Alundra: The PlayStation "mature Zelda" that failed to deliver a sequel

In the mid-1990s, the market was trying to reinvent itself after the 16-bit era, and the industry was searching for new languages ​​for genres that had reached technical maturity on consoles before the PlayStation.

Action RPGs, in particular, were at a kind of crossroads: between preserving the legacy of games like The Legend of Zelda and experimenting with new forms of expression—it was in this space that Alundra was born.

Released in January 1998, the title seemed like an attempt by Matrix Software, founded a few years earlier by developers from studios like Telenet Japan and Masaya, to carry the trappings and elements that made it seem like a Sony attempt at a Zelda-like: the influence of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is almost obvious in an action RPG with an isometric perspective, interconnected maps, and dungeons structured around specific tools and progression based on exploration and unlocking new shortcuts.

Alundra, however, rearranges these elements to support a story marked by a surprisingly dark tone. From its very first moments, the game establishes a deliberately unsettling pace, sustained by an atmosphere of loss that permeates the entire game experience: the story of a young man capable of entering people's dreams, who arrives, after his ship is wrecked in a storm, in a village plagued by deadly nightmares.

Instead of a traditional epic journey, the player is confronted with themes such as guilt, trauma, faith, and death, and the title builds its plot through the internal conflicts, personal traumas, and irreversible losses of the inhabitants of Inoa, where each inhabitant carries invisible marks that manifest in dreams—and if they are not saved in time, eventually the nightmares will consume their lives.

Our hero's first mission to save someone set the notorious melancholic tone of the entire game: Alundra fails to save someone. His efforts, due to his inexperience with his powers, were in vain. The game is melancholic, unsettling, and for a long time avoids relying on heroism while debating themes such as the power of collective belief and the human psyche, almost like a distant cousin of Zelda that flirted with another franchise that had just been born at the same time, Persona.

This same melancholy was reflected in the dungeons, which are divided between segmented environments to obtain a new item or artifact necessary to progress with the exploration and others, more focused on the plot, which serve as symbolic extensions of the psyche of their inhabitants, exploring their guilt, fears, and regrets.

Alundra, however, became famous—and infamous—for its puzzles. At times, the game became stressful due to the player's precision required to unlock a puzzle door or a specific positioning and/or movement to reach a particular room, to the point of driving the most impatient players crazy and proving challenging even for the hardcore fans of the genre.

Each dungeon demanded observation and a lot of trial and error to unravel its mysteries, and what for some players became an obstacle was part of the game's identity and what made it so special and differentiated it from its competitors and similar titles.

Alundra's initial reception wasn't explosive, but it was consistent enough to make it worth the player's time. Over time, the game built a solid reputation, with an average score of 8.6 on Metacritic. It didn't become a sales phenomenon comparable to the console's big names, but players who discovered it—often by chance—tend to remember the title fondly.

The game didn't try to compete with the grand 3D spectacles that were beginning to dominate the PlayStation, but it compensated for its lack of graphical capabilities by embracing a refined aesthetic and a distinctive art style, which, despite seeming like a conservative choice, became a major differentiator.

Given this scenario, a sequel seemed natural. There was room to expand the universe, refine systems, and perhaps correct the mistakes of the first game. However, Alundra 2: A New Legend Begins, released in March 2000, followed a radically different path that strayed too far from the experience proposed by the original title.

The dark and introspective tone was replaced by a cartoonish aesthetic, with dialogues and scenes—now with a title entirely built with 3D models—almost comical, paving the way for a narrative that abandoned the dark and melancholic themes in favor of a lighter, more humorous adventure with characters that followed tropes already well-established and reused in other works.

From a design and gameplay perspective, the changes were also noticeable: the puzzles were simplified and the challenges were reduced, with more intuitive maps and even mini-games that, while fun, seemed as silly as the narrative aesthetic of the plot.

Today, looking back more than two decades later, it seems that Alundra 2 had a different target audience in mind. Perhaps it flirted too much with Zelda in the first game, perhaps it created a plot that was too adult for the main consumer audience of games at the time, and therefore opted for a game geared towards a children's or young teenager narrative that, while it marked the childhood of some, was a less memorable experience in the long run.

Alundra 2 could have carried that title, but it clearly didn't want to be Alundra, and the consequences were almost natural: if the first game is remembered today for its complex puzzles and story shrouded in tragedy and loss, the sequel lost what made it unique, and in a market already saturated with light and generic adventures, Alundra 2 began competing in the industry in a terrain where it had no advantage or distinction.

The industry context was also unfavorable: in the early 2000s, the PlayStation was already full of ambitious RPGs, many of them three-dimensional and technically impressive. Final Fantasy VII had redefined expectations on storytelling less than a year before the first Alundra was released, and audiences were increasingly attentive to the technological and narrative innovation that studios like Squaresoft were providing.

By migrating from two-dimensional aesthetics to the world of 3D games, Alundra 2, aiming to ride the wave of the mainstream in an attempt to become more "popular," ended up looking small in the face of competition, and the concessions made to try to catch up with the giants produced a product that was unpopular for the generation.

Today, revisiting Alundra is an opportunity to reflect on creative choices, the importance of understanding one's audience, and the courage to uphold a vision even when it is not the most commercially viable. The game wasn't perfect, but it offered something that wasn't easy to find with the same aesthetic and narrative elements on the PlayStation.

When Alundra 2 began to take shape, the industry landscape had already transformed. The market showed a growing appetite for more accessible experiences and visual appeal aligned with emerging trends. The sequel reflects a possibly erroneous interpretation of the shifting audience: the change of protagonist, the lighter tone, and the more constant presence of humor indicated a clear attempt to reposition the series for a new generation.

The price to pay was the absence of a clear differentiating factor. The series lost its conceptual anchor, and the lukewarm reception of the sequel ended any prospect of continuity for the franchise — Matrix Software dedicated itself to other projects in recent decades, including working with Square Enix on spin-off games of the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series.

Despite its premature end, Alundra remains a memorable adventure and one of the most remarkable titles in the genre during the PlayStation One era, and despite its flaws, Alundra 2 has its merits as a fun adventure and also as an example of how, sometimes, submitting too much to the audience's preferences can dilute its initial proposal and end up creating a product that, due to a misinterpretation, does not live up to expectations.