“Friday Old Games” is a series of articles in which we review a game from the older generations of consoles, share why we picked it, and whether or not it holds up with time.

Soul Blazer is a member of the prestigious Quintet Quintet, five cult games created by Japanese studio Quintet and published by Pre-Squared Enix. Around the era of Final Fantasy VI, Secret of Mana, and WingDamage’s beloved Chrono Trigger, Quintet was slaving away at creating some of the most creative games of the SNES era.

In a time where Publishers were the face of gaming, Quintet stood out as one of the few developers who had complete control over their body of work.

Soul Blazer is a Zelda style Dungeon crawler that, like all Quintet games, revolves around a god, who in this case is named “The Master”. God is worried. His people, the Frelians, have had their souls ransacked by an unrelenting horde of sinister monsters created by his eternal enemy Death Toll, who may or may not be the personification of evil. To battle the onslaught of ferocious creatures, The Master creates you, the Warrior, to rain divine vengeance upon your unholy foes.

And by raining divine fire upon your unholy foes, I mean slowly swinging your sword. Slowly. Soul Blazer could very well have been one of those lost gems in the pantheon of lost gems, i.e. Earthbound or Secret of Evermore. But it suffers an incredibly weak opening that will test the limits of most casual JRPG players to the limit.

The Warrior feels like he’s thrust into the middle of a dungeon with a limp, inflatable baseball bat. Prepare to be one of the wimpiest RPG characters in the history of the genre. Enemies take five swipes of the sword to die, and the sword doesn’t even stun the enemies. Each battle turns into a minute long battle of dodging and slowly stepping backwards. When there’s around five to seven monsters in a room, this can get annoying, especially with monsters that cast magic.

But I soldiered on, and with the right armor, weapons, and spells, Soul Blazer evened out in difficulty. Soon, the sword takes a back seat to the magic, which sort of becomes the core of the gameplay. Certain bosses are immune to anything but the properly placed spell. Soon, when the game’s combat settles into a smoother ride, I focused much more on the world of Soul Blazer its self.

Quintet has some how stitched this strange, ethereal world together. It’s an odd pairing of traditional Japanese shinto Folklore and a traditional European village straight out of a Flemish painting. Yet, there’s sort of a gothic aesthetic to the village, an eeriness that rests in the souls of its inhabitants. It’s…. disconcerting, especially when the game starts planting little philosophical ideas in your head.

Why did I pick this game?

Quintet’s quintet is such a fascinating piece of gaming history, I felt obligated to try at least one of their titles out. Naturally, I tilted more to the Zelda style dungeon crawler more so then the standard JRPGs. I didn’t want to start with Actraiser, as it is already the much more talked about member of the Quintet Quintet.

How does it hold up with time?

Gameplay wise, it can’t touch the classics of the SNES era, like the aforementioned Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana. The early stages are going to be a real test for some players, and the game remains pretty slow up until the final stages.

But if you stick with it, you might find the same smart little game I found in Soul Blazer. It doesn’t quite have the same ambition as its peers, but it’s got heart, and that goes a long way in a JRPG.

Tags: Friday Old Games, Quintet, SNES, Soul Blazer

This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 10:10 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.