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Soul Blazer review

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After touring through both Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma, I got curious about their predecessor, the supposedly arcade-y, action-y and simplistic Soul Blazer. Well, it is certainly all those things. BUT, it is also a very oddly charming and enjoyable game, despite that.

I think this comes down to its gameplay loop, mainly. See, you're an angel tasked to destroy monsters and rescue captive/dead life, and you accomplish both by destroying monster spawners. Doing so not only offers XP and progression, but directly releases formerly captive/dead inhabitants immediately. As in, fully functional NPCs, complete with sprites, dialogue, and sometimes even sidequests and items! This means that while you're making progress in the dungeon, you're also actively progressing with the restoration of life, and can get to feel it yourself.

The game smartly uses this format to create fun vignettes, like delving into the backstory of a dolphin who was a shipwrecked man in its former life, or giving respite to a mole's soul by bestowing it one of its beloved's possessions. These are, in my opinion, the defining feature of the game, and singlehandedly add a lot of charm to the proceedings.

In addition, the game is also smart about not wasting the player's time. There is minimal backtracking, most spawner linked monsters stay dead permanently after being defeated, and there are enough save points scattered around smartly, making repeated attempts decently quick and painless. The only real punishment for dying is losing your casting currency, and that's so easy to work around it barely comes up as a real problem. I only had to grind once, and it was but a minor bump in the journey.

Of course, this is not to say the game is perfect. The combat is very simplistic, most enemies are mindless mobs, and the dungeons do tend to drag a few times, especially since some portions of them are rather blandly tiled. By most "objective" measures, this is a worse game than either of its successors...and yet, it is more consistently enjoyable than them. What can I say, I really enjoy saving townsfolk I guess.

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