indigozeal

I finished Soul Blazer a couple nights ago, and I'm pleased to report that it was pretty good! I'm writing out of order here - I still haven't talked about Terranigma - but I don't think a few paragraphs will go amiss.

The plot concerns a king who sold his subjects' souls to a demon in exchange for gold. (The demon's name is "Deathtoll," and the game's box, rather terrifically, exhorts the player to "make Deathtoll pay.") You're an angel sent down in human form by the god of the land, the Master (the same Master who headlines ActRaiser, in fact), and you're charged with reconstructing & repopulating the land. When you first arrive in a given region, you'll typically find little but a deserted wasteland and an entrance to a dungeon. As you defeat the creatures within the dungeons, however, you'll one by one release the souls of the land's former inhabitants. The soul's return to life & home is illustrated with a satisfying & well-done effect: as a given soul reincarnates, the structures which they knew and inhabitated in life are rebuilt around them - houses are reconstructed starting with the foundation, then with the walls, then with the layers of the roof; the tree where a bird once nested grows & releafs, etc. This video showcases some examples of the process starting a little more than five minutes in. Thus the world also comes back to life as its souls return to it.

You'll note that you're saving not just the souls of people, but souls of animals and even plants as well. Here we find the origins of Terranigma's animism: every soul is important, and every one helps you accomplish your goal, from people who give you information to dogs who sniff out the locations of new items to ivy that you can climb to reach new locations. Soul Blazer has a welcome thoughtfulness regarding the lives of its NPCs: you can peer into the dreams of a dozing tree, for instance, and learn that it yearns to be a bird, flying free & mobile.

Then there's the tale of the widower who, in his loneliness, has taken in a goat that unbeknownst to him is the reincarnation of his wife; your divine avatar (who, being from heaven, can communicate with all God's creatures) learns from the goat that while she can no longer speak with her husband in her current form, she enjoys his company. (I imagine this situation will turn a bit complicated if the man chooses to remarry, but so it goes.) The overall plot isn't as elaborate or thematically focused from beginning to end as Terranigma (and it kind of wastes its very last act on a forgettable & extremely thin damsel-in-distress love-interest plot), but Soul Blazer's investment in the people of its world, how it values them and puts them at center stage, sets its apart - it's a game not of one big story, but of a hundred little ones that are no less important.

It also has a great, humanizing sense of humor.

The action itself's not very complex (battle tactics consist mainly of intuiting where to position yourself for best defense, which is usually some variety of "diagonal"), but it benefits from being breezy & fun. Your larger strategy revolves more around knowing when to go back to town for more items or clues on how to progress, or just to recover. Fortunately, the game is kind again here: it gives you a few bars of health back every time you release a soul, and it seeds the dungeons with special gems that allow you to return to town, which show up with fairly perfect timing. It doesn't take the challenge out of the game, but it keeps the title approachable and user-friendly.

(One very minor sour note I have to mention, though, just in case you end up playing this yourself: the Master's Emblem G is hidden somewhere that's absolutely undiscoverable without a walkthrough.)

The graphics and sound are rather inoffensive yet unremarkable early-SNES fare. There are a good number of imaginative locations, though, like the model town where you fight toy soldiers and go tromping through like Gulliver through Lilliput. The game's not on any absolute best-of-system lists, yet it's well-respected and fondly-remembered in a good many quarters, and I can see why. I logged a little over 13 hours for a completionist playthrough, so if you're looking for a fast-'n'-friendly action RPG to play, you could do far worse than Soul Blazer.
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