Soul Blazer

 Another quickie. ...I was just playing a bunch of emulated snes games so I could get some quick game completions done before the new Switch 2 Donkey Kong game comes out, heh.

So anyway. this time I played Soul Blazer.

This is an action-RPG from 1992 published by Enix. ...I seem to be playing a whole bunch of Enix SNES games as of late, huh? 

in Soul Blazer, you play as a warrior, sent down to earth under the watch of The Master (...is this the same "The Master" from ActRaiser perhaps?), in order to restore a land that has been completely wiped out by the evil Deathtoll.

The game is structured like this: You arrive at a town area which is completely empty. You venture into a dungeony area and defeat monsters. Defeating the monsters frees the spirits of the trapped living beings, who begin to repopulate in the hub town as real people again, one by one. Freeing spirits also causes new buildings to appear and new areas to open up in the town. After reaching the end of the dungeon area, you fight a boss, free the spirit of the main townsperson who holds one of the magical orbs you need to collect in order to find Deathtoll, and you are then granted access to the next town to do it again. There are six such towns in the game.

Soul Blazer is a simple little action-RPG. Your main actions are walking around and attacking with your sword. The attack feels good in this game - your sword has a good arc to it that can hit enemies beside and behind you comfortably. You get Exp from killing enemies and can level up to become stronger. You can also find new equipment to increase your attack and defense as you progress through the story. 

Soul Blazer has an Ys-style inventory system where your weapons and armor menu contains every piece of equipment you've found, and you can freely swap back to previous ones if you want. This is useful since some armours have specific effects, such as the ice armor that prevents hot floors from damaging you, or the bubble armor that lets you survive in underwater areas. 

You have a little spirit orb that floats around you, which helps you cast magic spells. When you kill enemies, they drop gems, and you can cast spells by spending gems. You find spells throughout the game - it's fireballs and other things like that. The spell will be cast from the spirit orb's position rather than from the hero's position, which is a bit odd, but it means that your magic requires a bit more timing and precision to aim.

In order to free the trapped spirits of the living, you need to destroy monster lairs. Lairs are tiles in the dungeons that continuously spawn monsters. In order to destroy them, you need to kill every single monster that emerges from the spawn point until it runs out and there are no more monsters.

This system is.... kind of interesting, and kind of monotonous, at the same time?

The interesting part is that, if you want to do it efficiently, you kinda need to figure out a good position to stand in so that the stream of spawning monsters will each approach you in a way where you can safely dispose of them. Sometimes this is a simple matter of standing near a corner, but sometimes it can be a bit more tricky than that. It depends on the monster and on the terrain. The monotonous part is... since some of these lairs can have quite a lot of monsters in them, there's a lot of time spent in this game just repeatedly pressing the attack button standing in front of the spawn points, waiting for them to finally run out of monsters...It can feel like it takes a bit too long sometimes, because you don't know how many monsters are left in a lair until they're all gone.

The boss fights in this game are an unfortunate difficulty-spike in my opinion. The first boss, for example - it deals a lot of damage, and the arena has three conveyor belts in it that make it difficult to find a good place to stand. The later bosses aren't much better, especially one really annoying boss fight atop an airship, which has gusts of winds blowing you around the entire time...this one is especially hard.

 There is only one healing item in this game, a healing herb that restores all your health. You can always replenish your herb as long as you've resurrected the herb shop owner's spirit, but you can only hold one herb at a time, which means that there's no way to "stock up" on more items to help you with tricky bosses. You can grind enemies for level-ups if you're truly struggling, but for the most part, this is a game where you need to figure out the boss patterns and get good at dodging. 

Aside from the bosses, I'd say the difficulty of the game is pretty relaxed and easygoing. The dungeons never feel too complicated to figure out, even though there's no map. And there are enough opportunities to warp back to town and restore your health so that it never feels too oppressive to explore deep into the dungeons. I really like the way it plays.

Once you have rescued people, you can talk to them in the towns. They give you little sidequests, give you hints, or simply just say thank you. The NPC dialogue in this game is quite interesting in my opinion. They believe in reincarnation, and they even give hints about which of their loved ones might have reincarnated into some of the animals that populate the town. It's oddly sweet in a half whimsical, half melancholic kind of way. 

The second town is a very cute forest clearing, populated entirely with animals and trees, with no humans at all. In this game, trees also contain spirits, and even objects crafted from wood still retain their soul and can be rescued. There's a section where a bunch of wooden raft platforms refuse to let you ride them across the swamp until you've proven your allegiance to the forest town. I found this very cute. 

One of the more interesting locations was the mountain village, populated by a race of dwarves who only have a one-year-long lifespan. Yet the people here are happy and thriving, and it is said that they never once consider their lives to be too short.

This game seems to have a lot of things to say regarding life and rebirth. The themes and the messages of this game give it a unique spiritual feeling.

Overall... I really really like Soul Blazer. It's a short, cute little action-RPG, and it has nice, easygoing exploration and combat, plus some interesting meditative feelings to express. Very cool interesting experience that I would recommend to all fans of classic RPGs. :)