Soul Blazer reviewed

If you guys remember my Illusion of Gaia review I mentioned the Soul Blazer trilogy.  Of course, a lot of people played Illusion of Gaia and I was happy to leave it at that.  But then something started bugging me about maybe I should play the other two games in the series.  So I thought I should start at the beginning of the series with Soul Blazer.  Of course I was thinking this game would play fairly similar to Illusion of Gaia....boy was I wrong.  So with that said, I'll explain further as we dig into Soul Blazer.

Some time ago King Magridd of the Freil Empire finds out about this inventor guy Dr. Leo who can invent anything.  So the King impressions the doctor and forces him to invent a way to get the evil spirit Deathtoll into contact....which he does and that makes Deathtoll come.  So Deathtoll offers Magridd a gold piece for every living soul in the kingdom and he agrees so every living soul is now every living monster.  The Master of this world sends a plucky young angel ie YOU to go down, kill everything that moves and repopulate the kingdom.


Now I mentioned in Illusion of Gaia that it was a tad difficult to classify in a specific genre.  Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with that but I thought I should mention it just the same.  In Soul Blazer, it is ridiculously easy to classify, it's an action-RPG like Legend of Zelda II.  You go to a room, you kill all the monsters, you save all the people, plants and animals & you level up.  You basically do that for the entire game and it's incredibly simple but it is actually pretty fun.  There's something so nice about not thinking of anything but just swinging your sword until something dies.  Oh sure, you'll have to change swords a couple time to exploit weaknesses but that happens but a couple time.  Lastly, you can do the moonwalk if you hold the shoulder buttons on the SNES controller.

However, this game does not make anything easy.  I hesitate to call this maddeningly hard but at a few times I was really frustrated with how cheap the enemies are.  Most of the enemies come from this generator thing and they have a few seconds of invulnerability so you can't hurt them until they become vulnerable.  However, they can hurt you and if you're not careful, they can hurt you a lot.  Also, some of the bosses are actually quite cheap.  They're attacks are hard-to-avoid and they're usually at close range so it makes dodging even harder.

But all in all, for some weird reason I like this game.  It's the equivalent to a summer blockbuster where you turn off your brain and see some monsters die by your hand with a fairly slim story you expect from those types of movies.  The graphics may be simplistic but they are colorful.  Is this as good as Illusion of Gaia?  Almost but not quite.  While I blasted Gaia for having too much padding, I almost wanted some padding for Soulblazer.  But on the other hand, you can beat this game in a full day so it's not all bad.  It's decent fun but you'll forget it as soon as you beat it.

7/10