Gaia Gensouki / Illusion of Gaia (1993, Quintet)
With ActRaiser and Soul Blader under their belts, Quintet's founding duo of Tomoyoshi Miyazaki and Masaya Hashimoto set out to lead the sequels to both, simultaneously to boot, which was the cause of some stress for them. The result on one hand was ActRaiser 2, which did away with the city simulation segments of its predecessor altogether in favor of pure sidescrolling action while considerably beefing up the aesthetics, leaving a beautiful if perhaps somewhat disappointingly workmanlike product. It fares decently against any other game of its genre in 1993 but is underwhelming as a sequel to one of the most unique games of its time by the exclusion of an entire dimension of complexity; it was effectively a totally different game. So how would a sequel to Soul Blader turn out? As much as I have emphasized the structural similarity between it and the first ActRaiser in the past, there is none of the genre-blending in the former that is found in the latter; as interesting as its back-and-forth overworld/underworld interaction may be it's still an action RPG, and a fairly basic one at that. There's nothing really to strip down here, and it would make even less sense to do so in a hypothetical Soul Blader 2 than it did in ActRaiser 2, a game designed primarily for a Western audience who presumably was more critical of its city building segments. In short, for a sequel, there's hardly anywhere to go but up.
Gaia Gensouki occupies the middle segment of a spiritual trilogy between Soul Blader and Tenchi Souzou (a.k.a. Terranigma). It, like ActRaiser 2, discards its predecessor's general structure in favor of something else, but in this case in a kind of lateral move. There isn't any interaction between peaceful areas such as cities and hostile areas like dungeons, but the progression isn't so stratified anymore into a definite number of wholly distinct areas each with their own overworld and underworld, and is now much more freely and unevenly mixed. You'll weave in and out of cutscenes, towns and dungeons across a contiguous world at the whim of the story rather than a general blueprint from which several worlds are presented; sometimes you'll spend an extended amount of time in a town, and sometimes the game throws you two big dungeons in a row. As a result it's more unpredictable, the narrative more naturally flowing, and is overall more befitting of a story about a group of children finding their way through crises in a harsh world than that of a Godsent hero's quest to rebuild it. Unpredictable though the progression may be, the game, expectedly of a console action RPG from the early 90's, most prominently features combat, and can sometimes seem in a bit of a hurry to get you back into it. World traversal is still basically done from a menu, this time over a neat mode 7 depiction of a paper world map that your characters automatically travel across, and is almost entirely linear with explorable areas becoming inaccessible as new ones become available. There is almost no backtracking here, either on the micro scale of areas you had just visited, or on the macro scale of the entire world that you might find at the very end of a game, though each area is substantial enough that you don't feel too much like you're being railroaded from one place to the next.
Graphically Gaia Gensouki is a step up in every respect. Sprites are now much larger and more detailed with much more complex animation, and are on the whole less cutesy and toy-like. The main character's hair will ruffle in the wind, and he sidles deliberately against the walls of narrow passages. Enemies are just as varied across the many combat areas in this game as in its predecessor, though now they're more visually elaborate; bosses too have gotten bigger. The art in general exudes its makers' confidence with the hardware generating it, with truly impressive translucency, parallax scrolling and mode 7 all used sparingly and to consequently breathtaking effect, layering another coat of brilliant sheen on to the scenery art otherwise just as attractive as in previous Quintet titles. Flower petals drift lazily across a town with hidden seedy alleyways, a golden ship sparkles as it bobs up and down on the sea, and a lattice of vines and mushrooms connect circuitously above a darkness sprinkled with luminescent foliage, the latter in somewhat of a level design nod to Soul Blader's more grid-like dungeons; though unconnected in story there are actually a few callbacks to the previous game in its enemy designs and NPCs. Clearly a huge amount of time was spent making this game occupy an entire new realm of graphical fidelity, as well as a place as the aesthetic equal of the stunning ActRaiser 2.
You don't, strictly speaking, have a party with which to dungeon crawl as all of that is done with the main character alone, but you do have an ever-changing group of friends to accompany you in peaceful areas with their own stories that run alongside your excursions into hostile areas, and their natural mix in the game's progression helps connect them up. For a console game of this era the storytelling is quite sophisticated; a particular highlight early on is when you and one of your friends are adrift at sea on a makeshift raft for days. A dialog box notifies you that you've been out here for 1 day, 2 days, and so on, as the sun takes its place in various positions in the color-shifting sky, until hunger takes over and you'll need to attack some passing fish to the horror of your fellow animal-loving castaway; what's notable here is that none of this is a cutscene. A conversation ensues about how acceptable it is to kill other sentient things for your own desperately needed sustenance. I was honestly taken aback at this and several other scenes in the game, touching on themes involving animal rights, slave labor, the death of an old world and the birth of a new one. Without spoiling too much, as I feel like I've already revealed more than enough, the events of the story can get pretty dark sometimes. However a lot of elements are kind of thrown at the wall and not everything is exactly resolved or fully developed by the end, but there aren't many console RPGs from this period with such thematic richness.
Combat takes place on the same scale as peaceful segments, though in the latter you can't use weapons. It introduces a superficially similar style of combat to Soul Blader, but here we now have diagonal movement, which allows for greater freedom at the slight expense of some of the tactics of the original. Unplanned action and reflexes play more of a part here. This goes for the bosses as well, as the original game's single-solution puzzle bosses are mostly traded in for more rough-and-tumble damage races, emphasized by the fact that you can carry more than one healing herb this time around, though the herbs in the game are finite and mostly found as treasure. The crab-walking strafe mechanic is no longer, replaced instead by drawing in certain objects by standing still and holding your weapon in front of you with L or R, much like how you previously drew in gems. Gaia Gensouki also discards a somewhat superfluous magic system in favor of gradually gathering new, mostly physical, techniques across several transformations into other beings, each making themselves useful for both battle and traversal in a variety of situations, which is a notable step up in overall design. These new techniques factor into the puzzle design neatly, which has been made more complex and quite a bit harder. I got stuck maybe once in Soul Blader but there are quite a few head scratchers in this game whose solutions often pleasantly surprised me, especially near the end of the game, though a couple of times some of that old flavor comes through when you find an item you need right outside of where you need it. Dungeons on the whole are much more puzzle-based and open, inviting favorable comparisons to Zelda games. In a sense, one could say that combat got easier and perhaps simpler, while the dungeons got proportionally harder and more complex.
Experience gain and leveling has been streamlined, accordingly to an already streamlined action RPG structure, into a straight increase of either attack, defense, or health points upon the defeat of all enemies in a given room, and progression within dungeons, if impeded at all, is dictated by the defeat of just one enemy usually near the other end of the room. This actually deepens character development a little bit, in that the risk of facing all of a room's enemies is a bit of a strategic consideration unlike mowing down every monster generator in a Soul Blader dungeon because you're not sure which ones are and aren't required to progress in the overworld. I found myself ignoring some of the level ups late in the game because it would have been too risky to double back after I had accomplished my goal in that room. There is also a weird lives system, in which you collect 100 gems dropped by enemies to gain an extra life; if you die with one in stock then you start over in that room with all of the enemies you've beaten staying beaten, whereas if you die with no lives then you start over further back with all enemies respawned, however the level ups are one time only. I utilized the lives during the dungeon crawling because I didn't want to use my herbs outside of boss encounters, though against bosses I would typically just reload after a death. If there's any sloppiness in the game design it's in this odd system, though it's a nearly insignificant complaint. While I'm on the subject of insignificant complaints, you character can dash but at the double tap of a direction which feels kind of clumsy sometimes, especially in battle. I mean there's a whole unused button, two in the localization!
Gaia Gensouki is a marked improvement on an already great and tightly designed action RPG. Aesthetics, story, combat mechanics and dungeon design are all taken up a notch in a way frugally accommodating of a more complicated and unpredictable progression structure; there's a lot to the game and barely any of it is wasted or out of place. An abundant, sprawling journey is conveyed while rarely making the player feel left out of its proceedings. It represents a refinement in one sense, and something new in another. It subtracts a structural dimension from its predecessor, though in a way much less drastic than ActRaiser 2, while expanding the scale of the story and precisely fitting in mechanics to suit it. But what if the concept of world resurrection from Soul Blader were combined with a journey on the scale of Gaia Gensouki? That would have to come later...
Final rating: 5/5 (Great)