Soul Master is a board/card game developed and published by Koei (well-known for Sangokushi and other strategy games) for the Playstation back in 1997. It was re-released as a Playstation The Best title in 10 Dec 1998, for 2800 yen. This article is a review of this game. Experienced board game players may also want to read the description of play article to get a more concrete idea of what the game is like.
Unlike Sangokushi and most other "serious" Koei games, Soul Master is a light, "family" game. The concept of Soul Master is loosely based on Talisman, a (physical) board game published by Games Workshop. While Talisman is considered by some gamers to be a game with great looks but little substance, Soul Master is a much better game, with many nice extra elements being put together coherently to make an enjoyable game, suited for players of various levels of gaming experience.
Talisman is a game in which you build up your character until he is powerful enough to complete a certain task. Your character moves around the board, hoping to draw good cards which increase his stats. Soul Master is similar in concept, but the implementation is much more refined. Instead of counting on lucky dice rolls and card draws to build up your character as in Talisman, there are reliable methods of building up in this game: you build up magic levels by "marking" lands on the map, and you get new monsters and raise your stats by "searching" and defeating monsters. So even though sometimes a lucky player may gain a significant lead over his opponents, the annoying situation that an unlucky player can't build up at all rarely happens. Soul Master is a 4-player game; when there are not enough human players, the computer takes over the extra ones. The skill of the AI is acceptable, but not very good.
Soul Master is a game with rich color. There are a good variety of monsters, which you can capture and use as your allies. There are interesting global spell, item, and equipment effects, and quite a few interesting random events. There are a good variety of terrain types and special dwellings. Replayability is one of the design goals of this game: with randomly generated maps and a rich collection of game elements, Soul Master remains enjoyable even after many games.
The graphics are average, and the music is pleasant. The character designs are quite cute: the player characters are cat-eared people, and the various monsters are nice to look at. The primary appeal of the game is the multi-player mode. When you can't find human opponents, there is a story mode for one player, where you follow the story with several branches and play games against computer players. There are also an album mode (for viewing monsters collected in the story mode) and a vs. mode (for playing a battle using cards collected from the story mode). A game usually lasts for an hour or two, depending on the size of the map. (Unlike Talisman, it rarely drags on.) The game offers the convenience that you can save game at any time (except during a battle). There are some program bugs with the controls, in that in a multi-player game, the other players can interfere in certain minor controls with their controllers, but the problem isn't too critical, and it isn't a problem at all if the players 'behave themselves'.
Soul Master is a game with good playability. With a coherent game system, the game is rather easy to learn. The game is more strategic than Talisman, since you have a lot more control on where you are going. Although it is not a game with particularly great depth, it is fun and pleasurable to play the game and interact with the colorful game elements and deal with the various situations. Unfortunately, the game is in the Japanese language. With the aid of my description of play document, and with some patience in trying things out, it is possible for a Western, non-Japanese-reading player to enjoy the game, provided that he has invested a couple of hours studying Japanese katakana (which, I insist, is an excellent investment for anybody who is into Japanese import video games, or just Japanese anything): even though you may not understand some events, the choices often are not too important. For players who can read some Japanese, Soul Master is an excellent multi-player board game which is simple and has a nice mix of luck and strategy, and is recommended to players who like such games. In particular, it is highly recommended to players who like Talisman, as well as players who like some aspects of Talisman but feel that its implementation is inadequate.
Copyright 9 August 1999 Alan Shiu Ho Kwan
Alan Kwan / tarot@netvigator.com / created 9 Aug 99 / last modified 27 Sep 99