STARDUST: Wish of Witch

Great game. You can pretty much immediately tell where a good chunk of budget went. Full, fun voice acting, and beautiful pixel graphics with a lot of frames of animation to them. I found the moment to moment gameplay to be fun, and I rather enjoyed the story, but this game isn't without its own set of issues. First off: I found that combat had just way too many enemies. While wiping out hordes of enemies can add to a power fantasy, sometimes it makes the game a slog. Especially when enemies spawn halfway across the map so you have to trek over to them. Nice of the devs to not have their ai activate until you're in range, so you're not being swarmed from the get-go, but it's also kinda annoying. Second: Resources. Crafting accessories costs money and monster drops. If you want to gear up your team, you're going to have to revisit missions multiple times to farm the cash and the drops, which when combined with the hordes of enemies, can really slow down the game. This is the reason it took me 40 hours to complete a game people complained was too short. Third: Speaking of Accessories, the system can feel a bit restrictive. At first they're rather bland and unimpactful, but as you start ranking them up and getting access to higher tier gear, they quickly become extremely relevant. And while 3 slots seems good at first for a variety, there's only an illusion of choice. One slot is dedicated to mana, because everybody uses mana and you want to start off fights faster, else you fall behind in defeating the enemies and just lose. Second is a relic dedicated to your most relevant damage stat, cause of a lack of reliable healing mechanics in the game, the best way to survive is to quickly dispatch foes, and increasing your scaling stat is a great way to boost your usefulness across the board. Then that leaves you with a whopping 1 slot to play around with, and that's only if you don't need something to "fix," your character like a cooldown reduction or movement speed relic. Sure there are a few character buffs that can help, but taking up a valuable skill slot and turn to buff can be a risk of its own. Fourth: Some characters just felt way more useful than others. There's a character introduced later that's based on a flat damage DoT. But groups of low max hp enemies are better disposed of by Yu and his high base damage aoe spells, and high max hp bosses are better dps'd down by the character introduced after, who has % max HP dots. And Charlotte, despite being my favorite design, just fell short. If I wanted a beefy physical character I'd just go with Leon. He hits harder with attack artifacts, has team buffs, and his defense passive can be used more than once in a blue moon. If I wanted aoe damage, I'd just keep Yu and Star. Even the free DLC character didn't really feel like she had a place on the team, other than cheesing out the postgame exploration quests by hitting the whole map at once. Speaking of hitting the whole map, Chizu as a whole felt a tad disappointing cause her gimmick is not attacking for a turn and then using her whole kit at once You need to build a team around her or she's just a brick for a whole turn. Even then, her turns that I had quickdraw, her passive on, and a ton of mana didn't even output enough damage to make it worth using over anybody else. Lastly: As some other reviews have mentioned, none of the town npcs ever really change dialogue. It's a bit of a shame to have all these neat looking characters but have them just say the same line every time, never updating with the changing world. Overall despite these issues I still had a great time. I'd still fully recommend it, Even at full price. Although there's a lot of text up there, these are small gripes in the grand scheme of things, but things that can be improved on nonetheless.