 At first glance, Soul Blazer looks primitive and limited and not nearly as appealing as the quote-unquote sequels it spawned, Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma, but even though it may look dated, Soul Blazer is still a high quality title. Yeah, the graphics look a little bleary compared to its peers, the music is a bit odd, and it has just kind of a dated early Super Nintendo vibe to it. But this game doesn't fight its limitations by being too ambitious for its time. Soul Blazer has a clever hook to it, very similar to a game like Link's Awakening for Game Boy. The story takes you from town to town, where you clear each area of monsters and their layers. Each destroyed layer unlocks a soul that was being held captive, and with it a part of the town that you're trying to revive and return to normal. Dometically it's a little bit similar to another early Quintet title, Actraiser. But when I talk about freeing souls, I mean the souls of people, goats, dogs, squirrels, flowers, sure okay. But yeah, as you can see, this is a typical top-down four-directional adventure style game, the same as the two sequels I mentioned. But the way the game is structured here is great, it's an excellent way to weave together the story and the gameplay. I found myself having a hard time putting the controller down because I just wanted to unlock the next area, and then the next, and the next. Even if you don't succumb to this game's addictive nature like I did, Soul Blazer has a save function that can save your progress after each monster layer you destroy. And let me tell you, that's helped this game age so well. Hell, you can play this game on your lunch break, take out a few monster layers, double back to the save location, turn it off and come back to it later, or whenever you can. Most of the major stuff you took care of will still be gone, it's a great feature. Anyway, like I said, the combat here is what you'd expect. It's a significant step ahead of something like Lagoon, but in my opinion it's still a bit short of Illusion of Gaia, the hit detection isn't as polished, and you can take advantage of some diagonal angles with certain enemies, there's a lot of shortcuts you can exploit. Soul Blazer can certainly up the difficulty at certain points however, there's a good variety of enemies with all sorts of different patterns, and some boss fights are pretty challenging. You do get a couple different forms of magic in addition to your sword, but it's a bit tricky to get used to, for example the first kind of magic you get only shoots in the direction you're facing, the temptation is to use the directional pad and aim that way, but you have to hold the L or R button to maintain your direction so you can fire away while moving around. The story is pretty simple, the ruler of the Friel Empire, King Magrid, wants to get rich. No, I mean really, really Scrooge McDuck somehow swimming through coins kind of rich, so he gets this genius inventor guy named Dr. Leo to build a device that will summon the Dark Lord of Money, I guess, conspicuously named the King of Evil, Death Toll? Hmm, he shows up and his proposal is, one living being for one gold piece. Man, the currency exchange rate in hell is lousy. Anyway, King Magrid agrees, and that explains why these towns have been swallowed up. The Master, or God I guess, sends you, our hero, down to free all these trapped souls, unlocking a total of six villages, and that allows you to head to the world of evil itself for a final boss fight. You eventually meet Dr. Leo's daughter, Lisa, you fall in love and it goes from there. One thing that really stands out here is how dark this story is. The people and animals you interact with don't hold a lot back. These guys are depressed. And I guess, uh, why wouldn't they be? It's just kind of jarring to see this level of gloom in an early Super Nintendo game. One thing I really like about Soul Blazer, though, is this effect you get walking into somebody's house. It's kind of a minor thing, but I just love this, it's an ingenious effect that should have been utilized in other games. I also gotta mention the music because it's just different. It's not bad by any means, but I definitely didn't expect to hear some upbeat slap bass when playing an adventure game with such gloomy themes. I do like it quite a bit. It's very different for the genre, that's for sure. So it's a nice departure from the lushly arranged stuff you'd hear from someone like Umatsu or Mitsuda. Anyway, yeah, Soul Blazer is absolutely worth playing today. Just don't expect something in the same vein as Illusion of Gaia or Terranigma. Yeah, the game kinda sorta has some similarities to those two, but since it was made years before, it's a bit more limited. Thankfully, when I say limited, that's not a bad thing here because the game's developers came up with a clever and addicting structure that lends itself really well to the basic gameplay here. Throw in some unique music, and Soul Blazer most certainly holds up perfectly well.