Blip's Old Shitty Game Review - Secret of the Stars

Since everyone else reviews new games, I'll review old ones. Mostly because I'm cheap.

Today I bring to your attention Tecmo's dirty little secret: Secret of the Stars aka "An abomination and borderline criminal offense"

Premise

Secret of the Stars is about some kid named Ray and four other equally unimportant people who make up Aqutallion; a group that comes together to defeat the evil (what else?) Homncruse, who apparently wants to destroy the world for no particular reason. The kids all had fathers in Aqutallion and are born under a "mysterious destiny" (pretty much everything in the game is described as "mysterious"), and are assisted by an even more useless band of idiots called the Kustera, which is a separate party that you can control and serves no purpose whatsoever in the main quest.

Story

The plot of Secret of the Stars are about as thin as the chances of a quadriplegic midget playing for the NBA, with virtually no character development whatsoever. A character will join the party saying something like "You are Aqutallion? Me too! I will join you! We beat Homncruse!", and not much else, if anything, afterward.

Furthermore, the translation is hilariously awful. Thought the PS1 translation of Final Fantasy Tactics was bad? That my friends, was the complete unabridged works of Shakespeare compared to this dreck in text form. BY THE WAY THE WHOLE GAME READS LIKE THIS.

If a barely existent plot and annoying capital letters weren't enough of a deterrent, there's also atrocious grammar and punctuation, misused words, and awkward sentence structures as well (f.e. "past" away, "fateful doom" and "Chainmale"). The characters also have a habit of saying "however" and "anyway" alot, and usually completely out of place.

As said earlier, everything from islands to buildings to people are described as "mysterious", and yes, that's just about the only adjective used throughout the entire game. Not even the town and enemy names could escape this cruel fate. With foes such as "catboo", "badbad" and "Bingo", and locations such as "Jeep Mountain", "Giant" and "Old Tunnel" (despite it being freshly dug), you can rest assured that even if you fast forward through all the dialogue, you wouldn't be missing much except maybe a migraine or two. Or ten.This is partly because the game gives very little direction as to what to do or where to go next, though some people may enjoy this particular aspect rather than having the game hold their hand.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about it; frustration, anger, annoyance, sadness, despair, and wonder. As in, the single most repeated thought in my head, like an involuntary mantra of sorts, is "why the hell am I even playing this game?"

Gameplay

Well, at least this part of the game isn't completely broken. The battle system is kind of Dragon Warrior-esque, but at least it has an auto-battle function which will physically attack and heal as needed. This comes in handy as the encounter rate is astronomically high to the point where it can take 20 minutes to get to a town where it's only a 20 second walk. (There have been times when I'd finish a battle, literally take a single step and BOOM, battle time again. Take another step and BOOM yet another pointless battle.) You do all the RPG basics in battle: attack, cast magic, run away, defend, etc. Nothing special to see here, but at least it works.

Some people would call this primitive system "old-school", which is a nice way of calling it rudimentary and dull.

As previously mentioned, at times the game will offer very little direction as to what to do next, so you'll be wandering around fighting alot while looking for that key or 'mysterious' item. But that's just as well because you have to grind in order to even barely survive in the next area you go to. Despite the high encounter rate, you'll still find yourself looking around for enemies to kill so you can level up and learn that new may-or-may-not-be-useful spell.

Also, the defeated monsters give out an abundance of money in this game, so you'll always be able to fully outfit your characters in the latest cliched battle gear.

On a related note, your second useless and vapid party, the Kustera, can't even give items to the main party and vise-versa until later in the game. And with two parties, you're going to be doing twice as much grinding if you want to bother with the few uninteresting Kustera side areas of the game.

Visuals

Despite the fact that this game was released in 1995, it looks worse than most games did back in 1991. The towns are bland, the character sprites even moreso, and the spell effects are a cure for Insomnia. The world map is serviceable, with the usual mountain ranges and oddly shaped continents. The battle backgrounds are halfway decent, and change depending on the terrain you're on when you encounter an enemy.

More on the battle visuals; the monsters range from borderline embarrassing to somewhat inventive, but most of them are drawn fairly well. Your characters look much better here than anywhere else in the game, too bad you only see them for a split second, one at a time.

Overall the graphics are quite dated, yet serviceable enough. Some people would also call this "old-school", which is a nice way of saying it looks like crap.

Music (and I use the word loosely)

The 'songs' are 30 second loops of 'music', which range from tolerable to muteworthy, mostly the latter. The sound effects are standard fare beeps and boops.

TL;DR

The only secret that Secret of the Stars holds is how the hell Tecmo executives gave the green light to make this abomination printed on what used to be perfectly good Silicon. You'd have more fun playing with the SNES audio/visual test cartridge. If this game had a translation that was in English that wasn't evidently done by a fresh off the boat Chinese third grader with severe Autism, and if the encounter rate and grinding sessions were dialed down a bit, you might, and I stress MIGHT have had a somewhat enjoyable game here. But alas, the only fun to be had with Secret of the Stars is at it's expense. Truly one of the worst SNES games that I have ever had the misfortune of playing.

However, if you decide to ignore your better judgment and play out of morbid curiosity and/or masochism, my advice would be to play this on an emulator so you can fast forward through the literally thousands of coma inducing battles. Or better yet, don't play this game at all.

Still better than Dragon Warrior though, but that's like comparing Lung and Brain Cancer.

2/10