Cosmic Star Heroine

Cosmic Star Heroine at heart is a love letter to the SNES era of JRPGs. The influences of Chrono Trigger are clearly seen in the beautiful art style and the framework of the battle system. Cosmic Star Heroine offers a quick RPG, some fresh mechanics, and a witty sense of humor. I’m excited to write about it so let’s dive in!

The game opens following Alyssa, an agent of API (the Agency of Peace and Intelligence), on a mission to handle a hostage situation in a high rise tower. Following the conclusion of this mission you are chosen to go to another planet for your next mission to locate some technology devices from an abandoned research facility before a group of terrorists known as Astrea can get their hands on it. Upon retrieval of the devices you learn they are capable of mind control, and our story really starts at this point. It’s actually pretty good, and it’s not all that cliche. I found myself not being able to guess what would come next, with some twists that caught me off guard!

The cast of characters here is amazing! You have a couple humans, but then the rest of the cast is a diverse group of species from multiple planets, and a robot that dances like Michael Jackson. Can’t make this stuff up. The aliens of the crew contains a big green bounty hunter, a revived soul in a semi-mechanical body and giant ant that has enhanced his body with cyborg technology. Each is very well written, and has a completely unique set of abilities to match anyone’s play styles. I found myself gravitating towards a few and stuck with them, but I won’t say who. I don’t want to sound biased and sway anyone who may be reading this towards my picks, because they’re all great and fun to play!

It’s a short RPG, I clocked in about 18 hours. I found plenty of side quests to keep me busy. Talking to everyone gives you clues on how to progress the story, as well as find side quests.

Some cool things this game did was no random battles, and once you beat an encounter it was gone for good! If you wanted to re-battle you could choose “battle” from the menu in the areas you previously engaged with the enemies. The battle system was fantastic. You have a set of 7 abilities. Most of these are one time use, some could be re-used. You could refresh the one time use abilities by defending. You’d repeat this process to get through battles. It definitely added a tactical element to it, having to plan your turns. Each character also would enter “hyper mode” after a set amount of turns, each character having their own turn count to do so. “Hyper mode” would power up any healing or damaging ability used that turn. Hitting zero HP also didn’t always result in death if your “style” was over 40% (style increased every time you use a move, and goes to zero if you use a “burst” move). If you dropped below 0% you had one turn of that character to get back over zero HP or you’re out. After every battle you are back to full HP.

Now for the things that weren’t so great. While there were tutorials for most things, and even a menu entry for them, a lot of things were left completely unexplained. Such as a support character that says “no VR penalty” but I had no idea what VR referred to. A lot of places, when revisited, would replay the same events upon investigating things, as if nothing happened. If you visit a dungeon from early in the game, you would see repeated dialogue from the three characters that were there, even if they weren’t in the party. The menus and shops were buggy at times, not displaying anything unless you cancelled out and went back in. I had a few battles freeze on initiation as well. Lastly, this game was extremely easy. I played on the “heroine” difficulty, which was their name for hard, and I breezed through with no grinding. I did attempt the hardest difficulty, and it was fine in terms of how hard it was, but the battles just dragged on. I wrecked the final boss. None of these things are exclusive to this game, and are find in many AAA titles as well, so I won’t knock off too many stars.

Overall, this game is a master class on how to revisit the SNES era of JRPGS and make it approachable, fun and fresh! I wholeheartedly recommend picking this one up!