Sometimes I’ll be sitting around and I’ll happen to think of a game that I played some off time on rental or some such. I won’t really be able to remember the name of it, just a little about it, like what the screen looked like, or what you did in the game. For example, it came to me that I had played a game in which you ran around killing things and in doing so you rescued the souls. Then the souls went back to the towns and rebuilt it somehow. There was also this mechanic where you enter the dreams of some of the more reticent townsfolk and figure out their deepest, darkest secrets.
It turns out that the game I was thinking of was Soul Blazer.
It turns out that in this game you take on the part of an angel, sent to the planet in human form to rid the world of some kind of evil. This evil force has imprisoned the souls of the creatures of the planet into bodies of monsters, which you have kill. Kill the monsters and people spontaneously reappear in towns. Those people (or plants or mermaids or whatever) will open the ways to more areas to explore, so you go there to free more souls. And on it goes.
There’s nothing too tough about this game, it’s relatively straightforward. But it’s oddly compelling. It’s kind of interesting to see the cities slowly reform themselves as you repopulate them. And the dialog was reasonably well-written, and though it wouldn’t win any awards it was still entertaining.
The only problem I had with this game is that after one rental, starting the game one evening and having to have it back by the next evening, I managed to get all the way to the final encounter. I had absolutely no trouble getting to the last guy, but then, somehow, the game ramped up in difficulty so sharply that I couldn’t even come close to beating him. I didn’t think that wasting another few dollars just to fight a last boss was a wise use of my dollars… and I also didn’t have the dollars to use. So I took the game back, and never actually managed to finish it.
Of course, along with the person who pooled money to rent the game, we gave the main character the same name as Navin Johnson’s dog (no, not “Lifesaver”). So any time a ‘responsible adult’ walked into the room, we had to make sure that there wasn’t any dialog on the screen. And since that television was in the living room, that was a bit of a chore.
Or, like I like to think of it, a ‘mini game’.
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