Aided by four wise sages and a mysterious woman, he rises up against the tyrannical Draygonian Empire to ensure that humanity ultimately does not repeat the Great War.

The original NES version has been re-released via the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One.

Defeating monsters allows the player to gain experience points which increases his level thus boosting his health, defense, and attack strength.

Crystalis takes place in a post-apocalyptic world,[2] in 2097, one hundred years after "1997, October 1, The END DAY", when a global thermonuclear war began that reverted civilization to a primitive, medieval existence populated with fierce mutated creatures.

[1][2] With these skills, he controls the world's last remaining military power and seeks to conquer what is left of the planet by attempting to enter the Tower.

[4] The protagonist awakens with no memory, but, guided by four wise sages, gradually learns that the world is sinking into turmoil, due to the Draygonia Empire's destructive influence.

[4] The protagonist is assisted by four sages named Zebu, Tornel, Asina, and Kensu, primarily in learning magic spells and gaining information about the world and the quest.

[4][1] In the GBC version, the sages are each responsible for creating one of the four swords:[1] Zebu for Wind, Tornel for Fire, Asina for Water, and Kensu for Thunder.

Other major changes include an almost completely new soundtrack, re-translation differences (for example, Draygon is now known as Dragonia, as in the Japanese version) and rewriting of story-items and events[9] (Kensu's Body and the dialogue in the Dwarven village, for example).

[4] The lower resolution of the Game Boy Color screen, compared to that of the NES, results in a field of view smaller than in the original, making the GBC port more difficult;[10] some enemies can now attack the player from off-screen.

[16] The PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Steam releases of the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection mark the first time that Crystalis, a game once exclusive to the NES, had been made officially available outside of a Nintendo console.

[17] Critics remarked that the story and art design seemed to draw heavily from the Hayao Miyazaki anime film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

IGN criticized the game for being too linear and having a low difficulty level but praised its large world and visually detailed "cinema cutscenes".

[22] GameSpot also gave the Game Boy Color port an 8.0, saying of the original NES release: "Crystalis' sheer depth - and the quality of its presentation - was without peer, and it is still regarded as a milestone title in the [action RPG] genre".