Thursday, April 7, 2011

Soul Blazer (SNES) Illusion of Gaia (SNES)

I'm working my way through the Quintet series of games on SNES on the Xboxen.  I started with Illusion of Gaia which is a very linear action-RPG.  I liked the concept that killing every enemy in the room gives you an upgrade.  I liked that it had me marooned on a raft for a few weeks and it actually felt like I was marooned for a few weeks.  You also hear a lot about the pig sacrificing itself to feed a starving village but before that the plot goes completely freaking nuts.  I'm not sure how much of that was the terrible translation and how much of that was over-ambition.  None of the actual game playing is as good as a Zelda, but it was a nice change of pace.

Soul Blazer/Soul Blader is the game Quintet made before IoG.  It's much more formulaic.  Now when you finish fighing monsters you release people/animals/furniture/plants into the world to repopulate it.  It has a better translation strangely.   "You've released a goat."  FUCK YEAH I DID.  It's sort of like Ys III in forcing a romantic subplot at the end.  There's a girl who is sad her dad is dead but then you met her dad who is alive and then dies and then at the end you become human to be with her?  It even gives you a no choice prompt of "Will you return one day?"  >Yes

Made me think of how awkard the love plot is in Crisis Core or FF8.  You would think with the amount of romantic film/books/manga that Japan puts out they could just copy a half-decent one. 

How's Soul Blazer the game?  I had fun for the first dungeon/town and then you do the exact same thing 5 more times.  It has a very small soundtrack that they reuse it for different towns and dungeons increasing the repetive monotonous nature.  I almost stopped playing the game at the first boss, until I realize he required a tiny bit of effort.  He's also the only boss I remember.  He's also a bonus boss if you collect crap in IoG which honestly doesn't feel like a reward.

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