Released at the tail end of the original PlayStation’s lifecycle, Atlus’ Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth was largely overlooked by most gamers. While it appealed to hardcore strategy RPG fans, it received a mixed reception from critics. Apparently upstart Aksys Games (which includes some ex-Atlus employees) feels the game wasn’t given ample opportunity to shine, so now it brings it back in remixed form on the Nintendo DS.
If you look at the most successful games on the Nintendo DS, they’re almost all fairly simple titles that are easy to pick up and put down. Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth Remix is anything but simple, and that is ultimately what would’ve made this a much better fit for a home console. The storyline itself isn’t the problem, as it’s solid and straightforward. As a mercenary for hire, the player receives a request from the king to assist in fighting off the invading Valaimian forces. In true RPG form, things naturally expand from there and you soon realize that this is more than a simple invasion, and as the player you’ll be at the center of insuring that the world remains safe from harm.
So while the story is respectable, it’s in the gameplay that things get overly complicated and bogged down in repetitiveness. Battles make up the vast majority of game time of course, and start with the player choosing from a pool of available mercenaries and placing them on the battle grid. Once the battle begins player and NPC characters take turns moving, with all of the standard options you’d want to see like moving into position, attacking, using coinfeigms to cast magic, and using items. Positioning is important of course, with side, back, and certain terrain attacks in general dealing out more damage than simple front attacks.
If that was all there was to this game, most strategy fans would probably yell that it’s too shallow. And I agree, but unfortunately Hoshigami goes too far the other way and makes things way too complex, with nearly everything in the game factoring into combat and making it feel more like work than play. The one addition to standard strategy gameplay I do like however is the RAP meter. With the RAP meter, player turns aren’t determined just by a character’s speed, but also by the meter itself. The RAP meter allows a character to perform several actions in a single turn, with the type of action determining how much of the RAP meter is used up. However, it isn’t always wise to simply perform as many actions as possible during a turn, because the amount of meter left at the end of the turn determines when that character will be able to perform their next turn. In real-world thinking this makes a lot of sense, because a character taking it easy on one turn should recover faster and execute another action sooner.
Mastering the RAP meter is also important because, as it fills, actions using more of the meter cannot be performed if there isn’t sufficient meter left to handle them. For example, even if you can move a character into position to heal another, that doesn’t mean that character will be able to actually use the item before their next turn. This forces the player to think and plan ahead with positioning, adding a great deal of depth to the game, and it doesn’t bog the game down (by itself anyway) nearly as much as it may seem.
Unfortunately, while the RAP meter is a shining example of how an existing genre can be improved upon, virtually everything else is not. It’s not because each element is necessarily bad, but when combined things just get way too complicated. For starters, characters are aligned with one of six gods, with this increasing their effectiveness against opponents aligned with certain other gods. This attribute also levels up as the player does battle, adding another layer to the otherwise standard experience and leveling up system. Also contributing to an action’s success is the terrain itself, with different types of terrain bringing different bonuses and weaknesses with it, and this makes some types of attacks more suited to that particular terrain type than others.
Posted: 2007-10-22 19:23:21 PST