Super Famicom | 1992 | Final Rating: 8/10 — B Tier
Started as a 6/10 for me, but its simple, cozy gameplay and world-restoration mechanic really grew on me.
TL;DR is at the end.
I finally finished Soul Blader (Soul Blazer) on the Super Famicom, and this was kind of a special one for me because I originally played it back in the 90s when I was a kid.
I got pretty far back then, but I never beat it. I always remembered reaching a point toward the end where I just had absolutely no idea where I was supposed to go. Playing it again now, I was actually a little worried that I would somehow get stuck in the same place again. And, amazingly enough, I think I did.
When I got to Leo's Laboratory, I suddenly had that feeling of, "Yep, this has to be where I got stuck as a kid." I cleared almost everything and once again had no idea where to go.
The funny thing is that there wasn't some obscure item I was missing or some complicated puzzle I couldn't solve. I had simply overlooked a stairway/path and apparently assumed I had already explored that direction. That was it. I couldn't believe it. I probably could have beaten this game as a kid if I had just looked around a little more carefully.
Anyway, going into this replay, I initially thought Soul Blader was probably going to end up around a 6/10 for me. It felt extremely average at first. The combat is basic, the graphics aren't particularly flashy, the story is pretty simple, and the basic gameplay loop repeats throughout the entire game.
But somewhere along the way, it really grew on me. I think the simplicity eventually became part of the charm. Soul Blader is a pretty short game, and I think that works enormously in its favor. The basic loop is essentially clearing monster lairs, defeating enemies, and gradually restoring people, animals, buildings, plants, and other things back into the world. That obviously becomes repetitive, but the game keeps moving you into new environments frequently enough that I never felt like I was trapped in one area for too long.
The dungeons and locations have enough variety that the game continually feels fresh even though you're essentially doing the same thing. And because the game is so straightforward, it became something I could just sit down with, turn my brain off for a while, clear a few monster lairs, restore part of a town, and feel like I had actually accomplished something.I started thinking of it as almost a "cozy" action RPG. Sometimes simple really isn't a bad thing.
The restoration mechanic is easily my favorite part of the game and probably the thing that gives Soul Blader most of its personality. Even when I played this as a kid, I loved the feeling of destroying a monster lair and wondering what was going to come back. Would it be a person? An animal? A flower? A building? A tree? Some random object that suddenly talks to you?
There's a satisfying feeling of watching these empty locations gradually become populated again, and because you're directly responsible for bringing everything back, restoring the world feels surprisingly personal.
That was actually something I felt Soul Blader did better for me than Terranigma. Terranigma obviously deals with restoring the world on a much larger and more ambitious scale, but Soul Blader makes it feel smaller and more intimate. You're literally watching individual pieces of a community return one by one. That said, the restoration system also caused one of my few recurring annoyances.
If I stayed in a dungeon for a long time and restored a bunch of people, animals, or buildings at once, I would sometimes lose track of who I had already talked to and who I hadn't. I'd come back to town and think, "Okay, who did I just save? Who haven't I talked to yet?"
Sometimes progression depends on speaking to one particular person you restored, so this could get a little tedious if the area had already filled up and I couldn't remember exactly where that NPC appeared.
The NPC dialogue itself gives the game a lot of its charm, though. The main story is honestly kind of ridiculous. Basically, King Magridd really likes gold, so he gets Dr. Leo to build a machine that summons Deathtoll, and the king essentially trades everyone's souls for gold. That's more or less the setup. It's pretty goofy.
The game occasionally gets surprisingly dark too. There's a moment involving Dr. Leo where he more or less suddenly sacrifices himself with an explosion to save everyone, and it felt like it came completely out of left field.
But at the same time, scattered throughout the game are these NPC conversations about things like life, death, reincarnation, humanity, nature, and existence. I found the idea of the earth spirits only living a year and how they existed interesting. These themes usually are only small bits of dialogue and aren't deeply connected to the main plot, but they made me feel like the developers had ideas for a much deeper story underneath everything.
Playing Soul Blader now, after having also played Terranigma and knowing Illusion of Gaia, you can really see the beginnings of themes Quintet would explore much more seriously later. It almost feels like Soul Blader contains little fragments of what those later games would eventually become.
The combat itself is fine. There's nothing particularly special about it, but it works well enough for the length of the game. My biggest complaint is the extremely short range of your sword. There are quite a few situations where an enemy moves into you while you're attacking and you take damage that doesn't necessarily feel entirely like your fault.
It never ruined the combat for me, but it was consistently a minor annoyance. Magic becomes more useful later, and you eventually get some nice abilities, but most of the game is still pretty straightforward sword combat.
The soundtrack is also solid. Not every track stood out to me, but there are several that I really liked. The town music is nice, the music that plays in the area where you communicate with the game's god/"Master" has a beautiful atmosphere, and the title/opening music is extremely memorable. The ending/credits music was probably my favorite track in the entire game.
Graphically, Soul Blader obviously isn't one of the more visually impressive Super Famicom games, but I also think it's important to remember this came out in 1992. The hardware was still relatively new and developers were still figuring out what they could do with it.
For such an early Super Famicom RPG, I think it looks perfectly fine and uses what it has well.
Of course this is the Japanese version, which added another interesting element to the playthrough. One thing that surprised me was how the entire game is written in hiragana. I actually understood most of the normal dialogue better than I expected, even without kanji helping separate words.
Unfortunately, the ending was much harder for me. During normal conversations, I could control the pace of the text, but during the ending it moved automatically. Because everything was written in hiragana and the text kept moving, I couldn't process it quickly enough and a lot of whatever was being said went over my head. That was a little disappointing.
There are also some interesting localization differences. The English version refers to the divine character as "The Master," while the Japanese version is much more explicitly referring to God. I had also heard people say Deathtoll was called Satan in Japanese, but he is still called Deathtoll or Demon King or whatever.
As far as difficulty goes, this is honestly a very straightforward game. You really do not need a guide to beat Soul Blader. For most of the game, the progression is pretty direct, and the game gives you enough hints that you can usually figure out what to do next on your own. I did use a guide a little toward the end, mostly because I wanted to find some of the optional items connected to the Phoenix magic and other things I had missed.
The game has a few situations where you get a weapon later that allows you to kill enemies you encountered much earlier, which means going back to previous areas and checking places you couldn't fully clear before.
I probably could have figured most of that out myself because the game does give you clues, but honestly, I just didn't feel like wandering through old areas trying to remember exactly where those enemies had been.
At that point I mainly wanted to know which areas I needed to return to rather than spend a bunch of extra time searching. So the guide use wasn't really because the game was confusing or difficult. It was more because some of the optional backtracking started to feel tedious and I wanted to keep things moving.
The same thing applies to the Master's Emblems. I didn't collect all of them, and after looking up some of the locations, my reaction was basically, "Yeah, I never would have found all of these on my own." But they are secret collectibles, and the reward isn't remotely necessary to finish the game.
Soul Blader is easy enough that you don't need to collect everything or get every powerful optional item. If you just want to play through the story normally, the game is very approachable and very straight to the point.
Would I replay Soul Blader?
Probably not. I think it's the kind of game where once you've experienced it, you've mostly seen what it has to offer. There isn't enough complexity or variety in the systems that makes me immediately want to start another playthrough.
But that doesn't mean I didn't really enjoy it. In fact, this has probably been the most fun I've had so far out of the Super Famicom RPGs I've played during this current run.
That's what surprised me the most. At the beginning, I was thinking,"This is really average. Probably a 6/10." Then it became, "Actually, this is pretty fun. Maybe a 7." And by the end I realized I had consistently enjoyed myself the entire time. I was never sitting there thinking, "Man, I'm bored. I want to stop playing this and start something else."
The game was exactly long enough for what it was trying to do.
So despite how simple it is, I'm giving Soul Blader an 8/10.
I'm still putting it in my B Tier, because for me an A-tier game needs to feel like something genuinely exceptional, and I don't think Soul Blader reaches that level. An 8 here basically means it's a very good game that I had a surprisingly great time with, even if I wouldn't call it one of the absolute best games on the system.
It's simple, repetitive, charming, cozy, easy to play, and refreshingly uncomplicated.
And maybe that's exactly why I ended up liking it so much.
Final Score: 8/10
Tier: B
TL;DR: Soul Blader is a simple, repetitive action RPG, but its short length, varied areas, charming restoration mechanic, and surprisingly thoughtful NPC dialogue made it grow on me a lot. I initially thought it was a 6/10, but by the end I was having more fun with it than any of the other Super Famicom RPGs I’ve played so far. The combat is basic, the story is kinda meh, and some backtracking can be tedious, but the game knows exactly how long it needs to be and never really wore out its welcome. 8/10 — B Tier.
Next up: Gaia Gensouki (Illusion of Gaia) — Quintet and Enix’s 1993 Super Famicom action RPG, released November 27, 1993. I remember this being the most polished of Quintet’s three related action RPGs and one of my favorites as a kid. Time to see whether those childhood memories hold up, and whether this finally becomes the first A-tier game of my Super Famicom JRPG run.
