A look back at: Soul Blazer

Do the words "arcade" and "RPG" really go together? It's hard to say, because when I think of RPG I think heavily of story-driven games that take much longer than an arcade game. Then you have games that feel like they should be arcade games but have the RPG drive to them. Soul Blazer is such a game, a Quintet action RPG that really feels like what Zelda ought to be as an actual RPG game.

The dungeons are definitely standard for action RPG, but what you are doing is fighting enemies from "lairs" which eventually run out. And then things happen once you do that. Sure, I can talk about other things, like easily predictable enemies, leveling up your characters and gaining more health, or the telekinesis thing prevalent in this trio of series where you can just put your sword out (also has a good stab effect). I could also talk about how you need certain swords for certain enemies, and the nice nonlinearity on returning to previous areas where you can kill enemies you couldn't kill before.

But I will talk about the premise of this game. How did all of this happen? What exactly is your main hero doing? Well, if you venture out, you'll realize there's nothing on the overworld, so what do you do? You go underground, kill the enemies from the lair, and slowly you restore the inhabitants of the overworld locations to what they were. Whether it is a town with humans, or a forest with animals and flowers, or apparently some talking furniture in some guy's house, you are restoring what had been removed. The king and queen of Magridd, along with Dr. Leo, release the evil Deathtoll which is the cause for all the emptiness in the overworld. Surely enough, these characters once freed eventually realize that they shouldn't have done that, save the queen who for some reason still prefers to bargain with the evil spirit. She's not really villainous enough though, and Deathtoll himself isn't really anything more than a traditional Big Bad once you reach him. But the whole premise of restoring the world to what it should be is pretty impressive, especially given that this is an action RPG. The last game in the small trio of action RPGs released by Quintet manages to take this concept and give it a much better implication, but Soul Blazer's more arcade-style gameplay combined well with the action RPG stance making it a good one in my book.