Cosmic Star Heroine

Maybe it is fun for others, but I couldn't get into it at all. This is probably the best example for over-streamlining and convoluting the battle system at the same time. There is so much that needs to be better explained....or maybe it is later, but I couldn't even get myself to that point. I did notice that the achievement for beating the tutorial mission only has about 58% achieving it. That doesn't seem like a good sign to me.

Cosmic Star Heroine foi uma daquelas experiências que me fizeram lembrar por que eu gostava tanto dos JRPGs antigos quando era mais novo. O jogo pega toda aquela vibe clássica de Chrono Trigger e Phantasy Star, mas sem ficar preso ao passado, porque o combate é rápido, estratégico e não perde tempo com grind chato. Eu gostei muito da estética sci-fi neon, da trilha sonora e principalmente de como a aventura é enxuta e divertida do começo ao fim, sem enrolação. Mesmo com alguns personagens que poderiam ser mais desenvolvidos, foi um daqueles RPGs que me deixaram com a sensação confortável de estar revivendo uma época antiga dos videogames, mas de um jeito moderno e muito bem feito.

The game is alright - I will eventually finish it. However, I can't say that I recommend it (there are other JRPG style indie titles that I think are better than this one on steam). This is mostly because I like the combat (though, there's quite a bit of fighting and there are definitely some "main strategies" that make the game feel repetitive). The story is all over the place. Stuff seems to happen just because. Oh, and your party has no idea how to follow you.

I have played all of Zeboyd's games up to Cthulu 2, and generally I appreciated what they were trying to do and enjoyed them. But the problem with this developer is that they have not grown at all. It was one thing to start off your indie career with simple comical jRPGs that had some slight refinements that made them a bit more fun to play than most 8-bit titles. But 15 years later and their games are still just as shallow as they ever were. The indie RPG scene has moved far from this by now. Extremely linear gameplay, total lack of any character building or even customization of any kind. Very simple combat that doesn't ever really change through out the game. The same small pool of skills you are using every single battle, it gets old fast. Dungeons that have no real design, basically just corridors FF13 style. But the worst part of it all, is the absolutely terrible millennial writing! The characters, the dialogue, the cutscenes, the plot. It's all incredibly embarrassing to watch. It's the same exact kind of writing you get from modern AAA slop these days. Not a single "joke" landed here. Generic personalities, where everyone is just quipping at every moment. "Well that just happened." I couldn't take the game seriously at all, and neither could the devs. The characters can watch people get slaughtered and all they gotta say is some awful morbid pun cause being inhumane is funny in this universe. Then it happened, the black girl with colored hair showed up and I had to watch a full music video with terrible looping animation, bad art, and cringy lyrics. That might have been the worst thing I ever seen in a game that I actually paid for. All I can really say is that this game is incredibly juvenile, clearly made by overgrown infants who haven't matured past highschool. And their skills as developers haven't matured either. It's actually pretty sad to witness. I don't recommend this game to any RPG fans. A young progressive who has little to no experience playing RPGs might enjoy this game as an introduction to the genre, but for everyone else, there are so many better options out there. Save yourself the 2nd hand embarrassment and skip this game. (And all future Zeboyd games, as their recent magic princess game has shown they're certainly not getting any better.)

tl;dr if you like rpgmaker jrpg (wot is a jrpg idk?) you'll probably like this but it is very clunky Idk i guess i'll give the game a thumbsup since i did finish it (eventually) and it was ok but honestly this is a coin toss and just as easily could have been a thumbsdown. Just a few general thoughts: The combat is kind of fun and there is a little bit of strategizing but mostly the battles just take forever w/o any risk of loosing (at least on normal difficulty) and I wish they were a bit shorter. Also, how come the boss fights were easier then the regular enemies? Also, how come the final boss has three phases where it does zero damage so that killing it just feel more like a chore then a challenge? On the point of strategy you do have a lot of team mates to choose from to let you develop a strategy but most of them are useless so it's not really that good and having to manage them is kind of annoying (especially when the game makes you switch to one to talk to an npc or to do a side mission). Gun girl, knife girl and sue until you replace him with bug girl is a goated combo but everyone else is not even worth having. The part of this I hate the most is that for a lot of the story the game forces you to play with certain team mates. In one sense this is good because it forces you to use members you otherwise wouldn't and therefore come up with strategies you otherwise wouldn't. The bad of it is that I don't want to play as the team mates I don't want to play as and it really sucks creating the perfect team just for the game to be like "you don't get to use this team you've perfected". And the game is too short as well I think for the forced switching since doing so for a segment of each main mission causes the majority of the game to be locked to a team you hate. That and sometimes even when you're not in one of these locked states the game will just change your party arbitrarily. It might be a bug or the game trying to be helpful but failing but either way when this happens you can switch the team back to how you want it but it is super annoying to have to keep doing that. And then just as a side note sometimes the game is unclear about what path to take meaning you might not realize you're on the main path and then miss some side stuff if you progress too far. Not a big deal since I didn't really care about collecting everything but just something that is an issue. The menus are super clunky but the worst of that is you can't sort out your team's equipment or abilities unless they are in your party and sometimes you can't add them to your party like when you are in a section of the game that forces you to use certain members or when you're on your ship (hub) where you can only have the main character in the party. The transitions from overworld to underworld are also really bad. It's hard to explain but you'd notice it in game. Having to keep upgrading your weapon and shield for each character is kind of pointless since the game gives you so much money that you never have to worry about which items to prioritize in shops so there's no strategy there you can also just buy the best available thing so it just becomes busy work. Shields are a bit better then weapons since upgrading weapons is a very linear progression but there is a bit more room to customize when it comes to shields. However, I wish the stats upgraded automatically to cut down on the pointless busy work and you just had to pick a bonus that would be good no matter what part of the game you're in.

Deviates from the standard JRPG formula in several ways, and does it quite well. Story is rather bland, but gameplay makes up for that.

good

A JRPG with a too-fast paced story, stock characters, and confusing map design. Still, it was a lot of fun to play, and the combat is satisfying. It doesn't overstay its welcome, and I would recommend it to turn-based rpg fans that don't mind a retro style.