Review:
Cosmic Star Heroine has a lot to like about it. It's an excellent vibe game, I say vibes a million times in the Diary section, but like, it's true. It has a unique blend of classic JRPG and 80s sci-fi OVA vibes, an angle enhanced by its unique usage of Sega CD aesthetics. It has a lot of Sega CD style cutscenes that really cement what it's going for. The combat to this game is super fun and pretty unique, consisting almost exclusively of equippable single use abilities that you have to recharge once exhausted. The soundtrack is an amazing work of 16 bit cyberpunk nostalgia, and due to the unique Sega CD esque lean it has it's operating more in the Genesis space than the SNES which is pretty cool. Just a lot of elements to like about the game. Unfortunately, it suffers from a paper thin plot, underdeveloped characters, what I feel is a poorly explained equipment system and just a noticeable number of bugs, though the latter does. I think more modern JRPG fans are likely to find it unsatisfying, it's definitely a game for people who have a love and/or nostalgia for a specific era of Japanese media. Very "no thoughts just cyberpunk vibes" in that respect. I liked it though, it's never going to make any waves but it's still a good little game. It's also really short for a JRPG, it's only 12 hours long, very breezy. 7.6/10
Diary:
8/10/25
We got cozy retro JRPG vibes, y'all. I've played very little of this game so far, I think literally 45 minutes, because I just was like "I wanna play a little before bed" and then immediately found myself drifting off to sleep. Mostly because, well, this game is super cozy! I love the SNES era of JRPGs specifically so much just because every game is a vibe, and Cosmic Star Heroine really wants to recapture that vibe. I really appreciate it actually, I love how many people have taken the SNES era of JRPGs and really used that structure to make amazing games but sometimes I just want to vibe you know. And Cosmic Star Heroine is kind of "no thoughts, just vibes" in the way I'm often looking for in a JRPG. It also opens with gameplay, like, you are right in the thick of an area where you're going to be getting into fights, I really like that.
I really like the setting of this game too. I feel like real science fantasy is very underrepresented in video games in general, like. A lot of video games will be "fantasy but with some sci-fi elements at a certain point" or "science fiction but we do magic in some way", sort of sewing together parts of sci-fi and fantasy without committing to a blend. This game though, it wears its genre on its sleeve, it's a intergalactic adventure with proper space travel but every character uses a blend of tech and magic, it's super cool. One of the first party members in the game has a really unique ability called Gunmancy where she is able to summon and use guns with her mind, a cutscene shows her just spawning five guns at once it's so cool. Hackers are literally wizards in this universe, having learned how to effectively hack the universe itself to create magical effects like casting Thunderbolt. Love that. The developers of Cosmic Star Heroine were inspired by many games but the biggest ones for its setting is Phantasy Star and Mass Effect, and I really like that they went with that over just the typical Squeenix selections because it really gives the game a unique flavor.
I really like combat in this game. First of all, it's fully turn-based, love that. I always worry when picking up one of these throwback RPGs that it's going to be ATB and like. It's not that I DISLIKE ATB, it's that I would rather you be fully turn based or fully real time, ATB I feel tends to have both styles weaknesses more than their strengths. Anyways, characters have a wide variety of abilities they can utilize in combat. They have their very standard attack and then up to a certain number of specials they can take advantage of. Taking a note from more traditional tabletop RPGs, though, each special only has a limited number of casts (currently they all only have 1, I think the tutorials said they would only get 1, that's fine). You can cast each ability up to the number of uses it says it has and then you have to rest to restore the casts in your abilities. Resting is a mid-battle action, it's sort of a guard, while you're "resting" you reduce damage as well as restore all your casts. It's a fun little system.
The game also has a "hyper mode" system which I really like. Underneath your HP there's a a number of slots that fill up when it comes around to your turn. After all the slots are filled, you enter a hyper mode where you get a massive boost in damage to your next move. Not only does this add a bit more complexity to the combat, encouraging you to save your strong moves until you get this bonus, but also it solves a problem I feel like a lot of JRPGs have. Long JRPG battles can honestly be pretty draining, even as someone who loves turn based combat. Like the longer you go on in a battle, the more likely it becomes that you end up in this war of attrition state where because your resources are spent, you have to just keep hoping you can outpace your opponent in damage dealing to win. This system, though, always ensures you will have a late stage tempo swing to get you back in the battle. Especially since you can restore your casts by eating a turn, you can very easily rest the turn before your hyper mode is charged up and then move for big damage. However, every time you enter hyper mode, it adds a turn to the hyper mode charge, so while it's a mechanic that benefits longer battles, you can't rely on it to win your fights for you.
This game also has overworld abilities! Love an RPG with overworld abilities. Like, in my opinion, RPGs only benefit from adopting action-adventure elements. Even if the puzzle solving outside of battle is very simplistic (shoutouts to previous 2025 game clearing and diary subject Wild ARMS), it makes the world feel so much more substantial from a gameplay perspective, immediately gives you an edge for me. This game also gets extra points because its overworld abilities so far are the classic "sign of a good game" staple the grappling hook, and a giant flamethrower. And the latter is especially cool because once you obtain it, it becomes part of the arsenal of your gunmancy user in battle as well. Love that. The gunmancy user, Chahn, is my favorite character so far, she rules, I love her.
8/13/25
The music in this game is so good, y'all. Like, I know there isn't really a shortage of good retro throwback JRPG soundtracks, but man. The sort of cyberpunk/sci-fi flavor this game has? So good. Really, I encountered a couple absolute bangers in the first part of this game. But like, I REALLY started to take notice of the soundtrack in this section. The boss theme really had my neurons firing, such a good track. The theme of our fourth party member, Sue, literally so nice they play it twice. This is a great soundtrack overall and I think it has a very unique sound to it because, while it's definitely attempting to call back to just 16 bit RPGs in general, it kind of has more of a Genesis flair to it than a SNES flair, especially in some tracks. And like, the Genesis sound chip is the inferior soundchip in most ways but I kind of like the sounds only it can produce, you know? Oh, and of course I can't not talk about "Talk Back". Such an absolute banger, total high point of the game so far.
On the note of Talk Back, actually, what a wild experience that was getting to this song. So, I had known that Laura Shigihara was in this game ahead of time. I'm actually a massive fan of Shigi's work, as mentioned in a previous diary I'm a huge fan of Plants vs. Zombies and one of my favorite games of all time, Rakuen, was her passion project. I've been literally following her work since the days when she was just doing YouTube covers, actually, when a Let's Player I was watching at the time turned me on to her work. Shigi being involved is a pretty big reason why I know about Cosmic Star Heroine in the first place. But you know, I've been following Shigi for such a long time and know what her usual vibe is so I was expecting her music to pop up on like. A calm water area or something. That's the kind of music she usually does, chill, vibe music. Imagine my surprise then when we got to the club and immediately I hear Laura Shigihara's voice. Just a total vibe shift from what I was expecting. But you know what? Here for it.
Also on the note of Talk Back, I love the cutscenes in this game. I didn't know that "Sega CD" was an aesthetic I desperately needed more of in my life, but man, it hits. It hits so hard. Like, it's weird how much I crave the Sega vibes and aesthetics, to be honest, I was not a Sega kid, I was so Nintendo focused that my entire understanding of Sega was that "they existed as a competitor to Nintendo and made Sonic the Hedgehog" until I became an adult and started to do game clearing. Anyways, it's especially great in this game because Cosmic Star Heroine already has such immaculate 80s sci-fi OVA vibes and the Sega CD-esque cutscenes just put it over the top. Like, Cosmic Star Heroine is such a vibe, it low key might make my best list this year on vibes alone, it's crazy y'all.
The pacing of this game is so good too. Like, you can really see the Chrono Trigger inspiration in how this game is paced. I've already kind of alluded to this in the previous section but like, this game just goes. Even a lot of retro throwback JRPGs can get caught up in having too many story chokeholds where the player is kind of there experiencing the story for extended periods of time without too much gameplay and like. That's not a problem, per se, I love a lot of the stories in those games. But sometimes I just want to go man. And Cosmic Star Heroine definitely is a "sometimes I just want to go" sorta game. In the two hours I've played of it, I feel like a lot has happened but, most importantly, I feel like it was digestible, and I feel like I've been playing basically the entire time. It's a very fast but still very steady pace, I really dig it.
The game also has an incredibly good balance of fights and overworld stuff. Much like Chrono Trigger, Cosmic Star Heroine doesn't have traditional random encounters, instead having seamless transition into battles in the overworld. So it creates this nice flow in the gameplay where you're just kind of naturally moving through areas battling when the need arises. But on top of that, it feels like there is exactly as many battles as their should be in the game. It's a very well balanced game, like, if you're in a dungeon you'll typically encounter 3-4 battles per room, enough to where you feel as though you're progressing a good pace. You never feel overleveled, you never feel underleveled. And because battles happen in specific places, you can easily explore the area before entering battle and/or plan your strategy going in. There are also just a lot of very well placed "town" segments, allowing the player an extended period of time with which to just kind of explore and relax between fight heavy areas. Just an exceedingly well paced, well balanced game.
They also waste no time getting into the meat of the story. Like, an hour and a half in, it's revealed the organization we were working for, an intergalactic peace keeping organization named "the Agency of Peace & Intelligence (API)", are actually the bad guys. In this universe, after a war where computer viruses caused human beings to go insane, technology that can tamper with the mind has been outlawed. The head of API, Director Steele, sent our party out on a mission to an alien planet specifically to discover experimental technology that can control minds, which he intends to use to repeal the law on mind-tampering and then gain full control over the entire human race. He sees it as a moral imperative, without free will, humanities "sins" will finally be purged from them. And our heroes defect, running away to the slums to hopefully regroup and find a way to put a stop to Steele's plan. It's snappy, you know the stakes immediately, you're given information when the characters are which I like, it's such a nice feeling to be in the plot already in this kind of game. I'm just loving this game.
Something I'm curious to see how it comes back around is the interactions with various NPCs. Already there have been a few decisions I've had to make, early on the only surviving member of an enemy faction was in risk of bleeding out and we had to determine if we should give him our only potion. A man was getting falsely arrested for a bombing charge and we found the perpetrator for the cops, who didn't do anything because they're cops, their job is done, but the man was grateful. At the homeless shelter, we gave a young woman almost all of our money to open up a store, hopefully turning her life around. I'm interested to see the lasting impact of these decisions, see how the world changes because of them. The developers cited Mass Effect as an influence and I'm hoping this is where that comes in.
8/16/25
There was a festival in this section! I wasn't surprised by any measure that we got to go to a festival, it honestly kind of feels wrong to have a Chrono Trigger inspired game and not have a homage to the Millennial Fair. I'm actually a little surprised this game didn't do the joke with "Millennial Fair". We go to the "Freedom Festival", a Festival designed to celebrate the game's current villain faction, the API, year round because it's secretly a recruitment place for the "terrorist organization" Astrea. And since the API is now our enemy, enemy of our enemy is our friend. It turns out, Lauren, the musician we recruited last time who sings that song I wouldn't shut up about for three paragraphs, is a former member of Astrea and she has the hookup. So that's where we're at, we gotta join a terrorist organization!
But first, some minigames! Wouldn't be a Millennial fair without minigames, would it!? First of all, love the music here. It's called "Honeytrap" and I think that's an excellent name for it because like. It sounds so upbeat, like festival music should be, but there's also just a little bit of a sinister element to it. It reminds me of the New Pork City theme where it's like "wow, everything's so great, also this is 100% propaganda". Anyways, there's a few things we can do at the Festival, just cute little side stuff for rewards. We can endless lose to a conman at three card Monte, we can go on a scavenger hunt to find various items across the festival, we can enter a dance competition, try some local food, learn about the history of the API. There's even a giant alien cat that we can fight, an obvious homage to Gato from Chrono Trigger, though instead of earning 15 points you get a very powerful weapon for winning. There was even a fun little logic puzzle to solve, as the Rock-Paper-Scissors booth challenged you to eight consecutive rounds, giving you hints on what they were going to do before hand. Imma post it here, see if you can solve it.
I will make the same choice in round 2 and 3.
I will never make the same choice more than twice in a row.
I will make the same choice in round 1 and 4.
My choice in round 5 would beat my choice in round 1.
I will make the same choice in round 5 and 7.
I will not pick paper in round 2 or round 4.
I will not pick rock in round 3 or round 8.
I will pick paper less than I pick rock or scissors.
Some very cool fights happened in this section too. There was a multistage boss fight where we took down a giant mech, climbing up it to challenge each "layer". There was a part where we got to fight ghost sea monsters. There was the long awaited fight between the main character, Alyssa, and her former frenemy Echo. Back when they were both working for API, Alyssa and Echo were the two top agents and they had something of a friendly rivalry going on. But now that Alyssa has left API, Echo just openly despises her and is taking jobs specifically to end up in conflict with Alyssa. There was even a kaiju fight, with Alyssa commandeering the mecha we defeated to battle a massive monster. Even though it was turn-based, it gave me just like the strongest Rampage vibes. Lots of cool fights, lots of cool set pieces, love it.
There was also this really cool bit where, after we join Astrea, our party is separated into multiple teams as the API invades the Astrea underwater base. While Lauren, Sue, and Chahn are tackling shutting off the forcefields and allowing the last line of defense, the sea monsters that surround the base, to put a stop to API's invading force; Alyssa, Dave who is sort of the hacker/wizard hybrid I talked briefly about earlier, and new recruit and ex-cop Finn have to infiltrate the API's flagship to commandeer it for the cause. It's a pretty great sequence. Again, I'm amazed how quickly this game is moving, this feels like it's such a big victory and meanwhile I'm just over four hours in.
That being said, one of the main criticisms of Cosmic Star Heroine is that the plot is pretty undercooked. I'm starting to see that too. I've complimented how good the pacing is on this plot previously but the further we get into the game the more it feels like, while the pacing is good, the plot is just kind of there. Like, we're literally only 1/3 of the way through the game (according to Howlongtobeat) and we've already gotten such a massive victory on our quest to stop API, this feels like it should've been later, that there should've been more to do for joining Astrea. Stuff just keeps happening, it feels like, like we're a film adaptation of a book that only adapts half the chapters because it thinks that the basic plot is all it needs without any of the pieces in between. It's definitely a problem with the game.
But also it's not one that bothers me very much at all. Like, there are games where I care about the plot, I know this is like the third or fourth blog post in a row where I mentioned how I don't really care about the story of the game I'm playing. But like, I spent the majority of my Mother 3 post dissecting and analyzing that story because I loved it so much. Cosmic Star Heroine, to me, never really advertises "hey this is going to be a pretty big story driven game". Cosmic Star Heroine exists on vibes, it's trying to invoke like. The golden age of JRPGs and 80s anime OVAs and the Sega CD. Like, it's not that I don't think it's a valid critique that the story is kind of just there, or for that matter that the characters are kind of paper thin because they are a bit. But I think it's actually enhancing the vibe for me that it is this way?
That being said, I am curious just how much is in the back half of this game, because from what I understand I am at Chapter 7 of 13, so narratively I'm about halfway through the game. But like. I'm actually still in the teens/early 20s levelwise. So I'm expecting plot points to start being a bit more staggered, as I've heard most people finish the game between level 50 and 60. I'm really enjoying it though! Like, the reason it's taken me so long to get to Cosmic Star Heroine is that I've always heard final reaction to it was kind of mixed and so it kept getting put lower and lower on the priority list. But I've been actually having a blast, this is exactly the kind of good vibes I'm attracted to in an RPG. I'm kind of amazed how much I'm loving this, tbh, like I'm low key going "this might be a top 10 contender". So far it has been really exceling at what it is specifically trying to accomplish.
8/24/25
Soooooooo kinda took some time off to play Obra Dinn. Whoops. I say that but honestly, I mostly took so much time off to write the Obra Dinn post. I was in kind of a funk for a few days and had trouble writing, I don't want to get into it. Also Cosmic Star Heroine is kind of my "chill out in bed" game and lately I've just been like "as soon as I go to bed, I'm out". But I found time to play just a little bit more, finally, so I figured I'd do a small update. And I do mean small, I've played like an hour more, lol, which admittedly means for this game I've gotten quite a bit done. Let's do this thing!
So, indeed, it turns out that your decisions handling various NPCs do have long term impact. There is a mechanic in Cosmic Star Heroine once you get to Chapter 7 called "Supports". Supports are additional members of the team you can equip, comprised of various NPCs that have agreed to join the crew of your ship and, by extension, Astrea, and while they don't actually fight they give the team a passive bonus. Stuff like increased healing or more elemental damage, etc. The cool thing though is that the random NPCs you do sidequests for will join your roster of supports, giving you new passive abilities to play around with. I have yet to see what will come of the girl who I gave seed money to start a shop, mind, I keep checking back to see where that will end up. But like, it's a pretty neat but simple way for your choices to have impact. And simple is honestly this game's biggest strength, I think if it tried to be too much more than what it is it might have missed the mark on its vibe.
There's a Wild West/Outlaw town! Once again, I just want to highlight how much this game reminds me of 80s anime OVAs, like. It's so in line with that kind of aesthetic to just suddenly go into the wild west out of nowhere. It's your classic sort of anime Wild West town, a bunch of outlaws roaming the streets with like cyborg parts but 19th century attire. It's all built around a bunch of gambling dens, there's a sheriff way in over his head who desperately wants to clean up the town. The only wealthy person in town is clearly caught up in all this villainy but nothing can be traced back to him so he continues to live in luxury while everyone else struggles. The vibes, I swear, so good. The music is almost amazing. It reminds me big time of Wild ARMs, I really like Wild ARMs so I'm always glad to hear things take inspiration from it. What a cool setting, I adore the vibes of this game as always.
I think I've come to the thing I like the least about Cosmic Star Heroine: the shopping UI. So, Cosmic Star Heroine has a pretty basic JRPG shop setup. You go into the shop, talk the guy at the counter, and a shopping interface pops up where you can buy new weapons, armor, and accessories. I find the shopping to be kind of inconvenient for one key reason. So like, every character has a specific weapon type, that's normal, and it makes buying new weapons very convenient. You can always buy and equip for each character all in the same menu. Same with accessories, accessories are not often for sale, instead usually being chest items or quest rewards, but when they are they are very easy to equip from the shop menu due to the fact that they are character specific. Armor isn't like this. Armor is not only not character specific but, in my opinion, it kind of poorly communicates what the function of armor is.
So a few things that make armor such a larger headache than the other items. First of all, the characters in the game don't really have traditional defense/magic defense stats on their stat spread. So when you go to select armor, you can't see on the UI easily "oh the defense and magic defense are going up". Instead these stats appear in a relatively small box in the shopping/equipment UI, a box that's very easy to ignore, making it difficult to both see if it's an improvement on your current stuff or not and also see what its individual values even are.
Secondly, a large emphasis on the UI is on abilities that the armor gives you. Every armor comes with built in passive buffs, the only caveat being that your stats need to meet a certain threshold before you will unlock those buffs. In theory, I like this, I like the fact that your "Magic" stat, or as it's called in this game your Hacktitude stat, plays such a big part in your equipment, and that the higher it is the more stuff your armor does for you. It's a cool system that maybe encourages you to hang onto weaker equipment because of cracked abilities you unlock later on. The problem is that it makes it very easy, in combination with how easy it is to ignore your defense increasing, to just assume "oh this armor isn't anything I can use at this point because my Hacktitude isn't high enough to matter".
But the most annoying part about armor is how inconvenient it is to equip. Because everything else is proprietary to characters, you are allowed to view how it looks compared to their current equipment in the shop menu, make your purchase, and equip all at once. It's fast, convenient, exactly what I'd expect from a more modern JRPG. With armor though, you have to go through and select each character individually to have them go through the armor selections and see what would be the best fit. It's a bizarre ripple in what is otherwise a game with great shopping. But also, the armor shop doesn't let you shop for characters who aren't in your active party, so if you want to go in and update everyone's equipment, you have to leave the shop, go into the menu, switch out your entire party, and go back through. Like, is this make or break? No, it's a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things. It is just really annoying though!
9/5/25
We got to do some real spy movie shenanigans in this chapter. So, as previously mentioned, the sort of Wild West town is run by a potentially corrupt older gentleman. Said older gentleman is why we are here, his name is Enzo and he was, previously, planning on working with Astrea to assist in their takedown of Steele and API. However, after the events of the previous few chapters, Enzo has pulled support for Astrea as the heat is focused in on them. Arete, though, decides "well if he won't see us, we'll make him see us", and so Alyssa, Lauren, and Sue are tasked with sneaking into a party at Enzo's estate and trying to make him help Astrea.
First of all, the dress Alyssa is rocking to disguise herself? Fire. Absolute fire, she looks so good, I wish that we got to see one of the Sega CD-esque cutscenes at this point so we could see it fully, we only get like a single character portrait. Secondly, it's very funny to me that Lauren just sits at the bar. Lauren is like a well known musician, people line up to see her shows. Granted that's on another planet, but still. It's very funny she can just knock out a bartender and then pose at the bar without anyone recognizing her. Thirdly, we get to play around in secret passages!!! Enzo's manor apparently has a number of secret corridors that connect across the property, which I will say, it's disappointing that this isn't a proper dungeon; that you don't just go through all the hidden passageways and fight enemies who maybe monitoring these passages. But what you do get to do is spy on various patrons of the party and find out what info they might know about Enzo. Neat little section, I liked it.
To no one's surprise, Enzo refuses to help us and, moreover, he actively steals all our stuff (including the mind control device we had swiped from API) to sell on the market to the highest bidder. And he orders his goons to throw us in his underground super prison. It's there we meet Clarke and, man oh man, I LOVE Clarke. Reason number one to love Clarke: Clarke has a really funky theme, it's so nasty, I love it. Reason two to love Clarke: his design is so good. Clarke is a robot designed to look like Billy Dee Williams. It's an inspired choice, such a killer design. Reason three to love Clarke: he's such a weird dude. Clarke is clearly designed to be a suave robot, it's very likely that he was designed to be like a spy robot or maybe a public speaking robot. Or a love robot. But something is broken in him, and he's just really weird. He's stuck in like a disco mode, where he's trying so hard to be 70s cool and also failing because he has more than a couple screws loose. What an absolute weirdo. Obsessed with him. Reason four to love Clarke: I don't think I've ever played an RPG with a party member quite like Clarke. Clarke has the ability to put up buffs on the party that ONLY activate when he dies, and then a bunch of moves which instantly kill him. It's such an interesting idea for a character, just buff up your entire party and then either do a big sacrifice play to heal or to deal big damage, it's so unique. Clarke is cool, y'all, love this weirdo.
Oh, so, finally figured out how to do the team-up moves. Much like Chrono Trigger, one of this game's obvious inspirations, this game allows you to do a more powerful team-up move by combining the talents of Alyssa and the other party member(s) that are currently alive when used. These moves range from "big strong attack" to "powerful status inflictor" to "heal the entire party". It's not as a robust of a system as Chrono Trigger's, at least so far, as every matchup has to both feature Alyssa and seems to just do something both of them can do individually but stronger, but it's still a neat little addition to combat. The reason it took so long to figure out how to do them though? UI problems again! Team-up moves are tied to specific armor. That should tell you why this was a problem, I've already talked about how much of a headache the armor system was for me. But also like another ripple in how poorly armor is explained is that they don't really communicate to you that the armor's abilities are not passives, they're moves, and you have to access them through the menus in combat. Just an annoying little thing, again, not make or break, but still a tad frustrating.
I did my first character-specific sidequest in this part of the game. Finn, the ex-cop I briefly mentioned earlier, who is also a distant cousin of Alyssa, receives a call from the police station he used to work for saying trouble is afoot. He decides to go in with only Alyssa as backup, only to find that the power to the station has been shut off. Almost immediately, Finn and Alyssa find that one of Finn's fellow officers has been turned into a zombie and the duo fights them off. What follows is a nice little nod to the Resident Evil series, as you make your way through this police station overrun by zombies, placing jewels in the eyes of statues, playing the piano to find a secret door, fighting off both zombified people and zombie dogs throughout, all culminating in a trip to an underground lab wherein you fight the head of the police, who has mutated himself into a giant titanic monstrosity and unleashed the zombies in his attempts to try and create super soldiers. It's a very cute little section and as someone who played Resident Evil 1 earlier this year and loved it, it made my heart happy.
The game is slowing down a bit. Not like, too bad, like, it's still keeping a good pace, but Chapter 7 is so far longer than the first few chapters combined. It feels a great deal like they had very specific plot beats planned for each chapter and then it just so happened that they got longer as they went on because more gameplay has to happen between each chapter now. Like, I'm pretty sure one chapter in the first part was just 20 minutes long because it was the sequence where the characters go into the underground lab at API headquarters and try and steal the mind control device. But yeah, it does feel like the game is slowing down a little bit, giving more time for the player to just play between story bits, and like. I appreciate it, this game moves at a good clip anyways but I like that it's slowing down just enough to where it feels like we aren't just breezing through.
9/7/25
Okay I promise this one is actually going to be short because not a whole lot happened in this section. I know I've said that before but then I get to writing and before I know it I have seven paragraphs of material. But like literally I just got to the next town, did the next dungeon and ended off for the night. There's maybe like two total things I want to talk about in this section. Like I said, this game is slowing down just a bit so a lot of play time is now going into doing long sections of just fighting enemies and exploring areas and like. It's fun, I love the combat in this game, but I don't have that much to really SAY about it, you know?
This is our first time meeting a proper alien civilization! While we've had a handful of aliens, namely sentient green cats, this our first time entering into another civilization and seeing how they live. The aliens in question are the Scimerex, a race of distinctly insectoid aliens, they resemble large vaguely anthropomorphic crickets. They're a pretty interesting little society, they are, as most insectoid societies are in sci-fi, a hive mind but unlike most insect societies in science fiction, the Scimerex are just rather pleasant. They're a peaceful society, their link to each other is moreso spiritual than it is a proper mental link. When we arrive at the Sciemerex settlement, we quickly find out that the Scimerex here are all refugees. Typically the Scimerex make hive-like homes in the jungle ruins left by a previous civilization on their home planet, the planet Rhomu. The Scimerex we meet here, however, have had to flee their hive due to monsters infecting it, monsters that are seemingly related to the research that led to the mind control device the entire game is built around. There have also been a rash of disapperarances that are also, certainly, related to the mind control tech. It's a pretty sad sight, actually kind of impactful, the Sciemerex are trying their best to hold onto their lives, their customs, and the bond to each other despite literally and figuratively being severed from the hive. On top of that, despite this being their home planet, they are effectively second class citizens on it due to the power of the human cartels that live in the prosperous underground cities on Rhomu. It's sad brah.
I don't believe this is the first time we've encountered supernatural elements in this game. Like, obviously, we had zombies in the last section, but I feel as though we've also had "ghosts", as it were. But this section is really full of ghosts. Ghosts of Scimerex who remain in the hive, ghosts of lost miners, ghosts of the native fauna. From what we've been told, the underground cities on Rhomu were originally mining colonies, humans came here to mine, and eventually they dug so deep that they unleashed something that was sealed away on purpose. And now, this supernatural entity is upending the natural order. This is a major reason why the Scimerex had to leave their hive, it had become infected by the supernatural entities that were unearthed during a mining operation. Moreover, though, this is why the mind control device is so dangerous, so much moreso than we already believed it to be. The lab which created it existed on Rhomu and Psybe, a Scimerex scientist, believes strongly the device may have too been infected by what is haunting the planet. Our group, Psybe in tow, is now seeking out the old mine itself to try and find more information on this brash of hauntings.
Something I don't think I've highlighted but I do really appreciate about Cosmic Star Heroine is that when you recruit a new party member, you are forced to bring them along for a while. It can be inconvenient at some points, especially if you have a specific team setup you like to use and you have to very suddenly rework your entire strategy. But I really enjoy having to learn a new party member, figuring out their specific role and abilities and how they synergize with other team members. It also creates some funny scenarios as they pull things like "only three party members are undercover at Enzo's party because you need room for Clarke when they get arrested". I may not always enjoy the new party members, mind, I don't particularly like Finn for instance and Arete is clearly very strong but I don't enjoy how she works. But I'm always for giving each party member their chance to shine. The only weird thing to me so far though is that we are significantly far into the game now, I come to understand that there are 13 chapters in this game and even with it starting to slow down as it has, I'm still already in Chapter 9. And we're still getting new party members this late into the game. I wonder if this is another way this game is like Chrono Trigger, the entire main story wraps up pretty quickly and then right before the final boss you have full access to everything in the game and can do whatever you want.
9/10/25
There was a mystery in this section!!! Our party was framed for a murder!!! Love a mystery section in a game. First of all, the music that accompanies this investigation? Superb. It has the lick, love that. Also I feel like it has the "Love Potion No. 9" motif? There are so many parts of the track where I feel like I hear the chorus of Love Potion No. 9. I digress. Secondly, it's actually not that bad of a mystery for a small mystery section in a JRPG. Like a lot of times when a game does a mystery section it becomes very easy to not structure the mystery well, just being like "oh we have like the aesthetics of a mystery here but we don't bother trying to build a mystery". Like, there's a very clear line of logic that connects the clues to the culprit and builds a good alibi for us, it's honestly a better constructed mystery than some mystery games pull off, in my opinion. Thirdly, we get a new party member to help us out and I love him. His name is Orson Bolibar and he's this wild looking alien who has the personality, mannerisms, and theme of a grizzled 1930s film noir detective. He's literally like this ghostly purple being but he has this very normal looking PI office and he wields like. A revolver. A normal Earth revolver. The characters in Cosmic Star Heroine may be pretty undercooked usually but man oh man are their designs and concepts peak.
Nuluup is also a pretty interesting planet in general. The third planet we go to on our journey, Nuluup is a more prosperous, tranquil world than Araneau or Rhomu. The world is lush and green and while a hyperadvanced civilization does live there, they prioritize natural growth and take as little space as possible. Which is easy for them to do because Nuluupians aren't corporeal. They're a really interesting race where they begin life as a humanoid alien, many of them being indistinguishable from humans, and live out what appear to be standard human lives. But to the good people of Nuluup, the physical death is simply when a person "matures". They have what's called a "first death", at which point the being becomes noncorporeal and begins piloting a suit around to interact with the physical world still. Effectively, Nuluup is a civilization of ghosts. And they invented Gunmancy, my favorite thing in this game, love that for them. There's even a Gunmancy temple on this planet where Gunmancy users can train to become Gunmancy masters, which I assume is where Chahn's personal quest takes us once we can access the rest of our party.
Oh I guess I should also mention that, right now we are down to only a few party members. Nuluup is on high alert because of an intersection of, much like what's happening on Rhomu, a rash of disappearances happening on Nuluup, as well as the API's war with Astrea on Araneau. Nuluup does not blindly trust the API, their society has lived for a long time and they've seen empires rise and fall and, to them, the API is just another one of those. The Nuluupians are very aware that their neutrality and wealth of resources makes them a target for API, whom they earnestly believe are awaiting any excuse to bring their impressive force down on Nuluup. The people of Nuluup are very aware of this from the bottom up, even, with little to no love on the planet being given to the API, a stark contrast from the previous planets we've visited where there's a kind of fanatic loyalty to them. As such, it was deemed wise that only Alyssa and Psybe take to the ground on this mission, as their original goal was just to ask around, find some info on the disappearances on the planet. And then they're stopped by the mayor.
The mayor immediately recognizes Alyssa as the former top agent of the API, who is also supposed to be dead at this point. The API had spun a story that after Alyssa went AWOL she died heroically to sort of cover their tracks, though several people have obviously noted Alyssa being still alive. A common belief is that Alyssa is deep undercover, a convenient lie for the API, but the mayor has a different belief. He was always a fan of Alyssa's work, how she always put justice first, and so he believes wholeheartedly when Alyssa says she's no longer working with the API and is, instead, trying to stop them. Obviously he's excited about this because Nuluup has reason to believe the API will do anything to start a war with them, and Alyssa is a very good potential ally to have in that case.
Which leads us back to the murder mystery from the beginning of the section. See, it's a very convenient lie for both Alyssa and the API for people to believe Alyssa is deep undercover. Alyssa is able to move across the galaxy without scrutiny; and the API, knowing Alyssa is out there, have no great reason to go hunt her down because she's a much smaller force and, while powerful, isn't so much that she can't be dealt with. But in this case, the API choose to use this lie to their advantage, sending Echo ahead of Alyssa to frame Alyssa for the death of the Nuluupian mayor by planting a poison in his system and waiting, killing two birds with one stone. The Nuluup government will obviously arrest Alyssa for murdering the mayor and it'll go back to API, who can use Alyssa's arrest as just cause to invade Nuluup.
I know I just like talked about the plot for like three paragraphs and all the political intrigue going on but like. I'm just going to be real, the plot definitely is the weakest part of this game. Again, I think Cosmic Star Heroine is a vibe, I don't care as much about the story of this game because I'm just having a good time vibing, but like. It's definitely a more noticeable problem with it as I go on. It just feels like while a lot if happening, this game is very fast paced, the plot feels like it's kind of going around the point. The game started off so strong by immediately throwing you into the action but then for the past five hours we've seen hide nor hair of our main villains really. Instead we keep ending up finding a new thing to do that, while helpful to the overall mission, kind of makes it feel like the plot is moving pretty laterally. To compare it to one of its inspirations, the game it objectively borrows the most from narratively, Chrono Trigger; in Chrono Trigger you do kind of meander around the point for a while as well, especially in the beginning, and the main story almost does feel like it doesn't get going until like the 1/3-2/3 point. But at the same time, once you understand what's happening, the entire game feels so tightly woven, you know. Every part of it is an important part of the story of Lavos, it never feels like it's taking tangents.
The characters also kind of suffer from how undercooked the actual plot is. Like, again, doesn't bother me too much, I think part of the charm IS that these characters are so basic. It sells a lot of the 80s sci-fi anime OVA vibes I've been feeling. But still outside of very sparse interactions and just the general character concepts, you don't really get anything on the majority of the characters. Alyssa is your classic hero archetype, Chahn is the supportive best friend, Dave is a wise cracking guy in the chair, Sue is the bruiser with a heart of gold, etc. I think the most developed character so far is Lauren, the only character who had a normal life that they abandoned to join our cause. Or as normal as your life can be when you're a famous singer. Like, I think Cosmic Star Heroine nails a lot of the things I want it to be, which is why I'm so whatever about these massive weak points, but it's undeniable they're still present.
9/13/25
I keep accidentally running into superbosses. At least I assume they're superbosses because they health sponge like nobody's business and wear down my party members in a matter of turns. Earlier I went to try and do Sue's sidequest and hit up on a boss that I don't think is actually a superboss but is clearly so far out of my paygrade, and in THIS section I definitely ran up against a superboss, the Skeleton Warrior. This guy starts off being pretty unintimidating, he's slow to move and doesn't start off dealing that much damage, but like. Each time he lands a hit, he gets stronger and stronger, until eventually he is just dropping your entire party each time it goes around to his turn. I'm sure I'd have a lot of fun figuring out his strategy if that's a thing I did often. I can't remember the last game where I went to actually fight a superboss, I think maybe base KH3? That sounds right.
I also feel like there's a reference I should be getting with him. They've called him a "Legendary Hero" or a "Legendary Warrior" a couple times and like, it feels like I should know who this is? The dungeon where you fight him only contains three incredibly low level trolls and then it opens up onto this gorgeous scene of a cliff overlooking the native geography of Nuluup with a grave marker on it where you summon him. At first I was like "is this supposed to be Crono" because the area gives big vibes of the place where you resurrect Crono in Chrono Trigger. But also it might be a reference to another of the developer's RPGs, there are a lot of little nods to like Cthulhu Saves the World in this game. And then I'm also wondering if it's not a specific reference to anything but is instead like Culex in SMRPG, where it's just a big superboss designed to invoke the normal vibes of the genre in a game that kind of breaks genre conventions. In this case being a typical fantasy JRPG hero in this very sci-fi world. I don't know, I feel like the reference is obvious and I'm going to be mad when I found out what it is because I'll be like "of course, how could I have missed that".
The song of the waterfall area on Nuluup maybe my new favorite song in the soundtrack. Like it's so beautiful and so serene, I adore it so much. It's admittedly very hard to pick a best track from this game though, like. I have my issues with Cosmic Star Heroine, obviously, but one thing that has been unambiguously great the entire time I've played is the soundtrack. It's such a good old school throwback soundtrack, it's able to convey such a variety of moods through what is a pretty limiting structure. I genuinely don't know how people are still able to mine so much out of the 16 bit soundchips. This game especially has such a major uphill battle because it's invoking the Sega systems so much and like, the Sega Genesis has produced some bangers, don't get me wrong, but it is just a very crunchy soundfont to work with.
A complaint I do have about the soundtrack though is that it's really hard to find a lot of the songs I want. On YouTube, the entire Cosmic Star Heroine OST is officially uploaded by the composer, which is great, but the problem is that it's all uploaded by official track name. Some of them, of course, are obvious, Alyssa's theme is just called "Alyssa", Chahn's theme is called "The Gunmancer", etc. But a lot of the songs don't tell you who they are for or what area they play in so you have to just kind of scrub through the OST trying to find the song you're looking for, hoping that you remember the melody off the top of your head and aren't just going by "oh this song plays here". The soundtrack is roughly in order so you can use that as a measuring stick but like, still, it's difficult to find a specific track. Some parenthetical titles like (New Rhomu Theme) would be so helpful for me, I'm very much an "identify by area" kind of person.
We finally catch back up with Director Steele in this chapter, after him and API being basically absent for half the game. The disappearance of the Nuluupians was, in fact, caused by Steele and API, who have secretly been working on the planet the entire time, kidnapping natives to try and use them to power up the mind control device. Steele has been experimenting on Scimerex and Nuluupians for two very specific reasons; for the Scimerex, Steele has been attempting to use their connection to the "Hive" to figure out how to connect his mind control to a vast network so he can control all at once, and the Nuluupians for their connection to the spirit world. As he nears his end goal, however, he fully snaps and kills all the API agents who believed in his goal, almost finishing off Echo in the process as well. Steele, you see, doesn't just want total control, he wants total eradication of self. He isn't in this to use mind control to rehabilitate or to predict when crimes would happen, a goal the other API loyalists believed in strongly apparently, he wants to simply prevent people from having free will entirely. Why? Well.
It turns out that, at some point, Director Steele had come under the influence of some dark shadow being. We don't know much about whatever this thing is, but we do know that it absolutely has been manipulating the Director to summon itself forward into the world. Very likely it is an entirely incorporeal being, very likely an ancient god because this is a JRPG, and the Director's efforts have given it a pathway to become corporeal and rule our realm once again. The ghosts that have been manifesting have, in fact, all been a consequence of the API's experimentation and it has been a resounding success for the entity. Whereas previously it needed a conduit to manifest into the world, be it technology or a host for its energy, now it can manifest its own corporeal forms. Steele's recent experiments have allowed this entity to bring forth rough shadow constructs to reach into our world and handle threats, nightmarish, grotesque, unknowable beings with the entity controlled Steele at their command. Which made for a pretty fun boss fight, actually, as Steele brought forth these shadow creatures in the midst to kind of pincer attack and overwhelm the party.
I do have to say though, the less than stellar writing is getting more and more obvious as we reach the conclusion of the game. Like, okay, the Nuluupian society obviously is one that coexists with nature, they take only what they need and leave the majority of the planet to its own devices. So in a way, it makes perfect sense for Orson Bolibar, PI, to stop the party and complain about how they are killing native fauna to accomplish their goals. It would be an interesting conflict, especially since it establishes a potential rivalry between Orson and Psybe, the Scimerex scientist who believes heavily in the ends justify their means and who has a very personal attachment to stopping whoever is behind the disappearances ASAP. This would be a great character bit... if you know... it didn't come out of nowhere in the middle of a dungeon at almost the end of the game and is also like the first time these two characters have ever spoken directly to each other. I respect the vision, but the execution is just not there and I think I would've just preferred if they just didn't. It feels like maybe they wrote this with the idea that this game would be longer and then realized Nuluup was near the endgame.
Also like, fighting the Director here when you're locked into a party of just Psybe, Orson Bolibar, and Z'xorv, the latter being an assassin you've met earlier on in the game who permanently joins your party here, is just kind of lame. Like, this is the first time we are seeing the Director in ages, and honestly so many people have beef with him. Alyssa, Chahn, Dave, and Sue all have a bone to pick with him directly for, you know, trying to kill them. Arete obviously has a history with him on account of her being the head of the organization that tried to take API down. Like, there is so much bad blood between the Director and the party but the first time we even see him since the first couple hours of the game, we are forced to bring in a bunch of people who do not know this guy and only hate him because of the broad strokes of what he did. And I'm pretty sure this is probably the last time we're going to like have a conversation with him as we're already getting close to normal RPG endgame levels and we're about to enter Chapter 12 of 13, so I imagine we'll either be taking him out in Chapter 12 with a plot twist on who the actual villain was or taking him out in 13. It's disappointing, this game has so many strong points but the more story it inserts, the worse off it is.
I'm pretty sure I'm beating the game next time I pick it up, so going to give my like "pre-finale thoughts" as I usually do. This game's good. I have my problems with it, for sure, but I'm super glad I played it, the parts about it I like are real strong. Great soundtrack, good JRPG vibes, such an interesting aesthetic to try and invoke. I haven't mentioned the decided Sega CD-ness of the game in a hot minute but I adore it for it. Like, if you like old school JRPGs and 80s/90s sci-fi anime OVAs, I feel like you should play this. It's real solid. Very Chrono Trigger meets Ghost in the Shell just, you know. Not as well written as either of those properties. And who can say no to my boy Orson Bolibar. I don't know why Orson Bolibar amuses me so much, but I love him, he's so cool, he's so dumb.
9/14/25
So, I went back to one of the "superbosses" I was talking about last time and it turns out I was just underleveled/underequipped. Something I don't think I mentioned that is a pretty annoying inconvenience re: the armor purchasing system is that like. Oftentimes, the most up-to-date armor you can purchase is available on the shop in your ship. The problem is that the already clunky way that you purchase armor becomes way worse trying to purchase it on your ship. On your ship, the only party member you have access to is Alyssa. The other party members take up NPC roles and you can have conversations with them, they'll lead you in the direction of sidequests or give hints for potential new support crew members you might want to find. So buying armor for everyone just becomes that much more annoying. I think the game is trying to prioritize you buying armor for only the party members you use, i.e. I tend to roll up with a party of Chahn, Psybe, and either Sue, Lauren, or Orson Bolibar, PI, so I should prioritize getting them armor. But like, I think it also kind of discourages you from investing in your lesser used party members, which in turn creates a cycle of not wanting to use them more because they keep getting underpowered because you don't use them. And also it's like, weird for a game that so often locks you into a specific party composition for plot reasons to also be like "hey, prioritize only the party members you use". I don't know, weird design decision, I think they could've done better with the armor stuff.
Anyways, the not-superboss, so this was Sue's sidequest I accomplished, and like. It was cute. Sue is one of my favorite characters in the game, like, I know I didn't talk about him in the same way I did like Chahn, Clarke, Lauren, or Orson Bolibar, PI. But Sue is just great, this big, burly Russian dude with a heart of gold. And this sidequest has us rescuing his son! Apparently his coworkers never knew he had a son!!! His son got into some trouble on Rhomu and we got in there to bust him out, and we learned a bit of Sue's backstory. It was a nice little sidequest, we got a tiny bit more depth on a party member, it makes me wish there was more of this in this game. Like I really like Sue as a character and want to spend more time with him, but I feel like this is the first time since he joined the party that he's had like any real dialogue. A lot of the party members do get little reaction conversations to the events to the story but like, because these characters aren't super well defined, they all kind of mesh together.
Once you start like getting going with the ending of Cosmic Star Heroine, the game just goes. I realize that the game just going is one of the things I have commented on a million times but like, the entire last two chapters of the game can be done in under an hour. The "point of no return" of sorts is sort of at the end of chapter 11, the game tells you to backup save right there before you had to the "final dungeon", the abandoned mining asteroid that Steele has fled to, but I also think there are sidequests that don't open up until after you've beaten Steele at the asteroid? I don't know, made a couple saves just in case, point is that once you get going on the finale the game wraps up FAST. Also the last chapter is called Cosmic Star Heroine, that's cute. I'm sure there's like a TVTropes name for that but I'm a TVTropes hater, I think it reduces all of media into a checklist of cutesy snarky terms so I wouldn't know it.
Really glad Chapter 12 was not the final chapter of the game because, man, it would've been such an anti-climactic note to end off. Like the location is cool, this abandoned asteroid mining outpost, but it's such a softball area. Pretty light on battles, not especially fun to traverse, kind of a sterile and empty area. It's like, a fine enough dungeon but definitely not a final boss area. The music's really good though. But, before long we reach the centerpiece of this asteroid, the thing that was found in it that caused the site to be abandoned: a spaceship. This spaceship is the source of whatever entity has been controlling Steele and is the key in Steele's plan to destroy free will across the galaxy. The entity IS the ship as well, with both of them being named "Eternity". Our heroes move to stop Steele's plan once and for all, fighting him in a giant mutated form that high key comes out of nowhere but that's par for the course for this game, a LOT of bosses just come out of nowhere, and we defeat him, ending the threat of the Eternity. It is, too, underwhelming.
As a quick aside before I finish off explaining the plot, I just wanna say Cosmic Star Heroine's difficulty is really all over the place. Full disclosure, I was playing on a median difficulty setting, sort of the game's recommended difficulty, so I wasn't playing on a challenging mode for starters. And also, as mentioned, I had some troubles with understanding equipment/upkeeping my equips. I put forward both of these points because it feels like the game fluctuates a lot across the journey. The main story content, for instance, seems to be just really easy through a lot of it. By the time I got to the final areas with my chosen party (shoutouts to the girlies Chahn, Lauren, and Psybe), already these end game enemies were only doing 1 damage per turn to me. This includes the first two phases of the actual final boss, I was shrugging off damage and usually I only needed to have Psybe cast Regen on the party to not die. But the moment I do ANY side content, even side content that's below your level, enemies are just way stronger. Like to call back to Sue's sidequest from earlier, just random goons in that quest did more damage to my party than the actual final boss, and without that massive of a level disparity at that. Like it's not abnormal for an RPG's side content to be much harder than the main stuff but like, they give you the option to do some of this stuff early and it's way harder than what you get in the literal end game.
Anyways, of course Steele isn't actually the end of it. Our party member, Arete, the freedom fighting leader of Astrea, hangs back after we beat Steele and starts monologuing. She explains that she has been alive for a long time, much longer than any normal human could be. She was a scientist on the original team that created the mind control device this whole game's story is built around. And she, too, is a puppet of Eternity, that she has been working with the entity for centuries, setting the gears into motion that would end up here, at this moment. With Steele gone, Arete can now free her master, become one with it, and use this power to rule the galaxy. Arete has always been the grand manipulator, the drone always at her side being built with a version of the mind control tech inside of it, one that does not control but rather suggests, uses subliminal messaging to push people into Eternity's desired outcome. She has been the true villain this whole time. Which is very funny given that we are first introduced to this woman in the context of her being the head of a terrorist organization. Like, no duh guys, of course she's the villain.
So after escaping the Eternity to regroup, our heroes assault the ship as it hovers over Rhomu, attempting to use the Scimerex hive as a power conduit to control the universe and make everything Eternity. THIS is a final dungeon. The Eternity, first off, has an absolutely killer theme, just a genuinely great final dungeon theme. It not only sounds amazing but also definitely incorporates a lot of motifs from elsewhere in the soundtrack in it, it's real good. You also fight so many super unique enemies as the Eternity just throws everything at you attempting to stop you. Killer robots, chimeric monstrosities, a dragon that one shots your party so you have to kill it in a few short turns, an army of Alyssa clones. All within this sleek red and black space. And when you finally confront Arete, who is fused into the Eternity's central core, it's kind of sad actually. She calls you "friend" as she addresses you, like even through all of this some part of Arete is still driving her, and seems disappointed that you won't join her. And when you beat her you find out that, yes, Arete was still in there, in a moment of lucidity she recorded a message apologizing for everything and expressing how sad she is that she couldn't be with her friends. As an aside, the game pulls a pretty funny fakeout here, giving you both Arete's ultimate weapon and her best accessory right before the final boss, implying she might rejoin your party. Good stuff.
And so we fight Eternity who, like every good JRPG final boss, has a bunch of phases. First of all, the song that plays in the final areas of the game where you fight Eternity is super interesting to me. It's called, appropriately, Finality and it plays during the first few phases. It's a relatively calm song in this soundtrack but it's also super distant, like it's such a good "endgame" song, it feels like "we're coming to a close" and it's even a bit melancholy, like we're mourning Arete despite everything. The first phase of the Eternity fight is also super interesting, unless you want to count the Arete phase in which case it's the second phase. In this phase, Eternity takes on its only humanoid form, appearing to be the melded together parts of the machine Arete was hooked up to, it's face appearing to be Arete's drone. I wonder if this is meant to imply it has built its structure around Arete, still using her as a puppet even now. The second phase is way less interesting designwise, a giant face and giant arms that you can fight, standard video game stuff, but the final phase is where the game implies a lot of interesting stuff about Eternity. In its final phase, Eternity is just a singular eye on the ship's core, fighting with machines flanking it on either side. Eternity talks about how it is immortal, a god, but it appears to be little more than a ship's computer who has gone mad. A powerful ship's computer, one that discovered a way to rule the entire galaxy, but a ship's computer nonetheless. Even as we beat it, it still claims its immortality, all the while it explodes into nothing.
Thus we end Cosmic Star Heroine. Boy did it get buggy. I don't know why this happened all at the end but I started to notice the game kind of getting buggy in the final areas. The UI wouldn't display enemy sprites well. The menu would lag on closing. Sometimes when I went to change abilities it wouldn't pop up the list. I'd switch characters into my party and then they'd just run off. This all culminated in the end credits when they showed a "where are they now" of each character (Chahn becomes a gunmancy sage at the temple on Nuluup, Clarke becomes a galaxy-famous dancer, Orson Bolibar gets a hot ghost alien honey, etc.). During this sequence, the cutscene layering screwed up, causing the game to loop the previous foreground layers over and over. Some of this stuff was annoying, mind, especially the menu problems, I wish they had bug tested a bit more, but like, what can you do, this game's old now.
I enjoyed Cosmic Star Heroine. It absolutely has its problems, it's no masterpiece by any stretch. It's story and characters are paper thin, it gets pretty buggy, while it's definitely fast paced and I definitely appreciate that element about it, it feels sometimes like it breezes by too much without letting things sit. But I also think that this game just works as a vibe, you know? The way it very specifically captures the 80s/90s sci-fi OVA is so perfect. The usage of Sega CD-style cutscenes is inspired. The music is wonderful. The core gameplay is really fun and really interesting. And it's a very nice retro throwback JRPG, taking a lot of similar elements and combining them into something uniquely its own. There's a lot to like about the game. It ends with a sequel tease and honestly, I'd love to see that someday, I think a more refined Cosmic Star Heroine could go really hard. As it stands though, solid little JRPG, great if you really like the 16 bit era of JRPGs and/or old anime stuff, not overly spectacular though. 7.6/10
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