Collection essentials #249: Soul Blazer (SNES)

I talked about Illusion of Gaia before and how it was one of my favorite childhood games. Its developer, Quintet, had made other SNES games, but since we didn’t have the internet at home in my childhood, I didn’t know that. So imagine my excitement when, after we finally got the internet in my early teen years, I found out that Illusion of Gaia was the middle game of a loosely-connected trilogy! Indeed, the game’s secret boss was even taken straight from the game that came before, and I never knew it. 

Soul Blazer is a top-down-perspective action adventure game like Illusion of Gaia, but the games are very different in practice. And, actually, Soul Blazer seems to have taken inspiration from an even older Quintet SNES game that I’ve also covered already, that being ActRaiser. In ActRaiser, there were “simulation” portions of the game where you as the god-like character construct a town, and you wind up with rewards that help you out in the action segments. Soul Blazer similarly involves constructing a town, sort of. The game features a series of towns that have been sealed away with “monster lairs”. The towns are entirely empty at the start of the game. But as you traverse the dungeon associated with each town and destroy the monster lairs, parts of the town will be restored. Each lair is associated with a certain person or thing in the town that will come back to life. And, naturally, there are gameplay rewards to doing this, which creates a rather addictive gameplay loop as you become excited to see which people or things in the town you’ll bring back to life next. Sometimes you’ll even be able to return to previous areas in the game to destroy monster lairs that you couldn’t before for special rewards!

In addition to swinging with your sword, there’s a white ball that circles your character that you can use to cast magic spells as well. The spell usually comes out of wherever the ball happens to be, so you have to pay attention with your timing to make sure you’ll actually hit your target. The combat is fun, but the biggest knock on the game is probably that it can feel a little repetitive for some players. Sometimes monster lairs involve just killing the same monster several times in a row.

I wound up getting Soul Blazer on eBay in 2004 (the very cartridge in the photo, though the box and inserts I acquired much later) and played it before very long. My dad had played and enjoyed Illusion of Gaia as well, so he also played through Soul Blazer at about the same time I did. And I do believe this was the last time that my dad played through and beat a video game. As of this post, the save battery is still alive and our original files are there. (I think I backed them up, too)

I’ve only ever played Soul Blazer that one time, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. Since that was nearly 20 years ago, there’s quite a lot of the game that I don’t remember well, and it may warrant revisiting at some point. While I think Quintet’s future games were even better, this one is still a definite essential.