Re-release this: Soul Blazer

The first entry in Quintet's unofficial "Gaia trilogy" isn't as refined in some ways as its successors, but there's a damn fine game here that deserves attention in the present.

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Soul Blazer wasn’t Quintet’s first game, but it was the first that would come to define what they would spend at least half of the rest of their existence creating. Plenty of themes are shared between Soul Blazer and ActRaiser, the company’s debut both as a studio and on the SNES, but Soul Blazer is also very much its own thing, as it shifted from ActRaiser’s blend of top-down strategy, literal worldbuilding, and sidescrolling action platforming to a more straightforward approach, that of the action RPG.

To call Soul Blazer’s approach straightforward is only accurate in comparison to what ActRaiser was doing, however. Soul Blazer is an action RPG, with plenty of the trappings you’d expect from such a title — and with plenty that will look familiar to anyone who’s played a classic Ys bump combat game, outside of the bump combat itself — but its structure and progression was very much its own thing. Enemies poured forth from “monster lairs,” spawned by the approach of the personification of evil known as “Deathtoll” — I can’t imagine that’s the name on his birth certificate, but considering he locked up all of existence in an alternate dimension prison they needed to be freed from by our hero of the story, whom you name yourself, it’s at least a pretty good explainer for what you’re up against here. And when I say “all of existence,” I mean all of it: it’s not just people locked away here. Plants, animals, buildings, the literal ground that all of this rests and lives on. Deathtoll hid all of it behind these dimensional doors, the lairs, and you unlock them by defeating every demon contained within.

Not every lair is pivotal to defeat in terms of progression through the game, but Soul Blazer makes its stance clear very early, before you even swing a sword: every person, every creature, every plant, deserves a chance at existence and respect. So why would you not clear out all of these lairs, just in case there’s a goat or a tree or “just” an NPC behind it? That NPC might not share their hopes and dreams with you, but they’ve got just as much of a right to them as you do. And once you’ve unlocked their proverbial cage, they’ve got them back.

Image credit: Wikimedia

Now, this isn’t to say Quintet’s philosophy of respect and understanding for all life meant they were fine with evil and evil acts because that’s just like, evil’s opinion, man. It becomes pretty clear, through their oeuvre, what Quintet’s developers felt about evil and evil behaviors: the thing they were against was senseless destruction and killing, with every death in these Gaia trilogy titles needing to mean something. That’s why, in Soul Blazer, your foes are minions of evil created for that purpose, whose very existence locks even the potential for good behind locked doors. And why in Terranigma, every enemy you defeat has trapped the soul of something living with the potential for good inside of it, and destroying these evil vessels is the only way to revive the world. And why, in Illusion of Gaia, there is just the one death of a human at your hands, but oh wow, is it hard to argue against their deserving it.

Life after the apocalypse — and what to do within it — is not unexplored territory in video games. Trevor Strunk, in Story Mode: Video Games and the Interplay Between Consoles and Culture, juxtaposed how Fallout and Shin Megami Tensei, two game series developed with very different mindsets for cultural reasons handled by that chapter, handle the apocalypse question. While early Fallout titles attempted to make you navigate a world that is and attempt to fit yourself inside of it, later ones, developed by Bethesda, considered you more the arbiter of what the world could be, with “hard” choices, as they’re described by Strunk, not really being all that hard to make, given player agency and character agency can be one and the same, and the focus of all of this is on self-definition. Shin Megami Tensei games take a different approach, where yes, you’re figuring out how you want to live in the world that’s now overrun by demons, but you’re also figuring out if this world should even exist at all.

They are not what I’d call optimistic games, as enjoyable as they can be, as they’re both ones where you need to to, at least to a degree, sell out your principles to shape the world you’re capable of shaping post-apocalypse. Even the clear best of the modern Fallout titles, Obsidian’s New Vegas, doesn’t allow you to truly shape the kind of world you’d prefer to if you’re a leftist rather than the kind of liberal who would assume that the New California Republic are the good guys and not simply a neo-neoliberalist recreation of the kind of political maneuvering that helped lead to the nuclear war that ravaged the world in the first place. That you can choose this neoliberalist revival, fascism steeped in Roman symbolism, or a vaguer “New Vegas for New Vegans” that doesn’t quite answer the question of what the city-state’s idealogy will be outside of “New Vegas,” but you can’t make the budding leftist, communal entity of New Vegas its foundational and moral core is one of the only missteps of that title.

Soul Blazer’s — and Quintet’s in general — approach is different than this. Self-definition doesn’t play into it: the world you see is the end result of the world we actually live in, one that doesn’t respect its people, its creatures, its plants, the world itself. And your only goal is to attempt to recreate the good of the old world, without the evils that brought it down in the first place. It has not been designed for you to experience the world as you see it, but as you should see it. It has more in common with Mother 3 in this regard, only Mother 3’s story is, in the end, more about what happens when you let the evils that destroyed the world in the first place back in to the new one. Soul Blazer knows what is evil, and knows what has destroyed the world, and knows it needs to be excised: your job is to excise it, while coming to an understanding of the agency of all things, and not just the agency of yourself. Your reward in the end is to become part of this world you helped recreate, instead of just a soldier of God — sorry, “The Master” — deployed when there’s evil to combat in the world. If the lessons of Soul Blazer have been learned by the world, the developers optimistically imply, maybe such soldiers won’t be needed in the future, anyway.

To get you to connect with the world as a player, and to maybe avoid skipping over conversations with NPCs or failing to explore said world to its fullest, Soul Raiser locks all of it away from you, and allows you to reveal it piece by piece by defeating those monster lairs. As programmer Masaya Hashimoto explained it in a developer interview with Hippon Super back in 1992, “By restoring the towns piece by piece, it gives the player a sense of progress and fulfillment, while also serving as a good way to structure and pace the information we reveal. This way we could avoid flooding the player with exposition.”

And this one-at-a-time structuring also allows for a normalcy, in, say, seeing what a plant has to say to you, the protagonist, or even what a door — hey, doors are made out of wood from a living tree — might be thinking. Scenario writer Tomoyoshi Miyazaki, in the same interview, said that this was, “to mix and present two different perspectives: the way human beings see objects, and the way objects see human beings. By the end of the game, my hope is that the player will experience a change of perspective in their own views.” In another interview given by Miyazaki, he states that, “For people who are bad at action games, fighting enemies itself might not be much fun, but defeating enemies here its closely connected with the building of the world. With the story of Soul Blazer, we didn’t want to make a typical character story, but rather something that would be told from a different perspective. We wanted to make a simulation/strategy game that is accessible, without the usual trappings of hardcore simulations.”

Miyazaki and Hashimoto developed the original Ys for Falcom, in the same roles they held for Soul Blazer. (And Yuzo Koshiro, who had composed the music for Ys I & II, also composed the music for Quintet’s first title, ActRaiser.) Both developers had left Falcom after the first few Ys titles, along with others, to form Quintet. Now, none of the first three Ys titles are overwhelming in scope, but it’s also pretty easy to see, especially over three decades ago, how what we now consider a pretty modestly sized RPG world that asks a lot of the player itself could be daunting to inexperienced players. You had to explore everywhere, talk to everyone, and sometimes get by with the vaguest of hints in order to progress. Soul Blazer does away with much of this by opening everything up just a little bit at a time, directly introducing you to new NPCs, whether they’re people or plants or animals, and also sending a vision over explaining that hey, this person in particular is going to have something important to say to you or give you or ask of you, so don’t forget. Hints as to what kind of gear you need to find or directions you need to take are given freely, so long as you open the closed doors that keep those hints behind them. The game not even once feels overwhelming, and by the end, feels more familiar and lived in and understood than previous ones made by these developers. A huge step from Ys’ glory toward what was still to come from this collection of talented developers.

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Soul Blazer is an action RPG with some fairly light dungeon crawling mechanics. Each area you go to has its own little dungeon ecosystem attached to a “town” of some kind, and upon death you return to your origin point with your gems halved: you need gems to use magic, and the final boss of the game requires magic to defeat, so… you kind of need to avoid dying all the time. The rest of your inventory remains, however, and the dungeons are static and unchanging, which is why these are real light dungeon crawling mechanics. The game loop is pretty clear, however, and dungeon crawl-y, with you venturing out into the world, defeating a bunch of foes, then heading home to see what changed about the world while you were gone and also saving your game before heading out again.

Your primary weapon is a sword, which you’ll constantly swap out for new swords with higher attack and also special functions, such as a blade that can defeat otherwise invulnerable metal monsters, or one that can cut the flesh (?) of ghosts, or one that will recover your health with every slain foe. Your armors, too, have special characteristics, like making it possible for you to walk underwater by encasing you in a magical bubble, or letting you walk over traps or even fire. Your sword attack is a swing, like in topdown Zelda titles, rather than the stabbing of a Golvellius or a Crystalis, which is helpful considering that movement isn’t always as precise as you’d like for putting enemies in position for direct frontal attacks. A glancing blow from a side-swiped blade counts just as much as a full shot from directly in front of them, however, so it’s not much of an issue once you realize how to work the angles.

These kinds of equipment and status screens should look familiar to you, whether you’ve played other Quintet titles or early Ys games. Original image credit: TCRF, StrategyWiki

Your secondary attack comes in the form of magic spells, which you’ll discover as you go: it’s basically impossible that you’d find them all unless you take out every monster lair and eventually do some backtracking, too, but again: why wouldn’t you? These range from the simple (fire a magic blast at foes in front of you; charge attack) to the more advanced (rotating protective spell; four pillars of flame). The Phoenix spell is required to end the game — how else can the world be reborn without the aid of a phoenix? — and is discovered through a quest hinted at throughout the game, that can also be begun before you’re nearing the end. These spells require gems to use, as stated, and you earn gems from defeating monsters. There are ways to limit how many gems are used for a spell — one armor cuts gem usage in half, one accessory in particular that takes a lot of worthwhile effort to acquire makes magic use free — but if you can avoid dying and fight like you should you’ll have a plentiful supply, anyway.

And you’ll want to keep fighting for more than just the gems or the unlocking of monster lairs and the world, too, as enemies give you experience points, which you need to gain levels that will make you strong enough to equip your new weapons. Not only will you be unable to defeat certain foes that you have to without these stronger swords, but you also won’t live long enough to defeat the standard enemies, either, as you won’t have the hit points to survive their attacks.

Lastly, there are equippable accessories that are sometimes either basically or definitely mandatory to wear, those that you get more free reign over like ones that can improve your power, defense, or both, depending on your play style, and items you can equip either to generate a specific encounter with an NPC, or to do things like enter into the dreams of a sleeping NPC in order to find the location of an item or create a new progression point in the game. Sure, stalking people in their dreams might be a little much, but God sent you down to clean up this mess, so at least you’ve got some measure of authority there, and some of these people are stuck in nightmares or loops or are actively hiding out, or contain the only possible interaction point for you and someone who is dead and not coming back other than through a dream powered by memory. So tap that forehead with the Dream Rod and do what needs to be done.

Soul Blazer’s soundtrack was composed by Yukihide Takekawa, who was (and is) known more for his work outside of video games than within it. It’s an excellent soundtrack, though, which is basically expected from Quintet’s SNES-era titles, and the songs all do an excellent job of creating the mood for a specific location while also seeming fitting for that location. The epic — and I mean that in the “grand, sweeping” sense, not the “bacon” one — compositions of ActRaiser are mostly missing here, with more of an emphasis on what the SNES could do with a bass and a backbeat. Each area — outside of towns, which share a very ActRaiser-style theme — sounds unique thanks to the soundtrack, and the one “epic” styled song, that of the boss themes, is great, albeit less memorable and catchy than the rest of the bunch. The Battle against Deathtoll hits its marks by managing to combine the two styles:

While Soul Blazer isn’t the looker that Terranigma would be, that shouldn’t be a surprise. Its world and characters weren’t designed by a manga artist, and this was much earlier in the SNES lifespan, too. And really, everything looks pretty good even to this day thanks to strong design elements, outside of the protagonist, who carried on Quintet’s very specific idea of what a larger sprite should look like from ActRaiser. Even that’s fine, though, and the walking animation might take a little getting used to until you realize they bothered to fully animate his limbs in a way you didn’t always see in a genre where legs might be hidden in favor of some shuffling feet to denote movement.

Overall, there’s very little to criticize Soul Blazer for, as you probably gathered given the biggest ding so far is “protagonist doesn’t look stunning.” In some ways, it’s not quite as refined as what was to come from Quintet on the SNES, in terms of graphics or storytelling or game mechanics, but that’s more of a compliment for Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma than it is meant to denigrate Soul Blazer’s accomplishments, which are plentiful. It’s a lovely action RPG that treats its subject and gameplay with a different approach than not just games of the time, but plenty of games since, and it’s a shame that it, like so much of Quintet’s library, simply isn’t available anywhere to legally play in the present.

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