The Quintet Sextet - Soul Blazer

Quintet's a developer with a lot of clout for a very specific crowd. It’s a company that burned exceptionally brightly on the Super Nintendo, carving a legacy that sparks reverence from fans of the console to this day. The only game of theirs that's still actually officially playable at this point is ActRaiser, and it probably has the most lasting cultural memory, but the trilogy which started with Soul Blazer is still revered. These games had been on my to-play list for well over a decade at this point so I finally bit the bullet and played Soul Blazer. It's the start of a short but sweet journey, but to be fair that's totally in-line with the game's philosophy.

Quintet itself deserves a bit of extra introduction though. I've occasionally joked with friends that if you look far enough into the corporate family tree of any developer behind a cult classic Japanese RPG you will come back to one of two companies—Nihon Falcom and Nihon Telenet. Both companies were quite prolific at one time, producing many important games. Both saw massive talent brain-drains at various points in their histories, and those brain-drains spawned at least a dozen eclectic studios. Quintet hails from Nihon Falcom, staffed by developers who helped make the Ys series. They also had ties with composer Yuzo Koshiro, who left Falcom as well to form a company called Ancient. I've never been able to work out satisfactorily what actually happened to cause it, but following "Ys II: THE FINAL CHAPTER" and "Ys III: Wanderers From Ys," huge portions of that company left, often working together but all on their own games. Quintet's first game would be ActRaiser, and while that would be a logical place to start, I want to consider it separately from the trilogy as its duology is thematically consistent but mechanically distant from these games. Thus we land on Quintet's sophomore effort, a game which mechanically better reflects their starting point as former Ys staffers.

Soul Blazer sets the player as an... angel? set down by "the Master" to restore a destroyed world. You do this by going into dungeons and destroying monsters until the monster portal (or monster lairs as the game dubs them) they spawn from turns green. Step on the lair and a piece of the area you're in will be restored. 

It's an exceptionally simple game in mechanical terms; a logical successor to Ys. Ys (pronounced ‘ees’ and named after a Franco-Celtic legendary city swallowed by the ocean) is basically the simplest possible action RPG designed for very, very limited early Japanese computers. Attacks were performed by just moving into the enemy, seemingly to limit the required number of inputs. Ys 2 added the ability to cast magic, and so Soul Blazer builds essentially from this basis. Blazer (as future material would call the protagonist) can swing his sword, hold it out in front of him in a sort of combination of strafing and an ersatz version of Ys 1 and 2's "bumping combat" as it came to be known, and learn magic spells. In this sense it's an exceptionally simple game. Very little was added to this game for style or flair; it all serves a strict and utilitarian purpose.

Soul Blazer is kind of the masterclass in showing how much elements build off each other. It's the game equivalent of your favorite home cooked meal made out of 5 ingredients. Let me be clear, the town rebuilding in this game is not some Sim game style reconstruction mechanic. Every piece of every town is keyed to a specific monster lair. As you destroy monster lairs the town rebuilds itself piece by piece with no player guidance. Occasionally the player must return to a town to move on with whatever dungeon they're in, but the "core" of the game is a straight up, almost Gauntlet-esque dungeon crawl. This isn't a complaint, I just want to impress how much the game is built on its simple ideas and atmosphere. Watching the town rebuild is soothing, it makes everything in the game feel directly connected, like the things Blazer is doing have a real and tangible effect on the well being of the world. Everything about the process is methodical, meant to be taken in at a leisurely pace. On death the player isn't admonished for a lack of skillful play, they're admonished to take things slow and make steady progress. Enemies don't often spawn all at once so there's a measured pace to slowly killing monsters as they teleport in from the lair. The actual NPCs you rescue also reflect a core philosophical theme that life is to be taken and enjoyed at its own pace. One of the villages you restore is a mountain village full of gnomes who live for only a year. That time is taken up in deliberately plodding activities such as snail races, seemingly entirely to illustrate this point.

The game is also touching on the concept of reincarnation. The villain of the piece threatens to end the cycle of reincarnation. Various characters are implied to have reincarnated, but it occurs rarely, as though the new incarnation does not exist purely as an extension of the importance of a prior one. It feels like a consistency of ephemerality and cycles. The villain exists essentially as the basis of evil in the world, but destroying him obviously does not stop evil in the world, only reduces it. In that sense, Soul Blazer's world remains as cyclical as ever, having been thrown out of balance not by the existence of evil (although it is something to be avoided, it is treated as inevitable to humanity) but by an encroachment of it. I'm likely reading this quite poorly but that was my takeaway. 

Soul Blazer's philosophical underpinnings aren't sophisticated per se but they are generally interesting and consistent with the mechanics and general worldview that otherwise pervades the game. Quintet would become somewhat well known for the themes of their narratives, perhaps in part because they were less character- or plot-driven. The narrative wears its themes on its sleeve because that is its truest heart. It's the heart of the game itself. For a game literally about a warrior wandering into dungeons to kill hundreds of demons, Soul Blazer is about the contemplative, the slow, the small things in the world. Cycles in Soul Blazer are not about inevitability as such, but about the connection inherent in the world. Blazer's powers as an agent of the divine are thus to allow him to communicate with all parts of the world. Not just nature as we would perceive it but sometimes even doors and shelves. The proof of this divinity is thus given in the way that Blazer can see the interconnections of the world, the true thing that underpins all these cycles.

It would be possible to critique Soul Blazer's actual construction as a game if you really wanted to, but that would feel like a betrayal of its core ideas. Being simple is not something it was by accident, and to pick apart these simple elements and complain would feel rather silly. There's some gorgeous sprite work—a lovely soundtrack that shares much of the sound signature of ActRaiser even though it isn't a Yuzo Koshiro composition. It's a game I would best describe as soothing. That's not a feeling action RPGs often strive for, as there's usually a preference to try to evoke thrills, danger, and adventure. Soul Blazer feels more like slowly and methodically constructing a Lego set. It has a peaceful rhythm—to be killed in it is just to be told to try again, not to rush. It's a game with a philosophical commitment perhaps most core to its identity, and in that sense it's fascinating, and it's immediately clear why it was memorable. Not to say that other RPGs, even of that vintage, didn't have thematic intent. I merely mean that it feels like a game where every consideration stemmed from a desire to communicate its philosophy clearly.

The unofficial trilogy that sprang from Quintet is one I'm glad to finally try, though I am also on some level glad I waited a bit. There have been many times in my life where this game would not have worked for me, but here and now it fit me well. I intend to touch on Illusion of Gaia next, a game that may have had the most contemporary players among this set. Soul Blazer seems to have been a success, and it will be interesting to see how Quintet iterates on such simple design principles, as well as what concepts animate the series going forward. I'll take it slow though, I wouldn't want to disrespect Soul Blazer's own message in trying to move forward.