Soma Bringer is a game in which you are a cliche anime hero doing cliche anime things, a boring, uninspired mess. You're actually part of a large cast, but the story follows one character, Idea, on her quest to figure out her identity. The rampant idiot plot here is fascinating for that fact alone. The gameplay is pretty bland and uninspired, an action-RPG that mostly feels like button mashing. What makes it worse, perhaps, is that you cannot choose different styles of fighting, despite many being offered at the beginning of the game. The music is pretty good compared to the rest of the game, but that really shouldn't come as a surprise with Mitsuda of Chrono Trigger fame pumping out the jams. So what you're left with is a snooze fest that has a few unique talents contributing to it, unfortunately not being able to make up for many of the greater flaws within the game.
So let's start with the story. A good guy meets amnesiac girl who finds out she has superpowers and then uses those superpowers to help out good guy. Bad guys pursue amnesiac girl, bad guys are vague, but as an omniscient character you already understand everything about fifteen minutes into the game. Because of this, the game is no longer being played for the story, which is already a bad sign since RPGs (Role-Playing Games) are always played for their story. By the way, it's a Japanese story (in particular, an anime Japanese story), so expect "heart-rending" turns of events that the characters should have already expected, but for some reason weren't prepared for. Again, realization about what Idea "is" becomes obvious literally fifteen minutes into the game, but the characters will not figure it out until the final fifteen. Despite the rather eloquent and at times amusing dialogue, whenever the main plot is exposited to you, the characters must be dumber than dishwater (family saying) to not figure out what's going on.
To be honest, that's pretty normal in the Japanese RPG genre though. My theory as to why the characters are so dumb is to retain a purity and innocence about them. The way in which these types of pure evil and pure good come about is largely a sort of Yin and Yang mindset. The game will hark on quite a bit about balance and ultimately that's what the game is all about. But such a story is not unique to Soma Bringer, and is definitely cross-cultural, at least in East Asia. The same story can be found in the Magna Carta series (a Korean RPG series), one in which a similarly magical substance can be either in or out of balance. The goal then is to bring that substance into balance because chaos is what lies outside. Outside of balance is where most of these games lie, but in the case of these examples, the purpose is purely for the sake of exposition and not really grasping at the deeper nature of the world. They take on a different mythology from that of Western games, and while that's not bad in itself, the character development is poor no matter how you look at it. Characters are vital in any form of storytelling, and Soma Bringer (and the Magna Carta series as well) does not have terribly interesting characters. They are artfully designed characters, but nothing that comes out of their mouths speaks more than of their general traits. They are uniquely two-dimensional, but that's not really praise.
Despite all the complaints, the art design really is something to be lauded here. Environments are lush and vibrant, monsters have interesting movement, and each location takes on a unique theme. Granted, the themes are tried and true; you have your forest level, your plains level, your volcano level, your snow level, your evil tower level. But that really shouldn't take away from the design of these levels, as they are beautifully illustrated and hand-drawn. The colors themselves also take on a bright color palette, a welcome escape from the dark, gritty tedium of so many games today. Within these worlds you'll meet lots of different critters, and it's actually quite impressive just how many unique models there are, given the constraints. Even with that though, it's quite likely that much of it will be lost as monsters are everywhere and the fighting system isn't exciting enough to carry the amount of action required for the entire game.
The action system is based on two things, a class and a set of fighting abilities for that class. You are in a party of three, two of which are computer controlled, the one you control is picked out of a group at the outset of the game. You similarly choose a single class to play. The classes themselves are just typical positions in parties: caster, healer, tank, damage dealer. Of course, with item upgrades your character will basically become a master of all of them anyway, so any one class is not really all that different from another excepting play style (button mashing being a common denominator for every class except casters). What's most problematic about the lack of choice in play style means that it's really easy for boredom to set in or to want to focus on the play style that gives the fastest results so you can simply move on.
There are a few boss-style enemies in the game that would be challenging if balanced correctly, but unfortunately that's not really the case. Some enemies are pretty much made to kill you, while most others are made to barely touch you (though at least most of these weak enemies die in a few hits). But never fear! You don't die permanently in the game, you just automatically respawn at your base and lose a small amount experience. The enemy that killed you doesn't regain health either, so persistence alone can conquer any battle (this includes the last battle in the game, mind–at least it's consistent?). The themes for enemies are obviously related to the levels in which you encounter them, and while the enemies mostly match, there are a few which had me scratching my head (a fire jellyfish?).
While we're on themes, there's also the music, which is consistently super-great. It's a shame really, because the music does what it's supposed to do, be a background in the same way that the art within the game is a background. There are lots of tunes that will get stuck in your head invariably. Even after having finished Soma Bringer, the tune of the save select screen still rings about in my head. It's a simple flute tune, but like many of the pieces, somewhat addictive.
Mitsuda is quite talented at matching music to both environments and moods, and Soma Bringer is no exception. The volcano level sounds bombastic and has a sense of bursting, the snow level is downbeat and soothing, yet with a sense of fading. The theme of Idea is at once an elegy and an uncertainty. All the pieces take their place calmly and manage to contribute a sonorous elegance.
Unfortunately, fading is the modus operandi of the game. It's the mantra of the Japanese RPG really, that the longer the game goes on, the more the problems of a faded genre come to the forefront. Games were never meant to be so long, and most of the reason they were long in the past was primarily for the purpose of making a short, difficult game. The few exceptions that we see in Chrono Trigger and Earthbound are still nowhere near as long as most RPGs that exist today, and that's really the problem. Some Bringer is about double the length of either of the above two games in terms of playtime, yet does nothing that would distinguish it from any other action-RPG. The game's so directed and lifeless in terms of characters that all the vibrancy of the art and music is lost, sucked dry by terrible writing and repetitive gameplay. I played the game in the hopes that it was something new and different, partially due to it being fan-translated. But the game is neither of these things, a testament to the devolving state of videogames today.