Soleil

Originally posted on Facebook on 6 January 2023

Just played through a cute little Mega Drive game called Soleil - also known as Crusader of Centy.

I've wanted to play this one for a while - the actual Mega Drive cartridge is a rare collector's item, though, and I didn't feel like spending so much to get it.

Fortunately, they decided to include this game in the recently-released Mega Drive Mini II, so I am now finally able to try it out.

The game has two English names because it actually received two separate English localisations. I think it was published by different companies in US and Europe, but I don't know the full story behind this.

The European version of the Mega Drive Mini II has the UK English version of Soleil, while all other versions of the MD Mini II have the US English version on it. I played the UK English version.

It seems like the two different localisations actually have completely different names for all of the characters, which is a bit annoying when it comes to looking up stuff about the game, as most sites online tend to use the US version's names. Oh well, it's not too big of a deal.

The game is an exploration/action game.

People online seem to always compare it to Legend of Zelda, but actually, I felt it also had more similarities to other exploration action-RPG games like Terranigma. Unlike Zelda, Soleil has a World Map screen, and it doesn't really have distinct "dungeons" in the way a Zelda game does.

The story involves a young boy's journey to become a hero and rid the world of monsters. But as you progress through the game, you learn that the monsters may not actually be bad guys after all... Is slaying monsters truly the "heroic" thing to do? It's another tale about the hubris of humanity.

Despite this heavy-sounding premise, the game remains very light-hearted and colourful throughout the whole story. It doesn't really dive too deeply into these themes, and for the most part, you're just bashing baddies without a care.

The main gameplay elements are the sword-throwing skill, and the animal friends. Early in the adventure, you learn the ability to throw your sword like a boomerang, which is used for attacking, cutting plants, hitting switches, and a few other things. And along the journey, you make friends with various animal partners who can be equipped to enhance the sword-throw, or to provide some other kind of benefit: the Penguin gives you an ice sword, and the Cheetah improves your running speed, etc etc. You can equip up to 2 animals at a time, and can swap them any time from the pause menu.

You journey from location to location, traversing through the environments and defeating a boss at the end of each. It's pretty straightforward stuff. 

This game was pretty good, all-around! It's not very long - it only took me three sessions to finish it 100%. The environments are fun and varied, the combat is okay, and the animal friends are cute. There's a bit of puzzle-solving, a bit of exploration, it's all good stuff. The difficulty is rather low, and the bosses are easy-peasy, so it's a nice, light and breezy little adventure to play through.

No complaints here! Fun game. Glad they decided to include it in the MD Mini II. 😃

The Mega Drive Mini II also has a few other games I was interested in trying out - it has Langrisser 1 aka Warsong, and also Shining Force CD. ... I also never got around to Monster World 4 and Landstalker, which were both on the first MD Mini. 

Gotta love having easy access to all these retro RPGs. 😃