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Hoshigami Remix Review
Written by Chris Goldberg on Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Rewarding tactical battle system & party progression.
Very stupid AI. Bland storyline.
Usually games that receive the remake treatment are noteworthy in some way. It might have sold a lot, it may claim a very hardcore fanbase, or the gameplay was so good that a developer decides it's worth revisiting with new technology. Although there are exceptions, the original Hoshigami doesn't really fit into any of these scenarios. It was a forgettable and obscure SRPG that hardly has any real defenders among the hardcore... which is rare enough! But ASNetworks and AKsys games decided it was time to revisit the original and update it for the Nintendo DS, and the results are not exactly a huge improvement.
In Hoshigami Remix, gamers play as Fazz, a young mercenary who is early on separated from his mentor after one rough battle. Promising to find his friend, Fazz sets out to learn more about what is going on around him. What follows is many of the typical conventions anyone familiar with RPGs will be right at home with. You'll meet new friends who you want to fight for, you'll find out one derivative secret after another about the people who inhabit this world, and you'll eventually climax in a battle with the main antagonist with the extremely predictable motive. While this is certainly a generalization and there are a few things worth noting throughout, it fails to hold much interest through its library of boring dialogue, which very much remains in the days of the early, underdeveloped 32-bit storylines. And although new story branches and characters were added to the mix for the remake, it is definitely not enough to patch this into something compelling.
Despite this major criticism, the game could still excel if it provided a worthwhile battle system with real strategy infused throughout. Fortunately, it does manage to get many things right in this regard. Like many other games in this genre, your goal is to build a mini army of various classes/strengths by hiring more mercenaries and building them up. Hoshigami has a specially designed place for training your troops outside of the story battles, called the "Tower of Trials." In it, you go from floor to floor fighting progressively tougher enemies for exp, money and seals for the Coinfeigm system. This has an oddly addicting allure, as player's can challenge themselves to face enemies that are significantly stronger than their team if they so desire. Once you agree to move on in the tower, you do not again have the chance to leave until you win the battle ahead. If you're in too deep, you may find yourself needlessly losing your allies permanently, which ups the intensity of the battles considerably and is counterproductive to your goal of making a stronger army.
Achieving victory in battle is done through the use of things familiar to any seasoned SRPG veteran - magic, physical attacks and clever use of your surroundings. Hoshigami puts its own spin on magic via the "Coinfeigm" system, which is basically magic you can level up through the application of seals that can be combined to various effect. Some seals will add a greater area of effect, while others will allow you to have more points to allow you to cast the spell multiple times per battle. What makes this interesting is that when adding seals to your coins, you have a chance of weaking your coin if your make a bad combination choice. While untangling exactly what makes the coins weaker or stronger can be confusing at first, eventually you'll gain a firm grasp of the system and start creating coins that are perhaps best described as "overpowered." On a related note, your characters can all choose an affinity for a particular deity, which alongside allowing them to gain certain skills, is another way you can exploit the use of magic.
Another interesting mechanic is the R.A.P. meter, which is essentially a way to give you more control over the order of turns as the battle progresses. Everything from using coins to movement uses up the meter, and much of the strategy comes from determining when it is best to use another attack or move, or when it is best to rest and allow your next turn to come sooner. This is a well-thought out system that develops much customization for how to approach each situation, and for my money this is always a positive thing.
When ending a turn, there are two distinct options: defend and session. Defending is extremely predictable and does exactly what you'd expect, but session is one of the games best and most difficult to master features. When you set a character to session, he'll sit around with a symbol indicating this. Using another character from your team you can approach an enemy and "shoot" him into the character in a session, which triggers a combo event. This, unsurprisingly, does massive damage. After that hit is done, the enemy will again be shot in the direction that character is facing. If the enemy runs into another character who is waiting in session in the process, then another combo will be set off. The easiest way to describe this is that it's like playing volleyball with your enemy. To get all seven members of your crew involved is obscenely tricky and yet unbelievably rewarding when performed.
Disappointingly, the enemy A.I. is where the game seems to most fall apart. Although there are different difficulty settings, on any you try you will find the same peculiar enemy habits popping up. There seems to be a systematic failure to take trajectory or height into account, and numerous times I saw enemies shooting their own allies with an arrow or boomerang, move one space over, and then proceed to slam an arrow into the back of another one of their own. Magic using enemies often rush up front as quickly as a physical attacker, without accounting for their generally lower HP and defense or role as team healer. Most damning of all, if the battlefield is big enough, large groups of enemies will simply not move at all until you get within a certain distance. They'll continually skip their turns and watch as the rest of their team members get slaughtered - a flaw that makes the game highly exploitable, and a little silly. Considering this game takes place during wartime, you have to wonder exactly how these soldiers were trained. Isn't ignoring your allies so directly in wartime worthy of the brig?
In all other ways, Hoshigami is as lifeless as can be. It has an atrocious presentation, less worthy of the Nintendo DS than it is the original Gameboy. The title has no visual impact, with character and sprite designs so dull that one imagines even the artists must have felt it was not worth the paycheck they were receiving. Even magic effects fade into the background, with the primary indication of element being the color that flashes on the screen. If it wasn't for the fact that it was shimmering, I might have confused that ice block for a pine cone.
It's hard not to be cynical about a game like Hoshigami. It tries so hard to be ignored in so many aspects of its design that it's a quest just to find the game's heart. As cheesy as that sounds, there really is a pretty fun core here that creates a solid foundation for future titles if you search for long enough. If you give it the time of day, you can certainly find a game more worthy of remembering than the original. But it simply takes too much effort to unearth that quality from within, which is unfortunate. If there was a special rating scale Modojo adopted specifically for tactical RPGs, with the lowest score being an "Onimusha Tactics" and the highest score being a "Fire Emblem" or "Ogre Battle 64", Hoshigami Remix would be dead center... another "La Pucelle" of the genre.
