The Video Game Revue

Quintet

It's time to have another good chuckle at my obvious lack of photography skills:

I just can't seem to get a picture of anything without some sort of nick-nack being visible in the background. I guess I should really tidy things up around the ol' apartment.

Today's rant is about a Japanese action-RPG developer known as Quintet. Their games were mostly published by Enix, and their most popular titles in North America were ActRaiser and Illusion of Gaia, which most SNES fans will be familiar with. They developed a lesser known, but still excellent action RPG between those two called Soul Blazer (or I believe "Soul Blader" in the Japanese version; you can learn all sorts of interesting bits on Wikipedia.)

If you're looking to familiarize yourself with some of the old school roots of console RPGs, you could do a lot worse that to play these three games. ActRaiser was one of the earliest SNES titles available, and it drew the attention of critics by combining arcade hack-em-up action with a SimCity inspired town building element. ActRaiser is not a deep game, but it is well-made; I've found it to be thoroughly addictive, and have finished it from scratch at least four or five times in my gaming career to date. I find that the game's theme is a large part of what makes it so endearing. It's hard not to become attached to the little townspeople of the communities that you oversee, and then it's very satisfying to personally kick the crap out of the monsters that terrorize those people.

Similarly, I found that a lot of what Soul Blazer lacks in technical merit is made up for in its thematic execution. There is a kind of old school anime charm to Soul Blazer that makes the game compelling and gets you emotionally invested in it (even if only a little) in spite of the fact that Soul Blazer is not a particularly ground-breaking or classic game. Fans of the greater work, Illusion of Gaia, will definitely recognize its roots in Soul Blazer's gameplay, however. Soul Blazer played a particularly important role in my personal development as a gamer, because it paved the way for me to become an action-RPG fanboy before Secret of Mana arrived, and Secret of Mana knocked me flat on my ass so hard that to this day it remains one of only a handful of games that I can basically play start to finish in my head. If it's possible for you to imagine going back to a time where Zelda: A Link to the Past is the most notable action-RPG-ish title available to date (since Zelda isn't really an RPG), then perhaps you can see what makes Soul Blazer such a worthwhile game.

And, of course, Illusion of Gaia is one of the most critically acclaimed action RPGs for the SNES--perhaps second only to Secret of Mana. It certainly is a memorable gaming experience that takes the Quintet style of that era to its apex. If you consider yourself anything of a 16-bit generation Nintendo fan at all, you should at least have played this game.

Quintet's contribution to the SNES lineup is not a huge portion of video game history by any means, but it is a significant one--especially for console RPG fans. Those of you in particular who feel that console RPGs started with the PlayStation era, or that only Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior were early influences on RPGs outside of the PC gaming realm, would do well to look to these oft underappreciated Quintet works.

I have other rants about games like Lufia, or how I'm still angry that Seiken Densetsu 3 (the incredible sequel to Secret of Mana) never saw a North American release, but I'd rather not steal Quintet's thunder at the moment, so I'll save those for another time.

posted by Parappa @ 11:44 AM