It has not been all that long since Nintendo announced and finalized its acquisition of Xenosaga and Baten Kaitos developer, Monolith Soft (also known as MLSI). It also has not been that long since they announced their first title under new management: Soma Bringer.
When the title was first announced, the response was underwhelming, to say the least. The game’s screenshots were ugly, and much of the information seemed very uninteresting. It wasn’t until a month ago when streams of information started flowing into magazines and onto forums that RPG and Nintendo fans started to get interested in the title.
The game has a lot going for it. For one, the game is helmed by Tetsuya Takahashi, the creator of both Xenogears and Xenosaga, and the chief creative director at Monolith Soft. The game also features a fully original soundtrack composed by industry veteran Yasunori Mitsuda.
Apart from the game’s pedigree, the concept itself is enough to entice even the most staunch of Action RPG haters to take notice. Described by many as “Japanese RPG company does Diablo,” Soma Bringer features many of the things that made Diablo, Nox, Titan Quest and its ilk so great, and puts its own twist on it.
At its core, Soma Bringer is indeed a dungeon crawler. There are 6 playable characters to choose from, with one secret character that can be unlocked later. From the outset, the player chooses a single character that they will control for the entirety of the game. The character they choose determines the base stats (HP, SP, attack power, magic power, and defense) that they start with.
Once they choose a character, the player then chooses a class. The class system is very reminiscent of western RPG dungeon crawlers, as each class is saddled with a unique skill tree that players put points into over time. The class a player chooses also changes their character’s base stats, subtracting from some, while adding to others. In that respect, picking a character is much like choosing a race in a western RPG.
The gameplay itself is far more western than one would expect from MLSI. It also tries to do away with some of the small flaws that have become almost traditional in japanese rpgs. Takahashi and team have gone through great pains specifically to make the game as friendly as possible for travelling handheld gamers who may not be able to play for hours upon hours.
For one, the game puts event markers both in the field and on the map, making it very easy to know where to go next in the game. The game also has a handy quest log, much like in Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs, split between side quests and the main scenario. Players who haven’t picked the game up in a while will be able to jump right in, and pick up from where they left off.
The game seems to lift a number of things from the western dungeon crawling subgenre shamelessly, and I am personally quite happy they did. Why fix what already works? Not only is loot organized by color (blue items and weapons are magic, while yellow ones are rare), but the game even has Diablo’s famous “corpse running” mechanic: when a player dies, they can run back to where they died and retrieve their tombstone, or proceed without bothering. The downside of not retrieving one’s tombstone is merely lost experience, which is far nicer than Diablo’s far more harsh death penalty. The game is even split into acts, with a central city to constantly travel back to, and a number of locations that branch out from there.
While I do want to leave the more technical aspects of the battle for the review, I did want to touch on the aspect of breaks. Breaking is a bit like a combo system. As players attack an enemy in succession, they get increasingly closer to “break mode,” which allows them to perform even more brutal attacks. During break mode, where the monster is completely defenseless, certain skills take on new attributes, such as a thrusting spear attack that actually has knockback when enemies are in break mode. Combos with your teammates become more and more useful as the game goes on, and using varied attacks start to make sense.
These impressions are just of the first act of the game. Stay tuned for a full review in the next 2 weeks, and possibly a Helping Hand column with full translations of all the class skill trees!
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Thanks for posting these impressions. I watched a few videos of Smoa Bringer on my Wii, and became very curious. I hadn’t really heard of it until I saw those preview videos. Your initial thoughts alone made me interested in trying the game sometime. I really liked Diablo, and that type of kill-stuff-collect-loot game. Looking forward to the review.
The game is far more goal oriented in terms of story that has you moving back to the main city and then back out into the field, but there’s still a strong emphasis on the crawling aspect.
I’m almost finished Act 2 now, and I’m finding the fields far bigger, far less linear, and requiring far more management of my skills.
Hopefully I’ll be able to write a review next week, along with a new editorial. Thanks for the kind words.
Cool. I’m actually very interested in this game now. I’ve had the urge to play a solid Action RPG on my DS for a while now (though I read about Lunar Knights so I’ll probably be picking that one up soon). It’s unfortunate that Soma Bringer isn’t slated for a US release yet, but I think this has a pretty good chance of being localized.
By the way, how text-heavy/story-driven is Soma Bringer? Diablo II had very little narrative and almost complete focus on combat, but Monolith Soft’s past games have been very story-driven, so I don’t know what to expect.
Keep up the impressions! It’s even better to hear impressions about games that get very little media coverage, like this one. Until now I knew nothing about this game other than its developer.