Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth Remix

"An underated S-RPG that brings back the cult classic Hoshigami for the Playstation."

Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth Remix brings back a S-RPG from the 32-bit era by Maxfive, and faithfully brings back Maxfive's only achievment in the industry.
The game stars Fazz, a virtuous sellsword. Though merely a pawn of war with a pricetag in the beginning of the game, he shows an adequate amount of character development. Sadly, him and his friend and instructor Leimrey are the only ones who show any real character development at all.

The game has several unique features. Unlike mainstream titles such as Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem, Hoshigami uses something called the Ready for Action (RAP) system. The RAP system has it where as opposed to moving to wherever then selecting an action, you instead have a meter that fills up some for each thing you do until its filled up. Basically you can choose to move several spaces but may only have enough space left in your meter for one attack. If you don't move, you can fit in 4 attacks. Costs for actions are very balanced, and the game's tactics are very unique cause of this. The Push system is another feature of Hoshigami. It basically entails your attack moving an enemy back two spaces in exchange for decreased damage. Very strategic, and nothing beats pushing an unit off a high cliff. (This game does feature elevation beyond Evasion and Defense =D) It's used for something called an attack session as well. Attack Sessions are where you push an enemy into another one of your units that are in an "Attack Session" stance. They will then push the enemy into a pre-determined direction by the player. As long the enemy unit is pushed into more AS stance units, high combos will result, which concludes to high damage and even rare items for your party. However, this system is HORRIBLY broken and you'll be lucky, if ever, to pull off a high as combo due to sheer map design. Speaking of which, a good summarization of the game's map design is "hawt or flop". You see, some maps, most such as Aus, Fort Yugo, and Temple of Water are incredible and very fun and challenging, while others have such glaring flaws that beating the map within 2-3 turns is a rather simple task.

You will also find as you play a HUGE inbalance between magic and weapon. About halfway through the game, weapons become obsolete. They will hardly scratch the enemy while magic (referred to as Confeigms) will simply decimate enemies while hitting several targets.

Moving away from the gameplay, this game's story is an awful, clichè-filled piece of crap. As usual, you get caught up in a political warfare, and as you fight the evil Empire a threat to the planet emerges, it's your destiny to stop it, etcetera. Very boring. The developers do try and change it up a tad at the end, but it's nothing unpredictable or breathtaking.

Graphics could be nicer. While a pointless, random anime cutscene tries to pass off as eye candy, and large sets of breasts certainly are eye candy, in actual gameplay whenever the game auto-zooms in on a character (which you can't turn off), ugliness ensues. I normally don't care about graphics, but it's really just displeasing to the eye. Camera angles could also be a problem at times, especially when selecting targets of magic attacks.

The music and sounds in this game. What's sad is I found the most memorable music in the whole game to be the title screen music. The rest is just boring and unmemorable. Sound effects were annoying, except whenever a female unit dies a scream that sounds like a banshee. It's really annoying. For comparsion think anything Hilary Clinton has ever said.

Multiplayer: All it is is trading equipment, don't get your panties in a bunch.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/08/07, Updated 11/19/07

Game Release: Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth Remix (US, 06/25/07)