Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth

"Beyond Pulling-Your-Hair-Out Frustrating, but still an awesome game."

Well, here goes my first review (hooray!).
Alright, on to reviewing...

First of all, this game is not for the casual gamer. If you consider yourself to be a new gamer, or a casual gamer, you should just stop reading this review, and go buy a different game.

I'll wait...

Okay, so now we've filtered ourselves out to you: the hardcore gamer.
Hoshigami is a Turn-Based Strategy RPG, which is very, very difficult, and complex.

Gameplay: 9
Okay, so you know it's hard, but why? Well, first off, your characters aren't invincible. No phoenix downs, no coming back afterwards. Just your good ol' friend the RESET button. and believe me, you'll be pressing it a lot. Unless you spend hours and hours playing through the mind-numbingly boring Tower of Trial (your one-stop location for easy enemies), you'll find your characters at the same level as the enemy.

The Gameplay itself is very good, and the RAP (Ready for Action Points) system is genius. The RAP system gives you a set amount of points, and everything costs a set amount of RAP points. The more of your points you use, the longer it takes for you to get your next turn. With this in play, that means that your character could walk all the way across the map, but then wouldn't be able to do anything else, and would have to wait a long time for his next turn.
It could also mean that your character could attack three times, and then not move at all. Your weight will effect how many RAP points you have. So this means that you could outfit your character with 100-pound unpiercable armor and a sword the size of mount everest, but he would move very, very slow. While you could outfit a guy with light clothing and a sharp knife, and he would have enough RAP points to run in, cut somebody open, then run back again.

The game flows nicely, and the menus are easy enough to navigate. The AI is good (maybe too good, which makes it that adjective I've been using a lot this review, hard), and the enemies are fun to play against. The overall Gameplay experience is quite fun and enjoyable.

There's a great selection of weapons to use, and there are several deities (elements to devote you characters to) which will determine which weapon they are more proficient with. You can level your Dev (Devotion to your deity) as well as your Exp, which will give you skills ranging from 5% more defence to raising all stats by 100% when hp is under a certain amount.

The problem here is that the whole game feels like it'd be better suited to be on the SNES or the Gameboy Advance than on the 32-bit PS1, which is capable of real 3D. The game feels like it should've come out about 5 years earlier. Not that this is a bad thing, but we're used to better in the 21st century, aren't we?

Sound: 2
This is what gets me about this game; the music is alright, but it's too short, and there's not enough variety. you get 45 seconds of the same song played over and over and over every fight. The sound when you select something on the menu isn't very nice either. you hear it about 10-20 times per character, per turn. multiply that by the billions of turns you'll be playing through in the game, and you'll feel like kicking your poor PS1. The only reason the sound got a 2 is because the noises of impact (from a sword, spear, axe, boomerang, whatever) sound crisp. but how can you enjoy it of you've got a constant annoying "dee-doo" playing over and over again?

Graphics: 9
Although they look like something out of your SNES or GBA, I, personally love sprites and prefer them to 3D models. The anime art of every character also looks very nice, and there are several different poses for each character, depending on their emotions. The sprites are all very unique, and you can easily distinguish what character that is, and what he/she is doing (usually bouncing up and down slightly, waiting for his/her turn).

Animation: 8
the sprites could use a couple more positions (there's about 3 for walking: right leg forward, left leg forward and both legs together), and it looks a bit choppy occasionally, but the attack animations are very clean, and very entertaining to watch.

Story: 9.5
The story seems cookie-cutter at first (mercenary is recruited by the king to lead small attack force, mercenary accepts, mercenary's town is sacked by enemy, mercenary swears revenge, etc.), but about halfway through the game, it starts getting interesting with twist after twist, and a big revelation at the end (which is too good to spoil).

Replay Value: 1000000000000000...
The game has infinite replayability. With more than 10 different endings, and a wheelbarrowful of secrets and unlockables, the game will keep you occupied for a long, long time (that is, if you don't mind the difficulty level)

Fun Factor: 7
The game should have an easy mode, for it is too boring leveling for hours in the Tower of Trial, and too hard without the Tower. Frustration pulls the Fun Factor down by a lot, but if you like the first hour of play time, you like the next million.

Overall Score: (taking into consideration that replay value, fun factor, story and gameplay are a lot more important than graphics, animation and sound)
7.8

GameFAQs rounded score: 8

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/27/06