Cosmic Star Heroine

A JRPG with a too-fast paced story, stock characters, and confusing map design. Still, it was a lot of fun to play, and the combat is satisfying. It doesn't overstay its welcome, and I would recommend it to turn-based rpg fans that don't mind a retro style.

Nice. Play it at heroine difficulty.

Stars call heroes forth She battles across the stars Cosmic fate awaits

I'm not sure what others aren't seeing in this game, but I personally love Cosmic Star Heroine. The aliens are cool ideas and the human characters are relatively interesting. Don't get me wrong, there's story elements I would change, but there's dozens of hours of gameplay here. Exploration, combat, side quests, hidden treasures, and even Easter-eggs from their previous games are in abundance. The combat system is fun, the music is great, and the game is really pretty. Plus, even if you're worried it's not worth $15, these games are often on sale so just give it some time and try it out!

I'm sure that you found this game through word of mouth. Unfortunately, I cannot in good faith give this a positive review when the title is severely lacking in polish. - If you want to restart a battle, there's no pause menu. You have to either slog through a long wait as the enemies chip away at your giant health bars, or restart the game from wherever you last manually saved. - Multiple grammar mistakes across the script. You'll find a sentence in need of a comma every 10 minutes at minimum. Not helped by the plot and characters not being well-explored. - No auto-save in a JRPG released in the late 2010s. - When you open the game, the option the cursor points to automatically is New Game, not Continue. - There's no custom logo or background for this title in the Steam Library. The font is generic based on what Steam auto-loads, and the background is just the first screenshot from the store page. For a title that could have boasted its pixel art, this is not a good way to handle this. - Multiple gameplay elements are not properly explained to the player. I still don't know what "Burst" means, and it's not explained in the Tutorial section of the menu. What does it mean that some…

It's got that neglected RPGmaker classic energy. If you told me this was the work of one person hammering away for five years, I'd believe you. However, it's Zeboyd Games. They did the later Penny Arcade JRPGs, and they're sort of a Known Name. So seeing this much heartfelt jank energy radiating off of one of their projects feels strange. Strange but refreshing. Zeboyd's usual deal is a minimalist plot slapped together from snark and referential genre pastiche, and then some genuinely well considered technical jrpg design. And in this sense, Heroine is also a mold breaker. Its technical gameplay is ROUGH. Shops don't let you see your current equipment to compare new equipment against. You have to duck out, go into a menu, look at your stuff, etc. Your combat loadouts also take a full minute to fall into place, and on the intended hard difficulty the fights feel very iffy right up until you win. However. The story is pretty good? Or at least it's miles ahead of the previous Zeboyd titles, the Penny Arcade ones notwithstanding, and it actually sort of has something to say. I *like* the astral scifi setting and the goofy Deus Ex core conflict and the clunky cutscenes. They feel ea…