Secret of the Stars

"I don't care what the secret is"

Probably the only kinds of video games I enjoy more than RPGs are graphic adventures. So suffice it to say, I've played more than a couple RPGs in my time. Based on my fondness for the genre and a supposedly great new offering from Tecmo (it's the only RPG they ever released, and small wonder), I checked out Secret of the Stars.

You're a poor villager who learns that he's the son of a generic legendary warrior called the Aqutallion. You need to find a party of generic companions to become Aqutallions too and help you fight the generic master of evil, Homncurse in this case. It's not like the time is right or anything, you just happen to discover it one day.

Generic as a whole pretty much sums up Secret of the Stars from beginning to end. The graphics are generic, the game play is generic, the audio is generic, the story is generic, the characters are flat and what meager development they're given ends the moment they join the group. Even the parts of the game that aren't exceedingly generic don't add much to the proceedings. The battle interface is more or less the same as every NES role playing title you can name. You pick attack, magic, item, or run away, like you did in seven hundred RPGs before. In fact if the game didn't have a 16-bit palette of colors, you wouldn't be able to convince me that it was a Super Nintendo rather than a plain old NES role playing title. The graphics are just as sophisticated as the graphics from the original Dragon Warrior. The music and sound effects are little better.

One thing that tries to make Secret of the Stars unique is that besides your main party of Aqutallions, you can switch to a secondary party of characters called Kustera. Unfortunately, the emphasis is always on the main party. The Aqutallions have to fight all the bosses, advance the plot, and generally blaze the trails. The Kustera are good for getting three items out of each dungeon that the main party can't and that's all. You can't swap members, there are no quests the Kustera must complete but the Aqutallions can't. All they're really good for is getting information from the people in bars because they're not kids like the Aqutallions. I'm sorry Tecmo, that's not worth doubling the time I spend building levels, especially not when your game is so vague I need a walkthrough to get anywhere anyway.

Sometimes I felt like the game was made for four-year-olds. How else do you explain a villain named "Bad Bad"? And I was on the verge of accepting that the game was meant for children as a beginner RPG, until I realized how cryptic the game was about what it wanted you to do next. In Final Fantasy II, for example, you'd always know what it expected of you. You'd get a dialogue that said something like "Golbez will trade Rosa for the earth crystal, so let's go to Lavaville (or wherever) and get it." Phantasy Star IV even had a feature where you could make your characters talk to each other and thus figure out what your next objective was. Secret of the Stars gives clues that are either vague or misleading a lot of the time. Or sometimes just stupid. When you need to find the key to lower the bridge (you find it really early but aren't allowed to find a way to cross until much later), the only person with a clue where to find it is the one person who specifically didn't know where it was before, so how you were supposed to figure out to go back and get the information from him I can't imagine. When you need to find your way into a volcano on the first island, your helpful Kustera tells you there's a secret way in, BUT DOESN'T GIVE YOU THE FAINTEST IDEA WHERE. Another reason to like those guys. This is all compounded by some terrible translation work. It's not quite as bad as in games like Ninja Kids, Violence Fight Zero Wing, but it didn't matter so much in those games because what more do you need to know to play those games besides ninjas fighting punks or two sweaty guys punching each others' teeth out? In RPG, you need to be able to tell what's going on. And Secret of the Stars at least likes to pretend it's an RPG.

Secret of the Stars feels like it's trying to be a really great RPG, but even the first SNES Final Fantasy game blows this away, and that came out two or three years before. In any case there's a good reason that Square is known as the king of RPGs and not Tecmo, and its name is Secret of the Stars.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 05/16/04, Updated 05/31/06