Tag: turn-based

Starbites

I’ll Have a Starburger, Starfries, and a Space Coke, Please

Having played Starbites for almost 25 hours and obtaining my first ever platinum trophy on it, I can confirm with absolute certainty that it is an RPG developed by IkinaGames and published by NIS, and not a chain of intergalactic-themed fast food restaurants. There is a bar in it, but it’s called Salud’s or something. There’s a pun there about salad bars, but I’m not sure if it was intentional.

The game is set on the planet Bitter, where salvagers eke a living off of war-torn wastelands surrounding a multi-levelled city known as Delight. It’s got a definite cyberpunk thing going on, but it completely lacks the edge of the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 or The Ascent. There is a bit of swearing, though, which makes it pretty hardcore for a turn-based JRPG about a plucky, optimistic young adventurer assembling a ragtag bunch of misfits to save the planet.

The little emblems beneath the enemy’s health bar denote what types of damage they’re weak to.

Despite its lack of edge, the story of Starbites is legitimately interesting. The set-up involves protagonist, Lukida, being horribly buried in debt and working for the heartless mistress of Delight City, Fennec. Lukida, being headstrong and more than a little careless, keeps getting herself into scrapes that just pile on the debt, yet she still never loses hope that she’ll achieve her dream of getting the heck off of Bitter. As for Bitter itself, many years before the events of the game a war was raging on and above the planet’s surface, and then some unknown event caused every starship in orbit to come crashing down to the surface at the same time.

This apocalyptic incident isn’t the only mystery surrounding Bitter, and when Lukida starts digging into the planet’s strange past and uncovering secrets about herself at the same time I found myself genuinely invested. The other party members are entertaining enough, but I did find Makobo, the mandatory, kooky child character, kind of annoying. Stoic ex-merc, Badger, was cool but a little bland, Jerome was kind of wishy-washy (I still don’t really know why he was around, though I appreciated his super powerful follow-up attacks), and super-serious Marie was a nice foil to Lukida’s optimism.

That leaves Gwendoll, the mecha-bike riding action girl with the very revealing top and lips that don’t quit. I liked everything about her character apart from the in-game model, which looked kind of weird and doll-like. This does kind of make sense, though, as it was very heavily hinted throughout that she is an android assassin “unknown” or “doll” but isn’t aware of it, but this aspect of her character is never fully confirmed or really explored beyond the very obvious “hints”. Still, I like Gwendoll, she’s cool, and I guess it’s cool that we know she’s secretly a murder robot even if no one in the game world does.

The guy with the beanie reminds me of someone, but I can’t quite put my finger on who.

The music provides a fine accompaniment to the on-screen chaos and brightly-lit cyber-nonsense. There’s a mix of rock, electronica, and classical to amuse your ears, and I did find a couple of standouts, especially in the various battle themes. Incidentally, I’m no musician but the title screen music of Starbites sounds to me like a near note-for-note piano cover of the title screen music in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Go find them both on YouTube and see for yourself.

The battle system in Starbites is standard, turn-based fare with a neat, Persona-like twist where you’re tasked with discovering and exploiting enemy elemental weaknesses. Each enemy has a number next to their health bar that counts down every time they take a hit from an element they’re weak to. Get this number down to zero and the bad guy will enter a “broken” state, missing a turn and taking additional damage until they shake off their mecha-depression. This means that you’ll be paying attention to the elements and number of hits offered by each of your characters’ available moves, and using that info to pile the damage on your enemies and mitigate the pain that’s coming the other way.

All of the enemies are mechanised, although some have human pilots. Lukida claims that they “knocked out” an entire camp of villains at one point.

The playable characters don’t fight personally, instead piloting “motorbots”, which are essentially mini-mechs (or a bike in Gwendoll’s case), and their available attacks tend to specialise in a couple of elements each, so it’s wise to keep your party rotating depending on the prominent enemy type in a given area. The playable characters have extensive talent trees, too, meaning they can be customised into attacking powerhouses or defensive, support types depending on your preference. There’s also loads of equipment to upgrade your mechs, but only certain pieces are represented visually. I really enjoyed the battles in Starbites, though, and found myself suitably intimidated by bosses with huge numbers next to their health bars and trying to figure out the best way to break them quickly. The final boss makes excellent use of the breaking mechanic as well. I won’t go into it any more than that, but just know that it was a very nice touch.

Alas, it’s not all cyberpunk sunshine and holographic rainbows. Starbites does have some downsides that can’t be ignored. The game did drag at times; exploration is a bit pedestrian, some areas are annoyingly maze-like, and searching for crafting ingredients doesn’t feel rewarding when the crafting mechanic can be completely ignored. There’s an option to speed up battles, and while I didn’t use it at all early on, from the mid-point I was spending a lot of time watching attack animations play out in super-fast motion.

Marie seems cool but she’s kind of grumpy. Lukida and Gwendoll seem like they’d be more fun to hang out with.

It’s also very visually bland. I used this simile on my RankOne profile already, but when you’re out exploring the wastelands Starbites looks like Stellar Blade if it was running on a potato. Textures are blurry, environments are flat, and the cyborg character models that mope around the hub area in Delight City are kind of dumb-looking. I do like most of the main casts’ character models and the mechs look great, but even these don’t stand up when the camera gets a bit too close, and when the developers put these textures on full display during a cutscene close-up, it can really take you out of the moment.

Still, if you pretend you’re playing a PS3 RPG from your back catalogue instead of a brand new PS5 game, then you should be able to put up with it, and you’ll be rewarded with a wonderfully balanced battle system, fun characters, a legitimately interesting story, and a general, cosy JRPG experience that you won’t regret. Now, if you’ll excuse me, the guy at the counter has just shouted out my number so I’m going to go and pick up my Starburger, Starfries, and coke. All this talking has made me hungry for space-themed junk food.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes

A Hundred Hours of Procrastination

My first impressions of Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, Yoshitaka Murayama’s 2024 spiritual successor to the Suikoden series, were exceedingly positive. Retro but in the right ways, Eiyuden Chronicle has all the hallmarks of a fun and fascinating, reasonably challenging, super-cosy JRPG experience, but my initial positivity was curbed somewhat by some mechanics and gameplay directions that caused the game’s pace to almost grind to a complete halt, and while the lengthy campaign is still soaking up plenty of my precious gaming time (I think I’m about halfway through the story right now), I’ve been finding it a bit of a chore to get through of late.

The early party – I’ve moved on from all of these guys now (except protagonist, Nowa, of course), but a couple of them still live on in my memories.

You see, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes tasks the player with recruiting over one-hundred “heroes” to the player character’s faction, many of which are capable of taking part directly in battles. If you’re like me, you’ll feel obliged to locate and recruit every single one of them. This is fine when it’s just a case of locating a more colourful and detailed sprite in one of the various settlements or dungeons dotted around the map, realising that this means it’s likely a recruitable character, and doing a quick quest to get them on board, but many of the characters are hidden behind lengthy side activities, and this is where my problem lies.

The in-game card game is fine, but that doesn’t mean I want to play it for hours on end. I’m really not interested in playing the Bakugan rip-off (give me “Tin Pin Slammer” from The World Ends With You any day of the week). Fishing is an RPG staple at this point but Eiyuden Chronicle’s take on the noble pastime is hardly riveting, and the saga-like cooking “mini-game” and side-quest can get scraped directly from the plate and into the bin, thank you very much. I want all of the characters though, so I guess I’ve got to engage deeply with all of the above. What was that about a quest to save the free nations from a scheming noble wielding the full power of the Empire’s armies? I can’t remember, I’ve been so busy miserably playing with my little spinning tops that the main story feels like a barely-remembered dream.

Secondary protagonist, Seign, gets his day in the limelight.

The actual RPG gameplay of Eiyduen Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is great; the graphics are pleasing, the character sprites are awesome, the music is lovely, developing your own town and castle is actually a worthy side activity, and the actual battles are fun. I was concerned that the vast number of recruitable characters would just result in a whole host of sidelined party members who never get the chance to shine, but thanks to the guild missions and the odd larger-scope battle where party members act as lieutenants for squads of soldiers, those unappreciated companions will still pop up here and there even if they never get a chance to do a dungeon delve with the protagonists.

Sure, it has its share of jank, can occasionally feel sluggish, and has some archaic systems, but it’s all part of the old-school charm. The full package is very positive, and classic RPG enthusiasts are sure to have a great time. However, as an adult with a wife and a child, a job, friends, other hobbies and other games to play, I like it when video games respect my time. I don’t have a problem with long games, but only if they’re naturally long and don’t feel padded out by backtracking and faff. If you want to get all of the potential party members and town helpers, Eiyuden Chronicle is very much padded out by backtracking and faff.

Sometimes, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes can really nail those cosy RPG vibes.

The card game is fine, and I wish it was the only minigame included. It can be a bit of a time-sink, but the pacing of the adventure would have been so much more agreeable if it was the only time-sink. Get rid of the egg-monster races that feel completely superfluous, get rid of the Bakugan-like “Begioma”, because the characters it introduces feel out of place and take away from the game’s more serious story aspects (and also the actual minigame is boring), and please, for the love of all that is sacred, get rid of the cooking side-quest.

There’s this recruitable chef character, you see. His name is Kurtz and he can provide the party with stat-boosting meals. This is fine, but he also comes with a completely nonsensical and lengthy side-quest where various rival chefs (often with completely ridiculous voice acting) will turn up at the inn demanding a cook-off. What follows is a “mini-game” where you just have to tap a button a lot, and a food-tasting session that takes far too long to get through and is almost completely random as to whether you’re going to win or not. A waste of my precious time, but if I want all the characters, I’ve got to engage.

Today’s main course is a freshly prepared helping of “I don’t care” accompanied by a generous side-dish of “please just leave me alone”.

For me, this is Eiyuden Chronicle’s main downfall; if you want to recruit all of the characters (and why wouldn’t you? It’s kind of the game’s thing) then you have no choice but to engage with all the nonsense, and the story’s pacing suffers hugely, as will your enjoyment level. A perfect example of a game that does too much, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is great, but it could have been so much better if it was a bit … less.

My intention with Eiyuden Chronicle from now on is to play it sparingly when I have a bit of free time and maybe get through the second half gradually in between other games (like the upcoming Metroid Prime 4: Beyond), but when you only have an hour or so spare for a session and you check off another two or three card battles and then find another goddam rival chef waiting for you at the inn it’s way too easy to lose this hour without engaging with the campaign or even with the battle system once.

The game will often require certain party members to be present. Marisa and her kangaroo pal probably wouldn’t have made it into my main team otherwise.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes looks set to become one of my most-played games of the year, but I kind of resent it for this. When I think that I’ll have sunk more hours into it this year than I sunk into the likes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom I find that thought distasteful, as those games were far more worthy of my time. I still like Eiyuden Chronicle, I really do, but it’s just not designed for a busy, popular, handsome man-about-town like myself. If you have a job, a significant other, or some semblance of a social life, maybe don’t get involved with this one.

Played on Nintendo Switch 2

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Une Lettre d’Amour Aux JRPG

When you start a new game on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, you’re asked to select a difficulty setting. The game tells you that in order to get by in normal difficulty (known as “expedition” mode) you won’t need to master the dodging and parrying mechanics. This is a lie. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, developed by debuting French studio, Sandfall Interactive, is a tough game. It’s a turn-based RPG but it incorporates real-time mechanics in the vein of Paper Mario or Lost Odyssey, where timed button presses will enhance your attacks or reduce incoming damage. Except, it doesn’t feel like either of those games, it feels more like Dark Souls in turn-based form as statuesque, imposing and grotesque enemies consistently make an absolute mockery of your character’s health bar if you don’t have the reflexes of a mantis shrimp.

Alright, I might be overselling it a little bit, but every new area in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has the potential to be an absolute nightmare until you get certain timings and attacks memorised. To be fair, all of this works well thematically, as your party of intrepid explorers are in a somewhat dire situation in the game’s story, and the desperation that can often be felt as you scrape through dangerous encounters on an absolute knife edge really fits the bill. You do get the hang of it, though, and when you do, it feels pretty darned good. Until the next batch of combo-happy menaces comes along and you have to start the learning process all over again, that is.

During battles, you can aim freely and shoot a ranged attack. It doesn’t usually do much damage, but definitely has its uses against certain bad guys. There’s so much to battling that I haven’t mentioned in this article, but let’s just say that it’s complex in an awesome way.

I’ll talk briefly about the story, but it’s one of those games where to do much more than scratch the surface constitutes outrageous spoilers. You take on the role of the loveable and handsome Gustave, who is a bit of a savant when it comes to magic, technology, and combat. He’s part of Expedition 33, along with two other early companions, Lune and Maelle, and they’re off on an extremely dangerous and basically suicidal quest to eliminate an entity known as the Paintress. This artistic antagonist lives across the sea, and paints a number every year on a gigantic monolith visible from pretty much everywhere in the known world. Everyone of that age will disappear in a sprinkle of ash and petals once that number is erased, and every year, the number goes down by one.

As you can imagine, this is a pretty sorry state of affairs, and each year life in Gustave’s home-town of Lumiére gets more and more desperate. Don’t worry, though; the player is in charge of this expedition, so that means it’s sure to succeed, right? Well, let’s just say there are some complications and leave it at that.

Excellent cinematography, voice acting, and digital acting all combine to make for compelling cut-scenes. It’s just as well, because the story is multi-layered and winding, and as such the cut-scenes have a lot of work to do.

As discussed by its developers, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a tribute to traditional, Japanese RPGs given a modern, big-budget Western RPG makeover. The battles are turn-based, there’s a world map to traverse and a method of transport that can be gradually upgraded to be able to travel in new ways, and there are plenty of weapons to equip and skill trees to explore. Among the games cited as influences by Guillaume Broche, the talented, ex-Ubisoft creator behind Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, are Persona 5, Final Fantasy VIII, IX, and X, and Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon, but he has also pointed out that the parry and dodge mechanics were influenced by Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Honestly, the FromSoftware influence stands out to me more than that of the traditional JRPG thanks to its difficulty, mechanics, and visual design, but maybe that’s just because the traditional JRPG format is so familiar to me.

Of the list of Broche’s influences, I’ve only played Lost Odyssey to completion, but Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 did remind me of a couple of other games that I finished more recently. Firstly, it evoked a lot of the same feelings as Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Both are a melancholy tale about an adventuring group of young people trying to escape a mysterious cycle caused by outside influences that has condemned them to live tragically short lives. I see a lot of similarities in the world design as well, and the music of one could easily fit seamlessly into the other.

The decorative blob in the water is the character that carries you around the world map. You’ll probably like him, he’s called Esquie. A character named Monoco is super-cool, too, but I can’t say too much more because of spoilers.

Another slightly more specific comparison I couldn’t help but make was with Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Alongside some visual similarities, both games have an early area that consists of a mystical forest with bizarre light shows in the air and broken, floating landmasses everywhere. Also, both games have another early area that appears to be underwater but the characters can walk around and breathe uninhibited. Lastly, both games have a thing going on where amalgamations of multiple dead bodies litter certain locales and leak pools of unspeakable fluid into the earth, and both games have characters that insist on walking around barefooted and treading in the aforementioned pools of smelly viscera. The game lets you change which character model you’re controlling at will, but I won’t be choosing Lune until she puts some bloody shoes on.

Podophobia-baiting aside, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a beautiful game filled with wondrous landscapes, deep themes, and emotions ranging from elation to despair and everything in between. The central mystery is compelling and addictive, and the story is consistently surprising. All of the characters are likeable but, as with real people, all of them have their quirks or weaknesses that give them the potential to rub certain personality types the wrong way. This in turn makes for some interesting inter-party dynamics, and all of this is helped along by some great voice acting (although by default the voices are very quiet, so make sure you adjust the volume setting when you start), stellar visuals, outstanding cinematography, and wonderful music.

Very rarely, the game will throw some surprising platforming at you. This image shows the most hair-raising of all the platforming sections, and also one of the many outfits you can dress your characters up in.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn’t just an example of a fantastic game, though. It’s also an example of a new studio making a single-player, non-live service title and releasing it physically, and achieving great reviews and a stellar sales performance. It must be protected and it must be supported, so other developers and publishers take note and have the confidence to do the same. In this world where EA were fighting to wedge shared world features into Dragon Age: The Veilguard and have pretty much killed off that franchise because it doesn’t fit with their perceived future of always-online consistent worlds and microtransactions, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an important breath of fresh air, and must be purchased by anyone with even a passing interest in video game preservation.

It is also very, very French. Play for long enough and explore hard enough and you can equip all of your characters with fetching berets and deadly baguettes as weapons. I’m not even kidding. C’est vrai!

Played on PS5