Our voyage in search of truly timeless games has taken my co-host Patrick and I on quite the adventure. Sailing through a sea of nostalgia, we've dredged up our fair share of trash and treasure alike. While we don't always agree upon which is which, and are often surprised at each other's poor judgement, no game has ever rocked the boat quite like Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete.
What in my eyes was a fun little adventure to save the world was instead for Patrick a maddening nightmare that pushed him to the edge. Consumed with rage, he descended upon Lunar with cyclonic force; tearing apart the characters for their simplicity and smashing the plot against the rocks for its unoriginality. But even these criticisms paled in comparison to the tirade he would unleash on Lunar's gameplay. Almost shouting, he levelled criticism after criticism against the combat, calling it a shallow, repetitive and boring slog. A thirty hour game which had worn out its welcome in the first, subjecting the player to seemingly identical battles over and over and over again. From his perspective, Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete had some of the worst gameplay he had ever encountered.
And to some extent, I agreed.
While I thought that Lunar was an overwhelmingly endearing experience on the whole, I couldn't deny that over the course of the game my enjoyment of the gameplay had somewhat wavered. Character customization was almost non-existent, and I hadn't been required to make meaningful decisions for what felt like hours. Like many games before it, Lunar's gameplay had not stood the test of time. But to my surprise, the storm didn't end there.
Patrick went on to declare all JRPGs to be nothing more than grindy snooze-fests, a genre devoid of engaging gameplay, proven not only by his experience with Lunar, but with Crystalis and Vagrant Story too. He was so adamant in this assertion, so unwavering, that one of our listeners questioned if we would ever review a JRPG again. To be frank, I felt somewhat attacked. JRPGs are my favourite genre, and nothing brings me joy like a ragtag crew going on a grand adventure fraught with peril and strategic turn-based combat. Obviously I had chosen poorly when selecting these games for the podcast. It was surely a fluke that all three had had questionable gameplay. Most games in the genre were of course filled with brain-bending battles and strategic encounters which pushed their players to their limits, rather than boring them to death through sheer repetition.
Or so I’d believed.
As it turned out, finding a JRPG which presented interesting decisions was harder than I'd imagined. Many games were more complex than Lunar, but few I could find would demand more from the player than simply attacking, healing and maintaining buffs. There were of course some games which tried to mix it up, but more often than not you just found your strongest move and used it until you had won. This wasn't what I had envisioned, and I found myself slipping ever closer to that dark future where against all odds Patrick was somehow, impossibly, right.
Sadly for him, he was not. Enter Cosmic Star Heroine, a title I could have easily missed if not for an obscure comment deep in the umpteenth page of Google. It was exactly the game I was looking for, an antithesis to those who would label JRPG combat as dull and uninteresting. And I would love to share it with you, the game which shows that Patrick couldn’t be more wrong.
Cosmic Star Heroine stars Alyssa L'Salle, a special agent under the secretive Agency for Peace and Intelligence. Hopping from planet to planet on various missions, she leads a crack team of operatives in their ongoing mission to make the galaxy a safer place. The game's story moves along at an unusually brisk pace, with large scale events beginning and concluding in a fraction of the time that they would in most other titles. While many other JRPGs seek to hook you through a compelling world and vibrant cast of characters, Cosmic Star Heroine instead seeks your praise through a very well constructed combat system.
When reviewing Lunar, Pat and I agreed that the main issue with its combat was its staggering levels of repetition. It wasn't fun or satisfying to simply use each character's best ability ad nauseum until the fight was over. What should make for an interesting turn-based game is a mental decision tree which can evolve in different ways depending on your enemies. Each turn should be its own unique puzzle and the player should be forced to find solutions which are not only immediately impactful, but have positive ramifications several turns down the line. In Lunar, the answers to these questions were almost always the same, and you rarely ever needed to stop and think past the first turn. In contrast, Cosmic Star Heroine succeeds where Lunar failed by virtue of two very clever mechanics: Hyper and Defend.
While you may have seen the option to defend in many JRPGs before (Lunar had it, although I never used it), CSH uses it a little differently. Here, in addition to reducing damage taken for a turn, Defend recharges your abilities, which go into an indefinite cooldown upon being used. The most immediate effect of this is that you cannot repeatedly use the same ability turn after turn in battle. While you could theoretically alternate between defending and using your favourite move, this kind of play would be extremely inefficient and would quickly lose you the battle. Instead, you are forced to re-determine the most powerful move available to you turn after turn, making for a much more engaging experience. But this system alone isn't enough to make for interesting battles, as it would of course be trivial to simply use your moves in descending order of power. Luckily, Defend is just one part of the puzzle. The second part is Hyper.
Many games give their characters powerful signature abilities which can only be used every so often. These go by many names, such as overdrives or ultimates, but they all work to fulfill a similar set of functions. Something that has always annoyed me about using these in single-player games is that they very often take decision making away from the player. In multi-player games like DOTA or Overwatch, it's often correct to save up these ultimate abilities for a critical moment, rather than use them immediately. Conversely, in single-player games, it is generally more efficient to use them on-cooldown, so as to maximise your damage throughput. This means that a turn in which you use your ultimate is a turn where your decision was effectively made for you, reducing player agency. Cosmic Star Heroine gets around this by having Hyper not be a specific special move, but instead a power-up that makes whichever ability you use next stronger. As far as I can tell, Hyper affects every ability in the game, from damaging attacks to healing spells and even status effects. A hyper-powered poison, for example, will tick for many times the damage it would if applied normally. This allows it to still feel fun no matter which ability you use it with. And just as well, because the Hyper buff cannot be saved for later, but is instead used automatically the turn it triggers.
Hyper doesn't care whether your most powerful ability is on cooldown or not - it always arrives according to a very consistent pattern whether you are ready for it or not. As a result of this, you are really incentivised to plan out your turns in advance. The main character, for example, always gets her Hyper buff on the second turn of the battle and then every third turn thereafter. Meaning it is usually correct to avoid using her strongest move for the first turn, so that you can use a hyper-powered attack the next. However, if an enemy uses a powerful attack on their first turn, you may instead need to use the second turn to heal, missing out on that critical-timing for increased damage. From there, battles often spiral into uniquely complicated beasts, where your priorities shift with every turn that passes. Every character has a different number of turns between their hyper phase and you are incentivised to try and converge these turns into a singular strategy which results in an enormous amount of damage. It is here, in the balancing of the hyper buff and your available cooldowns that this game truly shines. Use too many powerful abilities too early and you’ll have nothing to use come time for hyper. Too few on the other hand and you might not heal enough to survive. In Cosmic Star Heroine you never feel like you're in the middle of a repetitive grind, but rather a strategic combat puzzle which requires you to plan several turns ahead in order to succeed.
On the recommendation of a user review, I began my playthrough on Super Spy, the game's hardest difficulty. Here the battles are so tightly tuned that a single misstep will lead to failure, and you really need to take full advantage of each mechanic in order to win. While I died many many times in the opening hours, I always felt like I was getting closer to the solution with each failure, a little better with every step. Eventually I got the hang of it and found myself winning a lot more than I had been, however at no point did I reach a point where the difficulty was trivialised by my playskill. Cosmic Star Heroine embraces challenge in a way which is always fun, fair and, most importantly, free of frustration.
It’s very easy to imagine a world where this process of improvement was extremely tedious. Where every failure resulted in a reloaded save or a long run back from a checkpoint. Here though, you are allowed to replay any battle from the beginning rather than wasting your time with mind-numbing busywork in between. The game really does try its absolute best to not waste your time which removes a lot of the frustration I've long associated with trying to play these types of games. The most notable quality-of-life inclusions for me were the ability to save at any time and being able to see enemies in the overworld. While random encounters have become less common over the years, CSH takes it a step further by having every enemy in an encounter on screen at once. Rather than running into a single enemy and then loading into battle with three, every member of the encounter is visible to the player at all times. Alongside a seamless transition into combat, this not only cuts down on load times but also allows you to plan your party's loadout ahead of time.
Speaking of items, gone are they days of finding hundreds of worthless potions or poorly explained knickknacks. In Cosmic Star Heroine items are not consumed upon use, but are only usable once per battle. This makes discovering new trinkets out in the overworld much more meaningful, as every item you find is completely unique. And they even come with a handy little description when you find them, removing the need to dig into the menus to find out what the hell they do. Together these little design decisions really add up and result in the otherwise simple overworld being quite enjoyable to explore. Exploration isn’t just about what you can find though, but what you can find and with who.
Most successful JRPGs feature an eclectic cast of characters who bring various playstyles, customisation options and personalities to the table. Similarly to Lunar, I felt that one of Cosmic Star Heroine's greatest strengths was how often characters joined and left the party. Each time I thought I’d understood my team’s playstyle, the game would throw me a curveball,adding or removing a character from the dynamic. The game boasts an impressive eleven characters for you to play with, all with their own unique strengths, weaknesses and customisation options. This huge amount of variety really helped to keep the gameplay feeling fresh throughout the experience. I loved the amount of tinkering that I was able to do with each character's skills and items. I was always trying to find the best configuration for them and was pleasantly surprised that the ideal setup changed each time I got to use them. As such, I was quite disappointed when this depth of customisation didn’t contribute to each character’s personality but instead led to the game’s largest flaw.
Having a huge cast of characters initially seems very impressive on paper, but it comes at a significant cost. Yes, it was wonderful to have my in-game party spiced up every few battles, but none of the characters were given enough time to breathe. I never experienced any of the small personal stories that I've come to expect from the genre. None of the characters had any significant shortcomings, growth or a growing sense of camaraderie with my other party members. Instead I struggled to remember what made each character tick and found myself unable to care about any of them. Although a lot of games feature subpar characters with only one exaggerated personality trait, even they do a better job than this. I didn't hate the characters in this game, but I think that would almost be preferable to how forgettable I found them. The story is similarly bland, which is a shame, because I really enjoyed the original sci-fi setting and its gorgeous 2D environments. It wasn't all bad though - some of the environmental dialogue and jokes got a good laugh out of me, and occasionally part of the world building shines through with an interesting idea. On the whole, however, this definitely isn't a game that I would recommend to people because of its writing.
It feels somewhat like a strange inversion of the JRPGs I had played previously, whose stories were always the main draw. Here the opposite is true, and all of the focus is on its well-crafted battles. The combat in this game is some of the best I've played in the genre, challenging but not frustrating and simple yet deep. Even if the writing was the worst I had ever seen (it’s not ) I would still recommend this game for the strength of its gameplay alone.
Not everyone will love this game as much as I did. Those who play RPGs to explore a big open world and grind monsters for hours should likely look elsewhere. And so too will those looking for an expansive and endearing story. But for players looking for a challenging game filled with tactical decisions and engaging customisation I can't recommend Cosmic Star Heroine enough.
Oh and its soundtrack is great too.
