Cosmic Star Heroine #HO | Chrono Trigger meets Phantasy Star

De GAF

Well, long story short, it’s excellent. I think it’s fair to say it’s essentially everything you would hope for with the pitch of “Two devs with a modern take on a Chrono Trigger-style JRPG in 2017”

First and foremost, I cannot overstate how much I like the combat system. I don’t want to misalign expectations too terribly, so I’ll preface things by saying that I’m much more partial to the strategic/tactical aspects of RPG combat than the flashing of huge numbers and intricate spell effects. With that in mind, I can’t think of a JRPG battle system I’ve liked better. Maybe a few that I like to an indistinguishably similar degree (Grandia 1 and 2 spring to mind), but I really can’t think of any I liked more, and CSH’s is so different from my other favorites that it’s hard to imagine a comparison as anything better than apples to oranges.

You’re not going to be able to mash your way through the CSH’s combat, at least not on Heroine difficulty. But that’s okay! Encounter pacing and variety is fantastic, and there are no respawns (unless you want them). Instead, with the way combat works, you have to consciously decide what you’re going to do, and getting there is basically a great optimization puzzle of attacks, defenses, buffs, debuffs, turn order, and Hyper. It sounds like a lot, but it boils down to, “This enemy has that weakness, so what’s the best way to get Party Member X to do Attack Y on Turn Z?” -- applied across however many enemies and and party members are in battle. It’s a refreshing change from the mundanity of typical regular encounter combat, and has about as much depth as any system I’ve seen without any of the extraneous or superfluous bloat that’s present in so many other JRPGs.

Speaking of party members, they’re all pretty fantastic as well. Each has their own distinct combat niche and support capabilities, which means that regardless of your party, everyone’s always able to find a use, particularly as your gear and ability options expand. Characters you initially think are terrible become world-breakers with the right skill or piece of equipment if you can figure out how to work them in the right way - which you’ll have ample opportunity to do, because the game isn’t afraid to lock a specific character or two into your party at regular intervals. There isn’t an overabundance of it or anything, just a bit more than you see in most JRPGs, but whereas in most others it feels like you’re having garbage thrust upon your party, because everyone’s so versatile and viable here it feels more like a well-timed curveball to keep you from settling in too deep on one set group of characters.

The writing in the game - the characters, the story, the dialogue, the little quips you get about each enemy as you target them, and so on and so forth - is good. It’s not going to change how you look at JRPG writing, but the game has a rock-solid understanding of its tone and delivers on it very well. I liked all the characters (/disliked the ones I was supposed to dislike), chuckled a bunch, laughed out loud a few times, and the serious side of the story was well done in that JRPG/anime-y way. I think it's easily the most well-written out of any of Zeboyd's games -- although I'm sure a part of that is just them being able to scale back on Penny Arcade's constant need to be Penny Arcade.

The pacing of the story, and the game overall, is superb. It’s propulsive, always pushing you into reaching new environments, meeting new characters, giving you a valuable equipment upgrade, getting you through a comfy Chrono Trigger-esque dungeon at just the right time, etc. And there are definitely a few moments where I did something like this. That being said, there’s definitely a healthy amount of interesting side content for players who poke around as well, which I don’t want to get into for spoiler reasons. But it’s good, it’s funny, it’s referential, it’s rewarding, and, occasionally, the most difficult stuff in the game.

Overall, because absolutely literally everyone loves numbers so much, the game is an easy call for the 9.0-9.5 range. There are a lot of games of all genres coming out these days that try to recapture that ‘old game’ magic, but very few of them have managed to balance classic elements and modern refinements as well what you get here.