Monday, July 28, 2008

Soul Blazer, Joel Frasier

Quintet's first video game was ActRaiser. My memories of ActRaiser are limited almost exclusively to the background music from the first stage and an episode of Nick Arcade. Mostly, as a kid, I just remember being really disappointed that the hacking and slashing of that first stage suddenly gave way to some kind of top-down SimCity bullshit, and that my manly sword-wielding warrior was replaced by this tiny weiner angel.

For a while, I've wanted to go back and see what I missed in ActRaiser. I thought about buying it on the Virtual Console. "Don't do that," my little brother said. "That's stupid."

"YOU'RE stupid," I told him. But I relented. After all, why go back and dredge up the past, when there are so many new games to play?

Then, while my back was turned, my little brother went to the X-Zone at Nanuet Mall, where he bought Doom and Soul Blazer for five bucks each. As some sort of olive branch for telling me that my desire to play ActRaiser was stupid, he gave Soul Blazer to me and told me to play it.

Soul Blazer, also by Quintet, is essentially a spin-off of ActRaiser. You take the role of a divine being sent by "the Master" - Nintendo of America's clever pseudonym for God - to revive the world, which has been emptied of all sentient life as a result of a Faustian deal between the king of the land and the evil deity, Deathtoll.

Each time you enter a new area in the game, it is completely desolate. No NPCs or anything - just you and the environment. After you walk around the giant empty space, failing to find anything but the magic tile that you teleported in on, you're only choice is to walk to an adjacent screen, where "monster lairs" spew out streams of demons. By defeating these demons and deactivating the lair, you release a new creature that appears in the "safe" screen back at the beginning of each area. Your mission is to dungeon-crawl from monster lair to monster lair, freeing creatures and carving new paths until you reach the boss who opens up the road to the next area.



The game itself is very simple. You gain magic spells along the way, which can be handy when you can actually aim them, but really, it all comes down to slashing. You press the button, you slash the sword, you kill the monsters, over and over. Rather than being merely rote, the constant slashing fosters a kind of arcade-style hypnosis, and you immediately understand that the challenge isn't so much in the slashing as it is in positioning yourself and anticipating the position of your enemies.

Despite the game's extremely repetitive nature, there's a constant delight in seeing who or what the defeat of each monster lair will release, and these continous rewards goad you on. "Yes!" you think, "My world is coming together!" I often played while my little brother was in the same room on his computer, and I would read the text in the dialog boxes aloud to keep him updated. "ButtLord released an old man." "ButtLord released a tulip." "ButtLord released a squirrel." By reflex I would sometimes read the text aloud even when I was alone.



Some creatures give you useful items or advice. Some thank you profusely for bringing them back to life. Some... well, some are just NPCs. But despite the cut and dry translation, the world is full of a colorful array of creatures. A magician deer, a pioneer basset hound, a shly romantic soldier, an angel fish that tries to impress you by jumping very high, and this one mole who pops up and says, "BOO!" when you walk by.

Seriously. You are on a mission for the Master, trying to revive the world and defeat the forces of evil, and this fucking mole is hiding in a hole in the wall waiting for you to walk by so that he can scare you. But, hey, it's just a mole. If that's what it wants to do with the life that's been returned to it, more power to it.

There is a mermaid in the underwater queendom of St. Elles whom, upon being released, tells you that she is one of the Queen's dancers, and if you release the other two dancers, they will perform for you. When you finally release all three, they invite you to dance, at which point you figure that the music will change or a cut scene will start. But no. They all just swim back and forth repeatedly. You kind of expect a token of their gratitude in return for reuniting them, an item or a new magic spell or something. But the dance is all. They're dancers, after all.



There is one man you release early in the game who guards the bridge to the other side of the first town. When you walk towards him, he steps out of the way before you reach him, effectively granting you passage. You don't even have to talk to him. He's completely superfluous. He just comes packaged with the release of the bridge. It's interesting, though, how the game says, "ButtLord released the bridge keeper," as opposed to "ButtLord released the bridge." The bridge may be more important to me in that it aids my progress, but in the world of the game, the man who guards it is much more special.

At one point, you pick up an item called the Dream Rod - which looks a lot like the star-tipped wand from the Kirby games and Super Smash Bros. With it, you can visit the dreams of sleeping creatures. You know which ones are sleeping because talking to them gives you a "Zzzzz" message.

This message appears when you examine a tulip that isn't wafting happily in the wind like the other tulips. "Zzzzz," the tulip says, even though tulips aren't known to snore - or maybe only heavenly beings can hear the snore of a tulip. Entering its dream brings you into a little room, with a little red bird in it. When it sleeps, the tulip dreams that it is a bird.

As you go from region to region, you release different sorts of creatures. Middling townsfolk, nobility, woodland creatures, aquatic creatures, domestic creatures, etc. There is one region, the Mountain of Souls, that is home to a peculiar race of halflings that travel by hopping or by riding on giant cave snails. Talking to a bouncy mushroom reveals that these creatures are born, grow up, get married, grow old and die all within the span of a year. The mushroom goes on to say that these creatures never feel that life is too short.



One of the first named NPCs that you meet in the game is Lisa, the daughter of the brilliant Dr. Leo who was forced by King Magridd to create the machine that summoned Deathtoll. When she is revived, she appears in her house at the edge of the town where she lives by herself. She is relentlessly grateful to you for reviving her. Her gratitude slowly but surely turns to romantic interest. Between the loss of her father and her impossible love for a heavenly being, Lisa is fairly tormented.

At King Magridd's castle, you meet a harpist who tells you that he once fell for a girl with "a name like Lisa."

Though your avatar can comprehend the languages of all creatures (including certain doors and cabinets), he is completely silent. Despite being the Master's only agent, you cannot speak for him, which is probably a good thing. Imagine the kind of questions you'd have to answer for the Master. "Where were you when Deathtoll was here?" "Why wasn't I born a bird?" "Why can't I leave this bridge?" Like some sort of idol, people talk to you, but you're unable to give them the spoken reassurance that they want. You restore their life, sure, but after that, they're on their own.

There are a few points in the game were you can reply Yes or No to a particular question. At the end of the game, Lisa asks you a question, but there is no choice as to your reponse. The only answer you can give is Yes. At this point, rather than being a conduit for the player's thoughts, the avatar gains a desire; he doesn't want you to say No, so he won't let you.

Soul Blazer has a sort of quaint thoughtfulness that is mostly overshadowed by things like extremely short sentences and gorillas that you need a certain sword to defeat. Still, I'd like to think that the existentialist beats made more sophisticated games (Earthbound, Valkyrie Profile) possible.

If anything, at least it was a good set-up for Illusion of Gaia.

1 comment:

  1. B. True8:15 PM

    "This message appears when you examine a tulip that isn't wafting happily in the wind like the other tulips. "Zzzzz," the tulip says, even though tulips aren't known to snore - or maybe only heavenly beings can hear the snore of a tulip. Entering its dream brings you into a little room, with a little red bird in it. When it sleeps, the tulip dreams that it is a bird."

    Okay, question: does it dream that it's a bird, or the wind under the bird's wings?

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