Like Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia also surprised me — but in a bad way! Conventional wisdom seems to be that this is one of the SNES greats, and a big improvement over Soul Blazer. I did not feel this way. It lost the simplicity and focused vision of Soul Blazer, and took a bunch of the things that game did well and did them worse. Combat is made worse by introducing some learned techniques that are pretty clumsy and not as fun as the magic in Soul Blazer, and the experience-based leveling and compelling “clear an area and unlock a part of the town” progression has been dropped in favor of tying leveling directly to area clears instead. Plus, the localization is simply atrocious — the translator didn’t seem to understand the story, as it’s presented incomprehensibly and filled with errors. It’s an action RPG with unrewarding combat and a bad story, so, why are we here? While it’s technically superior in terms of graphics and sound to Soul Blazer, I kept wishing I was playing that instead.