Review: Soma Bringer

Soma Bringer is a hack and slash RPG for the DS. Developed by Monolith Soft, behind the fairly known RPG-series Xenogear. Soma Bringer was released in Japan in February 2008, but sadly there’s hasn’t been any word suggesting that it will be released anywhere else. It’s one of those Japanese games that hasn’t made it to the western market. It’s pretty strange though, since this is a really solid game. It received good reviews in Japan and sold about 51,000 units initially.

Soma Bringer takes place in a world where an energy called Soma drives all technology and the daily lives of the Inhabitants. In this world lies the huge continent Barnea and recently the Soma balance as been disrupted. This causes monsters called Visitors to appear and terrorizing people. That’s where you come in. You play as soldier of an Visitor hunter organization called Secundady.
Your main quest is to help the people get rid of Visitors, but you end up getting you self involved in a much more harder mission. It seems that some evil force wants to bring an final end to the human world. Now you, together with your allies are the only ones who can save Barnea from destruction.

A Battle with wolfs

The gameplay in Soma Bringer is almost exactly as in Diablo. You pick a character and class, then you get in to the adventure where two team-mates hook up with you. You hack and slash the enemies with different spells and attacks. While you level up you can build talent trees to get better attacks/spells and boost certain abilities.
When you kill monsters some of them drop chests which you can loot for better gear and money. When you encounter rare monsters you get better drops and boss-fights gives you rare drops. Just like in Diablo the monsters re-spawn after you restart the game. So if you want to go on a grind-run, that’s an easy cake.
The boss fights are the most interesting in Soma Bringer, since they give a great challenge. You really need to check your tactics to get them down. Some rare bosses are so hard you’ll have to fight them later when you leveled up some more.

A boss battle

The gear you pick up has different colors depending on the rareness and the quality. Some even belongs to a set. Now there’s another similarity to the Diablo gameplay.
But wait, it doesn’t stop there. You can put gems in your gear to make it stronger and boost your skillpoints. You can even combine the gems to get higher leveled gems.
For every level you get some AP (Attack Points) and CP (Character Points) which you can spend to boost your stats and as mentioned build a talent tree.

Character Select

The battlesystem is simple. You use X, Y, A, B for the attacks you have assigned. Then you make sure you got a target in front of you or just press one button until you see a red marker on your target.
Then just hack and slash away.
But to add some to the battlesystem there has been introduced a break system which gives you the possibility to stun your target for some time. This happens when you continually hit your target.
There will first be one (!) then two (!!) and lastly three (!!!) which shows a successful break.

Chest looting and break points

You might think that a game that almost ripped everything from Diablo should be bad. In my opinion this is one hell of game. The story is simple and easy to understand. The character are pretty cool and the battles are kickass. One thing that really makes me happy while playing this game is that there’s no use of the stylus. The DS stylus should not be overused just because it’s there.
Well anyway, it’s easy to like this game when it’s so simple to get in to. It’s not the best game in the world, but it sure is fun.

The sad truth is that it’s only released in Japanese, but you can get a patch with a translation if you use chip. So that’s the only tips I can give you. I wont give you a link our anything.
You should absolutely play this game.

/Mr. D