minutes of play, right then I fell in love with it and started the game again. When I saw the title of the video I thought, Quintet sounded familiar, but could not place it, then you started describing their games and half way through Soul Blazer I started thinking about Terranigma, one of my favorite games ever, I must have played it at least 20 times (and still own a copy), never paid attention to the devs, but the game is brutally good, it's a masterpiece like only a few works of art are. Quintet changed how I viewed games when I was younger and I cannot recommend these games enough, specially Terranigma, a rich world filled with stories where you get to live long enough to ponder every decision and remember every step of your journey. Thanks for the video, I'm off to play Terranigma, cheers.

You finally did talk about the Quintet games! *-* I remember when I was a child I saw this comic for Terranigma in the German Club Nintendo Magazine (which was laying around for free at shops at the time). Even though I only played this game years later this advertising comic stuck in my head and let me wanna play this game. And when I finally did play it all the things I imagined over the years as how the game would be even surpassed my imagination. So I'm really glad you took the time to remember their games, especially Terranigma.

*When you realize actraizer made the music of EH*

Nier Automata and Doki Doki Literature Club are the most Quintet-like games I've played this year. Without spoiling too much, Nier Automata deals with the human emotions, and how it affects virtually thoughtless drones; basically how perfect beings deal with imperfections. Doki Doki LC is a lot like TerraNigma, where it is a constant struggle against an opposing force, and the *true* protagonist being both the force that destroys and rebuilds the world. These 2 are my favorite games of this year, it is a shame games like these aren't made more often.

To The Moon recaptures some of that... sense of loss, sorrow (REAL sorrow), hope, desperation, joy, and finality

As soon as I saw the name "Quintet", I ran like mad to watch this video. "Terranigma" is one of my absolute favorite games of all time. You know how everyone who loves games usually has that one title that made them see for the first time that games could be much more than just entertainment? Well, "Terranigma" is that game for me. I played it when I was around 12 and my life as a gamer changed forever. Thank you so much for vindicating this series, guys!

SuperGiants Games make some seriously effectively melencholy games.

Did you ever get a response from the "whoever" who owns the rights to the Quintet property?

You just made me remember that Terranigma was one of the few games I cried at the end of. That bird soaring was just beautiful. My favorite SNES game.

Thanks for letting me sit here, watering my eyes while you say "Terranigma" and show the Logo of it ... One of my most "felt" games to day. I have to play the other three - it seems I never saw them. Thanks for that! Keep up the fantastic work.

E.V.O. feels very much like a Quintet game.

You also forgot Illusion of Gaia. Not that I've played it, I just checked Wikipedia. Funny that a company called Quintet would end up developing 5 major titles (not counting codeveloped games.) That almost seems like it was on purpose.

I instantly fell in love with Actraiser. It was unique, looked great, played great, and that soundtrack....good Lord that soundtrack. To this day it's still one of my favorite games on the console.

Thank you for putting a spotlight on Quintet. I fucking _love_ Soul Blazer! That game was my jam. It was the only game where I could fight monsters in awesome settings, with amazing music, and have a reflective experience. The Illusion of Gaia was also fantastic. Going around the world, experiencing different cultures, and seeing amazing stuff like that was awesome when I was a kid.

New extra credits at 2 am? Guess im not sleeping yet

I haven't even played the games yet, but the ideas they share struck a personal chord with me: I really need to find them now.

Nice to hear about these earlier portrayals of melancholy and loneliness in games! I feel like the experience I had in Majora's Mask, where I traveled around, getting to know people and helping them with their problems, only to have them forget me completely the next time I played the Song of Time, was a beautiful and sort of somber experience I had never seen in games, and have only seen rarely since.

The greatest poetry of all in this, is that their studio mirrored their works. They did their job to completion, and left.

I think Dark Souls has rekindled some of this melancholy in our modern age of gaming.

The Extra History theme song came from ActRaiser! kzfaq.info/get/bejne/itOdY7Vm0rCuqnU.html

Great stuff dude, "melancholy" is the perfect was to describe the atmosphere of stuff like Terranigma. The ending of Lufia 2 held a similar feeling too. That games amazing.

Finally someone talks about this games. It's se rare to see some youtuber, big or small, even mention them. I really hope this helps this games reach more people

Illusion of Gaia man. That's a part of the series.

+Extra Credits I've been meaning to ask this for quite a while, but what happened to design club? It was a short project that haven't shown it's full potential imo, and I loved every episode in that series. I seriously hope you will pick it back up, because as much as I love you guys' normal extra credits (that first talk about an idea then sprinkle examples to elaborate), I think it was more interesting to see you guys dive in on a specific mechanic in a specific game and break it apart, there's so much to learn from that method that was just left unexplored.

I'm so glad you're covering Quintet, Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma are some of my favorite games from my childhood. Death and grief are common themes in these games, something that just about all media targeted toward my age bracket at the time refused to even acknowledge. I feel like I ought to try Lisa, I hear that also sorta deals with similar ideas.

It's rare that an Extra Credits can bring me to tears. This was one such occurrence. I look forward to the next.

Wasn't Illusion of Gaia also Quintet? And at least nominally part of the ActRaiser / Soul Blazer series, for that matter? I remember it being very different thematically from the other games though, and it definitely didn't really have that "restoring the world piece by piece" aspect, to my memory, so it makes sense if that was a purposeful exclusion.

Drakengard and Nier. Despite being bat-shit crazy at times (ex, Combat androids wearing Gothic Lolita sheer dresses, and the fact that the NieR series was kicked off by a giant woman and a dragon falling from the sky), these games really show both kinds of wonder: The kind where you sit there slack jawed at something so out there it piratically lives in it's own universe, and the kind discussed in the video i'm commenting on. These games are not Quintet worthy but they are profound in their meaning.

Glad to hear you talking about Quintent, who made by far one of my favorite games of all time, Terranigma I personally consider it right up there with Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger in terms of great SNES RPGs

I'm glad you made this video. These games - especially Act Raiser and Soul Blazer - have resonated with me for so many years. The music did a wonderful job of helping to push their emotional impact as well. Sadly, I missed out on the latter two games, but maybe someday I'll have the time to revisit the series as a whole. :)

Mainline Shin Megami Tensei games have a good sense of melancholy,

Was this whole episode just one giant rerelease beg? I'm pretty sure I'm okay with this.

Wow.... you just have to admire quintet’s devotion to sincere emotional exploration. I would absolutely adore a video with tips on how to get into composing for video games - to help make more projects like this, humanist and sincere. I come from a classical music background, and am at something of a loss at how to bridge my past with a future I hope to find in gaming

Soul Blazer is an unsung classic. It's one of the few games I've played where it felt like you're actually saving the ENTIRE world. And it really felt like you were restoring something grand to glory, one painful, piecemeal bit at a time no matter if you saved a king or a flower.

These are one of those great games that i can never play without a remaster. The price of progress is that it's sometimes impossible to go back. Also i think the ending to ActRaiser doesn't make sense. Just because the great evil got his head chopped off doesn't mean people will stop praying. The fact that god walks the earth also cements him as fact so he effectively has infinite followers. But the ending does work symbolically and is attached to a worth while game so i forgive this sin.

Certainly missing from the list: Illusion of Gaia, which could be seen as the spiritual predecessor of Terranigma.

Guys, how do you keep getting better and better? Every video takes me to new places and new feels. Truly awesome. Thanks for so many years of great work!

I played 3 out of the 4 games, and I had no idea. I loved them as a kid. This video shines a light on something I didn't realize / know at the time.

What about Illusion of Gaia?

I think the Fallout series does a good job of creating this feeling.

Probably one of my favorite developers of all times and I loved their games before I even knew who they were or that they were developed by the same studio. ActRaiser and Soul Blazer are so powerful and I can replay them again and again. But the crown of their achievements is easily Terranigma, a game I played randomly and got completely wrapped up in. So much so that I openly cried when I finished it, utterly devastated by what I was feeling. "Joy in sorrow" is probably the best way I've ever heard it put. It's so hard for me to accept that they're truly gone and I keep waiting for someone to take their place. Dark Cloud comes close mechanically but doesn't reach the same height of story and narrative. Every day I wish I could replay Terranigma for the first time again.

Terranigma is still one of my favorite games to this day, and I'm still haunted (in the good way) by how beautiful Illusion of Gaia was... I'm really glad you guys also appreciate these games that not enough people ever played T_T I didn't recall the scene you mentioned at the end of Terranigma though... my recollection of the end of the game was that they don't actually say what happens to you, but the end credits feature a bird flying over the restored earth, and I always felt they were kind of implying that he had died and his soul was free. The game had lots of little melancholy moments... I actually was inspired to draw my first fanart for this game because it struck me as so beautiful and sad that throughout the first age of the game, where you are restoring the plants and animals to the Earth, you can speak to them and understand them... and then when you awaken in the next age, humanity has been restored to the Earth, and the plants and animals are clearly still your friends and they still help you, but when you try to speak to them, they only reply with "......". It made me super sad at the time to think about Ark's severed relationship with nature. I had never played a SNES game before where I thought so much about what the character had lost personally by completing his goals.

I've never played a game quite like Terranigma, since. It really deserves far more recognition for how great an experience it really was.

To this day Actraiser 1 remains one of my favorites. I played that so many times. Actraiser 2 is one of those Nintendo hard games and I could never finish it, but I think I only rented the game. Did not know about the others. As an aside I've always enjoyed the brief snipped of Actraiser music on your videos.

Would love to see more videos like this one. Delving in the underlying themes and philosophy worked by the developer on a series of games and such. Great work.

Quintet also made the intro music for Extra History. That's another reason to love them

Quintet deserved this video, Thank you for bringing light to these amazing games ❤

00:24 Joy and Sadness. Two of the best emotions to understand.

Terranigma is the first game that when I finished it, I have to sit in awe to contemplate the whole journey. The way they expand the story to the whole earth and then contract it to a point that reference the start really opens my eye on narrative in gaming. All stages have different style but coherent to the theme, and you do get a feeling of how your character contributes to these changes. And the music also fits into the whole variety of scene so well that I have to search for the OST midi online. I'm glad they made a translated version of this game so we can all experience it.

You started, and I was thinking that I should really look into these games later. Then you started naming games, and I realized that I played them in my youth. :P Thank you for the memories.

I'm really glad you made this. It'll help share the game to more people.

I come back to this now and realize that Quintet's spirit absolutely lives on in games like Rain World, Hyper Light Drifter, Axiom Verge, and many more. We will never know the impact of our arts.

Terranigma was indeed fantastic, filled with such mood and ambiance!

I went fullscreen for this and it was delightful. Wonderful video.

Mother 3 is by far the most melancholy game I've played. I don't think it's possible for a game to be as loaded with both joy and sadness in such a perfect mixture. And it's all about the nature of humanity and how we can't seem to figure out how to be stable and happy.

Thank you so much for this. I did know that I actually knew Quintet... I was young and played those games without ever noticing who were the makers. Now, thanks to this I can revisit my experience of those games with my adult perception of things. That's good.

Dammit. How could I miss this episode? The Quintet games were ... are sooo good - especially Terranigma! Makes me wanna cry ...

I have never heard of this studio before today, and only heard of two of the games somewhere in passing. But I now have a desperate need to play every single one of these games, and probably any others they released.

I think I may remember these games or, at least, the developer. Maybe my older brothers might remember them more

I'm really glad you made an episode about Quinted, which games were one of my absolute favorites when I was a child. The stories they told, the morales they teached and of course the melancholy touched me like no other game ever did ever again, besides Life is Strange maybe, but thats another case. Altough, I am kinda surprised that you completely skipped Illusion of Gaia, which is considered by not only a few people as part of the "Soul Blazer Trilogy". And to consider these games as a trilogy makes sense, since they are telling the same story - the re-creation of world - from a different perspective. (Spoilers ahead) In "Soul Blazer" you are the chosen champion of the light side, trying to recover the world from the results of a deal with the devil one greedy king made. In Illusion of Gaia you are exploring and eventually re-shaping the world as we know it as the champion of mankind (or maybe Gaia itself), eventually uniting both light and dark in the final battle to save the world. And finally in Terranigma you are the chosen champion of the dark, which uses you to recover the world so it can shape it afters its own, fiendish will, after it disposed you.

May i say just how great you guys are, seriously y'all make amazing video game videos,have a really pleasant art style, and just fantastic history videos, keep up the awesome stuff guys

Very Poetic. This faded away piece by piece, much like that statue in Act Raiser 2.

Terranigma also dealt with other important suspects such as the consequences of modernization. I loved how it tackled with so many different subjects and left it open whether what you did was a good thing or not

The first act raiser is still one of my favorite snes games. This is literally the first time I see anybody talk about it so, thanks! I've tried soul blazer and act raiser II but i just couldn't get into them. Terranigma however is still on my list hopefully I'll find much more in it now that i have a new perspective on it.

I usually don't mind spoilers, but you talk it up in a way that makes me want to experience it for the first time by myself, so I am going to watch this later

I recently replayed Eternal Sonata for the first time in a decade and I got the same melancholic feels that you described. Great game.

Aye! I too love the Quintet games. Even their more comic ventures, like Robotrek have that melancholy undertone. And I'd just about jump through fire just to see their legacy preserved. Though... You missed out on speaking about Illusion of Gaia/Time, Robotrek, Granstream Saga and Planet Laika in this video. A follow-up would be awesome. Also, though not made by Quintet perse, Brainlord has a similar atmosphere. Haha, the SNES era alone has enough material to spend a lifetime researching tbh.

ActRaiser is a series I've been meaning to play for a long while now. Really should do that soon.

Terranigma's ending is one of the few video game endings that openly made me cry. Kudos, Quintet.

Terranigma is the game of my childhood! I played it for such a long time and multiple times. The OSTs of Terranigma are my favorites of all times - bar none. The melancholy of that game is just too much - I'd buy a remake/sequel of Terranigma in a heartbeat if it ever came out! I'm glad that other people feel the same about such a game 🙂

The end of Bastion made me feel rather melancholic, which is why it's one of my favorite games. It never occurred to me that other games could deliver the same feeling for some reason.

I played Actraiser, illusion of Gaia, and robotrek in my youth and really loved those games, and I played the other games you listed later. Really do wish they could come back together and make a new game.

I didn't grow up with an NES or SNES but from a recommendation I recently played Terranigma, and wow, I played it with a walkthrough for some parts and codes to get past some difficult parts but it has an amazing story to tell.

The Talos Principle is IMO one of those games. Maybe not as strong (never played Quintet), but as you start to unravel the mystery behind this voicemail records, and then finally realize your purpose, you (at least I) really get that delicate melancholy feeling.