Soma Bringer

When I started playing Soma Bringer, I was upset that it never saw an English release. Soma Bringer is an obvious precursor to Xenoblade Chronicles, containing many of the same gameplay mechanics, especially involving equipment upgrades and a pseudo-MMORPG style.  The music, composed by my favorite game musician Yasunori Mitsuda, is pretty excellent as one expects from the guy.  At first, I was loving the dungeon-crawlingDiablo-type gameplay, slightly intrigued by the story and expecting great things. 

Sadly, my enjoyment of the game tuned out to be short-lived.

Xenoblade took a mercifully long time getting to the stereotypical anime awful story tropes (by which point I didn’t mind them), but Soma Bringer only takes an hour before you have to deal with an amnesiac mystery girl with Mary Sue magical abilities.  This worked fine inFinal Fantasy VI when we didn’t know any better, but now it’s just hackneyed and frustrating.  In fact, the titular Soma is essentially Magitek or Mako energy all over again: energy from the planet or some mystical origin that men are abusing and now it’s lashing out.  Like I said, I used to accept the reuse of these tropes because they weren’t always being shoved in my face and there were plenty of other story elements distracting from them.  In Soma Bringer, the game is so linearly focused on its core plot (not unlike Radiant Historia) that you simply cannot escape feelings of deja vu, from the Soma to the girl to the cast of other heroes who look suspiciously like characters you’ve seen before (just look at that box art).

That said, I can ignore my problems with the story if the game keeps up the goods, but it does not.  You are clearly intended to play Soma Bringer with friends, but good luck finding someone with the game, especially on an emulator (spoiler: you can’t).  As a solo player, you get to control one of eight characters and pick a class for them.  Two AI teammates will follow you around, but you cannot customize any of their equipment and AI priorities.  In fact, you can’t heal them and can barely interact at all.  This is unbelievably frustrating in the middle of a boss battle: in basically any other RPG, you can chuck a potion at someone who’s dying, but no, not this one.  I understand wanting to have each player be self-sufficient, but there really should have been better options for solo players.

The dungeon design is just huge maps with twists and turns and treasure that will (in my experience) only be usable for classes you’re not playing as.  There’s simply no motivation in going down a long corridor to open a chest when it has a sword and I’m playing as an archer.  This could have easily been fixed by allowing me to customize my AI partners, but… well, you see my point.  Soma Bringer’s problems feed in to each other, and after two large sections of the game, nothing changes about this.

It is now clear to me why Soma Bringer did not get localized.  In order to be fun, it must be played with friends, and Americans simply don’t typically live in as dense a population of RPG enthusiasts.  The same problem applies to Dragon Quest IX, although it was at least a weak-ish Dragon Quest game without buddies tagging along.  Give this game a pass if you’ve been considering it.   I’m sad that Mitsuda’s music was wasted on a poorly thought-out game like this, and surprised Monolith Soft fell in so many avoidable pitfalls.