Are Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma a Trilogy?

Fans group Quintet's three Super Nintendo action RPGs, Soul Blazer (1992), Illusion of Gaia (1993), and Terranigma (1995), as one trilogy, and the grouping has three competing names: the Quintet Trilogy, the Gaia Trilogy, and the Heaven and Earth Trilogy, after Terranigma's Japanese title. Japanese fans call the same set the Soul trilogy. The games share a director's chair, a publisher, a composer's bench of creation themes, and a single obsession: a world being remade, and what the remaking costs.

The story connection, though, was denied by the publisher itself. In a November 2014 interview, a former producer at Enix USA stated that there is no connection between Soul Blazer and Gaia, and that Soul Blazer is instead related to ActRaiser, Quintet's 1990 god game, effectively a prequel to it. The games nod at each other, Illusion of Gaia names Soul Blazer's hero "Blazer," but no shared world was ever built.

So the honest answer is the one this shelf uses: an unofficial trilogy, bound by theme and authorship rather than plot. Read in order, they still play like one long argument about creation: ActRaiser's god who builds, Soul Blazer's servant who restores, Gaia's boy who travels a real Earth, and Terranigma's Ark, who resurrects everything and pays for it.