#and every game is about a very strong but ultimately mortal and human guy chasing after someone he loved

[skrunglesage]

as a known timeline heretic, i have to announce that in my heart of hearts the ancient hero is the first male gerudo born after ganondorf

[postgamecontent]

Quintet Spotlight: Soul Blazer

Original Release Date: January 31, 1992 (JPN)

Original Hardware: Nintendo Super Famicom

It's hard to say what Quintet's expectations had been for ActRaiser, but I can't imagine they were unhappy with the results. The game sold more than 600,000 copies worldwide, and although the bulk of that was in Japan, its overseas sales were surprisingly strong. A sequel would come before long, but by the time the sales numbers were in, Quintet was already well into development on their next game, titled Soul Blazer. This time, they would create an action-RPG, something a little closer to Ys, the series that the founders of Quintet created at their previous jobs with Nihon Falcom. But even though their new game jettisoned the unique genre-mashing structure of their previous game in favor of something a little more pedestrian, it ended up being a very strange game on the whole.  

Soul Blazer is ambiguous enough with its premise that you can treat it as a follow-up to ActRaiser or a story all of its own. You play as a servant of The Master (once again localized from the more direct 'God' in the Japanese version), given mortal form to try to bring the Freil Empire back from the edge of disaster. The evil Deathtoll has harvested the souls of the inhabitants and destroyed their villages, and I guess The Master didn't have the foresight to leave a bunch of warrior statues scattered across the world this time. The servant, Blazer, needs to battle monsters to release the souls from the monster lairs that trap them. Besides having the ability to handle a sword, Blazer has the special ability to communicate with anything that possesses a soul. There are a lot of things with souls in this game's world, and some of them are quite unexpected.

The story goes in some interesting directions, but let's cover the gameplay first, since that's the less interesting part. The world of Soul Blazer is divided into six main areas. Your goal in each is to recover a special stone. Once you have them all, they'll open the way to the final battle with Deathtoll. When you arrive in each area, you'll find it almost completely empty. Some exploration will lead you to a dungeon area crawling with monsters. The creatures will spill out of lairs scattered around the dungeon areas, and as you clear each one out, you'll restore a soul to the connected town, along with any buildings or features associated with them. At some point in each dungeon area, you won't be able to progress any farther. That's your cue to head back to the town and talk to everyone to try to open the way forward. Repeat as needed until you face off against a big boss, beat them up, claim your stone, and head to the next area.

Towns don't just open up paths in the dungeons, though. There are a number of side-quests and other distractions that will earn you vital new gear and items. You'll also find some interesting side-stories that don't have any significance on the main story or gameplay but are merely there for flavor. As you release each soul, you'll immediately see the effect its return has on the town. Watching these locations slowly rebuild themselves from nothing is one of the more satisfying elements in Soul Blazer's gameplay. It makes you want to seek out and clear every single lair as soon as you can. Fairly early on, there are some enemies you aren't able to damage, so you have to leave their lairs behind. Those moments will almost certainly stick in your mind for the rest of the game until you are able to take care of them.

The look of the game probably conjures up images of Nintendo's Legend of Zelda games for many players, but in practice, there's very little actual puzzle-solving to be found in Soul Blazer. You simply run back and forth between dungeons and the town, releasing souls, talking to them to get an item or trigger a flag of some sort, and pressing onward. As such, just as it does in most other action-RPGs, the bulk of the gameplay comes down to combat. Unfortunately for Soul Blazer, that's probably the weakest part of the game. Fight the monsters to seal the lairs and unleash the souls, fight the bosses to get the stones, fight your boredom as you strike down the tenth stupid enemy in a row that just tumbled headlong out of its lair. Blazer is supposed to be a heavenly figure, but I don't think there's room in Paradise for chronic spawn-campers.

It gets terribly repetitive after the first hour or so, and I think there are two reasons for that. First off, you're generally only fighting one type of enemy at a time. The game sometimes throws a second enemy type into the mix, but usually only one of them. Sure, if you let a bunch of enemies come out of the lair at once, things can get a little hairy, but such cases are rare. Usually you're just cutting them down one by one as they belch forth from their foul homes. Like most newborns, they're fairly stupid and almost totally helpless. Once you figure out how far you should stand to wait out their brief period of invincibility after spawning, it's just a matter of swatting at them by pressing the sword button again and again until they're all gone. Find the next lair, and do it again. And again. And again. Each dungeon usually only has a few types of enemies overall, so you'll be doing essentially the same fights quite a few times in each area.

The second issue is that Blazer doesn't really have a lot of moves at his disposal. Combat-heavy RPGs can work, but it's obviously essential for that combat to be fun enough to keep the player's interest for the course of the whole game. You can get away with a simple moveset as long as the enemies test the player well enough, but that's not the case here. The other option is to give the player a lot of enjoyable options to choose from in battle. Unfortunately, Blazer only has a basic sword swipe, a strafing ability where he jabs his sword forward, and some magic spells. Those spells are a little tricky to use effectively against smaller enemies, so you probably won't get a lot of use out of them against most of the basic monsters. Bosses are typically impervious to magic, so you won't be using them there, either. So really, it all comes down to sticking and moving, even against the toughest foes.

As with the Ys games, the boss battles are the best part of the action gameplay in Soul Blazer. They're tough, requiring you to both pay attention to the boss's pattern and execute your moves precisely. In theory, anyway. There are a couple of bosses where you can just jut your sword out and hump the poor creatures to death, relying on your medical herb to extend your life and ensure the bad guy dies before you do. But generally, you have to wake up for these battles. It's a nice change from the rest of the action. None of these fights are on the same level as those found in the Ys games, mind you, but we take what we can get.

The tedium of combat might have you thinking that the juice of Soul Blazer isn't worth the squeeze, and depending on your tastes, it might not be. What makes this whole venture worth taking on is the bizarre writing. Not just in the main plot, but in all of the little side-stories you'll encounter along the way. There are so many things in Soul Blazer that feel like important clues to future events, but end up just being flavor text. For a game of this vintage, that's a rare and beautiful thing. The way the game repopulates the towns one character at a time helps it pull off some fairly interesting events, too. In the first town, you'll meet a farmer whose wife suddenly passed away. He felt deep loneliness until he got his pet goat, whose companionship helps him feel happy each day. You won't get the goat until a trip or two later, but when you talk to it, you discover that the goat is his reincarnated wife. It's weird, but kind of sweet.

That's actually a good description of Soul Blazer: weird, but kind of sweet. You'll frequently encounter situations where you're too late to be of any help. Things are what they are, but they turn out as best as they can, for the most part. Your character's unique viewpoint on the world allows him to see and understand things on a greater level than anyone else, but what you end up discovering is that even if everyone involved in a situation doesn't fully understand the details, things are fine. The game also delights in little bits of cheeky humor here and there. A dog who has a good nose will lead you around to a couple of places before excitedly taking you to a spot that has really caught his attention. It turns out to be a patch that he urinated on earlier and forgot about.

ActRaiser didn't really have a lot to say for itself, in the explicit sense, anyway. You can read things into it, but ultimately the biggest takeaway is that humanity only cares about God when it is in need of divine intervention. Soul Blazer has deeper issues on its mind, and more words with which to talk about them. Its biggest points are hardly virgin territory, but it is rather interesting to see them discussed in a game of this era. A short life well-lived is better than a long one lacking in satisfaction. Be careful how much you depend on tools, lest you become controlled by them. There's a strong feeling of anti-futurism coursing through the veins of Soul Blazer. Not by coincidence, I think, the happiest souls you meet in the game are the animals. The cleverest, most forward-thinking humans also end up causing the biggest problems for everyone. Cautioning the player against the corrupting power of technology and wasting one's precious time on trivial pursuits is a strange message for an ostensibly state-of-the-art video game to convey, but it is refreshing, if nothing else, to see those topics addressed this early on in the medium.

You spend most of the game chasing a fellow by the name of Dr. Leo. A painter and an inventor, he's an obvious expy for Leonardo DaVinci, even before you find out his daughter's name is Lisa. The good doctor is the great inventor of this world, and it's through his technology and his care for his daughter that ruin comes to the Freil Empire. A rather weak-willed king is bent by his greedy wife to press the doctor, by threatening his daughter, into using his machines to open a dialogue with Deathtoll. He somehow convinces the royalty that trading the souls of their subjects for one gold piece each is a good idea, and perhaps it is, until Deathtoll takes them, too. I'm not sure about all of you, but in this situation, I'm not especially inclined to blame Dr. Leo. The game does, however. He is to blame for creating the tools, and he ends up having to pay for his redemption with his life. If that doesn't put a fine enough point on it, the game outright states that as long as there are inventions, all of this disaster could happen again.

The queen dies for her greed, obviously, but the king somehow gets off without a scratch, and the last time you see him imparts a strange moral. He picks some metaphorical lint out of his belly button, waxing about how a person who kills one is a murderer, but a person who kills one hundred is a hero. He talks about how he became a king in this way, but will now pledge all of the money he got from Deathtoll to construct a great town. Presumably, he's still going to be the king of that town, so he not only gets away without punishment, he sort of comes out ahead. The Master truly works in mysterious ways.

Before you have time to meditate on that bizarre outcome too deeply, the game swings back to the topic of mortality. In perhaps the least-earned part of the narrative, Blazer and Lisa have fallen in love with each other. Blazer has to return to heaven, but he promises to return one day. A year later, The Master notices Blazer is unhappy and misses his life as a human. The Master agrees to let Blazer live as a mortal, but he has to give up all of his memories. Blazer agrees to this, and the last scene of the game shows Lisa stumbling upon him and rekindling their relationship. I guess it's a good thing he's still wearing his red jumpsuit and tiara, or else she might not have recognized him. With a hearty bleat from Turbo the Goat, the game comes to a close.

Soul Blazer throws out some conflicting messages and comes off as confused as a result at times. Part of that is probably a translation issue, but even in Japanese, it's hard to get a bead on exactly what the scenario writer is trying to paint as the game's biggest message. What is clear is that those responsible for the game really cared about trying to say something, and that level of care ended up spreading through the whole script. You get the impression that they figured out background details that they were never planning on explicitly explaining to the player, with only the barest hints of these elements left in the game for players to connect the dots with. Is the Mermaid Queen a reincarnation of Lisa's mother? I mean, maybe. It seems that way, but the game won't ever outright say it. There are a lot of little details like that, and I think that's a big part of Soul Blazer's charm.

For lack of a better term, Soul Blazer has heart. And that's the biggest reason why I was able to stick with the game even though I became bored of its mechanics by the end of the second area, not even halfway through the adventure. I kept on going because I wanted to see more of this strange world, its odd inhabitants, and their relationships with each other. Among its many messages, Soul Blazer seems to put some emphasis on the idea that making genuine connections with others is one of the most important aspect of a fulfilling life. Dr. Leo's connections to his family and beloved pets ended up being the most precious aspects of his busy life. The king's lack of connections to his subjects and even his wife led everyone down a dark path. And in the end, Blazer gives up his heaven-granted immortality because of his connection with Lisa. Your power, technology, and inventions mean nothing next to a shared existence with others.

I could read a lot into Soul Blazer if I had a mind to. I could say that the writer was reacting to the contemporary Japanese culture, where relationships were increasingly seen as nothing more than assets or liabilities, a situation that likely contributed to the hikikomori phenomenon that the country currently finds itself dealing with. Given the frequent religious overtones in Quintet's games, I could also posit that the writer felt Japan or even humanity in general had lost touch with its spirituality and was placing far too great a value on technology, toys, and money. All curious lessons for a video game to try to teach, to be sure, but if you want to reach young minds, this was probably the way to do it. I don't know if the writer meant any of those things, though, so I'll just be content with saying that there are valuable ideas to be gleaned from this mediocre localization of a silly action-RPG, if you're inclined to do so. If you're not, the game is quirky and weird enough to fuel at least one playthrough.

Quintet was far from finished with its exploration of these kinds of matters, however, as we'll see when we get into the next games in the Heaven and Earth Trilogy. Before that, we'll be taking a quick stop-over with one of the company's biggest mistakes, ActRaiser 2. The developer completely misread the fanbase, and the results were disastrous. Look for that complete breakdown in the next part of our Quintet Spotlight.

Previous: ActRaiser

Next: ActRaiser 2

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