Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth

"Difficult to the point of ridiculousness; You have been warned"

When most players check out this game, most see the obvious resemblance to Final Fantasy Tactics. While Final Fantasy Tactics was immensely fun and offered many military options (archers, knights, white mages, black mages, etc.), it can get on the easy side, especially if you build up levels beyond the levels of enemies in story battles.

Hoshigami seeks to remedy the relative easiness of Final Fantasy Tactics with a very high difficulty level and unbalanced gameplay mechanics. The unbalanced gameplay mechanics that makes this game not as good as it could have been.

=================
Gameplay Analysis
=================

Deity System and Devotion Levels:
In Hoshigami, each unit can worship one of potentially 8 deities. Each deity has 16 devotion levels, where each level provides your unit with a skill or item. Like the zodiac system of FFT, each deity in Hoshigami is strong and weak against other deities. Unfortunately, earning devotion points is quite slow. Unless you attack higher level units (even your own), you will only receive 1-3 devotion points. At 100 points per devotion level, 16 skills per deity, and 8 deities, it will be an arduous journey to accumulate enough devotion points. You can only switch your deity to those who are friendly with your existing deity and you have at least devotion level 1 (you start at devotion level 0 when you change deities), so while you can learn all the skills, you'll be hopping around a little. There is a skill to increase devotion points gained by 10%, but it may not be worth getting it unless your unit already worships that deity to start.

Most of the skills affect your unit's statistics. There are almost no weapon, alternative attack, or terrain skills like in FFT (such as Move on Lava, Wave Fist, Steal, Invite, etc.)

Experience System:
Like the deity devotion system, there are 100 experience points and you must attack higher level units (even your own) if you want to get more experience points. Otherwise, you get 3-6 EXP. If your attacking units kills the unit, it gets a little more experience points. There is also a skill to increase EXP, but again, it may not be worth getting it unless your unit already worships that deity to start.

Weapon System:
There are 6 weapons: ring, mace, lance, sword, boomerang, bow. Since there are no jobs in Hoshigami, you can equip any weapon. Lances and maces have a range of 2 squares, but maces can only hit the closest target. Boomerangs fly mostly horizontally. Rings increase magic power. The unit's deity, however, determines which weapons your unit is most proficient (bonus) and least proficient (penalized). The bonus and penalties appear to be marginal in most cases. Since there are very few skills that enhance the weapons, you may end up using weapons with range and rings most often. The game does not give you any incentive to use a variety of weapons.

Combat:
Combat is the most troubling system. Hit percentages are not consistent. You can miss at 90% consistently (while the enemy can hit at 3% very consistently. Unless your hit percentage is at 95% or higher, you may find attacks miss more than you like. Of course, if you attack a unit whose deity is strong or weak against you, these percentages go more extreme. It's possible to get 0%.

In the story battles, the levels of the non-essential characters are the level of your highest unit. Thus if your army is not all at the same level, you will find it increasingly difficult to deal damage and survive. Each story has a level cap at which the enemies will no longer keep up with you, but since EXP accumulation is slow (as mentioned earlier), you will spend hours trying to gain more levels than needed.

The terrain itself can affect certain units who worship a given deity, either enhance or penalizing their stats while they are on that piece of terrain.

The computer has given itself a large advantage in its units. If you and the enemy units are at the same level and have the same weapons, the enemy units will have much better statistics. That means that they do more damage with weapons and magic and receive less damage from the same. It's as if the CPU gave the enemy units several extra levels' worth of statistic gain without raising their level values. As a result, you are at a statistical disadvantage unless you surpass the level cap.

In addition, in every story battle, you are outnumbered 2 to 1 and sometimes 3 to 1. So with enemies much more powerful than you are at the same level as you (if you don't surpass the level cap), the disadvantages continue to rack up.

With all these advantages that the CPU has, waging physical weapon combat is simply not feasible in many cases.

Since Hoshigami's story revolves around magic embedded in coins, however, you'll find magic in this game to be extremely potent. You can engrave seals to your coins to upgrade their power, range, area of effect, potency, Max MP, and MP usage (the coins have the MP, not the units).
Thus, you can give all your units powerful coins that do a lot of damage over a wide area and do a lot of damage to enemy units that don't have a high magic resistance. Unfortunately, this seems to be the most feasible way of winning story battles. This takes a lot away from the game, because the game does not seem to allow you to try out different attack strategies to win a battle. Your best combat option is magic: making all your units magic users. Physical attack units are relatively worthless. You cannot readily exploit positioning strategies because the CPU, with its higher stats, can easily bulldoze you if you do not use some magic to whittle down their numbers. This is a stark contrast to FFT and Tactics Ogre. In those two games, if you wanted to try using all knights, all archers, all mages, all lancers or a mix, you could do so and still have a reasonable chance to win, using brute force or positioning strategies.

Random Battles/Tower of Trials:
There are no random battles on maps. You must get to structures called Tower of Trials to level up, find random seals for your coins, and possibly win better equipment. Unfortunately, the tower's floors do not have a lot of variety and look boring. Fortunately, the level caps differ in the different towers, allowing you to take a low-level unit in to level up without fear of losing the unit.
You can save your progress every 5 floors (you must beat the fifth floor).

Death of a Unit/Life Ephemeral:
If you lose a unit in a battle, it's gone for good. There is revive magic, but it's generally not available until late in the game. With the advantages that the CPU enjoys, death can come swift, even if you employ your best strategy. The CPU simply has to bulldoze you with its superior stats. In most battles, you will likely lose units.

Recruitment:
There is a recruitment center allowing you to get new units.
The only differences between units are the deity it worships, weapon and armor it has to start, and minor stat differences.

You'll need this as your units can frequently die. At first they all start at level 1, forcing you to train them in the Tower, and there is even a chance you could lose them in the tower. It has been recently discovered that if all units in your party are at levels which are multiples of 5, you can recruit units at that multiple of 5. So, if all your units are level 10, you can start recruiting level 10 units, with better stats, weapons, and some devotion levels for one deity. If all your units are not at the same level, you should dismiss your non-story characters that aren't at the highest level of your party to allow yourself to recruit better units. As a result of this, you may not want to invest a lot of time and effort on your regular units to try to get them deity skills, since they can be replaced later.

Ready For Action Points (RAP):
An actual positive for this game. Each unit on the map has a certain number of RAP. When you move, cast magic, use an item, or attack, you consume RAP. You can even attack if you don't have enough RAP left, but any overflow will penalize you by halving your RAP regeneration, pushing you far later in the turn order. If you save RAP for your unit (not use it all up), that unit's turn can come sooner in the turn order. At the end of a units turn, you can even intentionally consume more RAP to make the unit have its turn later in the turn order. As a result, you have a lot of control over your units' turn order. Having this fine control is analogous to FFT's Haste and Quick spells, which affects that game's AT order.

Sessioning:
Sessioning allows you to push an enemy unit into your allies, who are lined up to receive the enemy. The result of this is a lot of extra damage to the enemy and an opportunity to get a weapon, armor, or coin the enemy units was carrying (random). It's the ONLY way to steal stuff off enemy units. Unfortunately, sessioning is hard to do because you must end your unit's turn in ''session,'' which make that unit take more damage from an attack. Any attack on a sessioning unit causes that unit to get knocked out of session (unable to participate). Since there are enemies galore, it's best to session enemies when there are a manageable few.

========
Graphics
========

Hoshigami's has decent battle graphics. It is inspired by FFT, so so the character sprites are ''super deformed'' characters on the map. The battle maps don't look as good as FFT, but they hold their own. You don't pick up this game for the graphics.

A nice touch is that in between battles, story events are told using full-size character portraits. There are several portraits per character for varying expressions.

Spell animations are competent, but lack the variety of FFT or Tactics Ogre.

=====
Music
=====

The music is mediocre. There a few nice songs, but they are very short and loop way too quickly. There also isn't a lot of variety of songs. Many places in the game will use the same piece of music over and over again.

Sound effects are competent. There aren't any sound effects that seem out of place.

=====
Story
=====

It's another war-torn continent, and a young mercenary, who seems to share a resemblance with Ramza of FFT, goes off to fight to rescue some friends and ultimately must fight to save the continent. The story unfolds with a lot more clarity than FFT, because of Atlus excellent translation. The story and ending evolve differently depending on which story characters you have and which ones are still alive.

========
Controls
========

The play controls are modeled after FFT. If you've played FFT, you should be able to pick up this game easily. A default setting is to provide you with a lot of confirmation messages (''Do you wish to proceed? Yes/No''). You can turn this off.

=============
Replayability
=============

There are some secrets in the game and since the ending changes somewhat based on which story characters you found and kept alive, you may want to replay the game. The unbalanced gameplay and CPU advantages make subsequent replays somewhat cumbersome and tiresome.

==========
Conclusion
==========

This game is recommended to diehard strategy game players.
The inherently unbalanced gameplay and built-in CPU advantages make this game extremely challenging and often frustrating, because you feel the game is not being fair (i.e the feeling of fighting a tank with a toothpick if you choose melee combat instead of magic). You will need to spend a lot of time leveling up units and engraving coins to upgrade their powers. If you want to have any reasonable progress in the game, you'll likely end up making all your units be magic users, stocked with powerful coins. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem much fun as you are now bulldozing your way through the game as magic users.
It's almost a broken game. You can win this game, but you must set aside time for it.

It's because of Hoshigami that I have much better appreciation for Tactics Ogre and FFT. The gameplay makes or breaks the game.

Thus...

If you want a fun strategy game with lots of options, a little strategy, low to moderate difficulty, and a balanced system, play Final Fantasy Tactics.

If you want a fun, but more challenging strategy game with some options, a lot of strategic elements, and a balanced system, play Tactics Ogre. It's hard but fair.

If you've mastered all the other strategy games (and maybe you are a glutton for punishment) and want a strategy game with the highest challenge (difficulty to the point of ridiculousness) thus far on the market, an unbalanced system, a little strategy, some options, and a built-in handicap, play Hoshigami.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 01/13/02, Updated 01/03/03