Soul Blazer (1992)
Genres:Role-playing (RPG), Adventure
Themes:Open world, Action, Fantasy
Game modes:Single player
Story:Soul Blazer, known in Japan as Soul Blader, is a Super Nintendo Entertainment System action role-playing game developed by Quintet and published by Enix (now Square Enix). Soul Blazer was released on January 31, 1992 in Japan, on November 27, 1992 in North America, and on January 27, 1994 in Europe. Similar to the company's previous game ActRaiser, the player takes the role of a divine angel, deity or lesser-deity, or avatar, sent by a divinity, called The Master, to destroy monsters and release the captured souls of a world's inhabitants. Soul Blazer was scored by Yukihide Takekawa.Show more
I really spent so much of my early childhood trying to make sense of this game and while its not a final fantasy or other big name rpg from this era it still helped foster a love of different fantasy universes and rpg settings. It was one of the first games I played that you could see the impact you were making as you progressed because people and buildings would return as you defeated monsters and progressed further.
Soul Blazer is the 1st title in a loose trilogy of action-RPG/adventure games, alongside Illusion of Gaia & Terranigma, from the now defunct Quintet. While it is the weakest of the 3 (not surprising, given it is the 1st in the trilogy), it is still a very good game. The Quintet trilogy are all very good games, iconic of examples of a popular & distinctive 16-bit era genre.
Moreover, the Quintet trilogy, with it's themes of a player character agent-of-the-gods restoring the world piece by piece, is arguably a major inspiration for other games - Dark Cloud, Legend of Mana, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Lost Sphear, & Dragon Quest Builders, & a slew of Minecraft Skyblock maps are all stealing from Quintet's narrative homework.
The games have never had an official re-release, they're only available in their original SNES/Super Famicom cartridges, or thru (*ahem* extra-legal) ROM emulation. They are exactly the kind of game the preservation program seeks to preserve, & they deserve your votes to help make preservation a reality.
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