Once upon a time, the planet of Soma was divided into a realm of careless happiness and a realm of responsible cynicism. A champion from each realm banded together to make their world whole again, and things seemed fine. At least until it wasn’t. After being split apart on a metaphysical level, Soma got literally torn apart. A spaceship cruises on, trying to search for bits of Soma to bring the planet back together, and two decades later, an opportunity finally presents itself…

Soma Union is the 2019 sequel to Torch60’s Soma Spirits. A spirit named Zero experiences a dream that sets them to lead expeditions into scattered bits of Soma, teaming up with would-be worldly guardian Reca and ship medic Lumen for an RPG adventure.

A surprisingly lengthy adventure, actually. I kept telling myself I’ll write about this game when I finish it. However, I’m 12 hours in and I haven’t reached Chapter 4 yet and gee, the month’s almost up. So, this post will be a general review on gameplay and other such things and a second post will be on story with full spoilers. So, consider this as your spoilerless review!

Soma Union brings in that turn-based action I love. The three characters have shared playstyles with unique niches carved out for each, like different elemental skills. What makes playing them interesting is nobody’s designated as a mage or medic or such, but instead you switch people’s roles in-battle. An attacker can switch their role in-battle to get a different moveset dedicated to support and vice-versa, and because everyone plays similarly, they can effortlessly switch roles when the need calls for it.

Say that an enemy is weak to ice. As somebody with ice skills, Zero can focus on attacks. Reca and/or Lumen could be switched to support to amp up their magic attack, or attach a status effect to the ice attack to give it an extra oomph. But as using upgraded magic skills costs increasingly more MP, you might want to save Zero’s MP, so maybe they can be support instead to make someone else’s physical attack ice-elemental – preferably Reca, who could later strike twice in one turn with that amped up power, or maybe Lumen if you want that stronger attack to lower agility while you’re at it.

The combat in Soma Union is very fluid and calls on you to switch around often, and it’s foolish if you just try to force someone in a designated role. In fact, as some bosses and enemies have the ability to force someone to switch roles, you’ll have to know how to work within the role system. The whole role system adds a rather engaging layer to gameplay that I was really into.

An interesting thing to note is that leveling only increases stats. Most skills are learned at set story moments, which I think is a smart way of approaching game balancing. These are set points where the developer can say, “okay, here’s when I can go a bit more crazy with enemy behavior,” without having to worry too much about players being under or overleveled, because while having higher stats certainly helps, it’s your growing repertoire of skills that’s really putting those stats in action.

There are also sigils, which is an equippable that gifts interchangeable skills or gives a passive. Sigil skills use up skill points that the party accumulates each turn that passes, just a little extra thing. It’s neat, but it also makes me think about the toy equipment that has unique things tied to them… that also get outclassed stat wise by the normal equipment so quickly. Like, why have a piece of armor that turns someone into a designated tank if your defenses may as well be tissue paper? I feel that these equipment could have been made into sigils to give them more usability. Like maybe a sigil that casts a guaranteed on demand dazzle would have more mileage than hitting someone with the equivalent of a newspaper for a random chance of that.

Outside of battles, the gang explores the fragments of Soma for the bits of power that’s believed capable of putting the planet back together. I find the dungeon design in Soma Union to be very admirable in that there’s an impressive variety of stuff. Even if gimmicks don’t seem big, they grant the places you go to with a lot of identity. The forest area offers a bunch of bounce pads to get around its flowing rivers, the first half of the amusement park world calls on you to do minigames to venture forth, while the factory underneath’s got switch puzzles, etc. The train lines of the local ice level are partially submerged in water, forcing you to go through time-sensitive underwater escapades between parts of the subway…

And speaking of ice level, there’s a segment where you deal with a sliding puzzle typical of this level type then a NPC goes “yeah that’s the only ice level stuff you’re dealing with.” You just get lost in a blizzard instead. Respect.

There are also scattered pick ups that replenish health and MP, and I think they’re a welcome addition that eases reliance on using up healing items. There are also power gems and if you want to skip a fight, you can use one up and get the rewards you would have normally gotten’ alternatively, finding and keeping the power gems to the end of the dungeon gives an array of bonus rewards, so there’s a nice little risk-reward system here. Also you collect stardust to use on party wide benefits, I guess. I dunno how to feel about it. It’s not exactly extraneous and there’s clearly thought put into how stardust is distributed, I guess tech trees just piss me off on an inherit level.

While I admire the locations, let’s also take the time to admire the looks of everything. Torch60’s games already looked pretty good, and that hasn’t changed. The art of Soma Union feels like a refining of Soma Spirits Rebalance, like battle screens having enemies outlined with white set against abstract backgrounds for a more simple, yet striking look. The game also plays around with larger illustration work that I don’t really remember seeing in past works that switches things up visually. Strut your stuff, Lumen.

As usual with Torch60’s stuff, he’s joined by Agent Ape for composer work. There’s a nice variety of songs to fit the game’s moods and environments. I’m not sure how to describe my feeling about this, but Soma Union’s music feels cleaner than Soma Spirits’ offerings, if that makes sense? Clearly Torch60 and Agent Ape improved in their crafts over the years, but I’m still shit at discussing music.

Soma Union? From a gameplay perspective, I’m definitely loving it! There’s a lot of thought put into the design with engaging fights and interesting places to explore. Besides those nitpicky things I got, I have no big complaints. How about that story…? Well, I’m saving that for later! Besides not being done with the game yet, I plan on rewatching someone playing through Soma Spirits because there’s a lot of clear narrative links into this sequel, so I feel that it’s worth revisiting for a better look at the story. So, see y’all like… at least two weeks later.