It's time to talk a bit about one of the most interesting and unique bits of video game writing that I've ever experienced. It lives outside the fairly standard "protagonists save the swords and sorcery fantasy world from antagonist" model that you see in a lot of games--a model that can be really good, too. See Final Fantasy 4 and 6.
No, today I'm talking about a fairly obscure little series that was produced by Enix back in the 1990s, before they merged with Squaresoft. Enix, the company most known for the Dragon Quest series, a series which fits fairly neatly in the aforementioned model 99% of the time. In the 1990s, Enix of Japan could basically print money by releasing a new Dragon Quest game, and they did something that most big game companies are terrified to do today:
They spent a chunk of that money on a little group called Quintet, to produce a trilogy that we'll call Soul Blazer here in the U.S. (It was called Soul Blader in Japan.)
What Quintet did was produce a trilogy with some of the most interesting and genuinely spiritual and mystical writing that has ever been.
The first game, Soul Blazer/Blader, was a fairly straightforward Zelda clone at its base. There wasn't much that was new about its gameplay, but its writing... While things were left kind of vague, there were hints of a unique mysticism and theology in the setting and worldbuilding, and even a heaping helping of a very distinctly Japanese pantheistic influence.
Your main task as the emissary of God in Soul Blazer is to rebuild the world that had been sealed away to prevent the expansion of power of the evil Deathtoll. In your quest to restore life to the world, you find that despite the silence of the protagonist, the characters in the game seem to apply their own meanings to him. As your quest continues, you find that you cannot merely rebuild the world without setting back into motion the events that threatened to give Deathtoll supremacy over the world, and you are thrown into battle to beat him back.
If not for the uniqueness and compelling spirituality of the setting, Soul Blazer would be forgettable on its own. But it also set the stage for the second game in the series, Illusion of Gaia, which is an unbelievable masterpiece of writing considering the limitations of its platform.
Illusion of Gaia replaces the silent emissary of God with a boy named Will. Will is surrounded by his friends and, through a series of strange but believable events, sets out on a journey with them across a world which has elements we see on Earth, but is also different in a lot of ways.
Illusion of Gaia is a miracle. The fact that this game arrived in the U.S. without being absolutely gutted by the then-heavy hand of Nintendo of America's censorship is so unlikely that I can describe it in no other way. In the very first town, Will and his friends experience the difficulties that come with social class stratification, poverty, broken homes, and depressingly unlikely dreams and ambitions. On their journey, they grapple with complex and dark issues such as hallucinations and dead societies, starvation and scurvy, the inhibitions of a civilized life and their breakdown, actual slavery and selling out one's morals, gambling--even with your life, cannibalism, self-sacrifice, reincarnation, destiny, history repeating itself, religion and the concept of multiple worlds, and more.
Throughout this story, Will's connections to his friends are constantly tested, broken, and rekindled. The human element of the story, and the side characters, all take turns in center stage.
Let me reiterate that it is insane that this made it past Nintendo censorship in the 1990s. This was when Nintendo would replace the word "killed" with "dispatched" in Wizardry ports. When crosses and stars would be replaced with other banal iconography. When simple wooden coffins would be replaced with rotund little ghosts. When all of these things were official Nintendo policy, they released a game in which you can sell out a fugitive slave (and must, in order to 100% the game!), and in which you have to win a game of what is essentially Russian Roulette, and watch what happens to the loser.
It's mind-blowing to me that this was made available to ten-year-old me. Yet it is one of the most significant cultural influences, one of the most memorable, and one of the most positive experiences of my early gamer life.
Another incredible thing about Gaia is its tone. You might expect such a game to be very preachy, but it isn't. It has an incredibly soft touch on these issues and always encourages you to keep an open mind.
It is a gem of a game. One that I won't spoil any more of.
The third game in the series never made it to the U.S. Tenchi Souzou/Terranigma was released in Japan and Europe but not the U.S., and I only played it much later. It maintains some of the mystical tone of the two earlier games, but chose instead to focus on more dynamic and varied action gameplay, which it does well. It plays with ideas of duality, light and dark, and perceptions of inside versus outside. It pulls the player through another rebuilding of a broken Earth, but this time it has a somewhat light and parodical tone as you go from city to city, meeting people based on real figures from history. There are moments of great tragedy and suffocating solitude. It doesn't quite reach the heights of Gaia, but it is by no means a bad game or a boring story.
This series is one of the most interesting examples of writing in the video game medium I have ever seen. Writing in early console games is a peculiar medium, where brevity is not just encouraged, but often strictly required. Each few words is another sprite that could be shown to the player instead, and the audience was typically seen (correctly) as pre-teen children. Most early console games didn't really even have stories, and if they were, they were usually window-dressing. Even when they weren't window-dressing, they were often quite formulaic.
The Soul Blazer series stands alone as a series that thwarted all of these stereotypes and created a story brimming with unique mysticism and spirituality that I find compelling even today. Even now, when storage space for software is so much cheaper, we still rarely see anything that has as much depth and gravity as Soul Blazer. What could have simply arose as a Zelda clone and vanished into obscurity became one of the most unique stories ever told in the medium.
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