Soul Blazer - Revive the World one Dungeon at a Time

Since coming up with the idea to open this blog I’ve also decided to bring my YouTube Channel back to life. I started that 10+ years ago, I was always entertained by the world of let's plays and I wanted to contribute my own way. As time went on I slowly lost energy to continue, but now I decided to give it another spin as a side activity and thus I decided to talk about the first game I decided to play for the channel.

Soul Blazer!

Soul Blazer was developed by Quintet in 1992 for the Super Nintendo, and published by Enix it was the first in a series of Action RPGs that would eventually compose what is know called by fans as the “Gaia Trilogy”, since all these games share a lot of similarities in their story themes despite their stories not being connected.

The story begins in the Freil Empire, where its ruler King Magridd was rumored to be a just ruler, but in reality he was a greedy tyrant, never satisfied with his own wealth and constantly wanting more. One day an entity called Deathtool will hear his plea and promise to fulfill his desire once he would summon him. King Magridd will then force Dr. Leo, the greatest scientist of the Empire, to build a machine that would’ve been able to complete the ritual, and once it was summoned, Deathtool offered a piece of gold for every living thing that was brought to him. 

Slowly but surely the entire world was depleted of life and even King Magridd would eventually succumb to his fate as just another soul for Deathtool to feed. The Master watching from the heavens will then send one his emissary on the surface with the purpose of destroying Deathtool and his army of demons, to finally restore life and balance into the world. This emissary will carry the name of Soul Blazer.

The story will follow the Soul Blazer through different localities, restoring them back to life by freeing souls of the living from the monsters in the army of Deathtool until finally meeting him themselves. The story contains themes that will become recurring in most of Quintet catalogue, the constant conflict between heaven and hell, the love of nature, rulers always falter to their worst aspects and finally our relationship with technology.

Unfortunately while these themes are present they aren’t exactly handled gracefully they can mostly feel stilted and awkward, not helped by an English Translation that sometimes feels stilted and very literal. The key players in the story, Dr. Leo and King Magridd also appear only very late into the game being some of the very last characters you save. There’s also an attempt at a love story between the main character and Lisa the daughter of Dr.Leo but even that is very last minute and a bit clumsily handled.

Despite its flaws there are some aspects of the story that have left an impression on me, since this is a world where the concept of reincarnation exists, there are moments where you can see flashbacks of some people’s past lives which can at times be a bit dark. Like a father and child living their few moments together and then traveling to that location in the dungeon to find a gem left by the kid, his only remaining treasure before passing away.

A moment that I found heartwarming when you talk to a man that was feeling down and alone after the death of his wife, one day he decided to adopt a goat that found outside of his house and if you talk to the goat you find out that she’s actually the reincarnation of his wife and appreciates being able to be in his company and help him feeling better again despite her not being human anymore.

So the story has potential but can’t fully realize it, what about the gameplay then?

Soul Blazer is an action RPG with a structure very similar to the likes of Gauntlet, you land in area of the world, start exploring a dungeon filled with spawn points called Monster Lair where you would have to face ah horde enemies until they’re all beaten and the monster lair can be finally closed, for each lair that has been closed new creatures will be saved and the landing area will be slowly filled with more life. Once the dungeon is completed, you’ll face the boss of the area and get rewarded with a plot item, and then move to the next area.

Your character comes equipped with a sword and armor which will gradually get upgraded in each new area, and you also an array of different magic attacks to help you. You don’t have an MP bar in this game, rather enemies will drop gems when defeated, and the more you collect them the more magic attacks you’re allowed to use. By killing enemies you will also gradually level up and get more powerful that way, and will also completely refill your life bar during exploration. The game is fairly straightforward and shows pretty much all that it has to offer right out of the gate.

The difficulty in general goes from average to very easy. In the beginning your character has very low health and you have to manage your movement carefully otherwise your life will get drained quickly, some sections can also become a bit chaotic requiring you to also dodge magic bullets, which can at times be overwhelming. You can only carry one medical herb at a time which will fully heal you once you die, just make sure to have it equipped on you when needed. When you die the game makes you respawn in the landing area you’re currently exploring while also losing all of your gems, monster lairs already cleared won’t respawn which is good because you’ll never be required to kill the same enemies again whenever you need to do some backtracking.

What makes this game very easy is mainly two things. The first is the enemy’s pathfinding, most of them are meant to chase the player around the map and don’t have ranged options to rely on, which means you’ll have to position yourself in order to keep the distance whilst attacking them with your sword swipes or magic. Unfortunately you’ll learn pretty quickly that if you position yourself in some spots in the map you’re exploring which aren’t really that hard to find, some enemies will just put themselves next to your character and stop chasing you making them very easy picking for your sword swipe which has a very large range of attack.

The second thing that makes the game easy are the bracelets that you can equip as accessories. There’s three of them, the shield bracelet which halves the damage you receive from enemies, the power bracelet which doubles the damage dealt to the enemies and finally the super bracelet which is simply a combination of both and fortunately you can only get this item at the very end of the game. These items are upgrades with no drawbacks, allowing you to either tank a lot of damage or be reckless because you kill many enemies in a couple of hits

These two aspects can make most of the dungeon exploration a walk in the park, you can still die if you’re not careful to the damage you take, but most of the time you’re just gonna clear up the stage with relative ease.

The bosses of the area do still pack a challenge. You can’t rely too much on war of attrition, instead you’re gonna focus and find the best spots to avoid their attacks while also dealing damage, since their life bars will always double if not triple your current one. Deathtool especially is a fairly tough challenge, there are many projectiles to avoid, you can only deal damage to him during a certain phase and since you can only hit him with magic you also have to manage your Gems consumption, the first time I fought him I had to take a couple of tries before manage to beat him.

Soul Blazer can be rather repetitive and very easy, but honestly that is the main reason why I find it so enjoyable to play every once in a while. Playing this game is very relaxing to me, just booting it up, going through a dungeon watching the town slowly coming back to life and then putting it down to continue the next day. As flawed as it might be, his pick up & play nature is perfect for when I just want to unwind.

Looking at it today Soul Blazer looks dated, both your character and the other monsters are very small and lacking in detail, really gives you the feeling of a game that has its aesthetic still a bit rooted in the 8 bit era, but that being said I really like the environments in this game! Most of them are very standard, but then you have some with very detailed and vibrant designs, my favorite being the underwater dungeon, the space aesthetic of the final level and a dungeon which is a town diorama where you fight against toy soldiers.

I especially love the effect once you free a monster lair and you see a section of the town being reconstructed by slowly unveiling all the pixel tilesets. The final boss and a portrait of Lisa during the end credits are some of my favourite sprites ever in a Super Nintendo game.

I also really enjoy the music. Yukihide Takekawa was able to put together a very fun score for this whole adventure: from the intense grand organ for the Master’s realm, the very cozy town theme which and its happier variation, to and the beautiful credits music. The highlight for me are the dungeon themes they’re very powerful bass line and their upbeat sound makes them perfect to completely alleviate the repetitive nature of this game and there’s never once a repeated theme each are has its own specific tune which makes you really look forward to hear what the next dungeon has in store.

I chose this game as the first one to play for my channel because of how easy to pick up and play and cozy it is. This feels like a game in which a team has a lot of ideas on the table and it’s in phase where it’s trying to figure out how to put them all together in a cohesive and fun package and while it doesn’t particularly hit the home run in this occasion, I know that all this building blocks put in place will pay off really damn well for the future, since this same team will end up putting together one of my absolute favourite games of all time, Terranigma.

If you’re interested in this game and wanna see it in action you can do so on my Youtube channel, unfortunately this game still hasn’t been re-released on modern consoles so if you wanna play it for yourself, you’re gonna have to do it any way you can. If you have already experienced this game, maybe let me know what you think about it. 

For those of you who have already played the game, I have a couple more things I wanna share about the plot so follow me to the…

SPOILER SECTION - Proceed at your own risk

I wanna talk in particular about some moments about the main characters in the story: Dr. Leo, King Magridd and Lisa

Dr. Leo’s main arc in this game is coming into to terms with his guilt over the machine he has built and the lives that were lost to Deathtool because of it, the game condemns this action while also underlining the fact that technology itself is an important aspect of our live, is just the abuse of technology and science that will inevitably bring to our doom. 

Dr. Leo built the machine because he feared for the life of his daughter, in the final sections of the game history repeats itself. Lisa gets taken hostage again, but this time Dr. Leo ends up sacrificing himself in order to save her, without him no one will ever be able to replicate his own work. It’s certainly an extreme measure, but it does send the message that the men of science should be the ones to worry about the consequences and prevent the abuse of technology.

King Magridd is the very last person you save and while he has failed as a ruler, there’s a moment in which he admits that he made the pact with Deathtool just to impress the Queen with his wealth, which left a bad taste in my mouth because it felt like he was shifting the blame for his own actions, which might be fitting with him being portrayed as a wimp but it doesn’t really fit with the fact that you’re supposed to feel like he has redeemed himself. I honestly think he should’ve been more of a presence in the story.

And while I have critiqued the love story with Lisa, there’s a moment in the ending were Soul Blazer is reborn as a human, but has lost all of his memories in the process, so him and Lisa have to basically start over from scratch leaving the game on a bittersweet note that they would eventually find love again. Of course the execution is still rather lacking, but I appreciate not taking the easy way out by having Soul Blazer just magically regain all his memories in the ending.

Again it’s a very messy execution but it’s clear the writers had a concrete vision but couldn’t fully realize it.