I beat a game!!: Soul Blazer
Soul Blazer is a cute little game for the SNES in which you play an angel sent by God to save the world; it's a mark of the fact that it was made in the pre-Playstation era in that religion, while not the huge presence you'd expect in a game with this premise, is unambiguously Not Evil. God (or "The Master" as he's named) does not betray you and show himself to be secretly the Big Bad; the Church is not corrupt; there's no moral ambiguity.
I'm a sucker for a good action-RPG. I like games that have the depths of an RPG system, but I'm sick of micromanaging my character, sick of levelling, sick of turn-based combat--I've been playing RPGs for the past 18 years, when I got a copy of Dragon Warrior for subscribing to Nintendo Power, and it gets kind of old after a while.
While Soul Blazer is far from a perfect game, it's hard to find any obvious flaws that glare at you: there's a bit too much backtracking, but I played the game on an emulator (after, of course, legally purchasing my own copy, sure). Gameplay-wise, it's a pretty solid Zelda clone with fewer puzzles. The handling of enemies is interesting: except for a slight sprinkling of respawning enemies, the enemies are all handled through monster lairs: a glowing tile that a finite number of a monsters spawn out of. When you've defeated all of them, the color of the tile changes, you stomp on it, and then you'll never get monsters from there again. It makes end-of-game levelling difficult but also unnecessary: the game expects you'll get 100% completion (which is awesome, I hate obscure and overwhelming sidequests), and you'll be at the proper level to beat the final boss with a bit of strategy.
When you stomp on an enemy lair, a few things happen: a treasure chest will appear, part of the landscape will change to let you progress further, or you'll unseal a creature. That's the main gimmick of the game: the Big Bad has sealed away all of the life in the world. When you start a level, you come upon a completely-empty town, and as you go through the level, animals and buildings and people begin to appear. It's a precursor to Dark Cloud in this regard, and calling it "a 2-d Dark Cloud without randomized dungeons" is a pretty good descriptor. The player, however, does not take an active role in arranging a town--characters appear in one location and one location only and it's all handled for you automatically. The game Actraiser--also by the same company--is very similar, and I'm interested in playing the other games in the loose series (Actraiser is simply by the same developer; Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma are somehow directly related to Soul Blazer but I misremember how; I've played all of them and all are good, and I think I'll get through them next.) If you're as much into animals as I am, you'll like it, particularly Stage 2, where you restore a forest and get to meet dogs and moles and birds and deer and all cute little things.
Particularly amusing to me--considering that the game was published by Enix, who is famous for it in the Dragon Warrior games--is the handling of a But Thou Must in the game's ending. The Designated Love Interest (who, based on the portrait of her we see during the credits, will be played by Laura Dern in the movie) asks the hero if he'll promise to remember her and come back for her, and a dialog box pops up. Because we've played RPGs before, we expect the box to say "Yes/No" and if we say "No" we'll get a scolding and the box will appear again. The box simply says "Yes"--only one option. But Thou Musts allow the forcing of one choice while giving us the option of more than one, but I've never seen it so transparent, and I've never seen subversions of it as early as this game, at least not that I can remember. More recent games do parody it by making all of the choices variations on "Yes" or "No" but I don't think I've ever seen a single option in a box.
It's worth playing--it's one of those rare games that's charming and fun enough that you can excuse any flaws and the lack of polish. Soul Blazer won't change your life, but I've got a soft spot for it, and it'll give you a week or two of idle playing (or a weekend of concentrated play) that you'll enjoy.
I'm a sucker for a good action-RPG. I like games that have the depths of an RPG system, but I'm sick of micromanaging my character, sick of levelling, sick of turn-based combat--I've been playing RPGs for the past 18 years, when I got a copy of Dragon Warrior for subscribing to Nintendo Power, and it gets kind of old after a while.
While Soul Blazer is far from a perfect game, it's hard to find any obvious flaws that glare at you: there's a bit too much backtracking, but I played the game on an emulator (after, of course, legally purchasing my own copy, sure). Gameplay-wise, it's a pretty solid Zelda clone with fewer puzzles. The handling of enemies is interesting: except for a slight sprinkling of respawning enemies, the enemies are all handled through monster lairs: a glowing tile that a finite number of a monsters spawn out of. When you've defeated all of them, the color of the tile changes, you stomp on it, and then you'll never get monsters from there again. It makes end-of-game levelling difficult but also unnecessary: the game expects you'll get 100% completion (which is awesome, I hate obscure and overwhelming sidequests), and you'll be at the proper level to beat the final boss with a bit of strategy.
When you stomp on an enemy lair, a few things happen: a treasure chest will appear, part of the landscape will change to let you progress further, or you'll unseal a creature. That's the main gimmick of the game: the Big Bad has sealed away all of the life in the world. When you start a level, you come upon a completely-empty town, and as you go through the level, animals and buildings and people begin to appear. It's a precursor to Dark Cloud in this regard, and calling it "a 2-d Dark Cloud without randomized dungeons" is a pretty good descriptor. The player, however, does not take an active role in arranging a town--characters appear in one location and one location only and it's all handled for you automatically. The game Actraiser--also by the same company--is very similar, and I'm interested in playing the other games in the loose series (Actraiser is simply by the same developer; Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma are somehow directly related to Soul Blazer but I misremember how; I've played all of them and all are good, and I think I'll get through them next.) If you're as much into animals as I am, you'll like it, particularly Stage 2, where you restore a forest and get to meet dogs and moles and birds and deer and all cute little things.
Particularly amusing to me--considering that the game was published by Enix, who is famous for it in the Dragon Warrior games--is the handling of a But Thou Must in the game's ending. The Designated Love Interest (who, based on the portrait of her we see during the credits, will be played by Laura Dern in the movie) asks the hero if he'll promise to remember her and come back for her, and a dialog box pops up. Because we've played RPGs before, we expect the box to say "Yes/No" and if we say "No" we'll get a scolding and the box will appear again. The box simply says "Yes"--only one option. But Thou Musts allow the forcing of one choice while giving us the option of more than one, but I've never seen it so transparent, and I've never seen subversions of it as early as this game, at least not that I can remember. More recent games do parody it by making all of the choices variations on "Yes" or "No" but I don't think I've ever seen a single option in a box.
It's worth playing--it's one of those rare games that's charming and fun enough that you can excuse any flaws and the lack of polish. Soul Blazer won't change your life, but I've got a soft spot for it, and it'll give you a week or two of idle playing (or a weekend of concentrated play) that you'll enjoy.
posted by R. Goodness at 8:08 AM
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