Soma Spirits: Rebalance

Hours played at review time, across 40 reviews with recorded playtime.

positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up

A short and quickly paced JRPG that has a lot of heart, and a lot of energy. Overall, Soma Spirits is a pretty standard framework: a collection of stock level themes and a story revolving around collecting some plot coupons to save the world. Helping it out however is the omnipresent split between the World of Joy and the World of Sorrow, which runs through both the narrative and the gameplay itself, and provides enough of a backbone to make the ~5 hour runtime entertaining while also giving it a little replay value and player choice on the side. The story here is light and largely comedic, as you may expect, but the writing is overall of a decent quality, and enjoyable. The most notable aspect is that it delivers a pretty nice message about how both positive and negative emotions are a necessary part of life, that trying to do away with all the sadness in the world or drowning yourself in grief and misery are both self-destructive ways to live- a kind of lesson you don't see a lot of these kinds of lighthearted games attempting to approach. That kind of balancing act is nicely represented in the gameplay as well- your two characters traverse both sides of the world, and change roles between support and offense depending on which side of the level they're in. Combat is rather simple, but over the course of the game you get some nice abilities that help differentiate the two party members and keep them from feeling like copies. The way the world-switching works in terms of level design is a little bland however- mostly serving as a means to just bypass static walls or pick up hidden treasures. The most impactful way the split is used is to have the player end each stage by fighting the resident boss in one world or the other- which will net them the corresponding "essence" of that world. The game offers several different endings depending on how the player balances out Joy and Sorrow during their run, giving it a nice bit of replayability. Personally I felt like the decisions to be made seemed a little lopsided in favour of the balance/true ending, but that could just be how my own take on the different dilemmas shook out. Hard to tell. Audio-visually speaking the game is also pretty competent. The art, while not super polished, has a lot of personality, and its fun seeing the Joy & Sorrow variations of all the characters and enemies in a given world. The music is pleasant, although not really as stand-out as the visuals. The World of Joy themes kind of steal the spotlight and end up being a lot more memorable than their World of Sorrow counterparts, though. While there might not be anything supremely stand out about it, I did enjoy Soma Spirits quite a bit- it was a good introduction to Torch60's work, and has me looking forward to eventually trying out the sequel, and their other titles.